Creative Writing: Working with Mosaics

I thought you might like some gilded Art Nouveau flowers to brighten up this interminably long shortest month. I am so through with February. I'm desperate for some mad March wind to blast the grey away and shake the gold from the daffodils.

In the meantime, here are my gaudy blooms, found above a shop front in Nancy, France. I'm intrigued by the composite nature of the image, hundreds of tiny tiles that would be decorative but meaningless on their own, fitting together to make a picture. I like the way the artist has put contrasting colours together to create an impression of depth and texture. It's interesting that the composition is framed in gold and then again in blue and white, and yet the petals break through the frame rebelliously, softening and subverting.

What my flowers teach us about writing fiction is to do with the accumulation of detail. They show how a picture full of depth and resonance can be fashioned from hundreds of tiny details, which looked at individually have little to tell us, but viewed as part of a larger whole can be extraordinarily revealing.

See how you can apply this to your own work: it can be helpful in building a character or describing a scene. Jot down as many individual observations as you can – more than you need – and start assembling them, being conscious of the effect of comparison and contrast. Move them around until you're happy with the overall effect and then stand back and take a look – you might be surprised at what you see.

Writing Fiction : The Perfect Beginning

I've just read the first two chapters of Maggie O'Farrell's new novel Instructions for a Heatwave, an opening so exquisitely orchestrated that it has left me feeling every other writer should just pack up their things and go home. I'd be full of gloom and despair for all our prospects, if I weren't enjoying her book so much.

Why is it so wonderful? It's not just because her writing is pitch perfect: never understated, yet never flashy either, with a tone as clear as a bell; it's the way she turns water into wine, using her intricate knowledge of the human heart to transform the ordinary lives of simple people into something representative and symbolic. In the opening pages we discover certain things about the Riordan family - the elderly father has gone missing, the son's marriage is on the brink – but we are learning so much more about the geology of human relationships as O'Farrell digs deep into the impermeable seams of rock, the crumbling sandstone, the pockets of air that make up the foundations of the interplay between people. She deals in misplaced aspirations and assumptions, in the shortfall of good intentions, in the abrasions between hope and reality – and I am only on page twenty-five! I've got three hundred and twelve pages still to go (not that I'm counting) and shall doubtless have plenty more to say about this amazing book once I have finished it. But in the meantime, if you want to discover how to write the opening chapters of a story, learn from an expert  – it's not just instructions for a heatwave that Maggie O'Farrell's novel contains, it's instructions for writing to the best of your ability...

Fiction Writing – Drawing on Your Own Experience

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar." So says Stephen King in his own particular take on the old adage that you should write about what you know, drawing inspiration from your own experience. I like the idea of remembering every scar, even though it might turn you into a poor, paranoid, retributive creature. The key thing is to be able to recall the feelings associated with each inflicted wound, because being able to write truthfully about emotion and therefore to share insights with your readers is what will bring them back for more.

However, being able to reproduce your own personal scars as literature is harder than it looks. If you transcribe your experience directly, without allowing your imagination to work upon it and transform it, you run the risk that a) your work will be full of self-pity and b) it will be so personal to you that it will fail to resonate with other people. You need to convert the particular into something general, without losing that unique genesis that made it individual in the first place – almost a contradiction in terms and flipping difficult to do.

Write about your scars from a safe distance, when you have enough perspective to interpret them in a way that will illuminate what you are describing for your audience. One of the best experiences for a reader is to think That's happened to me, I've felt that, I've been there. It's that moment of recognition, of identification, of profound sharing. The way you achieve that connection with them is not simply to reproduce your own trauma and unhappiness for public consumption, no matter how skilfully you re-imagine it. What you need to add is a sense of wisdom gained,  the promise that out of the darkness light has come. Suffering in stories always needs to be accompanied (and redeemed) by hope.

Creative Writing – How to Set Your Story in Time and Place

I'm just starting to work on a new writing project, so the setting of the story is very much on my mind. As a huge fan of Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, as well as classics like Wuthering Heights, I'm conscious of the powerful role that location can play in a book. Handled well, it can carry as much weight as the central characters. It can inspire feelings of longing, revulsion, alienation; it can enhance the emotional arc of your narrative by contributing to the atmosphere, or alternatively it can provide a useful counterpoint.

You can be businesslike about it and provide just enough information to anchor the events you're describing and the people who are involved in them and in a plot driven novel, where action is all, this may be the right way to go about things. However, I'm inclined to think that any writing opportunity which presents itself should be exploited to the full and that if you don't give due attention to the location of your narrative – where it exists in time and place – you may be selling yourself short.

If you want a brilliant example of how to tackle setting, check out Dart, Deborah Harvey's new book just published by Indigo Dreams. It's a young adult's novel set in 14th century Devon, and Harvey meticulously brings to life this remote mediaeval period (without her extensive research ever intruding), but the irresistible pull of the story lies in its setting on Dartmoor, which works upon the lives of her protagonists almost as powerfully as the scourge of the Black Death - the bubonic plague which overwhelmed the county and decimated its population. Even if you don't want to learn useful lessons about location, read it anyway: Deborah writes with a poet's lyricism, combining it with authenticity and accuracy to produce an epic tale that is still haunting me, even though I finished it a while ago.

Finding a Frame for your Story

I took this picture just outside the Place Stanislas in Nancy, looking into what is said to be the most beautiful square in the whole of France. It was designed by Emmanuel Héré and lavishly embellished by Jean Lamour, whose wrought iron archway draws the eye into my photo.

I'm a crap photographer, but I like the way the dark green foliage in shadow at the front of the picture anticipates the lighter tree in the square, and then the one that we can glimpse beyond that. I like the contrast between the pale sky and the gilded filigree of the railings, between the harshness of the foreground and the softness of the distant spire. Really, I suppose, it's two separate images, ones superimposed on the other, both of them echoing and resonating together.

Just as I've attempted to frame one view with another, so one story can provide the setting for another when you are writing fiction. You can do this through flashback, using the present as a lens through which to view of the past, or you can use your subplot, making the actions of the minor characters provide a commentary on the behaviour of your protagonists. As with my picture, there should be plenty of similarities and contrasts between the two layers in your story, in order to make what can sometimes be a complicated process worthwhile. If you can pull it off, your narrative will have greater depth, more nuance, more subtlety than it would if it consisted of a single plot strand, rather than two inter-related ones that counterpoint each other.

Ghost Writing?

I went to visit my father's grave yesterday. He is buried in a churchyard at the foot of the Cotswold escarpment, in a place that is haunted by memories: of my dad, of my son's childhood which was spent in the village, of life as it used to be and is no longer, yet each time I visit it feels as if it is I who am the ghost. I seem to slip into the uncanny space that exists between the worlds of then and now. When I wander up to the graveyard, or stand at the bottom of our old driveway gazing hungrily up at the house, I feel as if I am the spectre outside the window, the exorcised, the banished.

The reason I'm sharing this with you, the creative writing reason, is because I think it touches on perspective and what you can do with it when you are writing fiction. Received wisdom is that the dead haunt the living, but when I go back to my old "haunts", that isn't my experience at all, for me the reverse is true. I think you might be able to apply this to your own work: when you are tackling point of view within the structure of your narrative, see what happens when you approach it from a different viewpoint. For example, if A is the heroine of your story, try telling it from the perspective of B, or C. To put it even more simply, when you are working creatively begin with the obvious and then do the opposite.

The Spaces Between Words

We're Borgen slaves in our house, gone into mourning now that the second series has finished. How I'll make it through the year without my weekly dip into the lives of Danish Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her soulful, straying husband Philip Christensen (Mikael Birkkjær), I just don't know.

For the unconverted amongst you, the series is in Danish with English subtitles, so imagine my surprise when my husband asked me to turn it up because he couldn't hear! But when I thought about it for a moment, I completely got what he meant. Even though we could understand what the actors were saying because it was helpfully written on the screen for us to see, hearing their voices, with all the subtle inflections of emotion and restraint, was absolutely key in responding to their performances. In other words, how they were speaking was as important, if not more, as what they were communicating.

There's a creative writing lesson here - no way! - and it's about dialogue and context. When your characters are in conversation it isn't enough to show them exchanging lines with each other. You need to provide enough additional information for your reader to be able to interpret all the nuances of what they are expressing. They need to understand not just what they are saying, but what they are not saying, what they've regretted saying, what they really mean. You need to indicate whether their words are shot through with irony or humour or spite, whether sincerity is real or faked. There is a mass of spin that you as a writer can apply to ordinary speech, which is why dialogue alone is not enough – unless you have actors like Sidse Babett Knudsen and Mikael Birkkjær to do the extra work for you. So when your characters begin to speak, fill in the spaces between their words to make our reading richer.