Literature, Lycanthropy and Howling at the Moon

I love Margaret Atwood when she is slightly off the wall. She once told someone I knew to bury the names of the people who frightened her in a hole in the garden, something I've considered doing myself, although it would have to be more of a pit in my case.

Here she is talking wolfishly about writing:

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.... Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”

Perhaps what she means is the best fiction is about dealing with some kind of perceived threat, which is perhaps a bit of a theme for her as the gardening advice could be seen in that light too. I thought it would make an interesting subject as a writing exercise. Why not have a go at some literary lycanthropy yourself? Wolf in sheep's clothing, wolfsbane, wolfing something down – there are all manner of starting points and you might find that you have the germ of an interesting story. In any case, don't you think that writing sometimes feels like howling at the moon?

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.

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...)