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.
-
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing - one step at a time
I’ve discovered another quote that describes the process of writing in much the same way as the EL Doctorow quote I mentioned last week.
Anne Lamott uses an anecdote to illustrate the point:
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing is like driving
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
I live by EL Doctorow’s comment, probably because I know how easy it is to be daunted by the enormity of the task. When you begin, it can seem impossible that you’ll achieve what you’ve set out to do. That you’ll gradually weave in the information that will build and resonate in the reader’s head.
How will you hold the threads together through so many months of writing? How will you drip-feed information, resisting the temptation to spew it all out in an orgy of exposition – before you forget, or so that people will understand what’s in your head?
If you think about the process like driving, it makes it easier somehow. Okay, I do believe you have to know that you’re driving to Cape Town, or you might end up in Botswana. And that’s a different trip.
Writing Quips and Tips
Life doesn’t always provide the perfect narrative
We once had a writing student whose narrative just didn’t seem to be working. We suggested she change it for dramatic purposes.
“But I can’t,” she said.
“But why not?” I asked, stressing that we weren’t being prescriptive about how it should be changed, merely that it could work better.
“Because that’s what happened in real life.”
Writing Quips and Tips
Is it really not working, or are you mentally reading it in a funny voice?
There’s nothing quite like the high of a story that’s working.
You get into a zone and the world recedes. It seems more real than the world we’re told to believe is real. And when you finish for the day, you float a little above the mere mortals around you. You feel like you’ve been somewhere they haven’t experienced. You’ve touched something infinitely precious.
That’s when it’s working. As writer Julie Checkoway puts it, when your novel isn’t working, “it just lies there in pieces on the page, leaking vital fluids all over your desk”.
Writing Quips and Tips
Every writer needs a few - personalities, that is
How many writers does it take to produce a novel? One, but with multiple personalities. And that’s not a joke.
It’s a task that requires several selves – or parts of selves. There’s the intuitive, day-dreaming self who allows ideas and scenarios to drift through her consciousness until they begin to form threads. Then there’s the “medium” self, who allows herself to be taken over by her characters while they’re writing it for her.
When it’s finished, the analytical bitch-editor fires those sensitive selves – who are in love with every word – and get on with murdering the babies. After her, the tenacious self must still believe, all odds to the contrary, that a book is worth fighting for when it starts to be shown to people.
Writing Quips and Tips
If it sounds like writing, drop the grand theme
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” says Elmore Leonard in his 10 Rules of Writing.
This is the rule he says defines all the others. His book is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. I love that one. It cuts through all writing pretension.If I had to think up my favourite rule, it would probably be: Don’t start with a message. Any number of writing students come to Richard and me with a story idea – or they think it’s a story idea. It’s really a theme or a message.
You know the kind of thing: “I want to write a story about the inhumanity of men”, or “I want to expose the way women are treated in …”
And we say: “Okay … but what’s your story?”
“That’s our story,” they say.
Writing Quips and Tips
We are the “characters” we know best
We recently ran a Character-building course in which a participant was disturbed by the idea of sharing details from her life with the group.
“But why do we need to look at ourselves?” she asked. “Why can’t we just make characters up?”
In case anyone gets the wrong idea, we don’t ask for people’s deepest, darkest. But what makes our Character course unique is, we believe, that we run it with a psychologist. We look at ourselves first in order to understand and build believable characters.
Our tame shrink, Pierre, is useful in helping us look at how people tick. He’s an excellent writer in his own right, so he’s able to make the transition from people-shrink to character-shrink – in other words, from what people may need for a successful life to the narrative necessities of successful writing.
Writing Quips and Tips
Write a book or work on yourself - it’s all the same to us
“My project is me!”
This was the response of one of our writing circle participants when asked what she was working on. She said she had spent her life running a family. Recently divorced, she wanted to rediscover her creativity. She wanted to find the person she once was and celebrate her.
Good on her.
Writing Quips and Tips
Don’t sit contemplating a famous writer who has committed suicide
Roddy Doyle’s first rule for writers is: “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”
I think that’s just brilliant, largely because writing is harder than many non-writers ever conceive it to be. I often come upon people who ask if I have fun scribbling away while other people are working.
Writing Quips and Tips
If it’s true, does it still have a story?
“I don’t have to worry about building a narrative because my story’s true.”
One of our writing course participants made this point recently. She also felt that she didn’t have to worry about characters, point of view, suspense, or trying to “show” rather than “tell”.
I think it’s a fairly common misconception that you don’t have to “create” a story if you have real-life. You don’t have to worry about characters, because your people are “real”.
