This Itch of Writing

Is it worth it?

In Conditional Validation I was talking about how Malcolm Bradbury saying "They're good. Keep going" was enough for Ian McEwan to - well - keep going. We tend to think that the "they're good" is the important bit of that, but I more and more think that in some ways "Keep going" - said by someone whose knowledge and judgement you trust - is just as important. The thing is, they're two sides of the real question, which is "Is this worth doing?".

Mind you, Hilary Mantel said on Front Row that having won the Booker twice is no help at all, when you sit down to work on a new book: it's like the first day you started to write. In other words, the energy doesn't come from the pleasure of doing something know you're good at or are admired for - because that evaporates at the sight of the blank page. The energy to start in (again) and keep going comes from the knowledge that it will all turn out to be worth it, when you finally get to the summit. It's that knowledge which keeps you going over the endless immediate difficulties and setbacks of the terrain. Every step, every day, every month, every novel.

I realised this all over again recently, when the novel I'm working on was being profoundly awkward, at a moment when I had let into my psyche more of the routine book industry doom and gloom than was wise. As a result I was feeling the routine hysterical conviction that the novel, as a creative form and a way of earning money, is dying. Some writers and would-be writers seem positively to relish* feeling like that (or I assume they do, or why would they blog and tweet and grumble about it all the time?), but all it does to me is make it extremely difficult to get on with the novel. But this time, my agent happened to ring up to see how I was getting on; I said something about how disheartened I was. "Well, let me tell you why I'm optimistic about the long-term future," said my agent, and proceded to do just that. When your agent's been in the trade long enough to have only just missed Allen Lane, you believe what she says. And I put down the phone, rolled up my sleeves, and barrelled into the novel with as much energy as if I'd just had two strong coffees and a fan letter.

The novel hadn't miraculously solved its own problems, and the industry hadn't changed a hair: what had happened was that the work that the novel still needed suddenly seemed worth the energy and time and loneliness, and (let's admit it) occasional boredom that it was going to demand of me. When I thought that all might be pointless, I had no energy. When I thought it was worth it, the energy came rushing back.

And I think making it seem worth it is also one of the functions of a teacher. I was surprised, in writing But Can You Teach Creative Writing?, to realise how important a part of my job isn't just to provide a safe space for experimenting, say, or technical tools: it's to help the writers to feel that what they do is worth it, that there's a goal worth aiming for, that it's realistic to think they might reach it.

But in the end, I think you have to decide for yourself what makes it worth it, and then do your damnedest to seek out those things. And, perhaps, be prepared to acknowledge that they're beyond your reach, and either change your idea of what makes it worth it, or give up. For me it's having readers. Coming from the storytelling, not the journaling end of becoming-a-writer, I know that If I had no mechanism for reaching readers, I wouldn't write. But not everyone is like that: for some the act of writing is self-fulfilling.

And one final thought about what your writing is worth. As Claire King was discussing on her excellent blog some time ago, what we pay for something is a crucial component of what we feel it's worth. There are lots of good reasons for giving your work away for free on occasions: for charity, as review copies, as exposure in a place you want to be seen, as a twenty-four-hour ruse to get yourself top of a "bestseller" ranking. But I do think that anyone who consistently doesn't expect to be paid for their professional creative work is sending out a very strong message: that they don't think their work is worth it.

Far be it from me to tell anyone what to do with their life. But, I don't know about you, but my life is far too short to spend on anything as frustrating and badly paid as writing, if it isn't, also, profoundly worth it in all the ways that matter. I want it to be good. I want to be able to keep going. I need to feel it's worth it.

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* I asked a psychotherapist friend why so many people seem determined to hear and even relish only bad and depressing news.  "It's a form of masochism," she explained. "They're getting off on it." So next time someone insists that we're all going to hell in a handcart and refuses to hear your evidence for the reasonableness of a bit of optimism, you can quite legitimately and exactly describe them as that technical term: a w***er.

All the posts I mentioned at Getting Published 2013

These are links to all the posts I can remember mentioning last Saturday at the Writers' Workshop Getting Published event. If I mentioned a post that I haven't listed here, then do say so in the comments and I'll try and dig it up.

SHOWING AND TELLING: the basics : how to use both to make your story do everything you want it to do.

HOW TO TELL, AND STILL SHOW : how to get on with the story without sacrificing vividness

PSYCHIC DISTANCE: what it is and how to use it : a key technique, not much discussed and not hard to grasp.

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 1: the basics : what point of view is, what a narrator is, and why it matters

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 2: internal narrators : character-narrators who narrate in first person

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 3: external narrators : limited, switching and privileged point of view in narrators who narrate in third person

POINT OF VIEW & NARRATORS 4: moving point of view and other stories : how to work with a moving point of view, second-person narrators and other stuff

PROLOGUES : why you probably shouldn't, why occasionally you should.

REVISIONS: Taking down the scaffolding: many writers find it hard to spot the things which needed to be in the first draft, but must be fished out in revision. Here's how to spot them.

PLOT vs. STORY: what's the difference and why does that mean for your writing? Includes a link to Andrew Stanton's TED talk.

CHARACTERISATION-IN-ACTION : how to develop your characters-in-action and make sure their journey is really compelling.

and a couple which are very useful whatever stage you're at:

FIDDLING, HANGOVERS AND THE PARIS REVIEW : How not to get stuck in revision hell.

THE RESOURCES PAGE

Characterisation-in-action

When I let myself in for giving a workshop on Characterisation at Writers' Workshop's Getting Published event yesterday, I realised I haven't blogged directly about Characterisation as much as some things. It is a big subject, but for me, it's all founded in Aristotle: a character without action isn't a story, it's a portrait.  In "Clothes and Food and Dropping Presents" I explored how the process of creating (discovering? uncovering?) your characters can, essentially, go from the outside in, or the inside out, but here are some other ways to help you develop your characters-in-action.

And please don't forget that, as with any kind of imagining-on-paper, there's no reason to assume that you need to do this kind of thing before you start your draft. It may well be that it's more useful later, when you find you're defaulting to bland, standard-issue actions because your character isn't yet fully individual; when you just can't think what they'd do next; when you're in the 30K Doldrums.

First, as anyone who knows anything about acting (or grammar) knows, actions are expressed as verbs. So try these:

• Ten verbs for your character's characteristic physical actions:
  jump, dash, crumple, push, snarl, nibble, taste, wolf, leap, flop
• Ten verbs for their characteristic mental or emotional actions:
  spend, avoid, hunger, dream, enroll, crumple, flinch, rejoice, snooze

Did you notice how mental actions are often expressed as physical metaphors - crumple, flinch? Next, if you find that material objects help you to focus on someone, then try these to help you jump the tracks of the standard-issue things for your character's gender/age/ethnicity/class:

• Ten things they would naturally own.
• Ten things you wouldn’t expect them to own - but they do.
• Ten things you’d expect them to own - but they don’t.

And characters aren't just in-action, they're always characters-in-interaction. So, as I explored here, ask yourself - or your character

• How does your character think of him/herself?
• How does s/he describe herself to others?
• How big is the gap?
  
  
• What does each of your other characters think of your MC?
• What does each of them say about him/her?
• How much do these different perceptions vary? Is your MC very different for different people?

But whether you start by thinking about shoes and move inwards to Oedipus complexes, or start with dysfunctional childhoods and move outwards to Ferraris, the big drivers of your story -  of your character's journey as routed by the plot - come from the answers to these kinds of questions:

• What drives them? Is it enough to drive the whole story?
  
• What do they want? Does that change as the story develops?
  
  
• What do they really need (not the same as what they want) and they know it?
• What do they need, but don’t know it?
  
  
• What do they hope for? Does that change or re-shape itself?
• What do they dream of?
• What do they dread?
  
  
• What will they lose if it all goes wrong?
• What will they win if it all goes right?
• What’s at stake for them? Do the stakes get higher as the story develops?
  

And notice, again, how that list is all about the verbs: drive, want, need, hope, dream, dread, lose, win. Now, one more tip, one more list and a grid. (Y'all know how I love a grid.) First, remember that red is redder and green is greener when they're next to each other. So, any time you're thinking about a particular characteristic, try thinking about it for combinations of characters, and using that to boost the distinctiveness - the characteristicness - of all of them. For example:

• What clothes would your MC wear to meet his future mother-in-law?
• What car does each of them drive? A bog-standard middle-aged Ford Escort says a lot more if it's parked between a brand new Smart car and an ancient Porsche.
• Does being nervous make each of them eat (drink?) more, or less? 
• How would each character behave if they came across a group kicking a stray dog? (Thank you JoJo Moyes at York 2012, for that one!)

The list? It's the kind of list you see a good deal - but for me it's wholly optional. Still, there are times when it can help to think about these sorts of things:

• gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity
• appearance, height, physicality, vision, deft/clumsy etc.
• education, nationality/region, class, religion
• job, hobbies, parents’ jobs, or other knowledge/expertise/skills
• senses: which dominates?
• possessions: clothes, home, food, car, jewellery, electronics
• habits: e.g. insomniac, fairly tidy, always late, good driver, disastrous love-life, smoker
• tastes: reading, music, art, theatre, film
• leisure: sports, pastimes, socialising, travel

And the grid? It's for thinking about what characters think about each other, and where the gaps are. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that you must fill this out at all, of course. But it's surprising how it makes you think about relationships and relationships - characters-in-interaction - is what fiction is all about. Sorry it's only a quick jpeg, so you'll have to make your own, but what did Old Hamlet think of Ophelia?

When a flashback is an alarm bell

A student has just quoted a how-to book, 30 Steps to Becoming a Writer by Scott Edelstein. As with most how-to books, she says, lots isn't specially useful - at least not to her - but one or two things are. And the one she quoted which struck me was from a list of things you see in your writing which should ring an alarm bell: Beginning with an almost immediate flashback. This is probably caused, suggests Edelstein, by the desire To avoid the work of showing full-fledged events. And the thing is, I know exactly what he means.

I should say that I haven't got hold of the book, so I can't be sure I'm reading it right. But I have lost count of the number of MS I see which start with a moment in the story, and then zig straight back to the past. It's not, of course, that you should never do it - never say never about anything in writing (at least, not within my hearing). But I think there are several things that might cause you to do this, and they all need interrogating.

The most obvious question is, as with misjudged prologues, are you doing it because you want to start with a bang, but there's a lump of backstory that needs explaining if the bang is to have any kind of significance? Maybe you should ask if you're really starting the story in the right place, if so much that's important went before? It might be better to find the bangy-ness in the real start.

And besides, we may not need nearly as much backstory explained as you think we do. It's amazing how much you don't know about where people in good movies have come from, or indeed in good short stories; are novels really so different? And even if we ultimately do need it, we certainly may not need to have it explained now.

More generally, it's worth remembering that any page which is entirely backstory isn't moving the frontstory on. Of course it's contributing to it indirectly, in setting out why the stakes are so high in the frontstory, or setting up suspense or an instability for the frontstory. And a backstory scene should, of course, have its own narrative drive. But if the promise that the beginning of the novel makes is that as the story unfolds it will be worth the reader's while, any chunk of backstory can only be, as it were, something of an aside.

More generally - not just at the beginning - are you jumping into flashback because you're not confident weaving backstory into frontstory, but only in writing either one or the other? It's not difficult to learn to integrate the two, and it does save those lurchy, stop-start moments when you have to negotiate the jump into a fully-formed flashback, and back again.

But the reason Edelstein highlights is also very interesting: To avoid the work of showing full-fledged events. Of course backstory can be written as immediately and fully-fledged-ly as frontstory, but there's always a risk that it becomes a summary of necessary information:  Telling (Informing) us about how ever since she'd left school she always... or the battle had been long and hard and only as night fell did .... Especially if the backstory involve large sweeps of time or place, Telling it is so much easier and quicker than doing the full-on imagining and then the challenging writing that you need to Show (Evoke) such things. So I would agree that if you find yourself tucking major events away into pieces of flashback, it's worth asking yourself if it's partly because you can't see how, or don't want, to write them in full.

Mind you, my fiction is very often about setting right things from the past, and I'm often mediating a story through a character-narrator. In that case, what we learn of their past is often by way of their own memory: fragmented, subjective, elusive. They are their own narrator, if you like, and it's they who are telling/informing us. And for me, that's even more interesting, even if it also carries all the risks I've just suggested. The whole of Anthony's strand in A Secret Alchemy, for example, is essentially one big series of flashbacks.So although I take the point that, for example, a flashback might be a too-easy way out of actually writing a scene in full, it's an alarm-bell you should attend to, but not necessarily act on. 

To put my money where my mouth is, I'll give you an example. The Mathematics of Love is all about what war does to people, without ever portraying war except as mediated through memories and nightmares. And I don't think that does it any harm. This is from the end of Chapter 5: it's 1819, and Stephen is escorting Lucy around the battlefield of Waterloo.

***

She leaned forward to call to the driver, ‘Arretez-vous là, s’il vous plaît!’ He pulled up the horses and she scrambled out before I could assist her, only then turning back to me to say, ‘Shall we stop here? You must know this part of the field the best.’

Indeed I did, but struggled, as I had not on the day, to make my way through the heat towards the sandpit at the base of the knoll which we had been ordered to hold. Miss Durward climbed quickly up the small elevation and stood in the thin shade of the trees, looking about her. As I came up, she said, a little out of breath but as if there had been a few seconds, not several minutes since she had spoken the first part of her thought, ‘If I could only draw it as I see it now, with the battle more vivid in my mind than it can ever be on a printing plate or a twelve-ounce paper… If only I could draw this scene so well that what is in my mind is conjured in the viewer’s mind. That would be more honest! Do you understand?’

‘I’m not sure I altogether do,’ I said, the heat beginning to hammer in my head.

She seized my shoulder to turn me towards the country spread out before her. ‘Look! Look at the these hills and fields! Put them together with your memories! You will never see them thus in a gilt frame on a parlour wall!’

I looked as she demanded. The heat that day had been blistering and now it seemed to waver before my eyes. Our savagery was numbered, chained and uniformed, the brute harnessed and hardened. We were made little cogs in the machine, each turning another, I saw, and then clamour began to beat about me, and the stench of fear. The dust stung in my eyes, rasped my throat, clogged in my ears. I could not see, hear, breathe. It was blood in my eyes, sour and stinging. No breath –  no sense – no thought. Only the machine, grinding.

So what did Richard III seem like to the man he murdered?

In my novel A Secret Alchemy,  Antony Wydvil, Earl Rivers, uncle and guardian to the new, young King Edward V, has been arrested by Edward's other uncle, the Regent Richard Duke of Gloucester. In one, long midsummer's day Antony rides, under guard, from the castle of Sheriff Hutton to Pontefract, where he knows he is to be put to death.

It is some time after midday. Anderson spies a spinney a couple of furlongs off the road and orders a halt to rest the horses. The corn in the fields is well grown, and we ride along the rising ground of the headlands to dismount in dappled shade, like a group of friends taking their ease after a morning’s coursing. One of the men leads my horse away but no man tries to hold me. They have no need, of course: I am disarmed. There is no help on its way for me, and I could no more escape on foot across these open fields than I could from an island in the sea.

So no formal watch is posted, no sentry-duty ordered. These men know each other and their trade too well. They are quiet, but for a jest or two: taking off their helmets, loosening girths, checking horse and harness, going aside to piss, eating barley bread and cheese because men must eat to do their work, watering the horses when they have cooled, but always watching. That their watch is not needed is beside the point. Still they watch, bows and horses to hand, because that is what soldiers do.

They say that each man destroys the thing he loves the most. Through my agency Ned is destroyed, for though he lives, he is alone, and I cannot hope that he will ever be crowned. Day after day and night after night in the chill quiet of Sheriff Hutton I have known that it was my own failure, and no other, that Ned was taken from my guardianship. By comparison with that, my own death is as naught.

And yet, wherein did I fail? Where – at what moment – did I decide wrongly? To this day I do not know. Sometimes I have thought that it would be easier to bear if I could comfort myself that we had fought Richard of Gloucester and been defeated in battle, that Ned was torn from my hold. But Richard was in command, a prince of the blood royal, and I did not know Richard for an enemy. He was my fellow in faithfulness to the memory of his brother, and in care for our new king.

I destroyed my boy because I trusted a man I had no reason not to trust: a sworn knight, an honourable ruler, the most faithful brother of our late king.

*

We came to Stony Stratford on the last day of April, Ned sagging in the saddle with weariness when he thought himself unseen. ‘This was your great father’s favourite hunting lodge,’ I said. ‘And it was here that he lodged when he was married to your lady mother.’ As we approached we saw a man riding to greet us, bearing Richard of Gloucester’s boar badge. Their Graces of Buckingham and Gloucester were arrived in Northampton already, he said, and begged that when I had settled the King and his train into his lodging, and myself in mine at Northampton, I would dine with them.

As many stayed at Stony Stratford as there was lodging, and among them was Louis, for we take care that no man shall know us for lovers beyond that love that any man may have for a true comrade in arms. And it was politic, too, I said to him, as I made ready to ride back to Northampton. I would know what was talked of among the new King’s retinue. When all was in order I left Richard Grey to guard Ned, jointly with my cousin Haute, and Vaughan, that loved Ned like his own son and had long been his faithful servant.

I have seen Rome, and Lisbon, and Paris, but when I was a boy Northampton looked to me as grand as I imagined London to be, and the road to it from Grafton an Appian Way of promise. I smiled as we reached my lodging in the high street: one of three inns, all meet for the custom of the nobility and gentry, said the bowing landlord, though his inn, he trusted, was the best appointed. Their Graces were housed in the inns on either side.

That night at Northampton we dined, and drank a little but not too much, and used each other courteously, making plans for the progress of the King and the coronation. I had not long since begged Richard of Gloucester to arbitrate in a dispute with one of my tenants, and we spoke of that and other business of our private estates. He has a quick mind for such matters, and an instinct for what is both fair and politic. At dawn I rose and made ready to go to Ned: we were but a day’s ride from London.

But the doors of my lodging were barred from the outside, and the men that held me prisoner were Richard of Gloucester’s.

Men pray that they will know the hour of their death. You might say I knew it then, and but for the wild dreams of hope that overcome me in moments of despair, and make my despair worse when they flee again, I have known it ever since.

We were outnumbered and but lightly armed, for the main body of our force was with the new King. When they unbarred the doors, I was arrested in the Protector’s name, on a charge of attempting to rule the realm and the King, of plotting the destruction of the blood royal: the Protector himself. I argued my case: I was the King’s legal guardian by Edward’s own appointment; Gloucester was not yet confirmed Protector; I had done no plotting, but only fulfilled the late King’s charge as best I might.

To no avail. I can still feel the hand of the captain on my shoulder; hear the scrape of my sword as I unsheathed it and gave it up at his request; see Richard of Gloucester’s eyes as black as a lake in the dark while he listened courteously to my reasoning.

‘The King is safe in His Grace of Buckingham’s care,’ he said at last, with a shake of his head. He stands very still, does Richard of Gloucester, but when he moves at last, he is quick and sharp. ‘He will be taken to London as arranged, with all due ceremony. But I cannot allow any men guilty of plotting against the blood royal to go free, however much undeserved favour my late brother granted them. Not even if they are men of the cloth like your brother Lionel.’

I was taken aback. Here, new-minted, was his brother Clarence’s envy. Had Richard only been more politic in hiding a bitterness that was yet the same?

I suppressed my scorn for his rancorous words. ‘I tell you again, and plainly, and swear it on the most Holy Cross: I have made no plots, nor have my affinity. Such favour as I have been granted is nothing to what the late King most properly gave to those of his own blood. And what I have, I have certainly earned, as has my sister, Her Grace the Queen. Those of our family whose service to the King has been more modest have had no more than modest advancement.’

‘And your nephew, the Queen’s son? When did he earn the right to enter the Tower and seize the treasure there?’

‘Thomas Grey? If he has done so, it will be by a commission of the Council’s, of which he is a member. If there is some misunderstanding it may be put right in a moment when I reach London.’

‘You will not reach London. Richard Grey, Haute and Vaughan are all arrested. You will be taken to separate custody in the north, that the King and the realm and the blood royal may be safe.’

Then he turned away, and vaulted on to his horse unaided, as he always did, though he was small and ill-made, and took the road to Stony Stratford.

*

Guilt cramps my heart: guilt that I did not see what they would do, that I lost Ned to them by a stupid trick, that I could not – did not – lift a finger to save him. The pain is real, but I would bear twice as much – bear all the pain in the world – if it would save my boy. But nothing now will do that, if Richard of Gloucester wills it otherwise.

I catch Captain Anderson’s eye. ‘I would go aside to say the Office.’

He looks at me for a moment. ‘Aye, my lord, very well.’

The spinney crowns the crest of an outcrop of rock and I walk towards the far edge. Here sunlight lies warm on stones, dead branches and rough grass. Beyond the rocky edge, and far below, a stream threads like tarnished silver through sour brown and green marshland. Behind me, I feel a movement and another. They are wondering if I will leap to freedom.

I will not. A body broken by such folly would be no freedom, and to seek my end by such a design would be a mortal sin. Nor would it save Ned, or help Louis if he is still at liberty. All I have left is God.

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti . . .

I commend Ned and his kingship to God. I pray for Elysabeth, and for my two wives – one living, one dead – and for my daughter and her mother. And for Louis. Then I commend these loves, too, to God, and empty my mind of all, that it may fill with the peace and grace that God gives.

*

Yet I have spent hours and days of my captivity trying to understand Richard of Gloucester; trying to understand how I could have misjudged him so; trying to understand what he will do with Ned. When I heard that Elysabeth had gone into sanctuary at Westminster on that same first day of May, and young Dickon with her, I was glad. If Dickon was safe, then so, too, was Ned, for Richard was shrewd enough to know there was then nothing to be gained by harming him.

Yes, that is how I failed. I should have seen Richard for what he is: the same breeding as his brothers. George of Clarence would have killed his brother and taken his crown could he have done it. Even Edward did not scruple at the last to kill Henry - a cousin and anointed king - then his own brother, to keep himself safe. What Richard of Gloucester has done should be no surprise. He will not rest till he has everything in his grasp, and he thinks that we Wydvils are of the same mettle. He must hold land, and ships, and gold, and women, and the person of the King so that we cannot. It is beyond his imagining that Elysabeth and I want nothing but Ned and the kingdom’s good, no more than our just deserts for our great labour in the service of the King, and peace among the guardians of the realm.

Now I am brought to Pontefract in my turn. A horse slips and stumbles on the cobbles as we turn into the Castle Garth. Its rider curses, and slashes his whip across its neck. The drawbridge echoes under our hoofs, there is the clang of bolts, and almost silently the gates begin to open. This strange pilgrimage – one hot day’s journey, and my whole earthly life – is almost at an end.

Is your sex and violence boundary-breaking, brave, or just plain lazy?

One of the things you learn to take in your stride, when you're teaching creative writing, is sex and  violence, on the page, at least. And then there's other "strong material": racism or misogyny in  action or language which would be distasteful to some or many readers. I'm sure anyone reading this blog would agree that for writing as a creative discipline the default should be No Limits - and yet we do all have limits. And very, very occasionally the piece is genuinely ethically dubious, and hopefully the institution you're working for will have a policy that you're not obliged to read it. If you're on your own, then you're still entitled to refuse. This is not what creative writing teaching is for.

But on the whole, the "strong" material is in a good cause - having an honest try at evoking the horror of a rape scene, say. It's  integral to the story not gratuitous, the writer doesn't appear to be getting off on it or breaking boundaries just to show off, and you feel that, as far as possible, it's no more voyeuristic than it can help being. And yet, even after you've steadied yourself and concentrated on the technical merit and artistic impression of the piece, it can still make you feel uneasy.

Sometimes, too, the workshop you're running reacts with dislike or even ferocious objections. It may be because they think writing like that shouldn't be allowed, which is grounds for a discussion. They may make the mistake of believing that the piece is misogynist or racist in itself, because a character does or says misogynist or racist things - another discussion. But their dislike may be because, even if the writer is basically "on the side of the woman", or "disapproves of what X does", they sense that dealing in this stuff is an easy way for the writer to create a striking piece.

In Death Doesn't Always Become You, I was exploring how it's perhaps too easy to use death to give a piece a bit of instant gravitas which it wouldn't otherwise have, and I think this is a related question. The unease, I'd suggest, is an intuition that, in the quest to write a powerful piece - to find writing energy in themselves, and transmit that energy through the piece to the reader - the writer falls back, too easily, on the obviously powerful subjects and techniques.

Put two people in a sitting room discussing whether to buy some cushions before his mum comes to see the flat for the first time, and you have to work a bit to make the conflict compelling - though I'm sure many readers of this blog are already constructing the story where this little fracas is the pivotal moment in the collapsing marriage. But some readers may never get it, if their antennae are wrongly tuned. (I still cherish the memory of the listener who said they enjoyed my story "Calling" on Radio 4 even though "Nothing much happened", I assume because although those two thousand words brought in  widowhood, abandoned children, mental illness and attempted suicide, no one actually died.) 

Put those two people in a sitting room trying to get her pregnant before her husband gets home, and it's much easier to find the drama: there's just more, more obviously, at stake, it's physical action as well as verbal and mental action, and all that is rich fuel for any half-way decent writer's imagination and word-finding engine. It's a bit like Puccini (says my musicologist sister), who got his best arias out of himself by making his soprano suffer in mind and body, and then getting her to sing about it. Even people who don't feel an emotional connection to the situation in the story - either because it's not well written, or because the situation just doesn't speak to them - know that This Stuff Matters.

But, because working with this kind of material (whether or not one would class it as offensive) is an easy way to find energy and conflict, if you haven't actually found something new and particular to say, the "strong" might just seem cheap.  Mind you, I do think that "cheapness" in this context, and other such judgements about the effect a piece has on a reader, ("pretentious" vs "off-the-wall", "lyrical" vs "flowery", "spare" vs. "barren")  are very subjective indeed: what's an excruciatingly awful greetings-card poem for one reader brings tears to another reader's eyes in a good way, and that is an equally valid and honest reaction. But still, if you're defaulting to your usual strong stuff, you may not be trying hard enough to find the new and particular within it. And we may sense that, and feel efficiently manipulated, not led somewhere new and strange.

Of course, as I was discussing in Under the Bugle-beaded Bonnet,  we do all keep returning to our own themes and preoccupations. So I'd never tell a student they shouldn't use strong materials. And the strong handling of strong material is often called brave or unflinching, and of course it may be. The act of attention which a really good piece of writing is, is something that takes extra courage when what you're attending to is stuff most of us flinch from.

But it's actually no braver for a student who defaults easily to strong subjects to stick to writing them, than it is for a student who defaults easily to quiet, domestic subjects to stick to those. And you always learn more if you challenge your defaults, whether they're off-the-peg for everyone, or only for yourself. It's good for any writer to make ourself find real narrative excitement - the fuel for our writerly energy, and the drama for the reader - in a story which is made from  ordinary, humdrum stuff. Chekov is one of the most heartbreaking writers ever, and he said that people don't have grand feuds and huge heartbreaks, they have dinner. There's no need to smash the dining room window and let in Mata Hari, or the zombies. A pudding no one wants to eat might be enough.

Voice and tone: Figaro, Feydeau or the Moor of Venice?

In the Self-Editing Your Novel course that I co-teach with Debi Alper, Week Three is about Voice, and an old friend of a question came up: "How do I find my voice?". I've blogged about Voice before, and explored how it's the combination of "What you want to say", and "How you want to say it". So at the micro or midi-level, finding the voice for a piece of fiction is about two things:

1) Fully imagining your characters-in-action and their predicament: their actions, their emotions, their experience of the world that they act within, and their take on that experience.

2) Being in writerly training: having a rich language-hoard and free, flexible, writing muscles which can respond to whatever it is that those characters-in-action do and experience. It's about read-read-reading, doing exercises on all six senses, free-writing, taking a poetry course to sharpen your instincts for sound and rhythm and to clean out the second-hand language, and then getting out of your own light.

But that micro- and midi-level work isn't enough if the voice doesn't work for the novel as a whole, leading the reader on from that opening promise, through a story which really is worth our time. You may be able to catch us with a fantastic opening, and write engaging and vivid characters and settings, but how do you find your voice for the novel as a whole?

In What's Your Project I suggested that, at novel-scale, "What you want to say" becomes "What story you want to tell". And so the move to "How you want to tell it" needs thinking about too. I think it's Christopher Booker, in his brilliant and entirely fascinating book The Seven Basic Plots, who points out that The Winter's Tale and Othello are driven by essentially the same mainspring, as is many a Feydeau farce and The Marriage of Figaro. So what's the flavour of your false-accusation-of-adultery story? Does your old-lovers-re-encounter-one-another story taste more like Persuasion, or Private Lives? Is your tragedy of inaction Death of a Salesman or Hamlet? Is your irresistible central villain Julien Sorel or Humbert Humbert?

Tone is a rather feeble name for this question - it makes something very fundamental sound  superficial - but there doesn't seem to be a better one: it's the tone of that narrative which controls the spirit in which readers feel and think about the events they experience: first love can be agonising, nostalgic, light-as-a-feather, farcical, tragic ... This, I'd suggest, is how you find a voice for the narrative (who may or may not be embodied in the novel) that will hold us all the way through. Whether your narrator is inside, or outside, the events narrated, is one decision, and that has implications for your answer to several of the the questions you need to ask your novel: "Where does the narrator stand, relative to the events narrated?", "Who is telling this story?", and "Why are they telling it?". 

All those Why and Who and Where questions add up to an answer about How you're trying to tell this story. After that, again, it's a matter of getting out of your own way and letting that knowledge sieve out the right words and arrange them in the right order. But that will only work if you've developed your flexibility of word and phrase, trained yourself to dig through second-hand language and off-the peg characters and ideas, so that you see people and places and things with the new eyes of this narrator - whoever they are - who speaks to us with a new voice. And a new voice is, after all, the thing that will sell your story.

What does your character say about him/herself?

 When Jessica Chastaine is working on a part, she says, she makes two lists: "One: everything my character says about herself, and Two: everything everyone else says about her."

It's a good technique, and I'm sure she's not unique in using it: it sounds like a classic Drama School exercise. And, as so often, listening to how actors work is illuminating for writers. If our first draft is like the kind of improvising that goes on when actors and a playwright are devising a piece, and our obsession with finding the right verb is almost indistiguishable from Stanislavski's, then Chastaine's trick isn't even a parallel to what we could do: it's a genuine tool for us in working with characters too.

But what I particularly like about this tool (as opposed to the more usual idea of lists of likes and dislikes, dreams, cars,  or, heaven save us, star signs)  is that it embodies some fundamentals about fiction. First, fiction consists of characters-in-interaction, and as soon as you start thinking about how one character sees another, you're setting the seeds for what those interactions will be, and what they'll be like. So far, so much like drama.

But fiction - unlike drama - can go inside heads, and get directly at what we tell ourselves, as well as what we tell other people. As the psychotherapists put it, it's the stories we make internally about ourselves and our actions,  to understand our own lives past and present, that shape what we do next, and in fiction the writer can actually take the reader to those stories. Thinking about this might help you to shape the voice of your characters, too, since voice grows from the interplay of what each character sees and says, and how they see and say it - and both what and how is a product of those self-told stories.

Lots of actors would say that the most fascinating characters to play are the ones where the gap between what the character says of him or herself, and what the other characters do, is the biggest. Comedy lies in that gap and The Office is entirely built in it: David Brent the exemplar of someone where the gap is vast, and Orsino isn't so different. But tragedy's built in the gap too: Coriolanus is the archetypal self-blind tragic figure, but Lear, in trying and failing to align what his daughters say about him, with how he sees himself, opens up the gap he was trying to close, and falls into it. Only the Fool, whose job it is to speak the truths that others don't know about themselves, sees what's going to happen.

But there's another thing. "What my character says about herself" doesn't - at least in the clip I heard - distinguish what she says to herself, and what she says aloud. But most of us have some degree of gap between the two, if only for the most public occasions: we may make much of failings to beat possible critics to it; we often don't admit to insecurities or fears; or we don't admit to things we're proud of in case we seem conceited or tactless. So that might be another interesting list to make: what does your character believe deep down? What does she admit to, to whom? How big is the gap?

One last thought. I've been going on a lot, recently, about imagining-on-paper as brainstorming, not planning, and Chastaine's comment made me see - yes - a grid. Would it be interesting to draw one up, like those old times-table squares? If the characters down the side are the ones doing "What she says", and the row across the top are the person "Who she's talking about", you've got a square for what Lear thinks of Regan, and a square for what Regan thinks of Lear. Would it be worth pondering about these individual pairs? All of them? Don't worry if the idea makes you come out in a rash, but it would - I'd suggest - be very interesting to fill in. 

Composting, dreaming and other hard work

I'm contemplating going back to an earlier project. Not, heaven forbid, re-working the text, but writing a new text built on the same ideas and situations. And one of the advantages of doing things this way is that the researched material has mulched down nicely in the back of my head, in the sense I was discussing here.  The stuff you found out needs to become stuff you just know, so that there's no longer any difference between them: all compost. But is there anything you do to hurry the process of mulching down? Are there compost accelerators?

I think there probably are, although as a killer of spider-plants I'm not the best person to pursue horticultural analogies. But I do know that making compost is a mixture of turning it over, and leaving it be, and maybe that's true of writerly compost to. So what might you do, to leave things be?

Ignore the project, and wait for it to claim your attention again. Not-thinking, if you like. The character, the situation, the period which won't go away, is almost always one worth having another go at (as I was saying in The Value of Forgetting). But to be sure it is that kind of character, you need to walk away from it. When you do let it reclaim you, you'll have picked up all sorts of other things which change and enrich the possibilities.

Write something else. This is the quicker way to push a project out of the forefront of your mind, so that it can get on with breaking down, and is one reason I'm positively pleased to have two projects, at different stages: getting on with the other one is actually helping this one too.

Be patient. If you turn compost over it too often it cools before the separate elements can mulch together, but if you're someone who deals with desire by going headlong for it, you may read your impatience as frustration. But frustration, at bottom, is a kind of fear - in this case that if you don't grab the project - ideas, characters - now, they'll somehow escape. But the nice thing about writing ideas is that they're just as good years from now, unless in 2009 you had a great thriller idea set at the London Olympics ...  in which case you'd better get on with it. But for anything else? Be patient. Apart from anything, the longer you leave it the better a writer you'll be by the time you get there.

And one way of dealing with the urge to go headlong is to let yourself do some turning-over.  Not, I'd suggest, as part of a time-tabled progression towards the moment when you start drafting the novel, but in a looser and more free-form way that encourages stuff to "rise into the anarchic, gift-conjuring" part of your mind. So what kinds of turning over might you do?

Reading round. In reading non-fiction at this stage I avoid making notes: this is all about feeding the compost, not about providing a traceable bio-chemical analysis later. Notes help you to remember, but they also pre-determine what you will remember. If it's my own copy I might write headings in the margin, though, so I can flip through later to confirm what I've remembered or make notes in full. In reading fiction it's much the same. I absorb, notice mentally perhaps and, as when I was reading Wolf Hall,  trust that my intuitions about storytelling are being fed and grown. Another kind of reading would be things like poetry, myths or folk tales around the themes you think you might be working with. I might keep a list of what I'd read, but not more.

Dreaming on Paper. As I was discussing here, the kind of thinking-on-paper which you could call planning, can actually be a way of doing some much more free-form but focussed imagining. In a workshop we listed all the different things you might do: free-writing, family trees, sketch-maps, spider-diagrams of tensions and relationships,  plans of buildings, clusters on characters or images or themes, rhymewells on important words, lists of names, collecting quotations that seem to resonated, jotting down possible titles if they occur to you. Then there are the things which are slightly nearer to actually writing: pen-portraits of places and characters, or even a short story that brings someone or something into focus, or catches a voice. (If you do anything else by way of dreaming, not planning, then do mention it in the comments.)

Brooding on the story, not the plot. That is, on the journey you make, not the route you take.  Again, this needs to be very free-form - very much dreaming, not building. I try - though I don't always manage - not to let myself be lured into beginning to work it out in an organised, logically connected way.

And if I really can't help myself - if it all seems to so ready I really must start planning my route - my plot - or die, then I let it. As with your characters, so with your stories: you're in control, but sometimes you have to hear what they're telling you, and do it.

6 questions to ask your descriptions

In How Would You Describe It? I was talking about this thing called Description, which seems to get so many beginner-writers worried, and how you can get better at it. But I don't myself have a mental category of writing called Description at all; I just think in terms of Dialogue, and Everything Else - or, more grown-uply, Narration.

That's not because evoking places and things isn't important. The places and spaces we live in, and the things we live with, are profoundly important - but notice that they're important because we live in and with them: it's how we interact with them that matters. You don't get a lot of description in fairy tales, or in Jane Austen: story is king. What furniture is in a room matters because who sits so you can't see their expression matters, and how full the room is at the wake does, and how close together the illicit lovers can stand  does. What a landscape looks like doesn't matter: how it makes a character move or think or dread does.

Take, for example, this extract from The Mathematics of Love.  That passage isn't just word-painting to "help the reader imagine it": it's using bits of Stephen's  memories to embody how he's sorting through his present and moving into his past, as he works out which parts of the past he can bear to re-visit. Separately, it's a way for me to evoke for the reader Stephen's backstory which he, as a narrator, rarely refers to. And, thirdly, it's a way of preparing the ground in the reader's mind, in case Stephen does go back to Spain. So, even if the character's action is only thinking, settings and objects aren't separate from the workings of character-in-action, but part of them, and conditioned by them. My purpose was to move Stephen from emotional Point A to emotional Point B, from where he would then act: it just happened that, because I used memories to do that, it came out very descriptive.

It can also be useful to work with settings and objects when you're trying to cover the ground: November became December and the tweed on the loom grew steadily, while under her window the horses stood with their heads hanging in the rain. That's from my Showing and Telling post; it's essentially descriptive, but it's there to exploit the changes in these things, in order to evoke time passing in a direct, physical way. Mind you, it might double-up as the way we learn in the first place that the MC does weaving and owns horses, just as Stephen's passage doubles-up in colouring-in the reader's mental picture of Spain.

And talking of using description to prepare the ground, description is very useful for introducing apparently ordinary things which are going to be important to the plot, before you need them. I call it the Reverse-Chekov Tool, (not Rule because there are no rules). Chekov said that you should only have a gun on the wall in Act One if it's going to be fired in Act Three; Reverse-Chekov states that if you need a gun to be fired in Act Three, you should make sure it's on the wall in Act One. If Stephen goes back to Spain and the effect on him of "now" is partly because of what he remembers, one side of the contrast is ready and waiting.

In other words, Reverse-Chekov means you don't have to pause the Act Three  car chase while you explain that post-war Citroëns had all-hydraulic suspension, and that the road runs down a rocky gorge topped with trees on either side, so a single bullet from an invisible gunman can put a car wholly out of commission (Gavin Lyall's Midnight Plus One, since you ask). Fiction is always working with the human drive to make patterns out of the random chaos of real life. For it to be simultaneously shocking, and natural, for the car to be shot in Act Three we want to feel, retrospectively, that the risk was part of the normal texture of real life in the story: neither entirely random, nor over-determined. So, how and when are you going to build in descriptions of each element - how Citroëns are built, the geography round Grasse, how professional gunmen work - for maximum drama?

Of course, an internal narrator makes it relatively easy to decide what gets described and when: of this setting or thing, what would this character-in-action know, notice, and think about it? It's harder to choose the right bits and right amount if you've got an external narrator, because that narrator could narrate anything, including half a travel-book's or antiques-guide's worth of Stuff. I think the key is to ask yourself questions such as: 

1) Do we need any description of this place or person or thing? Or are you writing it partly just for the sheer writerly pleasure? Your reader may take pleasure too - especially if acute observation and gorgeous prose are among your strengths - but it's always at the risk of losing narrative drive.

2) Why do we need description of this place or person or thing? Plot? - because it matters to the action now, or later? Character? - e.g. her take on this place is revealing of her? (but careful: don't stall the action with an unconvincingly long series of observations). Character-in-action?  - e.g. his take on this place brings about some internal or external change in him? Atmosphere? - can be wonderful, but needs handling with discretion because it's not action.

3) Why do we need it now? Would earlier, or later, or from a different point-of-view, be better? Or should you break it up and distribute it between the possible points in the story and points of view?

4) What's the minimum amount of description which will achieve what you want? Or do you - as with clues in a detective story - want to tuck the crucial element a little deeper into the texture of real life and all its red herrings? 

5) Are there ways of making this description more active while keeping it vivid and evocative? (Leading us through the landscape? Evoking the box by describing how it breaks when it's dropped? Getting characters interacting and experiencing the menacing or idyllic garden/boat/house in a way that moves the story on.)

But of course, those all lead on - or, rather, lead back - to the real question, which is:

6) What am I trying to do with this description?

And if your answer is, "Because the reader needs to know what it looks like", then I'll spin you round and send you back to Question One.  The reader doesn't need to know what everything looks like: sometimes, as I was exploring in Less, More and Apollo in his Chariot, the best and most vivid and evocative description is the one the reader makes in their own head.

Of course, you may want to write a full description of something because you need to know what it looks like - or you may do so "by mistake", as it were. If I'm putting too much Stuff in, then it's because I'm feeling my way, either in the early stages of a piece, or just because  I haven't, really properly, decided what this scene is for, and so my character is wandering through the landscape while I find out. That's process writing and, as with all sorts of things which have a perfect right to turn up a first draft, you can, and you should, get rid of it later. 

Once you've got used to thinking in terms of what the storytelling purpose of describing something  is, whether you find Stuff falls out of your pen like rain over last Christmas, or your scenes are so bald that everyone says you should be writing for radio, you should find it easier to work out where you need description, and what description you need.