This Itch of Writing

Work in regress?

When I asked Twitter last night what I should blog about, one suggestion was "How do you know when to give up on a work-in-progress? Or when to stop and come back? Or when to re-conceptualise the project?". It was a good question, so thank you Damon Young, although I'm absolutely sure there isn't a clear-cut answer, because it's always going to depend on you and the night and the music.... Sorry, you and the write(ing) and the novel. So, I think the best I can do is suggest some things to ask yourself and the novel, in the hope that things get a bit clearer.

Are you aware that something's really, definitely not working, but you don't know what? You could try the diagnostic aid which is my post 17 Questions to Ask Your Novel.

Are you in the 30k Doldrums? When you're becalmed, almost any feverish hallucination of inadequacy - yours, or the book's - can get you in its grip.

Is that sexy new story flashing its legs at you? Is it that which is making you feel that the novel you're wedded to is drearily familiar? Are you tempted to forget your vows and go after the Other Novel? You could have a think about why that might be.

Are you bored by the central idea? (It's always possible to be bored, today, with the idea of Sitting Down and Getting On With It, but that's different.). Did you, perhaps, set out on this project because you thought you could sell it, or it seemed like a good idea at the time? Maybe your heart's not in it. A bit of drawer-time - a trial separation - may tell you if that's temporary or permanent. On the other hand, it could just be the middle-third blues, especially if you've been away from it for a while: of course Boy Meets Girl is a dull story. It's also the story of about half of all great literature; it's the flesh on the bones that makes a story compelling.

Is the novel trying to turn into something else - is it signalling that by refusing to do what you want - and you can't decide whether to let it? My instinct would always be to go with the new version, at least for a while. But you should probably do it on a new copy of the file, and keep the old one. You may, even, eventually see how you could integrate the two.

Are you trying to write a kind of thing which you, as a writer, are fundamentally not suited to? Did you think to ask your talent about that, when you were deciding whether to do for it? Or have things changed, and it no longer suits you and you it?

Have you had feedback from several quarters that are saying versions of the same thing? Is it something you know how to cure? Do you want to do this cure? If you do, keep going. If you don't, you may need time away from it before you know if it's a road you want to go down: your resistance could be absolutely right, or could just be... resistance. If it's a matter of murdering your darlings, might there be a Ram In The Thicket, to make it bearable?

Have you realised what's wrong, but don't have the technical capacity to put it right? Essentially, has your project landed you in problems you're not equipped to solve? You could try re-thinking the project, or you could try enlarging your toolkit. Or you can do what I do, which is to go away and write something else, from which you learn a whole lot of other things. Either way, at some point you can hope to realise that either you've changed enough to manage this project, or it has has changed enough to become manageable.

Have you tried it this way and that way and every which way and you've sorted out everything else that's wrong and somehow, you cannot make it work? This is a tricky one, because you've probably spent huge amounts of time and skill on it, and in lots of ways it's now very good. First, can you work out what still isn't working? (Maybe try those Seventeen Questions, if you haven't before?) When you have you need to decide what to do about it. What could you do, however drastic that it would be? Ideally, I'd suggest not going near it for a while, so that you're coming to it as fresh as you can. Then print the darned thing out, retire to the sofa with a pen and a large pot of tea, and read it through like a reader, looking solely for where and how you'd do what needs doing.There, maybe, you'll find your answer.

Do you know what needs doing, seen how, and realised that it's basically (re-)writing the book from scratch? If you're naturally persevering, you may feel incapable of throwing in the towel. But is that really the best thing to do? Are you ready, yet, to come to it absolutely fresh, and cool about the existing material? Are you too attached to certain characters, ideas, scenes? Might you do better to put it away and write something else? (which in itself will teach you things you didn't know, because the book you've put aside happened not to ask them of you so you didn't learn them.)

Only you can decide which way to go now. It might be time for something completely different, deliberately designed not to be goal-oriented. It might be time for giving the new novel a whirl, or a set of short stories... for now. Most of us are familiar with the character or place which won't go away, although it may take three or four incarnations, in different projects, before you find the right match for it and you. But when you do, it'll probably be the best thing you've ever written.

The good thing about novels, though, is that unlike spouses if you put them aside they don't wander off on their own. This novel - this project - this central idea - will still be there, if - when - you come back.

Putting on the Ritz? Try putting the Ritz on

In the days when I had au pairs, they would often ask me for help with their English homework. Most of them were doing pretty advanced work, so I'd have to deal with things like, "Emma, when do you say, try to light the fire, and when try lighting the fire?" As so often with the idioms of your mother tongue, I could usually only work it out by demonstration, and it was all good for the writerly brain. But the thing which they struggled with most is what are usually called phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs, according to [my slightly-edited version of] David Crystal in Rediscover Grammar, are

full verbs which consist of more than one word. The most common type consists of a verb followed by one or two particles. come in - sit down - drink up - get off - put up with - look forward to - look down on. A few multi-word verbs have a less predicable structure, and thus have to be taken as idioms: take pride in - break even - lie low - put paid to. What can be a particle? Some spatial adverbs such as aback - ahead - aside - away - back - home - in front. Some prepositions, such as against - at - for - from - into - like - of - onto - with. Some words which can act as either adverbs or prepositions, such as by - down - in - on - over.

All Indo-European languages, at least, work like this but English is particularly rich in them. On a family holiday in Greece my teenaged sisters and I spent a long, hot drive from Nafplion to Sparta working out that the verb which shape-changed most, depending on which particle it was teamed up with, was put. Put off alone can mean discourage, postpone, or remove, while put up can mean raise, accommodate or dare and put on can mean dress, fake or ignite. And then there's put over, put upon, put by, put through, and the relatively recent sexual meaning of put out, to go with disconcert, extinguish, display and eject.

Now the great joy of phrasal verbs for a writer is that even though the two (or three) parts belong together grammatically, they don't have to be kept together syntactically: there's huge flexibility available to you. Mind you, I've a feeling that Strunk & White, for one, tells you that particles should always be kept with the verb they belong to. But it's nonsense, like so much else in that book; you just need to learn to do it properly. I've blogged about the flexibility and flow of the long sentence before, and David Jauss explores a similar subject at greater and better length in his essay "What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow"*. 

Consider these versions of the same idea:

She tidied away the thought, before picking up the washbasket and carrying in the laundry.

She tidied the thought away, before picking the washbasket up to carry the laundry in.

She tidied the thought away, picked the up washbasket and carried the laundry in.

Away she tidied the thought, then picked up the washbasket and carried in the laundry.

Tidying the thought away, she picked the washbasket up and carried the laundry in.

Tidying away the thought and picking up the washbasket, she carried the laundry in.

and that's before you've brought in standalone adverbs:

Crossly, I reached up to the washing line and quickly began pulling down the dry clothes.

I reached crossly up to the washing line, and began quickly pulling the dry clothes down.

I reached up to the washing line crossly, and began to pull down the dry clothes quickly.

Reaching up crossly to the washing line, I began pulling the dry clothes quickly down.

Reaching crossly up to the washing line, I began to quickly pull down the dry clothes.

There are more I could do, though I don't know if there are sixty as I found for the sentence in A Million Little Versions. And don't tell me that there's a split infinitive in that last one, because I know and I don't care, any more than David Crystal does: sometimes it's just what the fluency or sense of the sentence needs. But do you see what I'm getting at? All these have different rhythms and patterns of sound - try reading them aloud and you'll see what I mean. The nuance and voice of them varies and undoubtedly some are more attractive than others. Away she tidied sounds slightly odd and I doubt if I'd write it except for demonstration purposes, but it's not ambiguous or grammatically incorrect and, after all, it's common enough to write away she went, or off they scuttled. I would suggest, though, that if the particle makes the verb change its meaning very radically, you take care not to separate them too much, or you might find yourself writing something horrid like this: Covering their extraordinarly large, ornate and elaborate lie up proved more difficult than they had reckoned the day before on.

There's another thing to bear in mind, looking at the main list: if you have several verbs in a sentence, not just the sounds and rhythms but also the grammar and syntax can make links and echoes between them. Look at the two which start Tidying away the thought: which of tidy and carry, picking/picked pairs up with depends both on whether it's tidying or tidied, carrying or carried, and on whether each phrasal verb is in itself divided or together: grammar, syntax and rhythm all working together. I explored this stuff in How a Subordinate Adverbial Clause of Purpose might just help you to sing, so I won't elaborate here. I'll just end by saying that David Jauss's brilliant collection of essays, which contains his essay on sentence form and structure, is just out in paperback as On Writing Fiction. I bought it as Alone With All That Can Happen after reading the extracts in that link, and devoured it at Christmas. As well as the one I've mentioned, it contains the essay on narrative distance which I've linked to many times, "From Long-shots to X-rays', and others on all sorts of fascinating topics. I can't recommend it highly enough.

A novel is not the singular of data

Recently, I came upon a neat phrase to use on those people who refuse to hear the fact that there has been net emigration of central Europeans from Britain, because all the waiters in their local Pizza Express come from Warsaw: "Data is not the plural of anecdote." But it reminded me of how a writer friend wanted her ancient-Persian heroine to start up a cottage industry making dyestuffs in her kitchen. "But it wasn't done like that," said the friendly expert at the British Museum. "The evidence is that dye production was on an industrial scale, and they wouldn't have employed a woman anyway." My friend's plot was dying (not dyeing), about her: she couldn't possibly do something that was "wrong". No doubt the general picture of the expert was true, but it's hard to believe that at the domestic, individual level, no "industrial" things were done; just because the only remains after Armageddon will be the McVities factory, I suggested, doesn't mean that no one ever set up a small business making cakes in their kitchen. My friend's plot was restored to health, because anecdote is not the singular of data.

And then few weeks ago, Jerusha Cowless suggested that to find the energy in a passive, put-upon heroine, without being anachronistic to a period when women weren't suppose to be act-ors, it would help to research the period more deeply. "There's nowt so queer as folk" said Jerusha, "and there are so many real stories which are odder and more surprising than you'd think". The writer should look to historians for particularities which go against the generalised ideas that the non-historian has.

So when I blogged over at The History Girls, under the title Caution Novelists: Historians at Work, I found myself saying this:

History, as a discipline, is about finding the larger patterns and forces which shaped lives in the past. An honest historian may acknowledge some evidence which exists but has yet to be fitted in. But still, the project will be to synthesise things to explain the whole picture. And yet always, as a novelist, I'm aware that the opposite was probably also true.... If you think round your friends I'd put money on every single one of them having several characteristics which don't fit the norm for their job/background/class/ethnicity/gender/nationality. The essence of gender history is that husbands batter wives, but that doesn't mean that no wife has ever battered her husband, and my characters are individuals, not essences. If I want to put a battered husband in my novel, I shall. I'll have to work harder to convince the reader, but that's never a bad thing for me as a writer, or for my reader. As I was talking about on my own blog a while ago, the expected thing slips past the reader too easily: it's the surprising, the off-beat, the taking-aback thing, done properly, which catches the reader and holds them long enough for the story to come alive.

In 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel novelist/critic/teacher Jane Smiley says, "The novel resists generalising", and it's true. Particularity is the usual project of fiction, because it's essentially a form that deals in individual experience and individual consciousnesses, even if the project is to illuminate wider ideas. And in the comments on my post Yours to remember and mine to forget, Jules said

I love the suggestion you make here, that information in a novel feels real when it feels remembered. Even when a narrator speaks in the present tense, maybe it has to have a remembered quality. It has to sound as though it has been filtered through someone's perception, someone's prejudices and experience. If it sounds too dispassionate or objective then it can stop sounding like a story.

So, whereas historians are trained to make their consciousness as thin and transparent a lens as possible, we feel what's told in a novel is real because of our sense that it's passed through an individual consciousness - at least the writer's, and most of the time the characters' too. I've always wondered why I'm drawn irrestistibly to plots which are about un-doing, or coming to terms with, something in the main character's past. And I think that might be the answer: it's then very natural for that past story to be filtered through the character's individual consciousness and thereby to acquire its realness.

There are two kinds of particularity going on, then: the individual sights/sounds/words/smells/actions of this moment in the story (calling them "details" doesn't do their importance justice), and the particularity of the consciousnesses (writer's, characters', reader's) through which they're perceived and transmitted. No wonder novelists need either to dig through the data to the particularity of anecdote, or toss the data, like seeds, into the "anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind", and wait for the truth - the particularity of imagination - to grow.

Dreaming the map: the efficiency of magic

You can't assume that someone who takes a day to write six words must be a finer artist and greater writer than someone who writes sixteen thousand: after all, would you say that Yeats is a greater writer than Dickens? And, indeed, you'll know how valuable I think the NaNoWriMo approach to first drafts "building up without tearing down" can be. And then novelist Sally Hinchcliffe pointed me to this post. Rachel Aaron explains how, with a new baby, and some very tight deadlines for a new novel, she had to re-think radically how she worked.

I approached it rather sceptically, because she's not talking about NaNo and shitty first draft stuff: her deadline was for a properly written and finished novel. And it's funny how horrified so many writers' reaction are to the idea of "efficiency" - as if it's only machines which can/should be efficient. And yet isn't it just one more aspect of learning one's craft? Artists who work in clay or paint or dance spend time and thought on avoiding wasted materials, where it's possible, so why wouldn't we? It's just that our material is time.

And none of us have enough writing time, so thinking about how you might put what time you do have to the best use is always worth doing: I kept reading. And so much of what she described I recognised in myself that her post began to make enormous sense to me. To explain - and suggest a way for you to think about Rachel Aaron's post for yourself - I'll start with things I know about myself:

• my slowest and dullest writing happens when I don't know what happens next, because when my instincts don't know what they should be trying to do, my word-hoard can't serve up the right words
• when I've internalised the research and know what's going to happen to the characters I write quite fast and fluently. And it's those scenes which invariably turn out really well and don't need deep revision (they always need editing, of course)
• it's the slow, writing-my-way-in beginning of a session which is most likely to go up a blind alley of plot or ideas
• the good-and-fast writing tends to happen towards the end of a session
• I naturally think on paper. If writing a scene is like pulling teeth, then I grab a piece of paper and work out the stages of what it's trying to do and where it's trying to go
• a scene I'm looking forward to writing - highly dramatic, important to the story, a climax - is always easier to write than one which is dull but necessary, or uses characters I'm less involved with

Rachel Aaron needed a process which used her own writerly nature to its best advantage, and she came up with three basic principles. The first - the most important - is

1) Knowledge: know what you're writing before you try to write it. In other words, don't use precious desk time for working out plot, characters and ideas from nothing: do it when pushing the pram or strap-hanging on the tube. This is just as much writing, it's just not at the desk. The more alive and present your characters are to you - the stronger a sense you have of their needs and wants and what they (being who they are) might do, and do do, to get them - the more fluently any scene you put them in will unreel itself.

And then, she says, know what you're writing at the micro-level. At the beginning of each desk session, grab a bit of paper and, with your full understanding of these people and their story ready and alive, spend five minutes imagining out how this scene is going to work. Not just the "they have a row" which your plot needs, but what the row's about, what the two sides are, the choreography and action of the row, the outcome, and so on. With the whole scene imagined, the words will unroll as fast as your word-hoard can release them, because your instincts know what's wanted.

Most writers would call this planning: drawing maps, not conjuring magic. But is there any reason we can't call that bit of paper not a map, but a zero draft? Surely what's often called planning is really an act of imagining just as much as we all know the actual writing is. These notes are just imagining separated from the business of first-draft-words-on-screen. I know wonderful, highly literary writers whose four-hour, draft-a-short-story stint is actually two hours on the sofa, staring into space, and two hours writing the 2000 words, because they know, by then, exactly, the story they're telling. And the words oblige by telling it, and although of course a lot of revising and polishing goes on, the story is essentially there from the beginning. 

If you say "but I'm a pantser" all you're really saying is that you use your first draft as a zero draft: the one where you work out what you're up to. You may chose to do the imagining by working it out in first-draft words. But a first draft for most writers is actually a first attempt at a final draft, and it's asking a lot of your writing mind to simultaneously work out the story you're trying to tell, and find the nearest-to-best words in which to tell it. Essentially, if you're desperately short of desk time then maybe it's not a given that your main imagining has to happen at the desk, word by hopefully-nearly-final word.

Aaron's other two corners of her triangle for making the most of your writing time are also interesting, and the third, I admit, I'd never thought of.

2) Time: track your time/wordcount/circumstances so you understand every aspect of what suits you: record how long you wrote for, where you were, how many words you wrote. That way you can really know whether a coffee shop with no wifi is best or your bed is, morning or evening, six hours twice a week or two hours every day, yoga before or a walk after, and so on. Most people have a vague idea, but I bet you've never really focused on making the absolute most of that knowledge, let alone got really ruthless about making your circumstances support it. Again, you may choose not to get ruthless, or you may not need to. But it's valuable knowledge to have.

3) Excitement: get excited about what you're writing today: There are always some scenes, some characters, some situations that the novel needs, which don't excite you. Writing them is not only slower, but, much more importantly, rarely gets your best writing out of you. So, says Aaron, when you're imagining out onto that bit of paper what you're about to write, try to get excited; look for what could excite you, where the vividness, the ideas, the surprises might be. She even suggests cutting the scene if you can't get yourself excited, because you're never going to be able to get the reader excited, You'll have to imagine out another scene that will do the same jobs in the novel, but at least, that way, you'll have decided this one's not right before you've written it.

None of this, of course, is the only way. But I do think it's worth thinking about, because what Aaron's really talking about isn't fulfilling contracts or racking up the words, but how to get your best writing out of you, by not expecting your writing mind to come up with the best words to say something, when you don't really know what you're trying to say.

A last thought:- Given how many writers agree that the scene that writes itself fluently, if not effortlessly, is so often the one that needs least revising, and ends up being one of the great scenes of the book, it's odd that so much snobbery hovers over the idea of writing fast. There's more than one professional novelist who hides from even his editor how fast he writes the books that officially take a year to produce, and Joyce Carol Oates's critical reputation suffers unfairly because she's so prolific. I guess it's because a) people wrongly equate time in the office with time doing the actual, real, core work, and b) the writing that's done away from the desk is so much less visible. But I notice that Joyce Carol Oates is quoted here, saying that you can't write the first sentence of a novel till you know what the last one's going to be. Which is where Rachel Aaron comes in.

The Prig's Writ, and Other Writers' Stories

In the comments on my post How Don't You Do It?, Glen says that he's been in writers' groups where:

they regard any form of deliberate intentionality in the first draft stage (as opposed to the later reworking stages) to be completely noxious to any eventual artistic merit. Now, this is all fine, but then these authors seem to imply that EVERYONE has to do it this way, or else you're being a fool to yourself and a burden to others (so to speak.)

I know exactly the kind of conversation Glen means - and I speak as one who's often explaining (even preaching) the merits of what you might call the NaNoWriMo or Shitty First Draft approach to writing. Various thoughts about this in no particular order.

I There are lots of people in the world who are very uncomfortable with not having their advice taken, even if it's about something, such as your writing, which isn't going to make any difference to them. For reasons deep-rooted in their personality they need to feel that you're actually persuaded of their case. And if you show that you're not persuaded, let alone that you still believe the opposite, they'll push amazingly hard to get you to concede. It's nothing to do with how right they are, or how important it is, and everything to do with them. Although it's worth asking yourself if your resistance has its roots in fear of what they're suggesting - some of the greatest NaNo devotees are people who used to be terrified of "writing rubbish", and vice versa.

II If I lined up a class of twenty new, "I want to write" students, the majority would need encouraging to stop the Prig clapping his hand over the Daemon's mouth, as Auden put it. When I suggest that a first draft is "thinking aloud on paper", not trying to "get it right" (whether "right" is for Teacher, or for publishers) you can almost hear the collective sigh of relief. Some only reach that point when I say, "We won't be sharing this." Immediately after the sigh comes the scratching of pens, as all sorts of mad, daemonic stuff comes up from their guts. If it's real free-writing I then ask them to ring three or four words that seem to have resonance, and they discover that this is just the start of a piece, but a start you couldn't have made without all the dross that came up with it. The students who don't need telling this are the ones who've already discovered it.

III This idea - that you need to learn to hold off the Prig for later, when he'll become your editor - is all about process, and mostly process at the beginning (though I've had some wonderfully mad ideas come along thanks to the need for a tweak in final revisions). But it gets mixed up, by the sound of Glen's interlocutors, with a different (but just as inadequate) idea that good writing can only come from direct, authentic experience, not from crafted, directed imagination. So, in the same spirit that Graham Swift was abused for having "made up" what readers had thought was autobiographical experience in Waterland, any writing which doesn't come from that unmediated outpourings from your daemon is thought to be, by definition, inauthentic, compromised, inevitably inferior.

IV So I would say that it's not at all that the first draft needs to be a mad, free-written splurge. I think aloud on paper, so for me writing-down is part of the process: my detailed imagination (as opposed to my rough idea of where the scene's going) is only a sentence or two ahead of my pen. The Prig gets his chance at the end of the chapter. But lots of writers aren't like that. Susannah Rickards says that half of the time it takes her to write one of her extraordinarily wonderful short stories consists of lying on the sofa under a rug. When the story is finally all there in her mind, the writing-down is quick, and doesn't usually need drastic revision: you could say she writes her shitty first draft in her head.

V So If you're someone whose Daemon and Prig operate on a one-sentence-in-the-head cycle, rather than a whole-draft-on-paper cycle, or anything in between, then you won't, apparently, be allowing the daemon his wicked way at all. But you are; it's just not visible on the page. I do think, though, that it's genuinely important to learn to find the place in yourself where the Prig's writ doesn't run. When students or anyone else's writing is dull one reason is always that their sense of story and voice, though it may be competent, is essentially second hand: nothing is really new and fresh and taking-aback for the reader, because they're not letting their own personality and imagination loose on their material.

VI Shitty First Draft is slightly different, as a discussion. Telling students that it's an inevitable stage, on the way to a good second draft and a brilliant third one, is saying that however coherent your first draft does or doesn't look, at this stage external judgement doesn't come into it. It's about shutting up your Inner Critic. It's also about shedding the "get it right first time" mentality as Barbara Baig puts it. (She's also the one who suggests thinking of it as a Zero Draft, which I think is brilliant.). To me it doesn't say that a first draft must be shitty, let alone that its shittiness is the guarantee of its merits. It's just that a shitty first draft is Good Enough. For now.

Jerusha Cowless, Agony Aunt: "How can I make a good, quiet and put-upon character more interesting to readers?"

Dear Jerusha: I had a one-to-one with an agent who said she felt my main character was rather dull and not pro-active enough. She was afraid that, not being like the usual feisty heroines who buck the system, my MC might fail to grab the reader's attention, and my writing friends have said similar things. I fully appreciate what they mean but I have struggled to correct the problem. The thing is, she is meant to be a bit 'wet' for want of a better word, or at least she is to begin with. She has to overcome this and break away from her "niceness" and stand up for what she wants, and that is her journey. (She ends up refusing to marry the man she loves because she wants to do other things first.) However, the novel is set in a world where an ordinary young girl brought up by a domineering mother can't be too "feisty" to begin, without it being anachronistic. At the start she is (outwardly) passive and more fearful than her peers. And she does make decisions and do things later on although her actions put her in a worse position than before. ("Out of the frying pan into the fire" kind of thing.) How can I make a good, quiet and put-upon character more interesting to readers, especially at the beginning of the novel, before her transforming journey gets going?

If your project in writing the novel is to chart the journey of a put-upon, un-self-determining character towards action, self-determination and self-knowledge, then you've got a classic premise. At the Guildford Book Festival I found myself describing Hallie Rubenhold's novel Mistress of My Fate to her as the story of how Fanny Price becomes Fanny Hill. But you've also got a built-in problem with this project: to make us like her and want to stick with her at the beginning, while she's still un-proactive, lacking in self-knowledge, and stuck in the situation (mental or practical or both) which she's going to have to learn to get herself out of.

I think the key to making any character engaging - any book engaging, come to that - is energy, and yes, it's always tricky if your novel is set in a time or place where women aren't supposed to be energetic and self-determining (although there's never been a time in history when women didn't actually run businesses, get rid of husbands and do their best to determine their own lives). That's easiest to write if you make your MC "feisty" (code for "energetic but of course not in a worryingly unfeminine way, oh dear me no!"). But I do think that's not the only kind of character who can have enough energy to carry a book for a modern reader. You need to think of other ways to build energy into her as a character-in-action. What could she be like, which would make her be energetic about something? What's available within the bounds of what's socially sanctioned for a girl in her world? Real goodness can be immensely energetic, for example, about the things which matter - until their ghastly mother says "but you've got to be back to give me my dinner".

First, although of course you want to be careful not to make things too anachronistic, I do think it can help if you deepen your sense of period, because there's nowt so queer as folk, and there are so many real stories which are odder and more surprising than you'd think. They buck the general outline that the historians give us, but are wholly authentic. You're also working with what your readers will regard as authentic, so you may need to work harder to make a surprising story convincing, than one which fits your readers' pre-conceptions of the period. But if you succeed, their experience of the book will be the richer for having had their pre-conceptions refigured.

Second, I'd suggest working hard to make her internally energetic, even though that energy's outlets are thwarted. It's slightly tricky not to end up with someone who does loads of internal, furious whingeing, which like any introspection quickly gets tedious for the reader, unless you're exceptionally good at providing narrative drive inside a bout of thinking. But her internal energy will help the narrative drive, because we'll be waiting for that thwarted energy to break out. It's a kind of instability, in that we know that the situation Can't Go On Like This forever. Concentrate on character-in-action, not character-in-inaction: what she does which expresses that thwarted energy. And if that sets off a piece of plot, so much the better. She can't murder her mother or even shout at her because Mother might have a heart attack, so she storms off up to the moors, crying with rage, where she falls and breaks her ankle and is picked up by Our Hero...

Another way to help is to make sure you're very clear, and forceful, about what thwarts the energy. Of course they can be external obstacles - not being allowed to go to university, lack of money - or internal obstacles - an emotional inability to tell her horrible mother where to put her Bengers Patent Invalid Food. And preferably both, if we're to believe her stasis at the beginning. But if you put good, solid obstacles in her way (perhaps with backstory - the memory of the first heart-attack) or practicality - (the encouraging mistress at school left, she's told that if she complains about being paid less than the bloke at the next workbench, she'll be sacked), then you'll be able to build up her energy quite a bit, and still have her unable to do anything.

You could try giving her a rich imaginative world: what does she dream about? What - at least in her wildest dreams - does she want? Every musical has its I Want song at the beginning ("All I Want Is A Room Somewhere!" "I Want To Be Where The People Are") just as it has its Conditional Love Song ("I'll Know When My Love Comes Along" "If I Loved You"), and it's always worth looking at how musicals are built, because they need a very strong, very clear structure, and the songs will always express the high points of that structure. And even though your plot may not be powered by her trying to get something that she wants (or dreams of) at the beginning, unfulfilled but strong desires can be another source of internal energy.

It could help to make her physically energetic or active in some other way: if she can't beat her horrible mother up, or walk out of her dreary job, then make her take her energy out in some other direction. Does she pinch and scrape - collecting bottles for the deposits, persuading her mother to give her the tram fare to Church, then actually walking - so she can afford to go to the cinema every week (feeding that imaginative world)? Does she let herself be talked into helping at Sunday School, and find herself wanting to get the children outside and acting out Bible scenes, not sitting and colouring in pictures? What does she do about that? Again, these could become big plot points, or they could just mean we pick up on the latent energy that will soon be powering things, and wait for it to be directed at the mother or the job. Then, when she starts being pro-active, the reader feels great satisfaction: it's the difference between scratching a line in the sand for a trickle of water to go down, and opening a sluice-gate.

One more thought: what's at stake for your character? One reason that readers may not have a sense of energy driving the novel is that the disaster which is waiting for your MC, if she doesn't start trying to be an act-or in her own life, just isn't very terrible. One built-in problem of the MC-stuck-at-the-beginning-of-the-novel project is that it would be perfectly possible for things to go on like that forever and (as I discussed in my post on the waking-up opening) that isn't an unstable situation. The manipulative, will-live-forever mother, for example, or the dead-end job, is the opposite of the body on page one: everything about them is conducive to nothing changing. I've just put a novel under the bed, although it only had one thing wrong with it: the pit yawning at the feet of one of my two MCs wasn't deep or scary enough. If it All Went Wrong, then... her hitherto loving marriage would become rather unsatisfactory. It just wasn't enough to keep the reader turning the pages, and for reasons I won't bore you with, changing that would have meant writing a different novel. Whereas Fanny Price may not be our paradigm of feistiness (and she's certainly Austen's least popular heroine) but her fate, if she loses her place at Mansfield Park and has to go back to Portsmouth, would be very grim indeed.

Yours to remember and mine to forget

I'm reading a fascinating book, The Agony & The Ego: the art and strategy of fiction writing explored, which is a collection of essays by all sorts of writers from Robertson Davies to Marina Warner, by way of the Johns Mortimer and Banville, and Sara Paretsky. It's edited by Clare Boylan, and it's out of print; I got it from the library, but it's so brilliant that I've just bought a copy secondhand, partly so I can read it in the bath with a clear conscience, and take a pencil to it too, but also because I know I'm going to keep going back to it, beyond the limits of even the London Library's patience.

What sent me to find this book was a forum conversation about my statement that I never write worse than when I've got a textbook, or a history book, or a guidebook, in my other hand. A friend quoted this, from Rose Tremain's essay (my italics):

...all the research done for a novel - all the studying and reading, all the social fieldwork, all the location visiting, all the garnering of what is or what has been - must be reimagined before it can find a place in the text. It must rise into the orbit of the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind before it can acquire its own truth for the work in question...

Graham Green, when asked by a journalist how he would make use of an important experience he'd had in South East Asia, replied: "It's yours to remember and mine to forget." He was talking about the novelist's task of reimagining reality. Reimagining implies some measure of forgetting. The actual or factual has to lose definition, become fluid, before the imagination can begin its task of reconstruction. Data transferred straight from the research area to the book will simply remain data. It will be imaginatively inert.

This, of course, is why I feel so frustrated by the obsession in some writers and many readers with strict accuracy to what they regard as the facts. It's not that it doesn't matter - I'll come to that in a moment - it's that it's not what makes a good novel a good novel. And yes, if I'm honest, I really do admire the storytelling skills (and the sales) of such authors, while finding their data-driven fiction imaginatively inert.

We often talk about the difference between using your own built-in knowledge and experience in your writing, and using researched material. "Research" implies what Tremain is talking about -  data that you use - but that's just the start. In Creative Writing, the brilliant and comprehensive course textbook for the Open University course I teach, after the chapter on 'Writing What You Know" comes the chapter on "Writing What You Come To Know", and I just love that name for what we're talking about. I'd forgotten that Tremain quotation yesterday, when I found myself saying in the Comments on my own recent post on the History Girls blog (sorry, that sounds solipsistic, but do have a look - the comments were fascinating). 

...the whole process of writing creatively - in my case, at least - is about internalising everything, wherever it comes from (research, voices, knowledge, my own experience), so that it has equal status inside me. It's only once it is all equal that it can be part of the process of re-imagining which results in the single, coherent entity which will be the novel. Otherwise, it's just a patchwork of stuff.

So don't expect the facts and images and ideas you've gathered to magically turn into fully-imagined places and people and stories, just because you're fitting them into a fictional narrative, and setting them on the page in your own words. As Kearney says in On Stories, it's about the move from non-fiction narrative, which deals in "probability and representation", to fiction's business of "possibility and verisimilitude". It's important to allow for time and process which will "let go of the research", as Tremain describes it elsewhere. Give yourself time (on a walk, in the bath, while scrubbing a floor) to dream these stuffs first, to inhabit the smell and sense of them.  That's what will make these stuffs start to move and breathe: you feeling them, apprehending them in an a-logical, simultaneous way.

And a last thought, which came along as I stopped drafting this last night to catch up on Radio 4's "All In The Mind". According to the Nobel laureate psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, not only do we have two ways of deciding things - quick, instinctive and imaginative, and slow, information-processing and logical - but

We understand things by making them true in our mind - by imagining them to be true - and then if it doesn't work, we conclude that they are not true.

Which, of course, is why if a writer gets something wrong in a novel - whether making Londoners drive on the right, or a respectable Victorian woman swear and use makeup - the reader's mental sleight-of-hand in suspending their knowledge that none of this happened, breaks down. We ascribe that to a failure of logic (wrong facts) but really it's failed our quick, instinctive judgement of truth. The novel fails the test of imaginability, and the reflex belief that it's therefore "not true", destroys the sleight-of-hand.

So, I'd suggest that while the writer's data-handling needs to be rigorous to prevent that happening, the other aspect of the reader's experience - the business of mental sleight-of-hand - also has a necessary parallel in the writer's process. For fiction to pass the test of imaginability the researched material must cease to be data, and become stuff that quick-and-instinctive can access: it must be allowed to be forgotten-and-remembered as our own experience has been. Only from that stuff can the process of re-imagination integrate everything into a single, story which passes the test of imaginability, maintains the sleight of hand, and is therefore believable, and so "true" in the aesthetic sense. When Tremain says that data "is imaginatively inert" without that kind of forgetting and re-imagining, she doesn't just mean that it'll be a boring novel. She means that it won't really be a novel.

A Million Little Versions (or nearly)

I've asked before whether you've ever thought about the order in which you put the elements in your sentence. And my post on the joys of the long sentence is relevant too, because of course a longer sentence, in our lovely, bendy, syntactical English, gives you more opportunities: you can play with rhythm and sound, with subtleties of meaning, with front-loading the sentence or keeping the grenade for the end. You can fine-tune for the period or the voice, for the character or their state of mind.

So when, the other day, I found myself writing the first version of what follows, I decided to do a writerly five-finger exercise with it. How many ways could I recast the sentence while retaining the exact sense by not changing the logic of the relationship between the five main elements: He, Surprise, Fierce, His-Need and Find-Out. And I'm sure there are more permutations I haven't thought of. I'm going to leave you to do the Maths about what works, what doesn't, why, and when you might use which. Yes, one or two of them do sound like off-cuts from the Star Wars script. But then you never know when you might need just that, do you?

• He was surprised by how fiercely he needed to find out.
• He was surprised how fiercely he needed to find out.
• He was surprised [by] how fierce was his need to find out.
• He was surprised [by] how fierce his need was to find out.
• He was surprised [by] how fierce his need to find out was.
• He was surprised by the fierceness of his need to find out.

• He was surprised that in him the need to find out was so fierce.
• He was surprised that the need in him to find out was so fierce.
• He was surprised that the need to find out, in him, was so fierce.
• He was surprised that the need to find out was so fierce in him.
• He was surprised that the need was so fierce in him to find out.
• He was surprised that so fierce was the need in him to find out.
• He was surprised that so fierce was the need to find out in him.

• He was surprised, in his need to find out, [by] how fierce that need was.
• He was surprised, in his need to find out, by his need's fierceness
• He was surprised, in his needing to find out, how fierce the need was.
• He was surprised, in his needing to find out, [by] how fierce the need was.
• He was surprised, in his needing to find out, by his need's fierceness.

• His need to find out surprised him in its fierceness.
• His need to find out surprised him by its fierceness.
• His need to find out was surprisingly fierce to him.
• His need was to him surprisingly fierce, and it was the need to find out.
• His need's fierceness - the need to find out - surprised him

• The need in him to find out surprised him by its fierceness.
• The need in him to find out was surprising to him in its fierceness.

• He needed to find out, and the fierceness of his need surprised him.
• He needed to find out, but the fierceness of his need surprised him.
• He needed to find out, yet the fierceness of his need surprised him

• Surprising to him was the fierceness of his need to find out.
• Surprising to him, in his need to find out, was the fierceness of it.
• Surprising to him in its fierceness was his need to find out.

• Finding out was a need which surprised him in its fierceness.
• Finding out was a need whose fierceness surprised him.

• To find out was a need in him whose fierceness surprised him.
• To find out was a need in him which surprised him in its fierceness.

• How fiercely he needed to find out surprised him.
• How fiercely he needed to find out: that surprised him!
• How surprisingly fiercely he needed to find out!
• How surprising was the fierceness of his need to find out!

• It surprised him, how fiercely he needed to find out.
• It surprised him, the fierceness of his need to find out.
• It surprised him that his need to find out was so fierce.

• The fierceness of his need to find out surprised him.
• The fierceness of his need to find out was surprising to him.
• The fierceness of his need to find out: that surprised him.
• The fierceness of it - his need to find out - that surprised him

• Surprised, he was, by the fierceness of his need to find out.
• Surprised by the fierceness, he was, of his need to find out.
• Surprised by the fierceness of his need to find out, he was.
• Surprised by the fierceness of his need he was: the need to find out

And that's before you've stretched things around a bit more, let go of the need for a grammatically complete sentence, or settled for a meaning which isn't quite the one we've been dealing with above. That might well not matter (it doesn't matter to poets, often; it's the way the words rub up against each other they're interested in, not always the connections of logic and grammar) but it might: you need to know which you're after. Some would only be unambigious in the context of other sentences. Some disconnect the need from being his need: it could be someone else's need. We could be here for hours, though, so here are a few samples.

• The ferocity of his need to find out was a surprise.
• The surprise was the ferocity of his need to find out.
• Needing so ferociously to find out was surprising.
• The necessity to find out wasn't surprising; its ferocity was.
• You're surprised by how fiercely you need to find out.
• What's surprising is the fierceness of your need to find out.
• Fierce - surprisingly fierce - how you need to find out.
• Surprisingly, his need to find out was ferocious.
• Fierce, his need to find out - fierce, and surprising in its fierceness.
• A fierce need in himself to find out, and that ferocity a surprise.
• It surprised him, his need-to-find-out's fierceness.
• He needed to find out: needed surprisingly, fiercely.
• Fiercely, surprisingly, he needed to find out.
• A need - a ferocious need - a need to find out... surprising in its ferocity
• It wasn't his need to find out that surprised him, it was the fierceness of his need.
• Surprisingly fiercely, he needed to find out.
• A need - fierce - a need to find out... but what surprised him wasn't the need, but its fierceness.

See what I mean? That's over sixty versions, and if you start playing fast and loose with A/His, The/An, fierce/ferocious, need/necessity, him/you, and so on, you could probably perm another sixty, or more.

It sounds frivolous, or pointless, although if you've stuck it this far I hope you see why it's not. But what this actually is, is yoga for writers. Of course there will be some versions which feel more like you and your voice, than others. Some might be a character's voice. And who says you won't need someone to sound like Yoda, one day? Do this, every now and again, and you're making your word-hoard and syntax-mind bendier, more responsive to what you're trying to say, more likely to serve up the right answer to a wrong sentence, more likely to get the right sentence there first go. Try it with one of your own sentences.

16 Questions to ask a Critique (and some to ask about a critiquer)

From the first poem you show a friend or a teacher, to five-page editorial letter from an agent who might take you on if you get the novel right, to a TLS review of your twentieth book, as a writer you never stop getting feedback on your writing. I've talked before about the basic decision about accept-adapt-ignore. But sometimes even that isn't enough to stop you agonising about whether you should change something in your writing because of what someone's said. And I would suggest that who that Someone is, is part of the decision.

These days it would be very un-PC not to say that everyone's opinion of your writing is valid, and in one sense that's true. But the flipside of that is that no one's opinion is valid in any meaningful sense, unless you choose to accept its validity. It's not arrogant to decide that you don't need someone's opinion of your writing: it's part of being a writer. I've seen so many aspiring writers have their confidence - and therefore their writing - wrecked, sometimes permanently, by being in the wrong environment (and not just that one particular, cultishly vicious online group). Even in good groups I've seen writers ruin a piece by trying to write by writers'-circle-committee, or by believing the all-too-many critiquers who critique by the rule book. Some of that is lack of confidence in a critiquer who doesn't know good writing when they see it, so they look for boxes ticked. Some is lack of confidence or experience in the writer, who can't hear their own instincts, or doesn't trust them.

Having said that, here are some questions to ask yourself about that Someone, when you're trying to decide if you should accept what they say.  

1) Are they too afraid they'll hurt you to be frank? Even some very discerning readers know how much it hurts to get feedback, so they don't really give it, and you're left with nothing to work with. It takes experience, or natural talent, to give feedback in ways which are rigorous but don't just trash the work.

2) Do they think that sensitivity is for wimps? "This is shit" is no more helpful as a critique than "This is wonderful". And it will probably damage your confidence more. As I was exploring in To The Point, it all works much better when two people's critique-styles are a good fit for each other.

3) Have they said, "It flows very well"? Every writing teacher knows that this is the mark of the inexperienced critiquer. It means precisely nothing.

4) If they're sounding very confident in telling you what's wrong, have a look at their own writing. Every group has members who know all the rules and know all about what agents don't like and readers won't buy. They are very rarely good writers, sometimes not even competent writers, and they critique by the rule-book because they don't know real writing when they see it. Unfortunately, their confidence is catching, and so the rules get promulgated far and wide, while the good writer's good answer, "It's not as simple as that", goes unheard.

5) Who is saying it? Someone you barely know, online? Someone who hasn't read the first ten chapters? Your longstanding trusted reader? A friend who reads a lot but doesn't write? A member of the writers' circle who's had a run of rejections for the kind of writing you also do? A writer you admire but who doesn't teach? Someone whose job is being a typical reader for your work (editor)? Someone who has power over your writing (teacher, editor, agent)? Any of these may be very useful, but it helps to know, in deciding what to do with what they say. 

6) How precise are they in observing their own reactions to the story? Can they pin down the words which aren't right for the voice? The sentences they didn't believe that character would say? The scene which meant they didn't bother to go on reading? The key good craft is to learn Problem Finding, and that's what this is. This, really, is what you need most and should try hardest to find; this is what will make you a better writer.

7) What are they saying? Sometimes one person points out a flaw and you think "Doh! how did I miss that?" If that's true, you don't really need to go any further: just change it. If you're not sure, you need to separate out their reaction from a) the reasons they give for it, and then b) from any solution they offer.

8) How many other people are saying it? If most of the writers' circle or six different agents are all saying the same thing, the chances are that most readers you haven't asked yet would agree.

9) Do they read your kind of writing (genre, form, degree of literariness) a lot? Just because someone rarely reads the kind of thing you write doesn't disqualify them from talking usefully about yours; it can be salutary to discover that plenty of readers don't get or are bored by what you aspire to write. But all forms and genres have certain basic elements, and if your reader balks at the violence in your crime fiction, the science in your sci fi, or the amount of readerly work your literary novel asks of them, then you don't necessarily have to listen... though you may win a wider readership if you do. 

10) If they've missed the point, is it because they're not experienced in reading this kind of novel, or because you're not making the point clearly enough for anyone (i.e. everyone) who doesn't already know what the point is?

11) Are they talking about what YOUR novel does, or about the kind of things they like to find in this kind of novel? Do they dislike it because their expectations were disappointed?

12) Can they separate out their tastes and pleasures - what kinds of character annoy them or what topics distress them - from their experience of your novel as a piece of storytelling?

13) Do they seem to have understood what your novel is trying to do? Can they talk about whether it's doing it well or not, separately from whether they're enjoying it?

14) Can they set aside what they would do, if they were writing this project, this scene, this sentence? If they talk about what they would do instead is it clear that they mean it purely as an illustration, not a solution? Might you want to solve it another way? Do they try to bully you into agreeing?

15) Are they diagnosing the disease from looking at the symptoms? There are many ailments that give you spots. Not all of them are measles, and each ailment needs a different treatment. And, just conceivably, your novel is a leopard anyway.

16) Is what they say something you can work from? There are lots of things we can say about a novel which are entirely true and not at all helpful. On the other hand some people have a gift for saying the one thing - perhaps quite vague - which unlocks the door for you.

I do want to say, though, that any or all of these are at risk of being get-out clauses, so that you can fend off feedback altogether and end up changing nothing more than a couple of commas. Indeed, if your resistance is extra-fierce, I'd suggest that it may be because you're hearing stuff that you know in your heart is true, but don't want to believe. And if you find a critique partner who can say the stuff you don't want to believe, in a way which makes you able to tackle it, then grapple them to the heart of your writers' circle, and don't let go.

Are you Showing too much?

Over on her excellent blog, The Elephant in the Writing Room, Sally Zigmond's been talking about Showing and Telling. And as well as flattering the Itch by linking to my own post about it, she makes a very good point that trying to Show often leads writers into endless, endless details about missing the alarm-clock switch, and scrambling out of bed and tripping over the dog and dropping things and running out of breath and tumbling onto the train and feeling sweaty when shaking the MD's hand.... and all to Show what could be told: John arrived at the office late, hot and flustered.

Undoubtedly, lots of beginner writers do this - and lots of more experienced writers find that in revision they have done it too, and cut a lot of it. So it's obvious that this kind of too-much-stuff comes naturally to many of us. But I have heard aspiring writers say "showing takes longer", and I don't think it's necessarily true, as the examples in my post about Showing and Telling prove. In other words, I'm not sure that it's fair to blame Showing, in itself, for the problem of Too Much Stuff. I think it comes from various, very natural, aspects of the process.

Writing to find out what you're really trying to say. If you're a Cutter, as a writer, then it's by putting words on the page that you find out which are the words you really need, and which you don't. You just have to remember, when revising, that you need to dust down each sentence to see which ones are really earning their keep.

Leaving in the scaffolding. This is a slightly different matter which I explored in The Common Scaffold. Because we all imagine, as well as think, by writing - by asking our imagination to supply the next word - these words came about as part of you having to imagine John's journey from being asleep to the MD's office. Which, again, is fine; it's process writing. Now it's time to decide which bits the reader needs, to get them from asleep to the MD's office, given the structure and pace and plot of the chapter, and of the book as a whole.

Thinking that Detail means lots of small stuff which adds up. What it should mean - what you should be thinking in terms of - is a few things that are particular: particular in the sense of particular to this person, this place, this time, this moment. Crudely, They met at the big tree isn't as Showy, because it isn't as particularised, as They kissed under the rotting willow, or They fought beneath the sapling oak.

Thinking that Showing means Showing Everything. It doesn't. It doesn't take a paragraph of detail to evoke the room of an old, paralysed Dowager Duchess, or the bear-pit of a bedroom shared by two brothers who hate each other. Indeed, it's quite likely that you don't have to write what you may think of as "description of the setting", at all. It's almost always stronger - and all you need - to evoke a setting in terms of the character in action within it.

So if you find that as soon as you stop summarising (Telling, Informing) and start detailing (Showing, Evoking) the wordcount starts to get out of hand and the story slows down, I'd suggest that you go back to summarising, but work hard at being Show-y, in the smallest space.

So, of the fifteen things that happen to John to get him flustered, which is the most telling? Which has the strongest sensory presence - toothpaste down the front of your clean shirt, or skiddy sand on the bathroom floor, or the bashed elbow? Which is most John-ish of the misbehaving objects he interacts with; the 1970s Star Wars alarm clock he bashes, or the antique silk prayer mat he trips over? Of all his actions from bed to boardroom, which is the most characteristic of him - still getting coffee on the way - or uncharacteristic - spilling it?

Mind you, a very common side effect of developing your ear/eye for evocative words is to use too many of them. Even when you're Showing in this very economical, less-is-more sort of way, you still need to give each evocative word some space of plainness round them, so their evocation has room to work. And of course, you may still decide that what the story needs here is still a straightforward bit of Informing, in which case go for it. But can I suggest that you're nonetheless firm with your first draft version of: John overslept and woke up late so he arrived at the office upset. In revision, see if it wouldn't be better as: John slept through the alarm, and scuttled to work in a fluster. Why not? Fluster is a good, strong word, after all, and so are alarm, and scuttle. And it'll even keep the creative writing fascists happy, because there's not an adjective or an adverb to be seen (at least not of the sort the CW fascisti disapprove of: 'through' is an adverb here).