How to Make Your Reader an Accomplice

Have you ever watched someone you love hurtling headlong for disaster? I hope not. It makes you want to reach out and physically contain them – in your arms, in a safe place, even in an institution, if that's what it takes. When a person is, for whatever reason, powerless to influence what is happening to them, it is easy to blame events on a malign fate engineering punishment, whether it's justified or not. For the saddened spectator, knowing what is coming further down the track when the victim can't or won't see it for themselves provokes extraordinarily complex emotions – guilt, terror, and despair; maybe even relief that your own life isn't like that.

When you are writing fiction, putting your reader in a similar position – that of omniscient spectator - is called dramatic irony. You manipulate the story so that the reader doesn't just have the pleasure of finding out what happens next, they are privy to it some time before the protagonist. This puts them in an ambiguous position. It can increase the suspense of your story if you hold up the possibility that your hero might, at the eleventh hour, realise what is afoot and avert disaster; it can arouse intense feelings of frustration or pity when this doesn't happen. In Othello, the audience knows about Iago's machinations and deceptions while Othello himself remains in ignorance. Using dramatic irony is a fantastic way of engaging your reader more directly with your story. It changes them from being passive recipients of events into  active participants because you are effectively implicating them in what is going on. Give them more information than your hero has and you are turning them into your accomplices.

A Long Day's Journey into Writing

I've had a long day's writing and I'm tired. You would think this might mean that it's time for me to shut down my computer and go and have a cup of tea – even a biscuit! However, I've learned over the years that I often write best when I'm weary. Perhaps it's because my defences are lower and I'm less resistant, so feelings and ideas can surface more easily. Perhaps the brutal truth is that it takes eight hours work to set the flow of words in motion. Whatever the reason, I often think it's best not to stop work when you're beginning to flag, that instead you should throw yourself into it even more. Write until you become almost incoherent; write until you're exhausted. You might find it's rubbish when you come to reread it in the morning, but my guess is that you will find nuggets of pure gold that would normally be inaccessible to you.

How to Give Your Writing Voltage - by Voltaire

Voltaire,  historian, philosopher and designer of doors (see my earlier post) was no slouch as an author either, his satirical novel Candide, which charts the passage from optimism to disillusionment, vying for attention with other literary and philosophical masterpieces. He was also French, which to my mind suggests style, pure and simple. For all these reasons it is worth paying attention to what he has to say about writing:

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

There. A perfect example of clarity and directness, qualities we should aspire to in our work. For the sake of absolute clarity, it's worth mentioning that a noun is an object and an adjective is a word which describes it: the red (adjective) house (noun). You'd expect the two of them to work together in harmony and often they do. Prose without any description at all would provide thin pickings, but to extend the food analogy a little, too much of it is like bad cholesterol: it clogs up the arteries of your narrative. You need to use it in moderation.

Here are some pitfalls to avoid when writing descriptively.

• If you use adjectives with abandon, the weight of unnecessary words becomes a burden and will slow your story down.
• If using adjectives becomes your default setting and all you ever write is adjective / noun, adjective  / noun, adjective / noun (the tall house, the deep sea, the little baby) the rhythm of your writing becomes predictable, which means that the attention of your reader will start to wander.
• Factual accuracy is important in your work, but literary accuracy is vital too. The reason that adjectives are the enemies of nouns is not just that they swamp them, they also suggest a fundamental inaccuracy in the noun itself. Instead of saying tall building, say mansion, or skyscraper, or brownstone. For deep sea you could substitute ocean; for little baby, infant.

It's a kind of distillation: the heat of creativity leading to the essence of truth.

And here he is – the man himself, surveying the grounds of the château at Cirey en Blaise where he lived for many years.

Pared down, as you might expect, to the minimum.

Writing - A Kind of Renewable Energy?

When you're preparing to write a novel or a story, you need to be in a receptive state, alert to all the diverse scraps of conversation, news, visual images and situations that come your way. As Margaret Atwood wisely observed, it's all material. How you collate everything is an intensely personal decision – I use a notebook, but I've heard of other people using index cards, box files and pin boards. The important thing is to nail something while it is still fresh, otherwise you may forget an idea or it might lose some of the vividness that drew you to it in the first place.

It's a kind of hoarding and when I'm researching I spent quite a lot of time, like Silas Marner, counting my gold, fingering the coins, holding them up to the light with greedy glee. I think about my stash of ideas often and add to it when I can, so that over a few months it becomes a bit of a ragbag, but I think that's a strength rather than a weakness - anything that doesn't fit when you come to start work can always be recycled somewhere else.

If you want a writing exercise for the weekend, try this one for size. Have a rummage round in your own ragbag and come up with something you've heard (this can be some gossip, a snatch of conversation, a news item), something you've seen, something you've been given and something you want but can't have. Mix them up together and see if the seed a story starts to germinate - writing as an exercise in thrift, as a source of renewable energy, perhaps.

Pathetic Fallacy in November

I'm sitting in my writer's block (shed) gazing out at the downpour outside. The sky is like wet newsprint, running with grey. The rain that is currently drumming on my shed roof, reminding me of wet camping holidays as a child, expresses some of the gloom I feel at the approach of winter and the loss of daylight.

November is the perfect month for pathetic fallacy, a literary device where you attribute human emotions or characteristics to nature, or to inanimate objects, for  example the sullen river, the hostile facade of the building... You'll notice I've chosen negative examples in both cases, and this isn't purely coincidental, because pathetic fallacy is often used when human actions are so intense they are uncontainable and spill over into other things. Wuthering Heights is stuffed full of pathetic fallacy – the wild weather on the moors expressing the turbulent emotions with which Heathcliffe and Cathy are wracked. It can be a great way of giving your writing resonance, ensuring that the feelings of your characters reverberate and echo.

Because it's effective, pathetic fallacy can easily be come a default position and you need to be wary of that. You might consider writing a scene in which your heroine is having a major emotional crisis against a background of utter delight – radiant sunshine, the perfect vista, the ideal home – whatever floats your boat. My hunch is that this will enable you to explore feelings of alienation and isolation that are not available if you rely on pathetic fallacy all the time.

So, instead of the sodden garden with its great burden of water that I'm gazing out at, here's a field of young sunflowers newly opened up, turning their faces round to find light.

Drama v Reality

I watched Michael Winterbottom's new film Everyday on Channel 4 last week. It's been described as a sketched drama, which is a difficult term because although I think it means that it was largely improvised, it could also imply that it wasn't fully realised. Hmm.

The film's USP is that it was made over a period of five years. It explores the relationship between Ian (John Simm), who has been sent to prison for drug smuggling, and his struggling family headed by his wife, Karen (played by the luminous, resilient Shirley Henderson).

Winterbottom's genius lay in finding  four real siblings to play the kids and he filmed them every six months, an arrangement that allowed this understated film to explore whether love can survive a long period of separation and whether it is possible to keep the detail of family life going in such testing circumstances.

The film was beautifully performed and the photography was outstanding – those huge, expressionistic East Anglian skies - but in spite of the fact that the production took so long to complete, the end result was weirdly static.

As a writer, this gave me plenty of food for thought. Over the five years that it took to film, given that the circumstances the characters were facing were so challenging, one would have expected to see profound changes taking place as the tectonic plates of family life shifted, but this wasn't the case. The children grew older, the mum seemed more worn, the dad couldn't resist smuggling some dope back into the prison after some home leave – the crime that landed him inside in the first place. Plus ca change - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Everyday worked best as a meditation on human behaviour. It was reflective, mirroring the lives of people under stress. I'm not sure it worked as drama. For that you need crisis, change, a journey to self-knowledge, none of which were much in evidence. Drama distils human actions so the audience can experience catharsis, but I'm not sure that realism has these magical powers.

Nick Dear - A Masterclass in Writing From Life

It was a play about writing, and words, and love, and what inspires them all. It was full of beauty and sadness, cadenced.

I'm talking about Nick Dear's new drama about the poet Edward Thomas, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, which has recently opened in London at the Almeida Theatre. If you don't have the chance to go and see it, although you will miss the heart-wrenching performances of Pip Carter and Hattie Morahan (playing Edward and his wife Helen), you will still be able to read the script.

As well as being astonishingly articulate about the process of writing – Thomas has a close literary friendship with the American poet Robert Frost and the two of them explore the fascination of the writer's craft - the play is a must read because it reveals some of the alchemy of bringing characters to life. In Dear's perceptive, clear-eyed incarnation, Edward Thomas is shown to be capable of the strongest bonds of friendship, both with Frost and with Eleanor Farjeon, but is a vile husband and an indifferent father. Yet his love for poetry seems to transcend mere earthly ties, and that is what transfigures both him and us. Thomas's character is revealed to us facet by facet, from the point of view of the different people who knew him, in all its inconsistent, cruel, passionate, inspiring humanity. It is a masterclass in writing from life. Look and learn, look and learn...

If you want a writing exercise for the weekend, here's a thought taken from the play, uttered by Robert Frost.

Words exist in the mouth, not in books, and you can't read a single good sentence with the salt in it unless you have previously heard it spoken. That's what I think. The ear does it all, the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Spend some time listening, listen for the salt in a good sentence, use your ears, then write about something that you've heard...

All Work and No Play

 Yesterday I wrote for twelve hours with barely a pause for breath and I've done six hours today: write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write - you get the picture. I'm off to London now, to see Nick Dear's new play about Edward Thomas at the Almeida, and tomorrow I'm going to a talk about The Wasteland - what cultural riches. I'm mentioning this partly because it means my blogging will be a bit thin on the ground this week, but also because I firmly believe in finding ways to feed your creativity. If you do nothing but write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write, you'll soon find that inspiration turns to stupification (which I don't think is a word, thus proving my point).

Take time out to read and think – absorb the best and worst writing you can lay your hands upon, because you'll learn from both. Stiffen the sinews : dream, walk, wander. Make a list of all the books you've read this year, then resolve to double it  next year. Don't just sit at your desk and grind words out.

That's my excuse, at least....

Creative Writing - Making Plans

I've been appraising manuscripts for a couple of literary consultants in London recently and there is one thing which crops up time after time in the books that I've been reading and that is a lack of planning. The most brilliant conception is going to lead to an extremely poor delivery if you don't make proper preparations.

Inspiration honestly, truly isn't enough and the perspiration which is said to be a necessary accompaniment should consist of at least some careful planning. You won't do justice to your genius idea if you don't spend time thinking about the execution of it. The stories I've been working on are well-written – no problems there -  but the characters are on the skinny side because the writers haven't lived with them for long enough, and the plots are prone to hideous expediency, because the necessary traps haven't been set in advance.

Great artists do preliminary sketches for their paintings, and in order to fulfil your own potential it wouldn't do any harm to come up with an outline plan for the story you intend to write. Nothing needs to be set in stone - the process of thinking ahead will have made you ask important questions about your plot and that is the main thing;  the answers may come later and will perhaps surprise you.

Be prepared. Otherwise you may sell yourself short, may not do justice to your ability. Because planning is a practical thing to do, it may feel like the opposite of creativity, but it will provide you with a structure for your story and a gilded frame for your talent.

At the Edge of the Precipice with F. Scott Fitzgerald

The other day I started re-reading The Great Gatsby because it's recently out of copyright and as a result there has been a lot of brouhaha about it, with dramatisations and new editions galore, and I wanted to remind myself what all the fuss was about. Then I spent a guilty half hour in our local Amnesty bookshop (guilty because generally I believe in buying new books so that authors get their due royalty, but I was poorly and didn't quite know what I was doing. Guilt partly assuaged by supporting Amnesty though...) and bought The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, which has sidetracked me a little, but THEN I stumbled upon the wonderful quotation below, which has catapulted me straight back to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and you'll see why...

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story.

Here is a thought that sums up what is exciting about great writing. First of all, it subverts, it takes you by surprise - Scott Fitzgerald isn't saying draw your chair up to the fire, or closer to mine, he's taking you to the brink of something extraordinary.
   
I like the fact that in this line there is an implicit contract between the writer and the reader. The writer is asking something of his reader and promising a reward in return. In reading a book you form a brief but intense relationship with its author. You open up your imagination and your emotional experience and allow him to work upon them. It's an intimacy that is almost sexual, and the vertiginous excitement that can result from it is what Scott Fitzgerald is referring to here.

There is danger in what he is proposing: the edge of the precipice. You are still on solid ground, but only just. If you lose your balance, either literally or metaphorically, you could plunge to your death, or to some hitherto unexplored depths of your interior world. He is not locating you anywhere comfortable; he's not offering you an easy ride; on the contrary, he is throwing down a challenge, but in doing so he is also asking you to trust him. Perhaps that's a writer's  greatest task – to challenge his readers, but to bring them safely home.

Whether you're reading or writing, finding a story that skirts the precipice's edge is the most exciting thing of all.

Throwing a Sickie...

Vile cold.
Here's a lovely door for you to be getting on with. It might lead you somewhere...

Normal service will resume shortly.

Help from Your Favourite Heroines

What is it that makes a character in a novel memorable? Perhaps it would help to answer this question by asking it in a different way: who are the characters you most remember? If you can come up with the who, it might lead you to the why and that in turn might be of help when you are conjuring your own protagonists out of that thin, thin air.

In terms of heroines, my younger self would probably say Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind, but more mature contenders would be Anna Karenina, Nana, the heroine from the Zola's book of the same name, and Tess of the D'Urbevilles 

 Why Scarlett O'Hara? Because she is so flawed and so beautiful– she behaves badly, has no moral compass and no self-knowledge. Because she is punished for all of these things and remains indomitable.

Why Anna Karenina? Why Nana? Both of them find themselves on the outside of society, one as an adulteress, the other as a prostitute. They're not conventional, nor are they seen as ideals of womanhood. They are compromised and unhappy and the dilemmas they face seem real. Anna ends by hitting the self-destruct button, Nana ruins every man she comes into contact with. The terrible workings of cause and effect in both their lives are plain to see. The same is true of Tess, whose unfortunate seduction by Alec is her social and moral and doing. She is both victim and avenger.

Perhaps there's a bit of the theme emerging here. The women I have chosen all have tragic stature because their fall from grace is so vertiginous. With the exception of Anna,  these women fight back, they show resilience. Their behaviour is extreme and in some ways subversive, and three out of four of them end by dying, something which makes the stakes of their respective stories extremely high. They are passionate, risk-taking and rebellious, and yet beneath this we glimpse their vulnerability, qualities which form a combustible mix.

When you are thinking about your next project, it might be helpful to conduct a brief survey of the heroines you admire. If you can work out what it is that attracts you to them, you are halfway to being able to endow your own protagonist with their feistiness, or their fragile glamour, or whatever it was that drew you to them in the first place.

Room With a View

Pulitzer Prize winning American author Edna Ferber once observed, 'The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.'
Perhaps the blank brick wall might serve as a timely reminder that trying to write well and be published is a bit like hitting one, time and time again, and I can see that a cloudless stretch of sky might lend itself to blue sky thinking, but I'm rather fond of the clutter of green that I can see from my window.

I guess Ferber was advocating minimal distraction and perhaps I have spent too much time watching my neighbour's runner beans ripen and gawping at the builders re-pointing the swimming pool chimney, but I'm thinking while I'm looking out, honestly, I am.
Rather than being a distraction, a view can often provide inspiration. At the moment sunlight is streaking along a cobweb that's been loosened by the wind, and the leaves on the silver birch tree won't be there much longer. When I'm gazing out across the muddled gardens I'm learning to notice  detail, I'm absorbing subtle changes and the effect of light and weather. Some of the time I stare attentively, sometimes I have no idea what I'm looking at, what I'm seeing is all inside my head.
Perhaps distraction is no bad thing, in any case: if you let your mind wander, who knows where it may lead you?