Mood Music

It's a sunny day today, and yesterday wasn't.  The dawn this morning was infused with pink light colouring a gauzy mist and the dawn yesterday was clammy with drizzle.  The view from my window yesterday and today couldn't be more different..The effect of light is similar to (and influences) mood; indeed, pathetic fallacy is the technical term for using the weather as a means of expressing the emotional state of the characters in a story.  The links between the two are strong, both in fiction and in the real world.

So here's a little exercise, in case you have some free time over the weekend (hah!) Try experimenting with the effect that mood can have on a scene.  Pick a situation and describe it in a mood of intimacy and then in a mood of alienation, or joy/sadness -- choose two contrasting ones that interest you.  Then try fusing your two versions together so that you have a situation that starts on one emotional note and then changes to another -- just like your average day, really....

All in the End Is Harvest

Saw this sign in France recently - Vendanges means grape harvest and it is such a big deal over there that it stops traffic -- literally.

The reason I'm sharing this photo with you is that I like the drama of the road sign,  the idea that a harvest, whether agricultural or literary, is something you should be alerted to, that it is worthy of an exclamation mark.  Part of me would like to hang out a big sign when I've finished the draft of a book (although another part of me would like to hide away and pretend that nothing has happened). I remember that when I put the final full stop to the first novel I wrote, I made the strangest sound - something between a laugh and a sob - and finishing a mammoth project to which you have committed months if not years of your time is a strange mix of grief and elation, of achievement and loss: the book is no longer yours, it belongs to other people and will make its way without you (or not at all, but that's another story).

So be prepared, if you are coming to the end of something you have written, for the turbulence of unexpected feelings; remember that once the harvest is in, a long winter lies ahead before you see the first signs of spring...

One, Two, Three, and S-T-R-E-T-C-H

The usual advice to fledgeling authors is to write about what you know, to draw upon the emotional truth of your own experience and translate it into fiction.  But it ain't necessarily so.  If you stick too literally to this tenet, you run the risk of achieving something closer to reproduction than the pure act of creation.  So, for once, throw caution to the winds. Have a go at writing something as far from your own sphere of reference as you possibly can.  Put yourself into completely alien shoes, spend some time walking around in them and discover how it feels.  It doesn't matter if you locate your story in the 10th century or on Jupiter, as long as you boldly go (!) By flexing your creative muscles in this way, you will stretch your imagination and you may find that when you retreat back to your comfort zone, your writing is the richer for it...

Taking the Rough with the Smooth

I love this door. I positively ache to unlock the lock, turn the handle and ease it open, so that I can discover all the secrets which must surely be hidden on the far side.  I like the fact that the door itself is made of metal, and the metal is rusted, and the paint is flaking -- already there are a number of different textures and surfaces to excite the curious gaze (mine).  It is framed by a wall made of stone and brick -- more texture.  Add to this the fact that it is half covered, and softened, by some tousled ivy, and that among the lowest tendrils you can glimpse a tiny punctuation of what look like yellow flowers, and you can see all kinds of contrasts at play: colour and drabness, a living creeper and cold hard stone, the rough with the smooth.


Good writing should be like this.  Your reader should be able to devour a scene in order to find out what happens next -- the literary equivalent of glancing at this photograph - but then, if they linger over the action and reflect on it, they should be able to appreciate all the different undercurrents and tensions that you have created within it: the dialogue might belie the mood, or contradict the inner thoughts of your characters; the characters themselves might subtly shift in relation to one another, and at a nuts and bolts level (the little yellow flowers of my picture) the language you use should be rich in variety, with sentences of different lengths and an interesting but restrained use of adjectives (no adverbs if you can help it), coupled with the occasional but not excessive use of metaphors and similes.

So now you know...!

A River Runs Through It

On a recent trip to France we crossed over a little river called La Femme du Tete Perdu, which my limited grasp of French translates as the woman who lost her head.  Very apposite, I thought, as since the move I have lost just about everything, including my head, but I have managed to find my laptop and although Virgin and BT are still having a standoff with each other and we have no internet service, I hope that normal blogging service will resume shortly.

In the meantime I've been busy reading - Transgressions by Sarah Dunant I found unsympathetic and gratuitous, but I'm LOVING Black Swan Green by David Mitchell -- the man's a God. There's much to learn from them both (characterisation, detail, integrity) and learning about writing through reading is almost as good as writing itself.