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 !

Research Junkie

That's me! I love a good bit of research to get me going with a book, whether it's set in the present or the past, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, digging around for information is a great stimulus of the creative juices; with me, it slakes a thirst.  Things that I unearth can often help in the development of character and certainly can influence the course of a plot.  Did this really happen?  Did they really do that in those days?  The answers to questions like that are meat and drink.

Because I love research so much, I'm really sensitive to the danger of piling all the knowledge that I've rootled out into my narrative.  Because I know something and it interests me, I'm damned well going to include it, even if it is of no interest to anybody else and actually hinders the narrative because it slows it down or clutters it up.

Just because I've made the cake, it doesn't mean I have to eat it all;  it's OK to have a slice and leave the rest in the tin for another time. It's the same with facts which you've uncovered.  Use some of them, to give authority to your work, to make it credible and help to bring it to life, but for goodness sake don't cram everything in as that's more like bulimia than writing and won't do you or your story any good.