Creative Pulse - Week 8 - Trying to Find the Click

By Sophie Wellstood
Images courtesy of JD Lewis

In Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof there’s a pivotal scene between Brick and Big Daddy, where Brick explains his need to drink.

Something hasn’t happened yet, he says. That click in my head. The click in my head that makes me feel peaceful. It’s like a switch clicking off in my head, turns a hot light off and a cool light on and suddenly there’s peace.

Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to equate Brick’s struggle to find his ‘click’ via pints of Bourbon with a writer trying to find theirs by way of a jumble of sentences - and of course Brick’s search is for oblivion rather than revelation, but never mind. For me the struggle is similar. The click is a rare, contrary creature. It hides. It beckons, then disappears. It sometimes feels like it has never existed. Oh, it visits every other writer, all the time, generously depositing its gifts of character, plot, dialogue and drama and two thousand words a day, but it avoids my front door like I’m the village hag who eats frogs and abducts orphans. It flirts, makes promises, then breaks them.

But we keep trying, don’t we? Because when the click does arrive, it’s why we write. It’s peaceful. It’s a hot light turning off and a cool light turning on. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle, the thrill of a new birth. It’s where we want to be. It’s just right.

But how do we find it, and, equally as importantly, how can we trust it’s the click we want, and not its loud-mouthed perma-tanned sibling, cliché?

There are countless exercises which develop the muscles and discipline of writing, countless lists of good habits, good advice and inspirational soundbites from fantastically successful writers. All have their value. The most true and comforting for me is Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The first draft of anything is shit.’ Accept that, and that’s the first hurdle cleared.

I guess the three or four main strategies for me in terms of searching for the click are these – in no particular order:

Psychic (narrative) distance

John Gardner explores the concept and practice in his book The Art of Fiction, and the authors, editors and tutors Emma Darwin and Debi Alper teach it (brilliantly). Understanding and using psychic distance in any fiction is probably the most effective way of finding a missing click – and essential in terms of changing text from a monotone drone (like my ex history teacher imparting the key dates of the industrial revolution) to an operatic orgy (like my dreams).

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/psychic-distance-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

Scene structure

Oh it’s such hard, hard work. Why not just have page after page of lovely sunrises and birdsong until BANG, someone’s carked it? The first draft of my novel had over a dozen sunrises. In the current draft (probably around the 25th, I’ve lost count) I’ve managed to reduce the sunrises to about three, plus one very foggy morning. I love writing about weather but sadly readers don’t like reading about weather. Kill the sunrises and make every scene muscular, every page powerful, make the reader compelled to continue reading.

Some of the best advice I’ve found about scene structure comes from Dwight Swain / Randy Ingermanson here: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/writing-the-perfect-scene/

This should be tattooed on the inside of a writer’s eyelids:

Goal - Conflict – Disaster – Reaction – Dilemma – Decision.

Ingermanson also describes at length the concept of Motivation-Reaction Units. It all sounds very unsexy and un-arty but it works. With practice it should become second nature and provide clicks galore.

Cross dressing

Who is the narrator? Why? Whose story is it, really? Send your narrator away for the week and re-write the crucial scenes and / or the whole idea you have from another character’s point of view. By character, we can choose the dog, the lover, the parent, the china dog on the mantelpiece, or even the flames burning in the fireplace. It’s fiction. Of course we can give fire a voice. And change the other characters. Do they have be the gender you’ve assigned them? Or the age, the sexuality, the race, the height? How would it change your protagonist if they existed outside the stereotypes? Could the male hero be four foot ten? Could the female love interest be hairy?

Gifts (or stolen goods)

All writers should be eavesdropping, all the time. It’s basic, basic stuff. The click for my story ‘The First Hard Rain’ came before I’d even written it, during a car journey with a dear friend who announced, in all seriousness, 'But the M6 - now that’s what I call a motorway'.

I knew then that I had something, and I would use it, at some point. The sense that someone could have feelings towards a motorway… I would never have come up with it, ever, and it rescued my story. I’m eternally grateful to her. Another friend had a very elderly boyfriend who was at the time very ill with pneumonia. ‘Or Old Monia, as I call it!’ she laughed. And I’ll have that, too, thanks very much. So listen, listen, listen to people, take their words, hoard them and when the time’s right, use them.

There are a few writing exercises /games I use too when inspiration is low. They may not all lead to clicks, but they really help to just warm the word muscles up, to become focused.

One syllable stories

Exactly that. Write a story of 500 words using words of only one syllable.

Animal, vegetable or mineral

Some characters seem to arrive fully formed, others are less clear. One of the ways I get to understand my characters is to turn them into an animal. Or in a couple of cases, vegetables. In my second novel, I have a (gay) couple who are a polar bear and a fox. In the current novel, I have a couple who are a carrot and a turnip. It helps me to ‘see’ them and their characteristics very clearly. So give every character their equivalent animal or vegetable. It’s a lot of fun and may provide some lovely insights.

Free writing

From all good creative writing classes. Choose a random object – or get someone to choose something for you. The duller or weirder the better. A cat hair. A breadcrumb. A cork from a wine bottle. An intestine. (Spot the clues about my lifestyle here…). Write for fifteen minutes about that subject without stopping, without lifting the pen from the paper at all. No stopping to re-read, no editing, no judging or worrying about spelling or grammar or whether it’s ‘good’. Just words, words, words, one after another, for fifteen minutes. Something lovely happens with the subconscious, and there’s the huge satisfaction of seeing a page fill up with writing that wasn’t there fifteen minutes ago.

Mixed length sentences

Fix a dreary passage by using sentences of varying lengths (which should be standard practice anyway) e.g the first sentence must be exactly six words, the second exactly fourteen words, the third exactly four words and so on. Or write your Booker Prize acceptance speech using sentences which increase by one word until you get to twenty.

Hi. I write. I write books. I write good books. The book won a prize. This is a wonderful achievement…and so on. (This is a very bad example and you will do much better).

And finally … stop writing

More often than not, my best clicks have come from stepping away from the computer and going for a long walk or a long swim, preferably in the cold north sea. The rhythms of walking and swimming just loosen up my creative knots. I can visualise settings and people, and ‘watch’ them as they move around. I can see how they stand, how they interact with each other, how they laugh or cry. I talk to my characters too, out loud, and they talk back. I don’t care if it’s mad.

We all write because we feel compelled to create authentic imaginary worlds, to inhabit a new universe where we are the God of absolutely everything. It’s the most wonderful activity, and extremely difficult to do it well. There’s no quick fix for bad writing, and often no reward or recognition for good writing. But I hope some of these suggestions help you with finding your own clicks, and help you to take your writing closer to being the best it can possibly be.

http://debialper.blogspot.co.uk

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/

Creative Pulse - Week 7 - Self-editing

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER AND MORE CONFIDENT WRITER THROUGH EFFECTIVE SELF-EDITING

By Debbie Young
Images courtesy of JD Lewis

No matter which genre you write in, cultivating a habit of effective self-editing will make your books better and boost your confidence as a writer. As an author myself, I know that’s been true for me, and I’d like to help you gain the same benefits by explaining how and when to self-edit – and when it’s time to stop and hand over to a professional.

THREE TYPES OF EDITING 

There are three main kinds of editing:

• Developmental or structural editing: addressing your book’s shape and form, looking at story rather than style

• Line editing: refining your story sentence by sentence, to make the language as precise and expressive as possible

• Copy editing or proofreading: checking for technical correctness of the language e.g. spelling and grammar

Professional editors provide all of these services, and self-editing includes them all too. 

WHY SELF-EDIT ANYWAY?

"But wait!” I hear you cry. “Isn’t it received wisdom that you can’t edit your own work because you’re too close to it?”

Sorry, I’m not letting you off the hook that easily. Even with a bottomless budget, you should still edit your own ms to the best of your ability before submitting it to your chosen professional editor for a final polish. Why?

• To learn and grow as an author – if you let someone else tidy up  your mistakes, you won’t learn to stop making them 

• To reduce the costs of a third-party edit - a good professional editor will charge less for a relatively clean script than for one riddled with errors

• To build a better relationship with your editor – make him or her look forward to your mss rather than dreading them

“But I’m aiming for a contract with a trade publisher, rather than self-publishing,” you might be thinking. “They’ll provide an editor to do that for me.” 

Er, dream on. Yes, a trade publisher will provide an editor, but they’ll also be much less likely to offer a contract for a shabby script than for a polished one. You’ll still have to do much of the editing yourself, following their instructions. Surely it’s better to get it right first time, rather than being sent back your script covered in edits, like homework marked in red pen? “Must try harder” is not a pleasant message to receive at any age.

HOW APT ARE EDITING APPS?

“I’ve got plenty of editing apps that will fix that stuff for me.” 

By all means run your ms through your word-processor’s spellchecker, or more sophisticated, algorithm-based apps such as Hemingway or Grammarly, but beware of their limitations. These mechanical methods will not pick up every error, nor will all their suggestions take your personal style into account. Its corrections may not be net improvements. For example, spellcheckers will accept words that are accurately spelled but wrongly used. No apps can replace the power of the human brain, or have your insight into your book’s unique concept and qualities. 

So if you want your book to be truly your own work, presented to the best of your ability, you should self-edit it thoroughly, rather than write the first draft and abdicate responsibility to all and sundry to turn it into a finished script.

THREE SURPRISES ABOUT SELF-EDITING

Now for the good news: although self-editing is hard work and time-consuming, it’s also hugely rewarding. Many authors even prefer self-editing to writing the first draft, because this is when their story really begins to shine.  

If you’ve never done much self-editing before, you’re in for some surprises:

• The number of edits you’ll make long after you thought your draft was finished (a quick check of my final draft of my latest novel yielded 350+ further tweaks)

• How much easier you’ll find the process on each subsequent book, (I learn more with every book I write)

• How intense and exhausting the process is, physically as well as mentally (if you’re not tired after self-editing, you’re doing it wrong)

HOW TO SELF-EDIT

So now let’s press on with instructions on how to go about it – and then I’ll give you an exercise to practise your skills in miniature, before you let yourself loose on your current work-in-progress.

First, take a break from the actual writing process. Writing and editing require two different parts of the brain – the first creative, the second critical. You need to turn off your creative brain and reboot your inner critic. 

The creative brain and the critical brain are like those two little weather people in a traditional wooden weather house: they should never both be out at once.

Received wisdom is that you should put a book manuscript away for about six weeks in a drawer (as if a drawer adds a special magic absent from a cupboard or shelf!) That allows time for your short-term memory to clear, so that when you come back to it, you will read what you actually wrote, rather than what you think you wrote, and so be more objective.

Plan to read through your manuscript very many times, with most of these times being for a specific reason, e.g.

- For plot structure – does the timeline work, does it make sense, will it meet readers’ expectations for your genre?

- To check speech – do conversations flow, do speech tags help rather than hinder (less is always more with speech tags), is it always clear who is speaking?

- For superfluous words – have you eliminated flabby padding that doesn’t add anything to the story except word count?

- For sentence and paragraph length – too many long blocks of text are hard on the eye, and it’s usually easy to them shorter, e.g. interjecting an action in the middle of a long speech to add a bit of movement and variety

- For writing tics - favourite words that are over-used (if you’re not sure what yours are, paste your whole ms into a word cloud generator, downloadable from the internet, and see what floats to the top – you may be surprised at the result)

- For continuity errors – do anyone’s eyes change colour from one page to the next, or their hairstyles or their names? (all frighteningly common) 

At each pass, key in  your changes before starting your next round of edits. This may seem an extravagant use of time, but it is the most effective way of fine-tuning your prose. 

HOW TO USE DIFFERENT FORMATS TO GAIN DISTANCE FROM YOUR MS

The  more formats you read your ms in, the more opportunities for improvement you are likely to find. Many authors work exclusively on their computer, but paper print-outs can be surprisingly helpful. 

“But I want to save trees!” is a popular misconception.

In our environmentally-friendly age, many authors feel guilty at printing off paper copies, particularly of long works, worried about wasting paper and ink. Avoid a guilty conscience by buying paper from sustainable resources (which is pretty much most of it these days) and tell yourself you’re supporting the forestry industry instead. 

Read your ms in the following formats as well as on your computer:

- On paper (ideally in a different typeface to the one you wrote it in)

- On an ereader or ereading app (these apps are free and available for phones and tablets, so unless you’re a complete Luddite, you’ve no excuse to avoid them)

- On paper again – but this time formatted in the style you expect your finished book to be in  (suddenly your book will seem much more real, and you’ll see it more through your readers’ eyes and be more sensitive to errors you don’t want them to read)

Finally, read the whole thing out loud. Yes, that will take a long time, but the resulting improvements will justify the time spent. (If you dictate your first drafts, you’ll have already discovered how much better spoken text flows.)

A SIMPLE EXERCISE TO PUT YOUR NEW SELF-EDITING SKILLS TO THE TEST

You don’t have to wait for your next book to be finished to try this system for yourself. Here’s a quick and easy exercise that I hope will leave you convinced that self-editing will make you a better writer and help make your books the best they can be. 

1. Take a pen and paper and write a 200 word description of something you do every day, e.g. making a cup of tea, cleaning your teeth, getting dressed.

2. Get up and leave the room, get yourself a drink, then come back, with your writer’s mind rebooted in critic mode.

3. Type it into your computer, and as you do so, if an obvious improvement jumps out at you, feel free to include it.

4. Read it on screen a number of times, checking and correcting each of the following, one at a time: logical order, continuity, writing tics, sentence length, paragraph length.

5. Try to reduce its length by 10% by eliminating superfluous words. It may be easier than you think. Can you reduce it by 15%? 20%?

6. Print it off, and while it is printing, gaze out of a window to refresh your eyes.

7. Now read the revised new print out. Spot anything you missed? If so, input those changes and print again.

8. Now read it aloud. Anything else you want to change? Change it, and reprint it. 

9. Finally, compare it to your original manuscript. You should see a significant difference. And think how much happier your professional editor would be to see the self-edited version rather than the original draft.

 OPTIONAL FOLLOW-UP EXERCISE 

• Put your final version away in a drawer - ah, the mysterious magic of the drawer! ;) Take it out again at least 24 hours later, but preferably six weeks later, and see whether there’s anything else you’d like to change. I bet a professional editor would also still find room for improvement.

WHY SELF-EDITING SHOULD BUILD YOUR CONFIDENCE

Don’t let the number of corrections you’ve made in the self-editing process dent your confidence as a writer. Instead, congratulate yourself on your craftsmanship and dedication at honing your prose to the best it can possibly be, just as a sculptor chips away at a block of marble, little by little, until a masterpiece stands before him.

But also like the sculptor, beware of applying the chisel for too long! There comes a point at which self-editing morphs into self-defeating. Don’t be the sculptor who chips off your statue’s nose. 

If you find yourself unwilling to stop self-editing, ask yourself whether you’re really just putting off the moment of declaring your work complete. I met a man the other day who told me he’d been editing a novel for ten years. Either he’s been writing the wrong thing, or for some reason he is afraid of publishing it: fear of success, fear of failure, or fear of being sued. 

Sometimes good enough is good enough, and it’s time to move on to a new writing project. 

A rigorous self-editing habit will make your work the best it can be, now and throughout your writing career. 

Good luck, and keep writing!

Debbie Young is the author of the Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries, the first of which is Best Murder in Show, and various collections of short stories. 

She also writes non-fiction books, such as How to Get Your Self-published Book into Bookstores, part of the Self-publishing Success series published by the Alliance of Independent Authors, of which she is Publications Manager. 

For more information about Debbie’s writing life, please visit her website www.authordebbieyoung.com.

Creative Pulse - Week 2 - The Dreaded Saggy Plot

– and How to Avoid It
by Lorna Fergusson

Images by JD Lewis 
 

So you’ve written that whizzy, grabby, punchy opening. You know your readers will be hooked and you’re saving an equally amazing ending for them. You can’t wait to see their reaction. Scene follows scene, chapter follows chapter, you’re keeping to your schedule of a thousand words a day or week … then something happens. Something bad.

 

The momentum slows, the story flags, your belief in it starts to evaporate. You were always aware of the risk of your plot flatlining, but it seems to be doing something even worse. It’s sagging. Your story started like the construction of a suspension bridge with sturdy towers at either side of the chasm – but the bridge itself is drooping into the canyon.

What can you do to save it? Here are 10 tips, plus an exercise to try out:

1 Think visually. Keep a grip on your plot with charts or colour-coding. This helps you to maintain a sense of its overall shape and of the interweaving of its elements.

2 Variety is the spice of plot: if you keep writing the same type of scene with the same kind of structure, you’ll weary your reader. Use dialogue, description, revelation, twists, changes of point of view. Intersperse the high-octane with the meditative. Open chapters in different ways. Have the calm before the storm, the false hope before destruction, the despair before redemption. Mix it up.

3 Nothing is set in stone. Maybe you wrote a route-map for this story but the road is heading straight to the Land of Boredom. Be prepared to retrace your steps to where you made a significant plot-choice, ready to take the road you didn’t travel first time round.

4 Complicate it. You have a main plot with main characters but they are not the be-all and end-all. They don’t exist in a vacuum. Who are the people around them and what are their stories? Don’t wheel on characters to do something in connection with the main character, then wheel them straight off again – give them their own wants, deeds and outcomes. Sub-plots, that’s the thing. Or dual narratives. Or multi-stranded thriller plots. Or multi-generational saga plots.

5 Raise the stakes. When your character has overcome a crisis, give them a bigger one. Unloose your inner sadist. Give them hell. Throw unexpected challenges at them or make the consequences of their choices turn bad on them. Give them trepidation, guilt and angst. Make them responsible. Give them, at all times, opposition, whether externally or internally.

6 Be unexpected. This is trickier than you might think – a twist in the plot that the writer chuckles complacently over, thinking they’ve outsmarted their reader, is often glaringly obvious to said reader. That said, when it works, it really works.

7 Create connectivity. Use flashbacks, repeated motifs, contrasts and counterpoints between plot and sub-plot, irony and foreshadowing. Be subtle with all that. Foreshadowing badly handled is telegraphing and as clunky as can be. Jump between groups or narrators or focal characters – spin those plates and keep them spinning.

8 Timing is everything. Seed information and revelations carefully so that the reader never thinks ‘deus ex machina’. That little breadcrumb trail will lead them inexorably into the heart of the forest.

9 Create mini-hooks. Every scene, chapter or section ending should have something in it that will encourage the reader to keep reading. The hook is usually an unanswered question. Keep your reader asking what will happen next. As soon as you answer one question, ask another.

10 Rev up. As the story progresses, give the reader a sense that it is going somewhere. Factor in highs and lows but make sure the overall effect is cumulative not sequential – you are building towards that superb ending you can’t wait to write, remember.

 

EXERCISE:

Here’s your plot scenario: a new boss joins the firm where your MC, a woman, works. Within a week the boss is telling her she will have to transfer to another town.

1 How does your MC react? Say yes or no? Is there a deadline for the decision?

2 What are the consequences of that choice likely to be? Jot the possibilities down.

3 If ‘No’, what are the reasons? Fear of moving? Commitments at home? What are those commitments? Children? An elderly parent?

4 If the MC says ‘Yes’ and moves, how does that play out? Regret? Whole new start? Does she rent her original house out? How does that go?

5 What might complicate that scenario? What if the elderly parent, for instance, has a fall and needs care?

6 If so, here’s your chance to thicken the plot. What if your MC has a sibling who has never carried his/her weight in terms of taking care of said relative? What now? Does MC ask for help? Does the sibling refuse? If so, a chance to complicate things further – what are the sibling’s reasons for refusing? Start inventing their life-situation.

7 What if the MC has no sibling and chooses instead to move the relative to the new town?
How does the parent feel about that? Grateful? Dislocated? Who are the friends/connections the parent is leaving? Is there a history there?

8 Review all this – maybe a plot has emerged as you mapped out these possibilities. There are a whole lot more, believe me! Start imagining where you could introduce the unexpected or where you could make the MC’s situation even more challenging. Before you know it, that narrative rope will be taut again.

Lorna Fergusson runs Fictionfire Literary Consultancy. She is a novelist and prize-winning short story writer, who has taught on various Oxford University writing programmes since 2002. She has republished her novel, The Chase, originally published by Bloomsbury, and contributed to Studying Creative Writing for the Creative Writing Studies imprint. Her ebook collection of historical short stories, An Oxford Vengeance, includes Salt, which won the Historical Novel Society’s London 2014 Short Story Award.

Websites: www.fictionfire.co.uk
www.fictionfirepress.com

Blog: http://literascribe.blogspot.co.uk
Twitter: @LornaFergusson
Facebook: www.facebook.com/LornaFergussonAuthor
www.facebook.com/fictionfire-inspiration-for-writers

The Chase: Paperback via my website
Or: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chase-Lorna-Fergusson/dp/0957647417/
Ebook:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chase-Lorna-Fergusson-ebook/dp/B00CBNG3BE/

An Oxford Vengeance:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Vengeance-Lorna-Fergusson-ebook/dp/B01LBU8216/

 
Next week: The Invisible Spider with Rohan Quine

Creative Pulse - Week 1 - Story Structure

Welcome to Creative Pulse!

Last year, we ran a ten-week summer course of creative writing exercises from respected experts in the field.

Did you miss it?
Here you go.

It was a great way to take time out and work on our skills, revisit the basics and focus on one area at a time. So much so, we're doing it again.

Stand by to tackle Saggy Plots, World-building, Imaginative Irresponsibility, Sensual Storytelling, Self-Editing and much more.

This course is FREE. No cash, no sign-up, just check into the blog on a Friday and join in.

Thanks to all our generous contributors and a special thanks to Julie Lewis for providing her beautiful photographs throughout.

Here comes Week One, by your hosts...

Story Structure: 3x3 = 10

Even if you’ve not heard of the three-act structure, you instinctively understand it.
You listened to nursery rhymes, heard songs, watched films, cartoons or TV series.
You understand how stories work.

Let’s start with three questions for each of the three acts.

Follow these instructions. Trust us.

• Take a pencil and scribble down answers to the nine questions below.
• Answer one at a time without looking at the next.
• Answer all questions as Marty McFly from Back to the Future.

Act I

Opening: What is normal here?

Trigger: What happens to change normal?

Decision: What can I do to put things back to normal?

Act II

Attack: How do I deal with this new situation?

Obstacle(s): Why didn’t that work?

Disaster: What is the worst that could happen?


Act III

Regroup: How can I change my tactics or find help?

Climax: How do I use all my strengths to defeat disaster?

Coda: How have I changed? 

Regardless of genre, this works across the board as a sharp focus on storytelling structure.

Now take those questions and apply them to the protagonist of your WIP.

Answer in his/her/its words and voice.

If any one of these questions gives you pause, you've found your problem.

Tip: you can always add a skateboard.


Next week – Lorna Fergusson and The Dreaded Saggy Plot


Images by Julie Lewis

Triskele’s Creative Spark

Summertime! Well, almost...

Same as last year, we're taking the summer months off to improve our writing. But this time, we invite you to come along for the ride.
 
We’ve bagged fifteen expert international tutors - including such luminaries as Emma Darwin, Amanda Hodgkinson and Jessica Bell -  to tackle one specific area of technique/style. We are officially excited!

Starting July 1st, for ten consecutive weeks, we’ll post an exercise every Friday. No cost, no commitment, just take what you want, when you want.

Each exercise is designed to last no more than half an hour, but all have suggestions for further exploration.

If you like, share your work/opinions/suggestions in the comments. But if you’d rather keep the results quiet, fine with us. Write like no one's looking!

Here’s the programme:

Triskele Books Creative Spark

• Story Fundamentals
• Plot and structure
• Character
• Point of View
• Voice
• Polished prose
• Subtext
• Location & setting
• Theme
• Sensory detail

See you on the first of July!

With grateful thanks to Triskele’s Global Partner, Ingram Spark.