Columns: Tag – Write
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Writing Quips and Tips
Romance – Why People Read It
People write romance for all kinds of reasons. But if you’re considering starting your first love story, it’s a good idea to know why people read them.
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
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
Holidays don’t always give you writing time
Holidays don’t automatically deliver up everyone’s most productive writing time.
Unless you’re a hermit who works off solar power in a cave somewhere, you are likely to be hit by a barrage of conflicting pressures.
If you have children, they’ll be on holiday too. And if you do already have them, you’ll know what that means. You’ll have a pretty good idea how much wonderful, uninterrupted time you’ll have. And how considerate the little mites will be to your need for some you-time.
If you have a partner, well … ditto. Same goes for parents and extended families – if this time of year means getting them all together.
But holidays can still be good for honing your skills, particularly if your plans involve travel.
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
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
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
Absence doesn’t make you fonder of your writing
For me, absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder - of my writing. I don’t know what it is about me, but the more I don’t look at my writing, the more convinced I become that it’s awful.
Even a week’s break can make me anxious. And because I’m in the sad position of actually having a day-job, that happens every week. I have to read back a couple of chapters, as much to reassure myself as to remember exactly where I was.
You do flow better when you can write regularly. But clearly, if you’re busy on a long project, there are going to be times when you can’t write: a big project comes up, you go away, a major personal event holds you up … or maybe you lose confidence for a while.
I read some advice recently that suggested you “visit” your project regularly, even if you aren’t writing. Glance back over it, keep it in mind. It probably would be a good idea - it might stop you (if you’re anything like me) from convincing yourself of its general unworthiness.
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
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
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.
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