ARE YOU SITTING COMFORTABLY?

Where do you write? Why? Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) writes in his shed; Will Self in a small room bashing away on an old Remington typewriter. Apparently, the perpetrator of the Harry Potter stories started writing them in a café, now you can hardly pass a café without spotting someone tapping on a tablet device, a Skinny Latté cooling at their side.

Of course to some extent it depends what you are using to writeyour Opus on. Many famous writers favour long hand on paper, with a pencil; here clearly a desk is required. Barbara Cartland said she had her best ideas in bed, don’t we all. Personally, I know you are dieing to know, prefer to use my laptop, sitting at the comfy end of my large couch. The other end is less comfy as my dear, dear dog used to lie there, indeed he died there. So I often glance over at the now derelict end of my couch, regretting I gave him the less comfy side of the couch, convincing myself that it did not contribute to his sad demise. I digress. I place my laptop on a giant World Atlas, which I place on my lap; this gives me ample space to also operate my mouse. (Not the animal, in case you were getting confused with the animal content so far) I have never been able to successfully operate the internal mouse of my MacBook. So there I am sitting comfortably. Atlas on lap, laptop on top of that, clicking away, only occasionally glancing over to the other end of the couch wondering; what if I’d chosen the other end?

STEPHEN WRIGHT 

Going For A Song – Why Writing Is Music To My Ears

For as long as I can remember I've always loved stories – reading them and writing them. I bewildered my primary school teacher with tales of evil Barbie dolls, navel-gazing my way through my teens, before settling on song-writing into my twenties and thirties – writing and performing with various local bands.

Last year I found NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month [link is http://nanowrimo.org/], scribbling more than 50,000 words of a first draft during November. Words began to flow, short stories and flash fiction followed and I was fortunate enough to find an excellent critique group, becoming a member of Phoenix Writers in March of this year.

Does that mean I have forsaken my musical background and joined the Monastery of Prose? Absolutely not. I love all forms of writing and penning songs has taught me a number of valuable writing lessons.

The Hook

In these multi-tasking times of minuscule attention spans, listeners are ruthless. If you can't grab their attention in the opening seconds, they will have skipped away before you can say "Des O'Connor's Greatest Hits"

Today's readership is choice-rich and time-poor. Don't give them an excuse to stop reading. The first few sentences of your short story or novel must have that same hook - something that grabs them by the ears and doesn't let go.

Structure

Great songwriters know that how you structure or arrange a song is key to its success. They know the rules and aren't afraid to break them when necessary. Many songs follow a simple verse-chorus-verse structure. Lennon and McCartney frequently played with this traditional approach and subverted it on songs such as Can't Buy Me Love, the track starting with that jubilant chorus.

As writers, we need to pay close attention to the way we structure our pieces. Follow the example set by The Beatles – find the right place to start your story and don't waste your words or the reader's time. No story should be 'all verse'  – unless it's a poem, of course!

Keep Building – use all your tricks

So, you've given them a hook, you've blown off their socks with that chorus… now what?

Sticking with our previous Beatles example, it's a bold move to unleash the catchiest part of their song in the opening seconds of the track and yet they are confident in doing so, knowing that they still have a few tricks up their sleeve - one of which is that superb George Harrison guitar solo after the second chorus. They just keep building, piling layer upon layer of musical brilliance until the listener is left breathless and stunned, desperate to hear it again.

Is that a tall order for your writing? Yes, without question, but pull it off and your readers will return to your work time and again. It doesn't matter if your genre is Romance or Sci-Fi, focus on increasing the tension and layering your story. Sharpen your dialogue and vary the length of your sentences to keep your audience entertained and engaged with the narrative. Knowing when to end is just as important as knowing where to begin, so tell your story and get out of there.

I could go on to talk about Voice, Rhythm and Tempo, but perhaps I'll save it for a future post. As any performer will tell you… "Always leave them wanting more."

Speaking of which, you can find more examples of my writing, including tips and advice, flash fiction and even a few of my songs on my blog, Kelly's Eye. 

Wayne Kelly

Going public

Putting your work out to scrutiny can be a daunting experience. Believe me I know. Part of me doesn’t want to show my writing to anyone in case they think it’s rubbish but my more rational side knows that writing stuff just to hide it away on the computer is pointless (unless you really are writing for yourself alone which is fine). It’s like training to be an actor but refusing to come out of the dressing room in case you get a bad review.

Joining a writing group can be a good first step. It’s the rehearsal room, not the first night. It’s the place where you read aloud the story that you’ve been struggling with for weeks. The one you know isn’t quite working but you’re not quite sure why. The one that’ll end up in the bottom drawer like all the others if you don’t do something about it soon.

Praise is lovely, we all need it and there’s always something amongst the muddle of words worthy of encouragement but it’s the well considered criticism of the other members that moves your writing to the next level. It helps too to listen to other people’s work, to think about what’s good and what’s not so good about their writing and above all to comment. You’ll soon find yourself thinking, yes, I do that. I tell don’t show, get the point of view wrong, confuse my tenses and a dozen other literary sins.

But mostly you’ll be thinking, perhaps I’m not so bad after all.

Sally
http://breaking-cover.blogspot.co.uk

WHY BE A WRITER?

We have all made interesting journeys to reach this point but I didn’t intend becoming a writer. It happened by default when I fell down a black hole and found a job with the village council.

I took my first innocent steps in creative writing when I had to learn to take the minutes of council and committee meetings. Nowadays, minutes consist of just a heading and the statement, “RESOLVED. Do/spend/object ...whatever...” but when I started, Council minutes were more of a social history and told a story.

I quickly discovered there was no point trying to write what people actually said; dialogue is disjointed. It rambles. It repeats itself. It makes no sense whatsoever. And as for reasoned debate, it doesn’t exist. So I wrote what they meant to say. Not everyone gets to write history!

It was all a matter of knowing the characters and it was a rare meeting that didn’t turn into the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. The characters were easily identifiable.

The dormouse was a nocturnal creature and was often seen walking round the village after midnight. “Photographing owls,” he said. Old and tired, he fell asleep during every meeting. He had a thick white beard and side whiskers. Unoriginally, we called him Santa. He was one of nature’s innocents who bumbled around the world losing umbrellas, cameras and raincoats.

We had the Red Queen. She was sad, bad and mad and her behaviour even made the papers. I lost count of the number of good people she wounded when their backs were turned.

The twins, Tweedledee and Tweedledum were contained in the persona of one two-faced councillor. He was the Uriah Heep of the local government scene and turned hand-wring into an art form that would impress even Simon Cowell.

One of my councillors never stopped smiling. He loved the limelight and having his photo taken. His smile has faded like that of the Cheshire Cat however. We buried him last month. Poignant but that fact will later play a part in this blog.

The Mad Hatter? That was the plumber, the maverick, the one who voted in opposition to everyone one else on the council. When push came to shove though, he was usually right. He was often the only one who knew what was happening.

My life with the council was so bizarre I was often the White Rabbit, caught in the headlights.

I learnt a great deal about dialogue, character and setting but I never wanted to write the book; the Vicar of Dibley got there first and J K Rowling has followed up with her book, Casual Vacancy. Although I had no book, I was writing: articles, poems, short stories.

But despite being a member of this group for about 18 months, I haven’t overcome my main problem. I still lack the focus to stay with one form, one genre, one anything.

I’ve been quite prolific – it’s better than doing housework – and like Dr Who crossing his own time-line, I sometimes turn round and trip over something I’ve left laying around. To my embarrassment, on the internet there are some of my old poems and stories and that matter of the Red Queen that made the newspapers? I put her there and that piece of writing is on the net too.

For several years I’ve written a monthly, 1000 word article for the Courier, the community newspaper, concerning events that happened during the past of the three villages covered by the paper. I do my research in local archives, at the Records Office and on Yahoo. One article concerned the Puritan son of the Lord of Blaby Manor who sailed to the New World in 1633. The article ended up on the website of a Heritage Group in Connecticut. Occasionally in my wanderings over the internet I find myself being directed to that site. It’s great, I’ve become a source!

I’ll try my hand at writing anything. When my friend and ex-colleague, the Mad Hatter died recently, I wrote his obituary for the Courier. Then the widow of the Cheshire Cat asked me to write his. I have no wish to make it a hat-trick.

The question is, do I continue with my butterfly approach to writing, or do I get serious, write the book and refuse all other commissions?

I’m skipping over the surface of writing like a flat stone skimmed across a lake. Can I find the dedication that other members of this group have? Or will I sink to the dark, cold depths and drown if I stop bouncing?

Glenise Lee

The A to B of travel

I’m an infrequent rail traveller, but when I do I find it difficult to read or take pleasure in unravelling a crossword puzzle. No, it isn’t a paper-versus-electronics argument, it’s simply that I can’t bear to miss anything. OK, I’m nosey! In my defence, it’s a researching sort of nosey.

Last week, for instance, I survived the boarding scrum and, as any forward-thinking commuter, sought out my reservation. Of the four seats across a table one – mine – was occupied by a holdall spilling out various items of toiletries and food. I smiled, indicated the holdall and waved my reservation with every intention of forcing a showdown.

To state a fact without being too personal the young lady was of immense size, her flesh spilling in rolls over the armrests and table which she had commandeered for her laptop and papers.
“This train is always so full,” she moaned.

Only then did I realise that of the two seats opposite, one carried her giant suitcase. So that’s three seats for the price of one ticket! Talk about heckles rising! Had we not pulled into our fist stop to dislodge passengers my tongue would have released a lashing on rude and inconsiderate behaviour.

Across the aisle, a thirty-something male had wires dangling from his ears as he constantly checked his mobile while watching Merlin Series Two on a tablet. Multi-tasking par excellence!

Farther down an inspector, complete with ticket machine slung menacingly over one shoulder, shouted a cheery ‘let me squeeze past, please, ladies and gents!’ as he came upon the standing-in-the aisles brigade. His undeveloped sense of humour was not lost on the general public: the results of his obvious love of ale hung heavily over his belt. A woman two minutes from giving birth couldn’t match such a girth!

When I get home I play the ‘what if?’ game:

what if the giant suitcase made human sounds?
what if the owner’s punishment was never to be freed from her seat?
what if the ticket inspector disappeared as we entered a tunnel and the standing passengers   congratulated themselves on a job well done?
what if the Merlin-watching man was a murderer?
what if I had unleashed my tongue?

No, travel is not for getting from A to B, travel is for ideas.

Krys Wysocki

Chapters with Flavour

Life is a series of chapters, and each one has a different flavour. Paul McCartney once said that being a member of the Beatles felt as if it belonged to a previous life, or words to that effect. I’ve lived long enough to relate to that expression. During my twenties, I travelled the world with the Royal Navy, and that is an experience I find difficult to relate to in my present circumstances. Each chapter in life is broken into clear experiences, but the chapters in our novels ought to be very different.

My Experience of Writing a Crime Novel

I began to create my fictional world several years before I began writing it down. I believe I created a realistic industrial town for my characters to carry out their roles, with an authentic history of its own. The trouble is that nobody wants that information stuffed down their throat, especially in the first chapter.

I changed that opening chapter seven or eight times until very little of my fine old town had any space at all – just a hint of its character here and there. Action takes pride of place, with a few hints detailing the promise of the story, and a hook.

I’d written perhaps a third of the novel before presenting parts of it to a writing group, the precursor to Phoenix Writers which I now frequent. At that time, each chapter began with too much description before the vocabulary kicked off.

“Begin there,” a colleague always said. “We don’t want all that pre-amble. Just feed in a little of that information alongside the clues relating to the crime.”

But what about my town?

The Wisdom of Experience

A published writer explained the problem in a more effective way.  If I were to construct a graph for my chapters with emotion as the perpendicular axis, the line would take the shape of a hill – suggesting all the action would be taking shape in the middle of the chapter. 

The graph should display emotion in the shape of a valley, with hooks at the start and end of the chapter. Every chapter.

His point being that I had my emotional cycle the wrong way round.

Why do we have chapters in a novel?

As an author, we really need the reader to put the book down, as most people have to at some point or other, at a point when they are desperate to know what will happen next.  If the reader breaks off from the novel in the middle of a long period of information and explanation, he or she may never return to the book.

Most people prefer to break off at the end of a chapter or at a page break, so these places have to be soaked in drama.  It doesn’t have to be action packed, just a simple observation such as, “The Gestapo surrounded my house,” or, “she didn’t look back,” will do the trick.  Plenty of white space at the beginning of the next chapter will make it more inviting for the reader.

What must a chapter do?

The reader begins a chapter with certain expectation of where it will end. It is the writer’s responsibility to insert a number of twists. Maybe one of the characters has a personality trait that is unexpected, or the villain does something the protagonist, or the reader, isn’t expecting. In any event, questions should be asked and the story should have changed in some way.

My Outcome

Eventually I finished the novel, but it became part of a learning process rather than a publishable work. As a crime novel, it lacks realistic clues for the reader to get their teeth into. Also, I have written it with too many points of view so it is difficult for the reader to empathise with any particular character and follow them on their journey.

I’m now embarking on an adventure novel which, if I’m honest, is more my kind of read. The protagonist is from the indigenous population of Bolivia, a country I visited on holiday. The endeavour of these people is fascinating. I want to show the horrendous way they have been treated by outsiders, and the sense of community that keeps the peasants alive against all odds. New chapters are being faced by rural settlements and villagers are forced into paid employment in unfavourable conditions by the changing weather patterns – and their self-sufficiency is threatened. I didn’t write this kind of novel in the first place because I thought it would be harder to research; and so it turned out. Not knowing the cultural history in sufficient detail makes it hard to create rounded characters, but more rewarding with each tiny success.

Pete Kings

Maintaining Tension

Firstly, let me just say that this is my first time blogging (EVER!), so bare with me just a little.

I struggled for ages thinking about a topic on which to write. Especially one that other writers might be interested in reading. So I asked myself what I would want to gain from this blog if I were reading it. Before I knew it, my memories had hijacked the car and I was back at University in sunny mid-Wales. And I remembered my favourite professor giving one of my favourite lectures – how to maintain tension within a narrative. (So here goes…)

In my youth, I was a bugger for starting a story and not finishing it. “I’ll do it later” or “I don’t know how it should end” were frequent excuses. But my real problem, was that my stories just seemed to drift off and get a bit boring. Since then, I’ve learned that there are a few handy tips and tricks to help you overcome this treacherous impasse.

1.     Do not delay (nor dilly-dally)

If we want to make our story exciting, we need it to grab the reader straight away. In a recent conversation with my brother, he told me:

“I read one of those [Jo Nesbo] books a while ago. It had a good storyline, but it’s about a three hundred pages, and it’s not until the last fifty that anything actually happens.”

I’ve seen this problem before – and will admit to having been guilty of it too. To make the story go and the reader stay, the origins of our conflict should be apparent right there at the start. Maybe not the first line, but certainly in the first couple of chapters. If there isn’t a problem for the characters to solve or adversity for them to overcome within the first act, start again.

2.     Is it believable?

OK, so you’ve introduced your conflict. Now what? Well, before we start frantically scribbling down act two, there’s an important thing we need to check first: Does our conflict match up with the rest of the story?

To explain this, I’ll need to go off on a tangent for a second…

When we create a piece of fiction (or fact, depending on our writing style), we create what is known as a ‘fabula’. It may sound like a medical condition, but it’s an important part of our story. The fabula is the world in which our story takes place, be it Middle-Earth or the East Midlands. When we create our story, we have a fully formed concept of our fabula in our head. Therefore, everything in the story needs to be consistent with the rules of that world.

The threat of a nuclear bomb might be a challenge for James Bond, but frankly Bilbo Baggins is in way over his head. Which brings me to my next point…

3.     Relevance

Sadly, since the rise of what my professor would refer to as “the MTV generation,” attention spans have been decreasing at an alarming rate. And whether we like it or not, we as writers have had to adapt.

Long gone are the days when we could get away with circuitous actions. Elizabeth Bennett can no longer take a stroll into town, visit the grocer, ask about how his family are keeping, leave the shop, wander over to a restaurant for some tea and buns, bump into an old friend who she hasn’t seen since childhood, have a lovely chat, part ways and THEN spot Mr Darcy.

Whilst this account of her day may be accurate, it doesn’t further the story. Unless the grocer’s family will appear at a pivotal part of the plot, we don’t really need to know about them. Our actions need to be relevant to our story and our characters.

Keep what you need in order to get to the next key scene, and have a long hard think about the rest.

4.     Balancing characters and doubting the hero

These should be two points really, but they sort of work in tandem.

Balancing characters in a story is essential. It’s natural for us to want our protagonist to be strong. After all, to an extent, they’re us. But a risk every writer faces is that the story dynamic becomes too one-sided. My professor used to say:

“Comedy is one of the hardest genres to right. Not because writers aren’t funny, but because often all the characters sound the same. ‘That’s you. That’s you. That’s you. And, oh look, that’s you as well. Where are the other characters?’”

If we think of it in terms of archetypes: A hero will always be there to save the day. He or she is the representation of good triumphing over evil. And our evil villain is that which threatens our sense of order and equilibrium.

But Superman with have to try much harder to defeat Doomsday than to thwart the Earthworm Kid. A hero is only as good as the villain they must face. Giving too much power to the hero can potentially turn the readers against them.

So we give our protagonist a challenge to truly test their might. And for a brief moment, (it could be over a couple of sentences or a couple of chapters) it even looks like our hero could lose. Now our readers are gripped. They want to know how things play out. Surely evil can’t triumph over good, can it?

This illusion or misdirection is a fleeting gimmick in the grand scheme of our story, but reminds readers of the risks our characters are taking.

5.     The ticking clock

At first glance it may look like the title of an Edgar Allen Poe poem, but this is a frequently used device for maintaining tension and suspense in writing.

We essentially put a time limit on our situation. There is now a race against time, where our protagonist has to complete the task or face dire consequences. This is used in all genres, ranging from thrillers – “The bomb is rigged to blow! I have to disarm it before the timer runs out.” – to romance – “If I don’t get to the train station in the next ten minutes, the love of my life will be gone forever.” Even the likes of Mills and Boone – “Oh God! My husband’s home! Quick, hide! He’s coming up the stairs! He’s only seconds away!”

6.     Getting the pacing right

When we want to convey tension on the page, we will often find ourselves speeding up. Sentences become shorter, sharper. Words and phrases will have more of a punch or an impact.

But a lot of people forget about the after math: It’s all well and good to have tension and suspense in your story, but let the characters put their feet up with a cup of tea once in a while! Slow down after the event in order to offer relief (not just to the character, but to the reader as well). People can only take a certain amount of tension for so long, otherwise it starts to feel like a beating.

7.     Hooking them in (or “Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Chanel”)

Each chapter, no matter how tense or suspenseful, is bound to come to a conclusion. It may not be the great revelation you’ve got planned for the end of the book, but let the readers know that the characters are moving in the right direction. An achievement by the protagonist will feel like an achievement for the reader, if presented right.

But, I hear you ask, what’s to stop them from just closing the book saying, “Well, that’s the interesting bit over. I’m not that bothered about the rest.”?

We want our readers to stick with us. We want them to know that there’s still more to come. So we tease them with treats of the next dilemma – “We have found the secret weapon and can now save the world! But wait…Oh no! The batteries are flat!”

8.     Plot Twists

The infamous twist – that surprising reveal that makes fools of us all – is the weapon of choice for a lot of writers. This can be used to great effect when timed right. When hooking our readers in for another instalment, it is most effective when we present a new revelation about the character or a new demand to be met that puts the characters in jeopardy.

Having gone through so much with our characters, our readers become concerned, eager to discover the ramifications of their actions.

9.     Don’t twist just for the sake of it

Be careful with plot twists, as these can make or break the story. Just as we mentioned in our earlier point about relevance, try to keep it consistent.

A consistent twist? I hear you cry. Why yes! It is important that we make it fit in with the rest of the story. Referring back to my professor, he advised us:

“Don’t add a twist that doesn’t make sense. There’s no point in writing a hard-hitting [piece] about domestic violence, and then at the end the son says, ‘Oh, by the way, Mom, I’M A VAMPIRE!’”

As humorous as this may be to a few, overall it simply doesn’t work.

Tom Everley