Back From the Drink

 I've been travelling for a couple of months with only limited access to the Internet, which is why my posts have been few and far between, but I'm back from careering down the River Rhone, so wide they say you can see the curvature of the earth,

 and hot for some literary trotting.

 The great thing about casting yourself adrift for a few weeks is the opportunity it gives you for reflection and - more importantly - READING. My big news is that I have finished the inestimable Claire Messud's latest book The Woman Upstairs. Let me tell you why it broke my heart. Not just because her writing is pitch perfect: clear, revelatory and highly polished, but because her access to the inner reaches of the human psyche, with all its frailties and inextinguishable aspirations, is second to none. She tells the story of spinster schoolteacher Nora Eldridge's attachment to the family of one of her pupils and her eventual betrayal by them and there are so many lessons to be learnt as a writer that I hardly know where to begon, but the two biggest ones are:

• Detail, when it well observed and pertinent, is a vital tool for drawing a reader into your story. The relationship between Messud's two protagonist's, Nora and Sirena, is forensically recorded glance by glance, meeting by meeting, until you feel that you are part of the web she is spinning between them. 
• Hold your nerve. If your story is strong, as Messud's is, then have the courage of your convictions and give it due space and time. Don't feel the need to cut to the chase - in some ways, the slower you go, the more impatient and curious your reader will become.

I was both awed and enchanted by The Woman Upstairs - the writing  made me ravenous - rush out and read!

Lost in Translation

Not sure the branding would work over here...

Franz Kafka: a Dead Man Writing

I'm sitting in my shed at the bottom of our garden with the doors and windows open, revelling in what passes for peace and quiet in an inner-city. Next door's runner beans are dying, but the ash trees which thresh and rustle overhead have survived the dieback blight so far. Apart from the odd insect zithering amongst the flowers, and the gulls which trace the vapour trails high above, I'm completely on my own, certainly beyond the reach of the front door bell.

That's how I write – in isolation. I can't bear any distraction: the view from my window is hard enough to resist. How JK Rowling managed to write the first volume of the Harry Potter series in a cafe beats me. As Franz Kafka once said, "I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”

So here I am, sitting at my laptop like a dead man, but feeling very much alive...

What's the perfect environment in which you would like to write?

An Exercise in Sensory Deprivation

The sun is shining, I can hear birds singing outside my window and it's the longest day, so the last thing you probably want is a writing exercise for the weekend, but if you think that the longest day will, by definition, give you more time to write, and allow your senses to be stimulated by the effects of the lovely weather, perhaps you might be persuaded....

Early memories, because they are vivid and elemental and form part of your make up, can be a fertile source of ideas. Try and recall an event from your infancy or early childhood and jot down as many details as you can remember so that you have plenty of information  at your fingertips. Then, just to make it a little more challenging, write a few paragraphs based on this memory, but without using any visual description at all.

This will force you to think about other ways of recalling and describing things – sounds, smells and tastes can be intensely evocative, and conjuring up a memory purely through the medium of touch might be a revelation. This is an opportunity to flex different writing muscles; going beyond the visual might take you deeper into the experience itself, thus bringing rewards to both you and your reader.

And anyway, the forecast for tomorrow is for gales and rain. Have a great weekend....

Wanted : Goethe's Dog

Wandering through the rain-soaked streets of Strasbourg recently, we passed a house where the playwright Goethe lived for a time...

...and I was reminded of a remark that he once made: wanted, a dog that neither barks nor bites, eats glass and shits diamonds.

Part of me wants that dog too, and wants it really badly (perhaps it's the little fellow who featured in my earlier post), but the hard-working writer part of me knows that what is worth having doesn't come easily, although on reflection perhaps drafting and redrafting and then – oh yes – having another go at it is the authorial equivalent of eating glass and that what you get in the end – dog or no dog – is a kind of hard-edged, glinting prose - your very own literary diamond.

Telling the Difference Between Showing and Telling

This is a tough one, the mistake most writers, but new ones in particular, are most likely to make: telling the reader something, rather than bringing it to life by showing it happen. In a sense it's the art of dramatisation; it's certainly the raising agent that turns a sloppy mix of eggs, butter and flour (or characters, plot and language) into a light sponge (or gripping read).

Here are a couple of examples of what I mean:

John was a tall man. Hmmm. Doesn't really do much, does it? But John shouldered his way into the room, ducking his head from habit; he was used to the feeling of being too large for most interior spaces. Without directly commenting on John's height, the writer has shown the physicality of his size and a little of how it makes him feel, so not only are we seeing John in action, we are getting a hint about how his appearance affects his behaviour and his thinking. Although the description is longer than John was a tall man, it is doing far more work.

"I wish it would stop raining," said Jane gloomily. "It's been like this for days." In this example the writer is half way there, as dialogue can be a help when you want to avoid bald statements and this short speech is a better description than simply saying It had been raining for days. There's more to extract here though, especially in terms of the effects of the weather on Jane and what it tells us about her mood. How about, "I wish it would stop raining," Jane leaned her forehead against the window, her breath flaring against the glass. She traced the path of a single raindrop through the condensation with an idle finger, noting how the paint on the frame was cracking and that small rifts were filling with moss. "It's been like this for days." She paused, waiting for a response, but nobody answered her. She breathed on the glass again, trying to make the weather disappear..." By exploring more fully just what gloomily might signify, a great deal of additional atmosphere and context has been added to the scene: the single raindrop perhaps equates to a tear, the cracked paint filled with moss implies neglect and decay, the fact that Jane's finger is idle and that nobody responds to her her remark suggests her boredom and isolation. The resulting image has infinitely more detail and more depth.

To try and prevent yourself from slipping into the trap of telling something rather than showing it, remember that good writing will always do more than one thing at a time - it will comment on the interior as well as the exterior, will describe physical and mental states, or use the particular to throw light on the general. This is partly because as an author you always want your work to have a two-fold effect on your reader - you want to make them think and feel...

The Three Rs of Creative Writing

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I'd passed the the first three chapters of my Work in Progress to my writing mentor to see if she thought I was working along the right lines. Like a good friend, she responded incredibly swiftly with some trenchant and radical opinions, so radical, in fact, that they stopped me dead in my tracks. She thought that I wasn't starting the book in the right place and that the strain of trying to bind two stories together was showing and that I should focus on just one. And that was just for starters! She had other observations to make as well.

My knee-jerk response was to junk everything I had written and begin the book again, closer to the origins of the story.

The subconscious, creative part of my brain has now had six weeks to process these suggestions. I've barely written anything and yet I feel the time has been well spent. The two strands of the plot are beginning to synthesise themselves together, although I have made major changes, and I'm fairly confident I know where my starting point needs to be.

The reason I'm sharing all of this with you is that it has taken me a long time to make constructive use of the criticism I received. You can't rush the creative process – if you do, you are likely to make mistakes you will come to regret. If you are in the throes of writing a novel or a story, hold your nerve and take your time. Contemplation is one of the most active things an author can do, even if it make you feel as if you are in a passive state. The three Rs of creative writing are every bit as important as the reading, writing and 'rithmetic you learn at school: when you are lucky enough to be given criticism, Receive, Reflect, Respond.

Normal Service Will Resume...

...but at the moment I'm hidden away in a remote spot without access to the internet - yes, such places still exist and the breathtakingly lovely Helford Estuary in southernmost Cornwall is one of them. It's an inspiring place in which to think and dream and I shall be back at my desk next week refreshed and inspired and ready to rock some thoughts about writing.

See you then.

Creative Writing: Working with Mosaics

I thought you might like some gilded Art Nouveau flowers to brighten up this interminably long shortest month. I am so through with February. I'm desperate for some mad March wind to blast the grey away and shake the gold from the daffodils.

In the meantime, here are my gaudy blooms, found above a shop front in Nancy, France. I'm intrigued by the composite nature of the image, hundreds of tiny tiles that would be decorative but meaningless on their own, fitting together to make a picture. I like the way the artist has put contrasting colours together to create an impression of depth and texture. It's interesting that the composition is framed in gold and then again in blue and white, and yet the petals break through the frame rebelliously, softening and subverting.

What my flowers teach us about writing fiction is to do with the accumulation of detail. They show how a picture full of depth and resonance can be fashioned from hundreds of tiny details, which looked at individually have little to tell us, but viewed as part of a larger whole can be extraordinarily revealing.

See how you can apply this to your own work: it can be helpful in building a character or describing a scene. Jot down as many individual observations as you can – more than you need – and start assembling them, being conscious of the effect of comparison and contrast. Move them around until you're happy with the overall effect and then stand back and take a look – you might be surprised at what you see.

Creative Contradictions

Jean Cocteau once observed that, "the spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction," an interesting avenue to explore on a Wednesday morning. You can think about this in a number of different ways. Writing fiction is often an exercise in polarity. You establish a status quo and then explore something as far removed from it as you can credibly go: taking your hero from a place of safety and normality to one of danger and uncertainty, giving yourself as much scope is possible to examine the terrain that lies between. In the course of a good story, the protagonist should move from  ignorance to knowledge, weakness to strength, emptiness to fulfilment and his state at the beginning should be as different as possible – contradictory – from his state at the end in order to give the journey resonance and meaning.

However, when you are writing creatively, contradiction needn't necessarily confine itself to exploring opposites. Cocteau was an iconoclast, out to subvert all kinds of assumptions, something you can do to great effect when you are writing fiction. You can upset your readers' notion of what the story might be about by whipping the metaphorical rug from under their feet, or you can confound your characters' expectations (both in terms of plot and other people) of what might happen next, or who exactly they are dealing with.

You could also try contradicting your own instincts as a writer – don't reach for the comfortable phrase or the first response, turn your default settings off instead, and do something different. Try working in a genre that is new to you, or write about a character you wouldn't be seen dead with in real life, or have a go at poetry if you would normally stick to prose. You might find your own expectations are restricting you, so have a day of being contradictory and see where it takes you...

No Ladies Dancing!

I'm feeling punch drunk having cut seventeen scenes from the screenplay that I'm working on – once you start, you just can't stop – and on the subject of cutting, I've realised that I left out Nine Ladies Dancing from my Creative Writing Christmas Carol. Perhaps dancing didn't seem quite important enough, but I shouldn't have let that kind of oversight slip through. Mea Culpa.

Moral? Always check your work religiously and, if possible, get someone else to cast an eye over it as well.

As I'm in slash and burn mode, I won't linger, in case I cut anything else that really matters. Here's a beautiful door, the gateway to a fresh start next time, to make up for everything...

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.

Architecture for Writers

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, according to Ernest Hemingway, an interesting insight with which to start the week. If you think of your novel as a work of architecture, you may find yourself looking at the way the story arcs and intersects with more pragmatic eyes. Try picturing your book as a building, think what you will need to support the spans of the narrative - strong characterisation and a slippery plot; give it solid foundations, provide somewhere for imagination to take refuge, house your reader, make them at home.

By concentrating on the structure of your story, you will be less diverted by the niceties of polishing your prose (that can wait for later), which means there's every chance your writing will be less self-conscious and the work as a whole more solid and robust.

 

An Observation about Using Observation in Creative Writing

I was on the bus the other day, whiling away the time by watching two people who were sitting side-by-side in separate pools of tiredness.  You could tell that they were both worn out, but they were worn out in different ways.  The woman was relatively upright, gazing into space as if she had been travelling forever, her expression blank.  Next to her, the man seemed hollowed out by tiredness, crushed by it.  He was slumped, his tie was loose at his neck, his head was hanging, his cheeks were gaunt.  He didn't have the energy to gaze anywhere, he was staring at nothing. He seemed at the end of his tether, beside himself, bereft.

I'm sharing this with you because, as writers, you never know where you're going to find material, and you won't find it if you don't look.  In fact, it's everywhere, all around you and if you take the trouble to search with an observant eye you will find everything you need to inform your work.  Studying these people (as covertly as I could) make me think about characterisation, contrast, degree and detail; it was like taking a short refresher course in descriptive writing.  It didn't just pass the time for me, it filled it with interest and wonder.

Another shopfront from the book village of Cuisery...

Characterisation -- How to Read a Face

While we were in the seductive book village of Cuisery (see my previous post) we wandered into the little church of Notre Dame, originally begun in the 11th century and completed in 1504.

I was stopped dead in my tracks by some beautiful frescoes in a side chapel.

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Although some of the paint is in lamentably poor condition, the character of the man portrayed here is by no means obliterated.  Standing gazing at his solemn, preoccupied face, it struck me how  rules which apply in one creative form can be easily transposed to another.

Try studying the painting and analysing what you see, because it will tell you so much about the person you're looking at.

• Clothing: he is wearing a hat that is well-fitting and has some kind of shape/design that goes beyond the merely functional.  We can see the collar of his tunic, which has some ornamentation on it, so he is probably reasonably prosperous.  The fact that he is dressed in co-ordinating shades of blue perhaps suggests that he has some sense of style and self-esteem.
• Age: he looks like a man in his prime, sporting a full beard with no apparent flecks of grey in it, nor are there any lines upon his face.
• Build: he seems thickset and well fed, again suggesting that he is well-to-do.
• Features: he has a strong nose and a full mouth, though his head is held at a slightly tentative angle, and his eyes....

Ah, his eyes, the windows of the soul, particularly in this man's case.  All his experience - sorrow?  grief?  loss?  uncertainty?  regret? - is expressed in the look askance, the slight frown, yet none of these emotions over drawn; they are subtly synthesised.

If you look at a face for long enough, you learn its secrets, you discover its landscape -- so much of the early stages of falling in love consist of gazing with unwavering absorption at the face of your beloved and it's this kind of intensity you need to bring to portraying the characters you are writing about. It might be a helpful exercise to try and bring to life on paper the picture in this post.

When it comes to your own work, imagine you're standing gazing at a mediaeval fresco, look long and hard at your hero or heroine, don't be afraid to stare!

How to Make Fictional Oaks Grow From Little Acorns

We've had sleet today and there's snow forecast, so it's definitely a good time to hunker down in the warm and do some writing.

How's this for an idea?  Describe a character; flesh out as much detail as you can -- appearance, back story, strengths and weaknesses, hopes for the future, occupation etc.  Put in as much information as you can.  Then do the same thing for a second, completely different character.  Finally dream up a situation in which they might meet one another by chance, and see what happens when they do.

You'd be surprised how much well-realised and engrossing work can spring from such a simple beginning.  After all, every story has to start at some point and an exercise like this might lead to somewhere interesting, or be a good warm up if you're working on an existing project.

Think of it as a new door opening....

(I haven't indulged in one of these for ages...)