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 !

How to Be a Lean Mean Writing Machine

Padding is great for sheds - the more of it the better, as far as I'm concerned, because I'm hoping it's going to keep me warm and toasty the whole winter through.

It ain't so good for novels, though.  There can sometimes be the temptation, particularly if you are writing in the middle period and desperate to put on length, to wodge things out so that your internal wordometer will tick over more rapidly.  This is why editing is so important -- if you want to write elegantly, economy is essential.  Because of this, I'm not a great fan of having a daily target: I must write a thousand words before lunchtime.  I try and let my own literary rhythm dictate how much I write, in the belief that each day's work has its natural length and that forcing the issue will add fat but not muscle to my prose -- the kind of insulation you can do without....

Creative Writing - Thrift not Drift

As well as stamina, fiction writers need good organisational skills in order to be able to stay the course.  As you are pounding through what can sometimes seem like the interminable stretches of the middle part of your story,  you may find that you write yourself up one or two blind alleys which lead nowhere, or have a brilliant idea which doesn't quite fit the section you are working on, so that you're not certain what to do with it.  I usually have a whole file where I deposit written passages that I can't quite place, but don't want to jettison altogether. The shed-building equivalent looks a little bit like this...

The Steves know they are going to need a door somewhere down the line, though not just yet, but there it is, not cluttering up the inside, but on hand ready when needed.

If you are editing as crisply as you should, you may find that your Out Takes file is soon bulging, and junking huge chunks of your work can be demoralising, but nothing is ever wasted.  Even if you cannot recycle material in another chapter, or another story, you will have learned something from creating it in the first place.  Try not to be sentimental or over-protective about your writing, even if you have sweated blood to produce it - remember that what you are after is quality not quantity and sacrificing a few pages as you go will be worth it in the end.

Keeping it Brief

I'm still in Hillary Mantel mode, mulling over all the things she said in her recent BBC2 interview and discovering nuggets of excellent advice. Amongst them is her revelation that she reckoned on cutting one third of every page that she writes.  Think about that!  One third of her entire output goes in the bin. I have known  inexperienced students in classes I have taught haggling over individual sentences, justifying their importance, and I don't entirely blame them.  If your time is precious and you have had to sacrifice something else in order to be able to write, then sweated hard over what you have written, chucking any of it away can be difficult to do.  Stories and novels are the offspring of your imagination and it's a terrible thought to inflict what you perceive to be damage on your own literary child.

However, just as parents can be blind to the faults of their sons and daughters, so writers can sometimes be unaware of the weaknesses in  their work.  If somebody suggests you make a cut, don't hesitate; what's more, look for other bits to snip out too. Stephen King once said that he cuts ten percent from the final draft of any manuscript -- that seems to me to be a minimum requirement. You could put this to the test -- fish out a piece of work you wrote a while ago and reduce it by a tenth.  I don't mind betting that the new version will be crisper, more vivid and packed with greater tension.

It's All in the Edit

When I worked as an actress, I once met a film editor who said rather mischievously that in the movies, all performances were made or broken in the editing suite and that he could sabotage an actor's reputation with one flick of the razor blade (this was in those long-ago misty, pre-digital days). 

Although I didn't agree with him at the time, with the wisdom of years (I wish) I can see how the same might be true in fiction writing. It's easy to think of the blank page as the writer’s challenge, but in many ways, the real test comes when you have completed your first draft.  You have gathered together all your raw material, and now you have to work out how to shape it. You may find you have to do some character work -- flesh out some details here, change the emphasis there -- and almost certainly you will have to polish the structure, perhaps deconstruct and rebuilt it entirely.  In between the first and second drafts of the novel that I am working on at the moment I added 10% to the length, expanding the back story and adding greater drama to events in the present, and it gave me a real sense of satisfaction.

Imagine my surprise on reading Stephen King's excellent book On Writing to discover that his formula for a successful novel is 2^nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

 

Minus 10%?? 

Is he serious? 

I’ve worried away at the idea since then, and I think he probably is.

As well as adding detail in, you do need to take a great deal of flab out.  Read with a critical eye, entire scenes, whole paragraphs and countless over-embellished phrases could be dispensed with.  So I'm going to set myself the challenge.  At the moment I'm dealing with notes from my agent that will almost certainly involve putting in additional material, but when I've done all that I'm going to go down the Stephen King route and see if I can take 10% of the total out again.

Watch this space…