Columns: Tag – Writing Course
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Writing Quips and Tips
What women want
Erotic fiction is experiencing a new wave of popularity – and, it seems a new level of respectability.
Collections of erotic fiction are suddenly everywhere. And people are no longer ashamed of enjoying it. The ‘90s, it seems, was the decade of chick lit, while the noughties have apparently been well named.
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
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
So you want confidence? Well, don’t be a writer.
A writing student of mine wrote this to me over the holiday break:
“I could do with more confidence that I can actually write an extended work of fiction; writing is always such a commitment of self and I face a struggle every time I sit down to write.”
It made me smile, not because I take his feelings lightly, but because the only thing I could think to say to him was, “Welcome to the club”.
Writing Quips and Tips
Can you write without suspense?
I recently heard an academic criticising a book for using “suspense” as a device. I found that odd, but perhaps that’s because my definition of suspense is wider than hers.
Writing Quips and Tips
Recognisable, but not predicable - what we look for in characters ... and partners
Travelling from India recently, I was catching a connecting flight in Dubai when I saw someone in the transit area who looked familiar. We smiled.
“Do I know you?” he asked. As it happened he didn’t. We turned our mutual acquaintances inside out and, though we knew many of the same people, we had never met.
Then it struck me. Hoping it wouldn’t offend him, I suggested: “Even if we’ve never met, we’d probably recognise each other anywhere.”
Writing Quips and Tips
So much is revealed by a sex scene
I recently heard of a writer who, daunted at the thought of writing a sex scene for the first time, said: “I don’t know what troubles me most, the thought that people might think this is my sex life, or that I’d like it to be my sex life.”
Writing Quips and Tips
It’s Valentine’s Week - and the characters are all having wild sex
It’s Valentine’s week again. I’ve been so busy that I hadn’t noticed it approaching. I feel like my entire contribution to the tradition has been to advise a writing course participant on the wild sex her characters have been having – which makes me feel a little like a couples counsellor.
It also requires that I keep a perfectly straight face, and resist the temptation to ask how much she drew from life.
Naturally, I am only kidding. Characters can have all kinds of sex, for all kinds of reasons that bear no relation to our real lives. But I do believe that our own response to sex and intimacy can affect the way we write about it.
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
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
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
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
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) ...
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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
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 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?