Columns – Writing Quips and Tips
A writer passes on the lessons she’s learned to make your writing better. Jo-Anne Richards muses on the challenges and excitement of a writer’s life.
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Writing Quips and Tips
It’s hard and lonely - and Oprah’s unlikely to be involved
People have funny ideas about creative writing.
Either, they believe anyone capable of stringing two words together can put together a 90 000-word novel. (“She writes really good proposals / sales documents /memorandums”.) If they just put their mind to it.
“If only we had the time you do.” (Spoken with a rueful sigh.)
Or: “Old Jimbo’s retiring in September. He’s going to write his book.
That’ll keep him busy for October, but what he’ll do from November I’m just not sure.”
Writing Quips and Tips
Genre doesn’t dictate quality
I recently saw this brilliant response to a criticism of chick lit. Michelle Gormon is a chick lit writer herself, published by Penguin. Her article appeared in The Guardian.
“Critics cite many reasons in their dismissal of the genre, reasons that ostensibly aren’t rooted in literary snobbery. ‘The problem’ with chick-lit, I’m told, is that it doesn’t deal with the real issues that women face. Well actually, some of it does. From sibling rivalry to infidelity, addictions to poor body image, a woman can take her pick within the genre if she wants to. And the rest of it? It’s meant for pure indulgent enjoyment, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
“But why insist that chick-lit reflect the issues facing its readership when no other genre is measured by the same yardstick? It isn’t expected of science fiction, crime, mystery, historical fiction, or even most literary fiction. Women didn’t flock to buy We Need to Talk About Kevin thinking, ‘Gosh, my son is in prison too for picking off his classmates with a crossbow. That’s the book for me.’
Writing Quips and Tips
Imagination doesn’t negate the truth
Writers are a lot like actors.
They need to be able to draw on their own experiences to understand others. And to express these in a compelling way that enables their audience (or readers) to believe in them.
Just to draw out last week’s theme a little more, this means that writers – novelists and non-fiction writers –are equally in the business of seeking out the truth.
Just because novelists use their imagination, doesn’t mean they’re not exploring their inner selves, and their time and place in history.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez says: “There’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.”
Writing Quips and Tips
Fiction isn’t falsehood, and history isn’t truth
“Fact” is trendy.
Non-fiction sells more than fiction. And when you talk to people about reading, they will often declare sternly that they prefer to “read facts”. They want to “learn” or “improve”, or whatever.
In fact, there’s not as much difference between the two as you might think.
Writing Quips and Tips
Reading as construction work
If writing is a blueprint which we, as readers, turn into cathedrals or palaces, then isn’t it also a route map?
Writing Quips and Tips
There’s nothing passive about reading
Reading is not a one-way process. It’s far more active than a writer imparting and a reader receiving.
The way to get the most from any reading experience is to accept that readers bring as much to the book as writers do.
As readers, we bring a complete psychological engagement to the task. That’s why movies of books we’ve read are never satisfying. Someone else has filled in the holes – and not as satisfyingly as we did.
Reading is construction work. The writer provides sketchy, incomplete blueprints so that each reader can build a different world.
Writer Alberto Manguel calls it the"intelligent and inspired reconstruction … using reason and imagination … to translate it on to a different canvas, extending the horizon of its apparent meaning beyond … the declared intentions of the author”.
Writing Quips and Tips
Reading for pleasure? Oh the horror…
Giving a book talk recently, I was asked most severely by a member of my audience whether my last book had a message. “It is surely not written just for … entertainment.”
I know we read for all kinds of reasons, but seeing books purely as the means to enhance moral virtues is, in the end, going to make reading unsustainable. It works against the idea of building a strong culture of reading.
There’s nothing wrong with reading for pleasure. I know I’ve touched on this in recent blogs, but I thought it worth returning to, not just because I feel strongly about it, but because I wanted to show that it’s not just my own lonely crusade.
Writing Quips and Tips
Reading builds empathy
I fear for a society that doesn’t read.
Lately I keep coming across people who maintain, with a certain pride, that they never read. Okay there’s some self-interest here. I don’t like to see writing as anachronistic or arcane.
But we don’t want to become a society unable to concentrate on anything longer than a blog. We don’t want to be an ignorant society.
Readers learn without realising. Off the top of my head, just this year and entirely through fiction, I’ve learnt about consciousness, about Tudor society and the role of Thomas Cromwell, the gritty underside of Edinburgh, about mathematicians and the behaviour of chimpanzees, about sexual ambiguity and genetics.
What I fear most is that, when we no longer read, we lose the ability to enter different worlds, to place ourselves in other people’s shoes. Nothing makes us identify with other people quite like accompanying them on a life journey.
I fear that a society that doesn’t read is a society that lacks empathy. And that we can’t afford to be ...
• We run face-to-face and correspondence writing courses - see www.allaboutwritingcourses.com for range and dates
Writing Quips and Tips
Does serious = obscure?
In a recent interview, I was asked about the “abiding division between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ novels”. I was asked whether I thought my writing managed to span the division. And whether I considered it interesting to apply these kind of labels at all.
Perhaps because we’ve faced some pretty serious issues, I think our society has tended to obsess a little more than most about whether a writer happens to be “serious” or not. Obviously, I’m happy if my writing is seen to straddle the great divide. I try to be accessible. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to grapple with interesting issues and themes.
But why do we find it necessary to enclose fiction into these restrictive boxes? We make excuses for reading genre novels. We feel vaguely ashamed if we’re not seen to be reading something deeply obscure ...
• We run face-to-face and correspondence writing courses - see www.allaboutwritingcourses.com for range and dates
Writing Quips and Tips
Dealing with Difference
I was recently consulted by a writer who worried about working with a protagonist of a different race.
This relates slightly to last week’s blog, which discussed our propensity for applying rules to what writers “ought” or “ought not” to be writing about. If that had been his concern, my answer would have been much shorter. I don’t believe in rules. Explore what you feel moved to explore.
But his question had more to do with whether he could succeed; whether his character would be credible. Perhaps we tend to be overly self-conscious about protagonists of a different race, or class or even gender. We tend to focus anxiously on the differences and forget the similarities. (After all, men are human too) ...
We run face-to-face and correspondence writing courses - see www.allaboutwritingcourses.com for range and dates
