Columns: Tag – Writing Tips
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Writing Quips and Tips
Writing Romance - Five More Tips
Good Romance relies on good characters. We need to believe in them. They should be strong and complex enough for us to identify with them.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing a novel – how to keep going
No first draft was ever perfect. Most novels need rewriting and extensive editing. But if you never finish writing, it, there’ll be nothing to work on. Writing four published novels, I’ve learnt one or two things about how hard it is – and how to make it easier on yourself.
Writing Quips and Tips
Dialogue is real speech but better
Everyone recognises good dialogue when they see it. But few people can write it. So here’s a quick guide to really good dialogue:
Writing Quips and Tips
Show, Don’t Tell and how to use detail effectively
His desk was bare, but for a human skull, with a cigar clamped firmly between its grinning teeth.
Immediately, we know a huge amount about this person, without anything having to be explained.
By now, the concept of “showing” rather than “telling” is pretty much accepted. But in numerous writing workshops, it’s become clear that people may accept the concept, but they’re often unsure how to to put it into practice.
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.
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
Tongue in cheek
Every now and again, someone comes along thinking they can knock off a romance or two and make a fortune from Mills & Boon. They begin with tongue firmly wedged in cheek and write … usually extremely ghastly stories that no-one in their right minds would publish.
The first rule in writing romance is to respect our readers.
Writing Quips and Tips
Why read romance?
Romance readers are passionate, not just about love, but about the books they choose.
And this isn’t because they can’t find any other books. Romance readers are loyal to their genre, and specifically choose to read these books above all others.
If you’re about to embark on writing your first love story, it’s a good idea to know why people read them.
A Slip of the Tongue
Scripting Sex
I am always intrigued to find out what inspires people to write about sex, so when I managed to catch Erica Glyn-Jones (writer of “Yes!”) on the phone en route to Grahamstown, the conversation got down and dirty very quickly. In fact, “so, what made you decide to write about sex” was my subtle and discreet opening question.
Writing Quips and Tips
Likeable doesn’t mean passive
Characters in romances must be likeable. I think we all accept that. Hard to pull off an insufferable character in such a character-based novel.
Your reader must be drawn to read on by caring what happens to your characters. Your plot depends more on changes of attitude between your two lovers than on great sweeping events. But Richard and I have been mentoring a new romance writer and it struck me that, in making characters nice, it’s easy to be tempted into creating a heroine who is too passive.
Writing Quips and Tips
McEwan on suspense
After I wrote so much about suspense last time, I found an interview with the fabulous British fiction writer, Ian McEwan, in the New Yorker. He’s one of my very favourite writers, so I was excited to find the following extract on the subject – and to see that he also believes that suspense stems from withholding information, rather than giving too much:
Writing Quips and Tips
Dynamic dialogue lifts a book from the slush pile
You’ve written a really crucial dialogue that will end your characters’ marriage, but 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
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
Therapy for Characters
Sometimes it takes a shrink to work out what really makes a person tick – even if that person is a fictional character in the mind of a writer.
Psychologist Pierre Brouard thinks he is probably the first of his profession to be involved in running a writing course.
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”.
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.