Monday 28 February 2011

You Always Hurt the One You Love

I seem to be in song title mode at the moment (see my earlier post It Ain't What You Say It's the Way That You Say It) but here's a little pinch of plotting snuff for you to breath in deeply.

When you are thinking about constructing a plot, at some point -- this is going to sound unkind of me, I know -- it is an excellent idea to punish a sympathetic character, ideally your hero or someone close to them, by ensuring that something truly dreadful happens to them. Your reader will find it extremely hard to bear any wanton act of cruelty towards  a character to whom they have become deeply attached, and the calamity will have the effect of drawing them far more closely into your story, as they will be waiting with bated breath to see if everything comes right in the end.

Simples!

Friday 25 February 2011

Chicken or Egg, Which Comes First?

In the world of writing fiction, which comes first -- character or plot? Much more interesting than chicken or egg...

Strictly speaking, I think that situation beats both of them.  I saw True Grit yesterday and you could sum the situation there as: Young girl hires hard-bitten US marshal to avenge father's death. That's a situation with a little whiff of plot going on and even the very beginnings of some character stuff too.

Once you have a situation nailed down, you will probably find that you are working on character and plot pretty much simultaneously, the literary equivalent of patting your head while rubbing your tummy, so keep concentrating. They are so interdependent that it's almost impossible to separate one from the other, so perhaps it's just a question of emphasis or priority.  There is, however, one cardinal rule, which is succinctly summed up by the late, great John Mortimer.
"It's important that the characters perform the plot and that the plot doesn't manipulate the characters."

Never make your your hero or heroine (or anyone else, for that matter) behave out of character simply to get yourself out of a difficult hole in the plot, as anything that takes place for the sake of narrative expediency will have a hollow and unconvincing ring to it.  In my experience, if your characters have been developed with sufficient depth, the plot will flow from them with a kind of satisfying synergy, but it never works in reverse: plots don't create wonderful characters, good characters involve themselves in fascinating situations.

Thursday 24 February 2011

Stuff and Nonsense

Following on from my hymn of praise to Roget, of Thesaurus fame, I thought it would be good to have a little Lewis Carroll moment, because I think it was that nonpareil of the nonsensical who made the following remark:
"Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself."
I think this is a great way to look at the use of language as it makes you come at writing from a slightly different angle, not getting too bogged down in meaning (you can fix that later) but just thinking about the plasticity of words, how malleable they can be, how audible....(and edible?)

With your Thesaurus close at hand (and if you haven't got one, rush out and buy one, even before you buy The Hand That Once Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell, which I'm longing to read) sit yourself down and have a go at writing some nonsense verse.  Do what Carroll says and just think about the sounds,  bemuse and bewitch yourself. You will probably have no direct use for what you come out with, but I wouldn't mind betting that next time you settle down to write, your sensitivity to what you're saying will be more acute and you will be far more dexterous.

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Roget and Out

I love my Roget's Thesaurus. I love it so much that I have taken the trouble to scan it in so that you can see how well-thumbed and fondly-used it is.






It was given to me as a birthday present by my grandmother, whom I adored.


If I had to choose a desert island book, it would be right up there with the Collected Poems of WB Yeats. It's not just an indispensable tool for a writer, much better than that pinched and meagre facility which Windows provides, it is a work of poetry in its own right.

See what spells it can cast over a dull a word like grey:

greyness, canescence, neutral tint, pepper and salt, chiaroscuro, grisaille, oyster, gunmetal, ashes, neutral, sad, leaden, livid, grizzled, hoary, glaucous, steely, pearly, smoky, cinereous, field grey, iron grey, mousy, mole.

Cinereous! Canescence! It's pure magic. I often find  myself looking up one thing and travelling from that to another to another, in something that is more than a flight of fancy, it's an unfettered leap of the imagination. Using Roget gives my writing not just breadth, which is easy enough to achieve if you work at it, but depth as well, something which is much more elusive (or flown, or fugitive, or wanted, or slippery, or abient (?), or enigmatic, or abstruse...)

Tuesday 22 February 2011

I Can See Clearly Now....

I went to have my eyes tested a couple of weeks ago and as I have at least three different things wrong with them, it was quite a challenge for the optician. She put one of those glasses -- as -- cages contraptions on my nose and then added in so many lenses that I could hardly hold my head up. After that, she fiddled and twiddled them and there was this extraordinary moment when, lo and behold, everything came miraculously into focus and I could read, ooh, three or four lines of letters on the far side of the room.

I thought afterwards that it is a little bit like rewriting / editing. You hack and hack and hack - move this scene here then move it back again; chuck that one; cut that one in half; discard, discard, discard; rewrite; cut; move to the next chapter; rewrite; change the beginning; rewrite the rewrite; ditch the end - until suddenly (lo and behold) everything comes miraculously into focus and the story as you want to tell it emerges before your very eyes.

I've had students say to me, "I could go on rewriting forever, how do you know when to stop?" but somehow you do know; you know.  The months and years you have spent nose to nose with your narrative mean that you have become so finely attuned to it that you know there is nothing more that you can do.

It's a bit like a child leaving home: you drop them at their new flat and they don't want you to help them with the unpacking, they just want you to leave them on their own to get on with things. It means your job is done.

Which means in turn that you must find a new door to open...







A door that Rothko might have painted?


Monday 21 February 2011

It Ain't What You Say, It's The Way That You Say It...

Dialogue is fun - I really enjoy writing it.  It offers a chance to change tempo, it is more relaxed and, well, conversational than descriptive prose.  It is quick to do, you can be funny or dramatic and it's a great way of really getting to grips with your characters: the words that come out of their mouths are the pure essence of who they are.

Dialogue is infinitely flexible, as well.  What people say is open to several interpretations, so there is scope to be elliptical and enigmatic.  To find out just how flexible, have a go at this little exercise.  Try writing a conversation between two people and then, while keeping the dialogue exactly the same, alter the sense of it by changing how they say it.  Context is all!

Friday 18 February 2011

Having a Hinterland Helps

The American novelist and short story writer Flannery O'Connor once said, "If you're going to write, you'd better come from somewhere," perhaps because good writing, like good wine, does have a sense of terroir - landscape, climate, derivation.  The Irishness of writers such as James Joyce, Yeats and more recently John McGahern somehow seems to be mystically ingrained in their work.

However, even if you don't have the good fortune to come from a place that has a recognised literary hallmark stamped on it, you can always come from somewhere in a metaphorical sense. Don't limit yourself to the geography of your origins, think about where you have come from in an emotional sense, in terms of your personal experience, and see how this can inform your writing. My hunch is that Flannery O'Connor , in saying that writers need to come from somewhere, might have meant that they need to arrive at the blank page in front of them with something pressing to say about where they have been, rather than where they were born, with a good story to unpack from their travelling bag.

Thursday 17 February 2011

Black Swan Down

I went to see the film Black Swan last weekend and if you haven't already, let me save you the trouble. Natalie Portman has been nominated for an Oscar for best actress and I can only conclude that the Academy has completely lost its marbles - she doesn't act: she looks beautiful and she over-emotes, which is a very different thing.

The only thing I could salvage from an afternoon of empty melodrama was the following little homily: showing emotion is not the same as evoking it in your audience, or indeed in your reader, because I am certain the same thing applies when writing fiction. If your character is awash with feeling it can easily look either self-indulgent, or sentimental, or superficial. To engage your reader, they must be feeling the emotion on your character's behalf.  If your character is doing all work for them, the reader has no stake in the situation. Generally speaking, it is more affecting to see somebody fighting back tears than giving way to them. A reader wants to see a character struggling to overcome a problem rather than succumbing to it.
The inestimable Margaret Atwood put it this way :
"If you want to express emotion, scream. If you want to evoke emotion it's more complicated. Listening to someone scream doesn't necessarily make you want to scream, it makes you want to shut the window..." 
Or in the case of Black Swan, it makes you want to leave the cinema...


Wednesday 16 February 2011

Brevity - Thanks Blaise

My mum recently reminded me of a wonderful quotation, "I am sorry to have wearied you with so long a letter but I did not have time to write you a short one," which has apparently been attributed to the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.

What I like about it is the counterintuitive notion that it can sometimes take longer to be brief - a thought that applies equally to writing letters and writing fiction.  It can be relatively easy to dash off a rambling page or two, where everything comes pouring out with barely a pause for thought.  To craft a supple paragraph in which each word earns its place can take a little more time, as you need to shape it carefully, honing and pruning all the while.

I suppose it boils down to the tension between quality and quantity. My average word count is something in the region of  eight hundred words a day: on a good day I can write as many fourteen hundred, on a bad, I'm down to a measly four hundred, but I am always driven by they wish to write well, rather than the wish to write lots.

Writing time is a precious commodity, hard won (or stolen), but making the most of it doesn't necessarily mean producing page after page of fairly mediocre stuff. Three hundred words that you are really pleased with and which still look good when you reread them the following day, can be infinitely more satisfying.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Glitterature

I think it's brilliant that the BBC is running a series about books and literature and it is great to see interesting programmes popping up on both the television and the radio.  I was particularly looking forward to Sebastian Faulks' series on writing fiction, but my disappointment in the first episode means that I haven't bothered to watch the second.

I had the distinct impression that the BBC lacked the courage of its convictions.  Perhaps they were a little nervous about featuring something "elitist" or "arty" at prime time on a Saturday, but in a bid to make the programme as accessible and popular as possible they turned it into something that felt more like a celebrity travelogue than a literary exploration.  It can't just be me who thinks that writing fiction and reading it are profoundly interesting in themselves, yet the dear old Beeb seemed to have little confidence in the subject they had chosen. Sebastian Faulks popped up on a desert island (cf Robinson Crusoe), in New York and London and a host of other exotic locations, each one as glittering and glamorous as the last. I would have loved to have seen him sitting at his desk, talking about his work.  I would have been really interested to hear about his preoccupations: what challenges him, what bores him, what intrigues him, what he feels his strengths and weaknesses are - he could have talked about that sort of stuff for hours and I would have been rapt.  As it was, I kept expecting to bump into Judith Chalmers doing her travel turn...

Faulks' theme was the hero and he talked interestingly enough about the concept of an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation, wrestling with internal and external problems, where the greatest thing he has to conquer is himself.. His theory that the idea of a hero as an individual was knocked for six by the collective slaughter of the First World War, paving the way for the antihero was interesting, but what could have been a masterclass (Michael Caine did some wonderful ones about film acting a while back) turned into something bright and shiny and insubstantial - lipservice to literature - and there's plenty of that around, as it is.


Monday 14 February 2011

A Different Perspective

In real life, people often experience the same event in profoundly different ways - eyewitness accounts of an identical situation can vary wildly for a number of reasons -- it can be that people bring their own preconceptions to what they are witnessing, or simply to do with where they are physically standing in relation to what is happening.

This phenomenon is something that you can make productive use of in your writing, particularly in detective fiction where a number of discrepant versions of a crime can help manipulate the reader's suspicions. It can also be a great way of throwing light on character and expectation.

To test this out, try writing the same scene twice, from the differing perspectives of the two people involved in it and see if you can put the inconsistencies that emerge to creative use: Why did John see something that Jane missed? Was Jane distracted and if so by what? Was she being wilfully blind?  Was John so caught up in his own agenda that he didn't fully comprehend where Jane was coming from? You can tease the situation out to comic or even tragic effect.  Have a go -- it will certainly give you something to work with

Friday 11 February 2011

Don't Count on Me

In the majority of novels, the writer chooses a character to act as the narrator of the story, delivers the plot through them, using what they observe and do as a vehicle, and what you see is what you get. In the majority of novels...

However, there is another way.  You can decide to use an unreliable narrator as the teller of your tale, someone whose account, it gradually dawns on the reader as the book progresses, is not to be trusted.  This is both subtle and complex and therefore quite difficult to do: you have to keep a large number of balls in the air -- the tale as told, the true story, who knows what, what the characters are not revealing and why etc - but if you are nimble and dexterous the hard work will pay off.

Not only do you get an exciting tale unfolding, you get an exciting tale with additional spin as well.  It has the benefit of making the reader work a little bit harder and therefore engage more fully with what they are reading.  They don't just have to keep abreast of events, they also have to test out what can be believed and what can't.

There is a character pay off as well, as the reader is made to ask why the narrator is unreliable, what are their motives, what previous experience has bought them to this pass, and so on...

If you want to read an excellent example of how this can be achieved, Zoe Heller uses this device to great effect in her novel Notes on a Scandal, which is seen from the point of view of an elderly teacher called Barbara, who turns out to have her own rather jealous and obsessive axe to grind in relating what happened to her younger colleague Sheba. Why not pop down to the library (see my previous post) and borrow a copy to see how it's done?


Thursday 10 February 2011

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.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

The Unkindest Cut?

With more than four hundred libraries threatened with closure at the moment, I just want to add my voice to all the others raised in protest (thank you Philip Pullman and everyone else who has spoken up with passion and commitment).

The origins of the word educate come from the Latin, ducere, meaning to lead.  Your education leads you to knowledge and for many people  the local library is the gateway, and often the road, on which to travel.


They house books and should therefore be a natural navigation point for anybody interested in writing.

I remember many years ago there used to be a library attached to the Shaw Theatre on the Euston Road in London -- I'm not sure if it has survived previous rounds of cuts -  and I tucked myself up with what was obviously a fantastically absorbing read, because when all the lights went out, I simply assumed that it was some kind of power cut and went on to the next chapter.

Eventually, I surfaced properly, put the book back on the shelf and headed for the exit, only to discover that the library had been locked up and everyone had gone home.  I was a bit disconcerted, but I wouldn't have minded spending the night there -- it had a tranquil and inviting atmosphere, comfortable chairs and shelf upon shelf of lovely books.  However, I was supposed to be in a play that evening, so I started hammering on the doors and after about an hour, a security guard came and let me out.

That library, and all the others in towns and cities up and down the country, was a place in which to be rapt, transported and entranced; a place of infinite variety and possibility, and in my case, sometimes a home from home. I was perfectly content at the prospect of being locked into one, but the prospect of us all, collectively, being permanently locked out of four hundred of them, dismays and horrifies me.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

Mind Your Language!

I've been reading quite a lot of poetry lately, boning up for World Book Night and my great giveaway of Carol Ann Duffy's book The World's Wife and reading prose as well (Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is top of the pile beside my bed at the moment; wonderful, astringent stuff) and it seems to me that a poem, in particular, is a slight thing and sometimes the weight of language can drag it down.

I think that when you are finding your feet as a writer, developing a sense of style and exercising your vocal chords in all their nuanced variety and you start to discover that you have a facility with words, it is easy to let it go to your head.  Just because you discover that you can fire on all literary cylinders doesn't necessarily mean that you  should.  It's easy to fall in love with your own voice, but hand-in-hand with your powers of expression, you should be working on a discriminating editorial eye -- the two go together and one without the other does not a writer make.

Perhaps it's easier to think of it in terms of jewellery: the rough gemstone needs to be cut and polished in order to maximise the play of light, but if you then go and put it in an incredibly elaborate setting, you run the risk of dettracting from the jewel itself.

I think it's the same was writing.  Don't settle yourself at your computer with the idea of producing beautiful, poetic work, be it poetry or prose; write to express your thoughts and ideas with all the clarity that you can muster.  Don't be tempted to sacrifice content for style -- in other words, mind you language.

Monday 7 February 2011

The Suspense Is Killing Me....

As a writer, you want keep your reader in a state of extreme tension, at least for some of your story, although it is not a bad idea to let them have time off for good behaviour occasionally.  Since I'm in mythical mode at the moment (see my previous post on Christopher Vogler) I thought now might be a good time to think a little bit about the use of omens.

Thomas Hardy has more or less cornered the market here and if you really want to dedicate yourself to mastering this dark art, reading just about any of his novels will get you started.  An omen is a foretaste of impending doom, it hints at dire things to come and in that way is fantastic for notching up the tension.  There is a brilliant scene in Tess of the D'Urbevilles in which Tess has just murdered her nemesis, Alex, stabbing him in their bedroom, and his blood forms a stain in the shape of the ace of spades on the ceiling below, signposting the tragic ending which has been set in motion.  Melodramatic stuff, but used delicately and with a light touch, it can be a great way of increasing suspense and adding to atmosphere, and it can even advance the plot..

Suck it and see - it might come in handy and even if it doesn't, it will have been fun trying.

Friday 4 February 2011

Demystifying the Myth

Hollywood script consultant Christopher Vogler, who worked on epic films like The Lion King and Fight Club wrote a book called The Writers Journey which has since become a seminal text for anyone interested in how to use myths and archetypes to help resolve the challenges of devising the perfect plot.  If you haven't already read it, rush out and borrow or buy a copy.  Although I wouldn't follow it to slavishly, his advice is great for getting yourself thinking and asking pertinent and important questions.

Vogler starts from the premise that a narrative is activated when the hero is called to adventure. See -- already you have something that you can apply  to your own work! Why not write the opening scene of a story in which a dream, an accident, a coincidence, a revelation, a loss or a warning acts as a catalyst to spurring the hero into action and setting the plot in motion.  You could try it several times over, experimenting with different calls -  try them all -- and you'll find that you have the material for a whole raft of writing.  And that's just the start of it...


I think you can't beat a good door as a call to adventure, or a call to something, or someone....

Thursday 3 February 2011

Give Yourself Room to Manoeuvre (Subplots!)

When you're thinking about a story, or are actively involved in writing one, it is easy to get transfixed by the main event and concentrate on the dramas and adventures of your central characters, but don't neglect the preoccupations of your minor characters - Ricky Gervais spun a whole television series out of this with Extras, and if it's good enough for him....

Exploiting the potential offered by your subplot, which documents the trials and tribulations of the bit part players, can have two major benefits to your story as a whole.

Firstly, it can provide a valuable counterpoint to what's going on at the heart of the book -- you can revisit similar issues, but in a minor key.  It can give you a variations on a theme capacity.  For example, if your story is about infidelity, you might have a scenario where the hero and heroine manage to resolve things happily, but a more minor couple don't. It can give you scope to look at the same thing in the number of different ways, which is an excellent method of adding depth and resonance to your narrative.

Another in credibly important tool provided by the subplot is that it is a means of notching up dramatic tension. You can cut away from action in your main plot to a scene in your subsidiary story, leaving the your reader breathless with desire to know more.

And that's what it's all about...

P. S. Hugo Williams has written a wonderful poem called Heroes of the Subplot - it's well worth tracking down and reading.

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Cooking with Kate or How to Get Started

I was thinking the other day  that writing these blogs sometimes feels like writing a recipe - take 4 oz. of inspiration, a pound of persistence, half a pound of linguistic flair, a pinch of editorial ruthlessness etc etc and you end up with...



If a Pain aux Raisins isn't quite your thing, here is a list of ingredients that you will need to start writing a good story:

You need a theme to explore.
You need characters to help you do this.
You need to create a situation as a starting point.
You need a location in time and place.
You need a series of subsequent events -- a plot -- which enable you to wring every drop of interest from your theme.
You need time to think before you start (I'm sure that's when the most important part of the cooking happens, almost by magic, without you apparently being involved in the process very much at all)
You need time to write.
You need the fire given off by a passion for what you do.
You need a raising agent  - or a literary one - if you want to get published.
You need to know that if you can't stand the heat you should get out of the kitchen, because it isn't an easy path to follow, but if cookery (or writing) is your thing, then keep doing it, because nothing tastes sweeter than something you have made yourself.



Tuesday 1 February 2011

World Book Night - March 5th

Today is a red letter day - I've just heard that I'm one of the people lucky enough to be taking part in World Book Night on March 5th - another red letter day.

It's a fantastic scheme : twenty thousand people are going to be given forty-eight copies of various books to hand out to all and sundry.  It's the first time that it has been run in this country (and possibly anywhere in the world) and is a wonderful way of bringing writers, publishers and the general public together in a celebration of the fantastic richness of the written word.

At a time when the future of printed books is as uncertain as it has been since Gutenberg invented the printing press, thanks to the advent of electronic media, this is an amazing gesture of faith in the important part that books play in all our lives. Both writers and publishers have shown considerable generosity in allowing the twenty-five chosen titles to be given away for free, in doing so providing the people who are going to be doing the hands-on stuff a chance to act as advocates for stories and poetry that really matter to them.

I shall be in Bristol, handing out copies of The World's Wife, an anthology of poems by the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, pressing them on unsuspecting strangers, and if they're friendly and want to listen, I'll try and explain to them how, as a teenager, poetry changed and possibly saved my life, and that maybe it can do the same for them.