Columns: Tag – Tips
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Writing Quips and Tips
Writing Romance - Five Tips
Many people think Romance writing is a bit like knitting. There’s a pattern to follow and, even if you’re a bit clumsy at first, you can knock off a finished product in a few afternoons while the kids are out playing.
Writing Quips and Tips
Romance - Why Write It
If you think Romance is a lesser form of fiction, go off immediately and read Pride and Prejudice.
There are many kinds of genre fiction, but nobody accuses Ian Rankin or Ruth Rendell of being lesser writers – simply because they write Crime. Genre fiction has certain expectations and constraints. But what else you do with it is up to you – and your talent.
Writing Quips and Tips
Characters and how to lift them beyond the cardboard cut out
A friend of mine is a fine writer, whose first book was a great success.
His characters were beautifully drawn and tugged us into a poignant memoir. But he had always longed to write a novel. I couldn’t wait to see it.
When he showed me a draft, I couldn’t believe it. The characters were cardboard stereotypes.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing dynamic dialogue
You’ve written a really crucial dialogue that will end your characters’ marriage. It should be dramatic and poignant, but instead it seems flat, unreal or, worst of all, dreary.
What’s wrong with it? It will change your characters’ lives. Why doesn’t it affect the lives of your readers?
Here are a couple of quick hints that will lift a plain or dreary dialogue and give it dynamism:
Writing Quips and Tips
Romance, Lesbian vs Straight
Both straight and gay Romance writing is about love. Both involve the intensity that we long for in our humdrum lives. They make us believe – that great love is possible, and that Romance is alive and well.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing Sex and how it can change your life
Every scene, even a sex scene, should take the story forward and develop your characters. Before your characters have sex, ask yourself why. Sound familiar? Probably because it sounds like your mother: “Before you leap into bed, dear, ask yourself why on earth ...”
Writing Quips and Tips
Characters - beyond the cardboard cut-out
A friend of mine is a fine writer, whose first book was a great success.
His characters were beautifully drawn and tugged us into a poignant memoir. But he had always longed to write a novel. I couldn’t wait to see it.
When he showed me a draft, I couldn’t believe it. The characters were cardboard stereotypes.
“But where are the kind of characters you had in your first book?” I asked.
“But that was non-fiction. This is a novel. I have to make them up.”
But you see, you don’t. You can, but you don’t have to. If you work from real life, think of a real character and … lie. Change them to suit your story.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing Sex (and how it can change your life)
7am – 1pm: Sex
2pm: Emails and admin.There’ve been a number of days when my diary has looked like this. Let nobody tell you writers don’t have a tough life.
If some future archaeologist excavates my diaries, he’ll write: “The ancients were an insatiable people …”
Writing Quips and Tips
Dialogue is real speech – only better
Everyone recognises good dialogue when they see it. But few people can write it…
Writing Quips and Tips
Journals for Writers
Oh, I know you kept a diary when you were fourteen.
Your awful brother probably picked the lock and read steamy passages to his friends. But even so … a journal kept properly can help your writing in many ways. A journal is a safe place to expose yourself, explore your own responses and to be vulnerable and honest. No-one will see it and no-one can judge you on it.
My mother once told me that I shouldn’t use my diary for teenage venting. “What happens if someone publishes it when you’re dead, like Anne Frank.”
But I believe that’s quite the wrong way of looking at a journal. Don’t imagine an audience – it makes you self-conscious. You can demand that all your journals be burnt upon your death. Or write as illegibly as I do – then no-one will ever decipher a word.
Writing Quips and Tips
Theme, plot and action - so what’s the difference?
“I want to write a story about the inhumanity of men toward women.”
“O-okay. If that’s your thing. But what’s your plot?”
“That’s my plot.”
This was a conversation Richard and I had with a student in one of our writing circles. And I think it’s a common misconception – that a theme somehow constitutes a plot.
Another is that, when you’ve actually got the plot, you’re set to go.
Writing Quips and Tips
Romance – Lesbian vs Straight
Life is a story.We tell stories, not just to entertain and to escape, but as a rehearsal for life. How would we handle this or that? How would we face the trials of our hero or heroine?
Romance novels should provide us with the characters and situations that we can, and choose to, identify with. Lesbian Romance gives gay women the kind of love stories they can be drawn into – that provide them with a “rehearsal for life” in the love stakes.
Writing Quips and Tips
Book Research is Like Make-Up
Research is like good make-up. It should make you look better, without drawing attention to itself.
As a writer, you have to do far more research than you’ll every use in your book. But once you’ve done it, you’re tempted to show it off. Resist the temptation.
There’s nothing quite as off-putting as having your characters indulge in a long conversation about the history of Rome, just because you looked it up and you’re damned if you’ll lose it.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing a novel - how to keep going
“These are notes you may find useful during your rewrite.”
Yes, these actual words left my lips while I was giving feedback on someone’s writing last week. And after four books, it seemed obvious to me. No first draft is ever perfect. A book is the end result, not the first try.
But I’d forgotten their effect on a first-time writer until I saw her collapse, grimacing and clutching for her heart. They’re not words. They’re daggers, poisoned spears.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing a novel - more tips to keep you going
When Richard and I worked on a screenplay once, we would allow ourselves a glass of champagne at the end of every scene. At the end of each act, we went out to an elegant cocktail bar for strawberry daiquiris.
If I’ve learned anything through writing four books, it’s how hard it is – and how to make it easier on yourself.
I believe in rewards. Even little rewards. While busy with my first book, I used to make up lavish “When my book is published” daydreams. Only, I wouldn’t allow myself to indulge in them until I’d finished writing for the day.
There’s nothing more important than just keeping on. It doesn’t have to be perfect first time, so that’s no excuse.
Writing Quips and Tips
Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s not a story
“I don’t need to learn about plot structure because my story’s true.”
Someone said this to us recently. They were questioning their need to learn writing skills if they were writing non-fiction.
And boy, do you need to learn about narrative and plot structure – even if your story happens to be true.
Writing Quips and Tips
Well, we don’t do it for the money…
Novelist Pat Conroy apparently doesn’t write happily.
He commented recently that his wife, Cassandra King, an aurhor of popular novels, was a “much happier writer” than he was.
“I’ll hear her cackle with laughter at some funny line she’s written. I’ve never cackled with laughter at a single line I’ve ever written. None of it has given me pleasure. She writes with pleasure and joy, and I sit there in gloom and darkness.”
It’s an odd thing, writing. I suppose my “happiest” book was my first. There were no expectations. No-one (including myself) expected me to finish writing it, and I spent many happy hours making up “When my book is published” daydreams.
Writing Quips and Tips
Can writing be taught?
A controversial article in the New York Times recently took university-based writing courses in America to task … for not actually teaching students to write.
Stanley Fish wrote that ”instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization.
“These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.”
It was his opinion that many students who had gone through composition classes could not actually write.
Writing Quips and Tips
Is God (as narrator, that is) dead?
I might be shot down in flames for this, but I find the Omniscient point of view a bit old-fashioned.
Of course there are exceptions, and some writers can still handle it with skill and applomb. But I’m talking generally here.
Okay, this is out of context and it is an old-fashioned example. But despite the fact that we probably all read Little Women voraciously as children, I’d like you to consider how you’d respond to this in a modern novel:
As young readers like to know ‘how people look’, we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within…
Writing Quips and Tips
Characters are people too
There’s a story about a novelist whose characters borrowed heavily from life. He wrote a moving story about a family, dominated by an overbearing matriarch who bent them all to her will through guilt and manipulation.
He was most concerned about the reaction of his mother. Would she forgive him? Would it cause a feud that would split the family, and make him an outcast?
He kept his head down, hoping she wouldn’t read it. But shortly after it appeared, his mother summoned him. Sweaty palmed, he appeared before her to receive her judgment.