Columns: Tag – Fiction
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Writing Quips and Tips
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Characters on the Couch
Is my character a psychopath or a sociopath?
Dear Gabriel
I’m writing a crime novel (with a strong love theme.) I’m a little confused between the terms psychopath and sociopath. Could you give me the quick version please?
Samantha
Characters on the Couch
Breaking relationship patterns for a character
Dear Gabriel
What makes some people choose exactly the same kind of disastrous person over and over again? I’ve got a character who I want to break out of a pattern like this. But I think I should understand what would make her do this, before I can understand how to get her out of it. For example, she chooses men who are controlling, shout at her and tell her she’s stupid.
Andrea
Characters on the Couch
Do people just fall out of love?
I read a book where a man woke up and told his wife he did not love her anymore. Is this believable in a character?
Characters on the Couch
Parents as role models for relationships?
When we fall in love do we usually choose someone just like our parents or is it more complicated than that?
Watch a novel grow
Why wash my dirty words in public?
I’ve explained why I want to write the novel. That’s clear enough. But what about this running description of the trials, tribulations and (I hope) triumphs of the process of writing it? Why expose myself to the cruel taunts of an army of critics out there—that’s you, dear blog reader? Why commit myself to a very public parading of what is under normal circumstances a very private process? (There can be nothing more private, after all, than the intimate conversations you have with your characters, and the even more intimate conversations you have with yourself about your characters.)
Characters on the Couch
Getting over abuse
Can my character get over abuse and lead a useful life?
Characters on the Couch
“Truths” about suicide
How do I write respectfully about suicide?
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing a book - the secret
I sometimes imagine all the unfinished novels in drawers. All the characters who will never finish their journeys; the stories that will never draw to an end.
Perhaps that in itself could be the starting point for a story. (Just an idea.) But why is it that so many people start out on their first novel with such enthusiasm, put so much effort and time into it, and then …?
Writing Quips and Tips
Waiting for Inspiration
A member of our writing class asked me recently whether I waited till I was inspired before writing.
I think this is one of the greatest misconceptions, that writers come over all creative occasionally. There’s this belief that creativity is a mystical process that mysteriously comes upon one and propels one, against all will, to sit down and write with beauty and power.
Well, if you’re waiting for the feeling to come upon you, chances are you haven’t written anything very much. Writing is scary. If you wrote well yesterday, you’ll scared you won’t write well today. And if you haven’t written for a while, you’ll be terrified of coming face to face with your own talent – or lack of it.
Writing Quips and Tips
Talking a Novel to Death
Someone asked me the other day whether I spoke to anyone about my writing. It started me thinking about writing and the process of talking about it.
First of all, I don’t think writers should talk too much about a work in progress. Telling your story over and over can be an avoidance tactic. Talking is the same as doing – you get the same sense of satisfaction.
And depending who you talk to, it can crush a sensitive idea. Most people can’t quite see how you intend to tackle it. Describing isn’t the same as writing. It takes a certain skill to be able to enter into the writer’s world and visualise it in its finished form.
Insensitive friends can pour scorn on an idea, which will cause you to view it, forever more, with hot and cold waves of humiliation. If it’s a first book, friends will refer to your “NOVEL” in arch tones. It can stop you believing in it.
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
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
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
Getting back into the zone
Okay, here’s a really practical little tip that helped me recently. It seems obvious, now I come to write it down. But I never thought to do it before.
Last week I wrote about having a break from your writing, and touched briefly on getting back into it.
It’s not as easy as it seems. First you have to break the resistance, which makes it seem absolutely urgent that you tidy the linen closet or tackle some project before the deadline looms too near.
I don’t have any real answers for that, except that you set aside the time, ring-fence it, don’t allow anything to intrude, and force yourself to start at the beginning. I’m a great believer in rewards. Offer yourself a treat if you manage to get right through it and write even a line or two.
I don’t think you can throw yourself right into the next chapter when you’ve had a break. Besides the fact that you might have forgotten all their names, and may not remember the threads you have waving about in the air, you have to get back into the zone. Every book has a “state of mind”. Find that, and you’ll be back into the voice and world of your characters.
Writing Quips and Tips
A book is a cathedral
A book is like a cathedral.
This isn’t my own idea. I found it in a piece on writing by Philip Gerard. But I do like it.
If the cathedral is the solution, what is the problem it was meant to solve? Chances are you’ll say: “To give glory to God” or to create “a majestic object of beauty”.
And you’d be caught in our “narrow Romantic aesthetic” without even being aware of it . You’re thinking about the cathedral’s effect on you, the message it gives you in its completed form. In other words, you’re thinking like a reader.
Those creators of the cathedral were thinking less about faith, legacy or the message they were trying to impart, than the prosaic details of load-bearing walls, holding up the middle, and how to light it.
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 ...
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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
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
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.”