An Alphabet of Better Writing # K

K is for....Keen

Keenness is a brilliant quality for a writer to have, keenness in all its manifestations and meanings.  My trusty Pocket Oxford  defines it as eager and ardent, and if you are not eager to write and ardent about your subject matter then you will face an uphill struggle in your writing life. 

The dictionary also defines keen as acute and highly perceptive - and intuitive perception about the way the world works and people's behaviour in it is an absolute necessity if you want to succeed as an author.  If you aren't already, you need to train yourself to be observant and to develop a spontaneous interest in people: look and learn, look and learn, as Margaret Atwood says, it's all material.
 
Other definitions include penetrating and vivid and if either of these appeared in a review of your work, wouldn't you  be over the moon?  If you can bring penetrating insight to bear on your story, your narrative will be more vivid and this in turn will engage your reader more intensely -- you need to create the right environment for them to fall in love with your book -- in other words you want them to be as keen on it as you are.

Keen also has funereal overtones and as a writer, you may find yourself bewailing things from time to time: it is hard to come to the end of a piece of work when you had invested so much in it; harder still to send it out into the world and face the gamut of puzzling and confounding and -  sometimes - joyous responses to it. So if you are keen in all the other senses of the word, be prepared to keen occasionally as well...

(A bookshop in the French book town of Cuisery that I was pretty keen on...)

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...

Bring up the Bodies -- Old Books Laid to Rest in Cuisery

As promised, here is another ravishing bookshop from the enchanting book village of Cuisery in the Saone et Loire department of France.

We wandered around the ancient streets peering at irresistible doors, including the one to the 13th century chapel, with its (timeless) plea not to piss against it as the urine  then enters the church!

I found myself feeling vaguely compromised: here I was, pressing my nose against the windows of wonderful bookshops with their precious cargo of rare and characterful books, with my recently acquired Ipad, loaded up with Hilary Mantel's latest, lying heavy as a bad conscience in my bag.

I won't stop buying books, real books, paper books, books that smell, books that age, books that crack when you bend back the spine, ever. But I can't promise that I won't continue some kind of illicit relationship, a guilty affair, with my Ipad, even though I hate the fact that it doesn't have page numbers and I can't weigh in my hand how much I have read and how much there is still to go.  I miss looking at the cover of the book when I start reading, I didn't realise how much it helped to locate me in the story.

Electronic reading is convenient and pragmatic, pallid virtues which kind of compensate for the loss of orientation, for the intensity of the relationship between the reader, ink, and paper.  But the story is king, always, and the vehicle is secondary, and I'm devouring Bring up the Bodies page by weirdly backlit page.

Bookshop Heaven

Just back from a watery couple of weeks in France.  When I die and go to bookshop heaven, I believe it will look something like this....

This was one of several divine bookshops in Cuisery, the French equivalent of Hay on Wye, although France has four  "book villages" to our measly one.  Being France, and it being a Sunday evening, all the shops were shut, but drifting around the streets you could almost smell the must which clings to seldom-turned pages, and the thick yellow light that faded over the hillside seemed slightly foxed.

More bookshops and more book chat very soon.  This is just a quickie to let you know that I am back.