Exploring the Past by Degrees

Without getting too metaphysical and going way beyond my pay grade, we experience time in a number of different ways. How we relate to the present differs from how we relate to the recent or even the distant past, and all the way stations in between have their own subtle distinctions. As writers we can express these through the tenses we select.
Here are some of the ones we commonly use:

• Present: I write
• Present Continuous: I am writing
• Simple Past: I wrote
• Past Imperfect: I was writing
• Past Perfect: I have written
• Pluperfect: I had written
• Conditional: I would write 
• Conditional Perfect: I would have written
• Future Perfect: I will have written

In these examples the present is condensed and authoritative: I write – it's a statement of fact, whereas the present continuous I am writing sounds a little more hesitant and open-ended. The real nuances start to make themselves felt when you venture back in time. I wrote is direct and straightforward, but I was writing is somehow more suggestive: I was writing... (and then something happened to stop me?) I have written sounds emphatic, taking three words to hammer the message home. I had written takes you farther back still. It's a dead tense, an inaccessible one and I don't like it at all. I would write  sounds like someone hedging their bets - I would write but... but... but - it's an uncomfortable tense, a mitigating tense, but it's not quite so hand-wringing as the conditional perfect – I would have written (but it's too late now.) The future perfect sounds wonderfully organised and efficient, redolent of forward planning: I will have written. It's self assured in a way that the imperfect never can be.
Try substituting different verbs: I would have loved, I was hurting, I rejoice, and you start to see what a crucial contribution the choice of tense makes to what you are trying to convey. Choose wisely and you will have done yourself (!) a great favour.

How to Make Your Reader an Accomplice

Have you ever watched someone you love hurtling headlong for disaster? I hope not. It makes you want to reach out and physically contain them – in your arms, in a safe place, even in an institution, if that's what it takes. When a person is, for whatever reason, powerless to influence what is happening to them, it is easy to blame events on a malign fate engineering punishment, whether it's justified or not. For the saddened spectator, knowing what is coming further down the track when the victim can't or won't see it for themselves provokes extraordinarily complex emotions – guilt, terror, and despair; maybe even relief that your own life isn't like that.

When you are writing fiction, putting your reader in a similar position – that of omniscient spectator - is called dramatic irony. You manipulate the story so that the reader doesn't just have the pleasure of finding out what happens next, they are privy to it some time before the protagonist. This puts them in an ambiguous position. It can increase the suspense of your story if you hold up the possibility that your hero might, at the eleventh hour, realise what is afoot and avert disaster; it can arouse intense feelings of frustration or pity when this doesn't happen. In Othello, the audience knows about Iago's machinations and deceptions while Othello himself remains in ignorance. Using dramatic irony is a fantastic way of engaging your reader more directly with your story. It changes them from being passive recipients of events into  active participants because you are effectively implicating them in what is going on. Give them more information than your hero has and you are turning them into your accomplices.

A Long Day's Journey into Writing

I've had a long day's writing and I'm tired. You would think this might mean that it's time for me to shut down my computer and go and have a cup of tea – even a biscuit! However, I've learned over the years that I often write best when I'm weary. Perhaps it's because my defences are lower and I'm less resistant, so feelings and ideas can surface more easily. Perhaps the brutal truth is that it takes eight hours work to set the flow of words in motion. Whatever the reason, I often think it's best not to stop work when you're beginning to flag, that instead you should throw yourself into it even more. Write until you become almost incoherent; write until you're exhausted. You might find it's rubbish when you come to reread it in the morning, but my guess is that you will find nuggets of pure gold that would normally be inaccessible to you.

How to Give Your Writing Voltage - by Voltaire

Voltaire,  historian, philosopher and designer of doors (see my earlier post) was no slouch as an author either, his satirical novel Candide, which charts the passage from optimism to disillusionment, vying for attention with other literary and philosophical masterpieces. He was also French, which to my mind suggests style, pure and simple. For all these reasons it is worth paying attention to what he has to say about writing:

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.

There. A perfect example of clarity and directness, qualities we should aspire to in our work. For the sake of absolute clarity, it's worth mentioning that a noun is an object and an adjective is a word which describes it: the red (adjective) house (noun). You'd expect the two of them to work together in harmony and often they do. Prose without any description at all would provide thin pickings, but to extend the food analogy a little, too much of it is like bad cholesterol: it clogs up the arteries of your narrative. You need to use it in moderation.

Here are some pitfalls to avoid when writing descriptively.

• If you use adjectives with abandon, the weight of unnecessary words becomes a burden and will slow your story down.
• If using adjectives becomes your default setting and all you ever write is adjective / noun, adjective  / noun, adjective / noun (the tall house, the deep sea, the little baby) the rhythm of your writing becomes predictable, which means that the attention of your reader will start to wander.
• Factual accuracy is important in your work, but literary accuracy is vital too. The reason that adjectives are the enemies of nouns is not just that they swamp them, they also suggest a fundamental inaccuracy in the noun itself. Instead of saying tall building, say mansion, or skyscraper, or brownstone. For deep sea you could substitute ocean; for little baby, infant.

It's a kind of distillation: the heat of creativity leading to the essence of truth.

And here he is – the man himself, surveying the grounds of the château at Cirey en Blaise where he lived for many years.

Pared down, as you might expect, to the minimum.

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.

Pathetic Fallacy in November

I'm sitting in my writer's block (shed) gazing out at the downpour outside. The sky is like wet newsprint, running with grey. The rain that is currently drumming on my shed roof, reminding me of wet camping holidays as a child, expresses some of the gloom I feel at the approach of winter and the loss of daylight.

November is the perfect month for pathetic fallacy, a literary device where you attribute human emotions or characteristics to nature, or to inanimate objects, for  example the sullen river, the hostile facade of the building... You'll notice I've chosen negative examples in both cases, and this isn't purely coincidental, because pathetic fallacy is often used when human actions are so intense they are uncontainable and spill over into other things. Wuthering Heights is stuffed full of pathetic fallacy – the wild weather on the moors expressing the turbulent emotions with which Heathcliffe and Cathy are wracked. It can be a great way of giving your writing resonance, ensuring that the feelings of your characters reverberate and echo.

Because it's effective, pathetic fallacy can easily be come a default position and you need to be wary of that. You might consider writing a scene in which your heroine is having a major emotional crisis against a background of utter delight – radiant sunshine, the perfect vista, the ideal home – whatever floats your boat. My hunch is that this will enable you to explore feelings of alienation and isolation that are not available if you rely on pathetic fallacy all the time.

So, instead of the sodden garden with its great burden of water that I'm gazing out at, here's a field of young sunflowers newly opened up, turning their faces round to find light.

Drama v Reality

I watched Michael Winterbottom's new film Everyday on Channel 4 last week. It's been described as a sketched drama, which is a difficult term because although I think it means that it was largely improvised, it could also imply that it wasn't fully realised. Hmm.

The film's USP is that it was made over a period of five years. It explores the relationship between Ian (John Simm), who has been sent to prison for drug smuggling, and his struggling family headed by his wife, Karen (played by the luminous, resilient Shirley Henderson).

Winterbottom's genius lay in finding  four real siblings to play the kids and he filmed them every six months, an arrangement that allowed this understated film to explore whether love can survive a long period of separation and whether it is possible to keep the detail of family life going in such testing circumstances.

The film was beautifully performed and the photography was outstanding – those huge, expressionistic East Anglian skies - but in spite of the fact that the production took so long to complete, the end result was weirdly static.

As a writer, this gave me plenty of food for thought. Over the five years that it took to film, given that the circumstances the characters were facing were so challenging, one would have expected to see profound changes taking place as the tectonic plates of family life shifted, but this wasn't the case. The children grew older, the mum seemed more worn, the dad couldn't resist smuggling some dope back into the prison after some home leave – the crime that landed him inside in the first place. Plus ca change - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Everyday worked best as a meditation on human behaviour. It was reflective, mirroring the lives of people under stress. I'm not sure it worked as drama. For that you need crisis, change, a journey to self-knowledge, none of which were much in evidence. Drama distils human actions so the audience can experience catharsis, but I'm not sure that realism has these magical powers.