The Secret of Songwriting is...

I saw American country singer Sam Baker at St Bonaventure's (arguably the best music space in the world) Parish Hall last night. His songs were  like perfectly crafted short stories, each one full of the drifting heartbreak of smalltown Texas life.  He gave great patter too, wooing the audience with his laid-back drawl and amongst the throwaway lines he kept using (I don't know where this is going being one) he kept saying, the secret of good songwriting is...and proceeded to list things you should mention to create a good song: push-up bras, red boots, Texan Stud.

Which got me thinking.  I suspect the secret of good writing, of songs or stories, is to write about what excites you, because  your excitement is what communicates itself to the reader.  Write about what you are confident about (a variation on the old saw of write about what you know) because your sense of authority will make your audience sit up and listen.  Write with passion because it is there you will discover your flair.

For me, the secret of good writing is clarity -- the letting in of light. 

What's your secret?

Just Do It

When I worked as an actor, one of the first lessons I learned was about stage presence: if you walk onto the stage as if you own it and have every right to be there, then you can communicate anything you want to a captive audience.  On the other hand, if you creep on looking uncertain about how you could possibly have ended up in the limelight, you will be lucky to  project anything as far as the front row.  It has a little bit to do with conviction and a lot to do with energy.

The same applies with writing. The novel I am working on at the moment is told from one character's point of view and involves two principal protagonists.  Another crucial character is part of the story, but never makes an appearance.  My agent suggested that this off-stage figure should have a presence in the narrative and I've been agonising about whether it matters if I break the literary convention I've established and if it doesn't, how I should set about it.  I've spent ages cudgling my brains and I've finally arrived at the answer:

Just do it.

As with acting, if you do something with total conviction and a certain amount of verve and energy, your reader will accept any convention you throw at them - first person, third person, present tense, past tense - whatever.  If you have faith in what you are doing, they will too.  If you are uncertain about it, you can bet your bottom dollar your insecurities will be transmitted to them as well.  For writing, the solution is unusually simple.  Get on with it.

A Different Perspective

It's a question of perspective: you can make something  - an emotion or an event -- seem enormous depending on whether your character is closely involved, or you can allow it to appear distant and insignificant if they are only peripheral. Sometimes, to get a sense of perspective, you need context too. In my cute little picture of Snow White,

(taken a while bumping about in a French lock) it is the presence of the flowers which give away the fact that she is only inches tall.  Without them, she could almost be lifesize.

Why not experiment with this in your writing. Play with the perspective of a scene to see how you can alter its significance.  What do you need to do to make it acutely important for one of your characters and negligible for another, and what effect does that have on the feelings of each of them?  Think of it as a kind of emotional engineering.  Remember, it is also a question of how close you as the writer want or are able to be to your work, because your distance (or otherwise) will have an effect on it as well.

In the Beginning...

 

Dawn, up early and no one else about, so time to look and think, both critical occupations for a writer, though to the outside observer it might seem as if you're simply idling. But stood idling long enough to see the day  lose its first intensity as the sun diluted.

The moment was full of private magic, like the best writing.  You need time to feed your imagination, and often that means being on your own, and daring to do nothing.

Taking Wing...

We found this tiny fledgeling in the middle of a lake at the Cotswold Water Park.  The poor little thing was drowning and we managed to rescue it and put it among  some dry leaves to recover.  There it shivered for half an hour or more and occasionally we crept back,  expecting that it would have pegged out and we'd have a funeral on our hands.  However, gradually it dried out and fluffed up and the last time we went back, it was gone.

Fiction is a little bit like that.  Some ideas need rescuing and all of them need tending regularly, with patience and persistence and a great deal of goodwill all round (both from the writer and the poor long suffering people around them.) But like our little fledgeling, ideas do fluff up (and with any luck they don't dry out) and eventually they take flight.  You have to stick your neck out and fight for them a bit, but if they soar, then every bit of effort is worth it.

The Bon Mot, or Choosing the Right Word

As a writer, you need to be as sensitive as possible to the nuances of language -- natch.  You need to be alert to the various meanings a word can have, and how context can alter them.  In the editing process you need to make sure you have anticipated every possible way in which your sentence can be construed, because if the words you choose are even slightly off target, the consequences can be disastrous.

I know that things can often get skewed -- or lost -- in translation, but even so, in this age of globalisation I hope the marketing consultants who came up with this brand are kicking themselves now.

Time Passes

Time passes, slipping by rather too quickly when you are away "researching" in the backwaters of southern Burgundy with its crumbling ochre villages, where Gothic architecture looks  positively cutting age and modern, compared to the rounded, earth-bound arches of the Norman churches and fortified farms that are two a penny, still.

Sometimes, it can feel as if one era has gently fragmented and in the cracks and fissures and shards that are left, you can just glimpse another emerging beneath.  Time certainly doesn't seem linear here:: it feels more elliptical and unknowable than that, so that the landscape appears to be dotted with unsolved clues to the mystery of the past.

Try writing about the passage of time in a way that evokes this sense of enigma. Think about atmosphere and telling detail, rather than dates; try and give your writing some emotional context (an ache? a sense of loss? a release?) as that will make it more interesting and resonant.