Columns: Tag – Writing
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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.
Characters on the Couch
Mothers who kill
I am fascinated by the real story, that appeared in the press, of a mother who killed her own child.
Characters on the Couch
From lust to languor
In my novel, my character finds the quirks of a man fascinating and attractive and then later repellent.
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
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
Every writer needs a few - personalities, that is
How many writers does it take to produce a novel? One, but with multiple personalities. And that’s not a joke.
It’s a task that requires several selves – or parts of selves. There’s the intuitive, day-dreaming self who allows ideas and scenarios to drift through her consciousness until they begin to form threads. Then there’s the “medium” self, who allows herself to be taken over by her characters while they’re writing it for her.
When it’s finished, the analytical bitch-editor fires those sensitive selves – who are in love with every word – and get on with murdering the babies. After her, the tenacious self must still believe, all odds to the contrary, that a book is worth fighting for when it starts to be shown to people.
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
Rules of Engagement
It’s something to do with the nature of creativity, I suppose. But people in writing groups share intimacies.
They may not intend to write about themselves, but somehow the creative process forces them to introspect. It makes sense. How can you begin to understand the motivations of others, if you haven’t looked starkly at yourself?
Writing itself is an extremely personal process. Bringing it into the open can make the most confident person feel exposed. It know it has to happen eventually and you understand that you shouldn’t take criticism personally (Yeah right!).
Okay, let’s say no more about that. We all pretend to be mature (some more successfully than others), but deep down we all want to kill anyone who suggests we murder any of our babies.
We recently ran a creative writing weekend during which participants expressed fears about having exposed themselves. They felt incredibly vulnerable. We’ve always talked about the way to behave in writing groups. But this group made us realise that perhaps we should formalise it.
Writing Quips and Tips
Changing and growing
Someone asked me the other day whether I always wrote the same way – and the answer, of course, is no.
I’ve said this often: sometimes it feels as though it’s flying, as though I’m a conduit for something larger than myself. Sometimes it plods, it drags its heels. But other things happen too. (It’s called life.)
We change, we grow, and it’s ridiculous to think our personal lives won’t affect our writing. Every event in our lives changes us a little bit. It’s going to change the way we see the world, and the way we express it.
The events themselves may creep into our writing in a way we didn’t quite foresee. I once had a huge fight with a good friend. The next day I was writing about a husband and wife. Almost of it’s own volition, some of the aspects of the fight crept into their relationship – and worked very well, I thought.
But I mean more than that.
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
Too many rules
We may be a lawless society, but we can be very rule-bound – particularly with regard to writing.
People often engage with both fiction and non-fiction on the basis of what “ought to” have been written, and in what way. You may have come across this attitude in reviews, sometimes even with a sense of outrage that, say, a certain class or race of character was portrayed in a certain way.
There is also sometimes a tendency in writing groups for members to criticise a central premise or theme. They believe a piece of writing to be too right wing / too left wing / too white / too black / too feminist / or simply to give “the wrong message”...
• We run face-to-face and correspondence writing courses - see www.allaboutwritingcourses.com for range and dates
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 ...
• We run face-to-face and correspondence writing courses - see www.allaboutwritingcourses.com for range and dates
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?