On the Seventh Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Seven Swans A-Swimming, and there is no prettier sight than one of them gliding along the water towards you. Their passage is elegant and effortless - you never see their black feet beneath the surface, hammering against the current.

It's the same with writing: your story should wash over your reader, your prose eddying, your characters making headway against the ebb and flow of your plot. Enough of the extended water metaphor, already! The point is that your reader shouldn't be aware of any of the effort you've put in. If they are conscious of all your hard work, it suggests that you are either showing off or asking for thanks and neither is good.

Some of the invisible graft that you should be doing includes:

• Researching your story – make sure that you visit any real location which features in your work and that you take plenty of pictures. If you are setting your book in the past, read everything you can about the period you have chosen. It won't do any harm to read books by other writers that cover similar ground to you, either.
• Getting to know your characters – they should never be far from your thoughts. Becoming acquainted with your hero or heroine is a bit like falling in love, you should be filled with a craving for more and more information about them. Make notes if it helps you; think about their past lives, their tastes, their ambitions, their aversions, their strengths and weaknesses. Be consumed by them.
• Planning your plot in enough detail to avoid you having to make expedient additions to it at the last moment because you haven't thought things through properly.
• Being clear about the themes of your story – remember that the plot is there to help you explore a wider world view; if it only exists as a thing in itself, your book will your book will be less satisfying.
• Editing your work – when you think you have cut every extraneous phrase that you possibly can, cut another ten percent so that you polish your prose until it sparkles.

These are some of the ways in which you can support your inspiration, the black feet hard at work beneath the surface, so that your story floats free.

I hope that 2013 challenges and rewards your creativity - Happy New Year !

On the Sixth Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Six geese a-laying. If you are very very lucky and have worked very very hard, one of the six just might be the goose that lays the golden egg – a book which gets published and even goes on to be a bestseller. A Christian interpretation of A Partridge in a Pear Tree would have it that the six geese represent the six days of creation and creation is very much my theme for today. I'm interested in the genesis of a story – where people source their ideas and what they do with them; how the same starting point can result in so many varying fictional interpretations; whether ideas arise more or less fully-formed or have to be teased out over a period of time; how the finished product differs from the first thought; the knock-on effect of seemingly insignificant changes. I'm obsessed by the whole process. That's why I keep a writing diary – it's a record of all the ideas I have, when I have them, and what I go on to do with them. As well as an aide memoir it's like a map to me, it tells me where I'm going, I'd be lost without it.

Writing fiction is such an idiosyncratic activity, there's no prescriptive way of doing things: over a period of time you discover what works best for you. Some people plan ahead, others take inspiration as they go along, or depend upon a bit of both. Some writers use pin boards or post-it notes or index cards, but most of them record their ideas in some form or another, so if you don't, it might be worth considering. In the end it doesn't matter how you go about it, as long as the darned egg gets laid.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Five gold rings. It's been suggested that these gold rings represent the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Alternatively they may refer to the gold ring around a pheasant's neck – some think that the early verses of A Partridge in a Pear Tree are a reference to the custom of stuffing one bird inside another inside another for the Christmas feast. Perhaps the rings also symbolise the gift of gold brought by the three Kings to the baby Jesus. Who knows?

It's all a question of interpretation, which is a source of endless fascination in fiction, where stories function on a number of different levels, each one accessible to different people in different ways. The act of interpretation is what connects the reader to the writer, It is an active process of enquiry. The trick for you as an author is to ensure that your work remains just elusive enough for the reader to have to work on it with their own imagination in order to experience it properly. If you do everything for them they will only engage with it in a passive way. If you make them do some of the work themselves, checking that two plus two really does equal four and not five as the plot seems to suggest, they will become actively immersed in the world you have created. There should be a sense of open-ended enigma in your narrative. This can be expressed through the unfolding of the plot, or by a character not being all that they seem, or in any number of other ways. Think of writing as a form of flirtation with your audience, promise and withhold, spurn and cajole, leave them in a state of creative uncertainty...

On the First Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

... a partridge in a pear tree, which in creative writing terms is an excellent example of alliteration, so this is what I'm going to look at in the first verse of my Creative Writing Christmas Carol.
Alliteration is when you cluster the same consonants together for acoustic effect. The Partridge in a Pear Tree, which dates from 1780, is stuffed full of them and the fact that you have to get your tongue round the lords a leaping and the maids a milking gives the lyrics a bright staccato quality that compliments the music.The reason for using alliteration is to make your prose (or poetry) more resonant, so that the words you choose capture the sound of what you are describing. For example, seven swans a swimming perfectly sums up the slow glide of the swans swimming upstream (you see, I'm doing it too.). Alliteration isn't just used for decorative purposes, it can give emphasis to phrases (think tabloid headlines) and helps to create atmosphere as well. Used judiciously, it can add a certain je ne sais quoi to your work as it suggests stylistic confidence. It's a handy tool in the creative writing kit.