Writing Workshop, Day Four. Thirty things I know about writing.

A writer I like very much, Matt Haig, recently made a list of thirty things he knows about writing for the Waterstone’s blog. When I saw that, I felt my competitive streak come leaping to the surface like a trout to a fly. If Matt Haig knows thirty things about writing, then surely so do I.

I feared I might only turn out to know four, and would have to crawl away with my tail between my legs. But in the end, I did manage to hit the golden number. So, among other things – a bit of a riff on language, a good dose of Prufrock, without which no writing workshop is complete – this is what I told my students today:

1.

Writing is hard work. It should be hard work. This is the language of Shakespeare and Milton you are messing with.

2.

The difference between writers and non-writers is that writers rewrite. Then they rewrite again. Sometimes, the seventeenth draft has to be wrangled from their crabbed, pedantic hands.

3.

Good writing is like jazz. It has a rhythm, and a syncopation. Listen to your writing as you would listen to music. One syllable too many can throw the rhythm off.

4.

Don’t be afraid of playing with metaphor. Be adventurous; be antic. This can bring writing alive and lift your words off the page. But don’t strive too hard for effect. The pudding can swiftly become over-egged.

5.

Writing should be a passion. It might even be an obsession. That’s all right. You need that to get you through the doldrums. And there will be doldrums.

6.

Don’t take yourself seriously, but take your writing very seriously indeed. You might want to keep this fact secret from your family and friends, especially if they are British. They may laugh. Or point. But you must know it, in your secret heart.

7.

Read everything you can get your hands on. If you don’t read, you won’t write. I heard one writer, modishly successful in the nineties, boast at a literary festival that he did not read books. His name has now entirely disappeared from the bookshops. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Reading is fuel for your writing; it is petrol in the tank.

8.

Some people say read the bad as well as the good. They say it cheers you up, because you may know that you can do so much better than this published charlatan or that bogus best-seller. I think you need to be really careful with bad writing. It can depress you and make you want to comfort eat and send your battered brain into a kind of fugue state. Whereas three paragraphs of Fitzgerald will send you racing to the keyboard, inspired by the possibility of brilliance.

9.

Love words. Be bold with them. Throw them up in the air and let them fall as they will. If you don’t love words, you have no business writing a sentence. I’m very hard line on this.

10.

The best piece of writing advice I ever saw, and I think it was from Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, was: allow yourself to do a really crappy first draft. This is wonderfully liberating. Nobody need ever see it. It can be as baggy and saggy and meandering and nonsensical as you like; there will be no walk of shame. Then you take the thing out behind the bike shed in the second draft and show it who is boss.

11.

The only rule in writing is: there are no rules.

12.

Except: you must never, ever dangle a modifier. Ever. It is not clever and it is not kind.

13.

If someone asked me, which they have not, what the two most important things in writing are, I would say clarity and authenticity. But if that same someone asked me tomorrow, I might say something quite different.

14.

Know the rules. It is important to know them so that you may break them. If you are breaking them through ignorance, you will end up with a mess. If you are breaking them on purpose, you are an iconoclast. If you do break them, make sure they damn well stay broken.

15.

Grammar is important because it shows respect for the reader. Most grammatical notions are not the idiot ravings of a crazed pedant, but designed for the comfort of the reading eye. Bad grammar usually means that the reader has to stop, frown, go back and read the sentence again to make sure of the meaning. This is not polite. We are back to clarity again.

16.

Practice, practice, practice. That is the only thing that will make the difference. I don’t know why people think they can write without practice. A concert pianist would not fail to do her arpeggios. Do your arpeggios.

17.

Don’t talk about writing, except to other writers. It’s quite a dull subject for those who don’t do it, and if you give too much of your passion away in talk, you may lose urgency on the page.

18.

Understand that you will fail. You will fail professionally. Books will be rejected; agents will sack you; critics will maul you. You will fail in the privacy of your own head, because the perfect book that lives there will never quite make it to the page.

19.

Mozart can really help. If you are having a bad morning, and your brain is filled with mud, put the 40^th symphony on at full blast and see what happens. There is some research to show he lights up the creative areas of the brain.

20.

Finish. That’s another difference between writers and non-writers. Writers finish. 90,000 words is a long slog. Get good sturdy walking boots.

21.

Find a subject you love, and write about it. Tell the story you want to read. The best way to work out what book to write is to think of the book you search for in the bookshop, but can never find. Make sure your subject really does fascinate you. You are going to spend a very, very long time with it. Someone clever once said something like: if your book doesn’t keep you up nights, it sure isn’t going to keep anyone else up either. (I should probably look up the correct quote, but there is no time. A Dear Reader will doubtless know.)

22.

You don’t have to feel sorry for writers, but in some ways they choose a hard life. All their youthful dreams will be smashed, one by shattered one. Most of them will never win a prize, will never have a best-seller, will barely make a living. Even the ones who are successful in worldly terms will still have to face the melancholy fact that they shall never quite become their heroes. (Their heroes are quite often alcoholic, dead, misanthropic humans, so this may not be entirely a bad thing.)

23.

Jokes are very tricky things in books, but humour is important. My theory is that only the very brilliant can embrace unremitting seriousness. In ordinary hands, a humourless book is half-dead on arrival, and will drag itself around with a lumpen, melancholy refrain.

24.

Write what you know is slightly defeatist advice. There is The Google after all. There is the imagination. Write what you love, what you fear, what comes to you in the night and won’t let you sleep.

25.

I’m not much for the dogmatic You-Must-Do-This. (All evidence to the contrary.) I’m more a shuffle my foot in the dirt and make a mild suggestion sort of person. Imperious advice can be confining and patronising. But if a novice came to me and asked for one single thing to help her become a writer, I would say: learn to touch type. It means your fingers can keep up with your thoughts. It’s the most useful skill I ever learnt. I use it every day and I never stop feeling grateful.

26.

Trust the reader. Not everything has to be spelt out. Readers are clever. They can read between the lines.

27.

There is something quite peculiar about the writing process. There are days when you feel as if you are wading through sand, when you are prodding and heaving and dragging yourself up to a respectable word count. You are almost typing for the sake of it. When you go back and re-read those words, they are often really quite good. On the other hand, when you feel flushed with brilliance, and coruscating sentences fly from your fingers, and you are privately convinced that perhaps you are Scott Fitzgerald after all, you often go back and find the work is thin and gimcrack. I have no idea why this is.

28.

You do have to kill your darlings. Everyone says so, because it is true. I make a special dead darlings file, so the murder is less agonising. That way, they are not quite bloody corpses on the floor, but in a gentle Darling limbo, where I may go and visit them whenever I like. I never do.

29.

Be yourself. The moment you start writing like anyone else, your words go dead on the page.

30.

This is the serious one. I hope you will forgive me.

Writing is frustrating, often unrewarding, financially stupid, exhausting, misunderstood and bizarrely difficult. But it is also a privilege. You get to think thoughts for a living. You get to be interested in everything. No person on the bus is wasted. You may ransack your own tragedies, so at least they are good for something. No heartbreak shall go unexamined. You are also in a fine cohort. You are doing the same job as Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. I’ve said it before, and I shall say it again: you are playing with the language of Shakespeare and Milton. That is something to brighten a morning.
 
The course is over. My students were brave and good and willing. I sprung oddities on them, made them reveal themselves, took them, at one stage, on a forced march. (There was a good reason.) They had to listen to me repeat myself, race off on interminable tangents, and mix my metaphors, which is what I do in speech when I get excited. They produced surprising and enchanting work, and I did make them work. I even took them to see the horse. (There was no good reason.)

I salute them all.
 

No photographs again today. No time. Just the dear foal with her semaphore ears, playing hide and seek with her dreamy mum:



 
Oh, and PS: Some of this does sound rather grandly prescriptive. There is a bit of must and should. The disclaimer of course is: only if you really want to. Take what you like and leave the rest. I may sound tremendously decided and certain. In fact, the only thing I really know as I grow older is that I know nothing.

PPS. Thank you to the Dear Reader who spotted a typo in the first draft of this. It has now been corrected. My eyes were squinting too much with tiredness to proof-read correctly. It is almost inevitable that when one writes about writing, one will make a howler. The hubris gods, laughing at my puny plan.

Writing Workshop, Day Three. Structure, character and opening lines.

Yesterday, I rashly asked the group if there was a subject they would particularly like me to cover.
Bit of thinking. Small pause. ‘Well, yes,’ they said, tentatively, almost as one. ‘How to write a book.’
Of course they did not quite say that, but that was the gist. So, I decided to tell them, in under three hours. I like a challenge.

I could have said: you start, you keep going, and when you are finished, you stop. And then we could have gone to see the horse.

This is facetious, but it is also slightly true. That really is what you do. It’s gloriously simple and fabulously hard. You need, I think, some hows to help with it. That is what I was trying to provide.

This is a truncated version of some of the things I said. It will not be the most beautiful thing you read today, because I’m trying to convey information, not dazzle you with my prose style. (As if I could.)

1. Structure.

Structure bores me witless, which is probably why I’m not very good at it. But there are things about it I do know. Your book needs a spine. Books with no spine collapse in a mashed soufflé of their own muddle and self-indulgence.

A beginning, middle and end sounds absurdly obvious, but it really does help. How much you know of the spine before you start depends on you. Some people have wall charts and index cards and plot points all worked out. This makes them feel safe, and they write from point to point, like those first steeplechase riders who galloped from spire to spire.

Some people find this too prescriptive, and merely require a more general direction. Then they can play around in between. I generally begin with a vividly-known opening scene; this is the germ of the book that gets me going. I’ll have in my mind three or four pivotal scenes along the way, and a definite finale. Within that, I make it up as I go along, so the journey is one of discovery.

Find the method that suits you. But you should know where you are going, or you will, at some stage, run into the sand, and get lost, and wish you had brought a map.

I include momentum under the heading of structure. A book should have a strong forward motion, which pulls the reader along with it. Sol Stein called this the engine of the book, and he always said that he listened carefully for the moment when the engine started. In a perfect world, it should turn over in the very first sentence.

Even if you are playing about with flashbacks or being cavalier with time, the pulling thread of the book should remain tight. Everything should strain forward, to that inevitable end. It sounds rather old-fashioned and blatant, but the question in the reader’s mind should be: what happens next? You should have a good answer to that question.

You can learn a lot about structure from the art of the screenplay. The strict three act construction, with its set-up, amplification, reversal and resolution can feel a little formulaic, but it’s not a bad thing to hold in your mind, especially if you are a novice. The classic screenplay moment at the end of act two, when it seems that all is lost, followed by the eureka moment when the heroine regains her mojo and sets out once more on her quest, is almost archetypal. It is drawn from the ancient myth form, with a faint Jungian aspect, and that is the reason it is so powerful. It’s something you might like to consider.

As a side note, thinking about film can help in another way. If you are stuck on a particular scene, run it in your head like a film clip. Then you may easily transcribe what you have just watched. Most of the writing advice that I dispense is shamelessly cadged from greater writers than I. This tiny trick is something I came up with all on my own. I’m stupidly proud of it.
 
2. Character.

Character is vital, and it’s really where a book should start. You can have the cleverest, most intricate story in the world, but if it is not happening to someone vivid and human it will be flat as twenty-seven squashed pancakes. The reader needs someone to root for. What happens is not the most important thing, it is who it happens to.

So, you have to start the very idea of a book with a strong character. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your plot is, if the reader is not caught by the protagonist, she will not care what happens, even if it involves fireballs and flying spaceships.

Sol Stein once said that when he was an editor and he was sent a manuscript, his first hope was that he would fall in love. This does not mean that the character needs to be lovable. You can create a monster, an anti-hero or heroine. The only thing I would say about that is that it is difficult. It takes a master to persuade the reader to stay with someone loathsome. Dostoevsky did it, and Nabokov, but they were flying at the very top of their game. I’m not suggesting you cop out. If you are fascinated by the ghastly, go with it. But if you want to make your passage into fiction easier, the best approach is to invent someone with whom you can fall in love, just as Stein hoped to. The likelihood then is that the reader will too.

Don’t make the mistake of creating a shining, perfect character. People rarely love the perfect, even if it did exist, which it does not. The very idea of perfection repels; it is distant and impervious. It is up on a high plinth. The moment in High Society when the Grace Kelly character becomes truly lovable is when she says: help me down from my pedestal. The ones people love are usually keenly human: flawed, contradictory, struggling, aware of their own folly.

I do think plot comes from character. You may have a ripping yarn in your head, and that is fine. But normally a plot starts with a human doing something. The woman picked up the ringing telephone; the man tore the bandage from his eyes. It is the person who begins the action and starts the motor of the plot.
If you try to impose a story on a person you have built to fit, the thing will always have an air of bogusness about it. Readers will only ask the what happens next question when there is a living, breathing, believable human in the vortex of all that happening.

And it is the knowledge of your character that will make your plot make sense. If you try to shoehorn a character into your set story, making him do something entirely out of character in the process, the fourth wall is broken, and the suspension of disbelief is lost.

Don’t be afraid of complexity. Humans are contradictory and complex and often hardly explicable. Fictional characters may be as complex as you like, just as real people are, but they should also have a sort of consistency. If you pull a stunt where a protagonist suddenly behaves completely against all previous form, you risk losing your reader. The protagonist may do the unexpected, but there should be a little foreshadowing, so the reader may look back and say: ah, yes, I see.

Characters should always want. The essence of plot is – a protagonist desires something, and has to overcome a series of obstacles to achieve it. The obstacles do not have to be visible or actual even; they can be internal. But they must be there. Kurt Vonnegut said the cleverest thing I ever read about character. He said: ‘Make your characters want something right away, even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.’

I try not to be too prescriptive, because really the only rule of writing is that there is no rule. You only have to read Ulysses to see that. But I do think that you should know your central characters better than you know yourself. It is for this reason that I never base fictional characters on real people. Even if you live with someone for forty years, she will suddenly surprise you. You will never truly know your great-aunt Mabel in the way you know Ethel Sambora, who grew up in the back-streets of Buenos Aires and now breeds chickens just outside Lowestoft, because you made Ethel up, and she is yours.

How you get to know your character depends on you. I live with mine. They are with me when I fall to sleep at night, and with me when I wake. I take them to the supermarket and to do the horse. Some people like to do a strict Paxman-style interview; some people set their characters twenty questions. A really good way to find your characters’ true selves is to put them under extreme pressure; then their inner core is revealed.
If you do not know your characters, your plot will stutter and fail. Learn them, love them, hate them, fight with them. Make them unexpected and eccentric and not quite normal. It helps if they amuse you, because you are going to spend an awful lot of time in their company.
 
3. The importance of openings.

The start of a book is the most important part of it, and the opening sentence is the crux of that. This is vital for two reasons. One is practical and vulgar. There are thousands of books on the market and people have little time and short attention spans. If you do not get them at Hello, your book will not sell and you will have to eat grass.

In a more high-flown, artistic sense, your opening sentence may perform many creative tasks, sometimes at the same time. It can introduce character, paint a picture, set a tone. It can create a mystery, pose a question, serve up a shock. It should, at the very least, interest and intrigue. I did not use to pay much attention to openings, but just went on instinct. This was a mistake. It is now something of which I am keenly aware.

I remember ages ago being struck by a piece of advice from a clever person whose name I have lost. It went something like this: always start a scene halfway through. The same goes for the beginning of a book. To start a book in a thrilling way, you can plunge straight into the action, the middle of a scene, an act of violence or love or wrenching loss. Trust the reader. You do not have to set the stage, explain things, map out what you are going to do. Let her see it, taste it, feel it, sense it. If there are loose ends, you can loop back later and tie them up. Hit the ground sprinting. The reader will go with you. She is quite brave like that, if she senses she is in safe hands.

Don’t forget that writing, even though it is composed of one-dimensional scratches on a page, is a vivid, visual medium. A good question to ask about openings is: what can the reader see? All the senses may be used: a good opening can invoke smell, taste, touch.

But don’t make promises you can't keep. If you begin on a note of high drama, of intense action, the book cannot then lapse into a dreamy, static examination of the human condition. If you want to write a contemplative book, begin on a contemplative note. That way the reader does not ask for his money back. Never write a cheque you can’t cash. Remember Chekhov’s gun. If you load the gun, and it never goes off, your reader may feel puzzled and short-changed.

 
Here are some of my favourite opening lines:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
LP Hartley, The Go-Between.

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a proud, rose-colored hotel.
Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night.

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady.

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
Karen Blixen, Out of Africa.

It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

In a village of La Mancha,
 the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen who always have a lance in the rack, an ancient buckler, a skinny nag, and a greyhound for the chase.
Cervantes, Don Quixote

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.
Dante, The Divine Comedy

James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and though about life and death.
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier.

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions.

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
Paul Auster, City of Glass.

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd.

I said an awful lot more. (My poor students. At least there was cake.) I’m not going to write any more now, because I’ve gone on long enough. Also, my fingers are tired.
 
And here, to reward you after all those damn words, is the now-traditional foal picture. Nine days old today:

Writing Workshop, Day Two. The Good Critic and the Bad Critic. Clue: one of them wears a white hat.

I spoke to my group today about the good critic and the bad critic. This idea is closely related to The Fear, of which I wrote yesterday.

I am crazy for utility, as I get older. I really, really like things that work, that have purpose, that do something in the world. I’ve always hated waste, but as I reach middle age and the hours whoosh past my ear, I particularly hate the waste of time. I like utility for many reasons, but one of them is that it saves time.

The good critic has utility. It is the voice of humility, which has a tenderness in it. The good critic, who should arrive, wearing her white hat, when you start on the second draft, says kindly, but very firmly: ‘Well, you are not very good at that, but we’ll work on it.’

The good critic is the one who makes you practice. Just as great musicians still practice their scales and arpeggios before they go out to perform an intricate sonata, so proper writers should practice the basics. Any form of daily writing will do it. I’m afraid I sometimes see this blog as my daily practice. I say afraid, because really it should be a selfless thing, devoted to the Dear Readers. But it builds my muscles; it builds the muscle memory that is needed for writing to stay fluent.

The good critic may say: chapter two does not quite work, or that character is flat on the page, or that passage is overwritten. The good critic does not say these things in glee or malice, but in a spirit of improvement and possibility. The good critic keeps you honest and keeps you grounded. It does not let you float into the fiery heights of hubris.

The good critic comes with a charming suitcase full of solutions. The solutions are not easy. They almost always are: work, and effort. And time too. And dedication and thought and care. Do it again, do it better, think about it harder. Don’t skimp. Don’t think you can cheat your readers, or cheat the process. The process must be honoured, and it is slow. The good critic is not about fleeting tips or quick shortcuts; the good critic has no magic wand. She is quite stern, and she should be.

The good critic is the voice of the possible.

The bad critic has no utility. It is really important that you trust me on this. I know her well, and she is a bitch. She is the wrecking voice of contempt. She smashes and trashes and laughs as she stomps all over your fledgling hopes with her beastly stiletto heels. She will grind you underfoot, if you let her. And then she will bugger off to torment some other innocent.

The bad critic is the bearer of shame. Shame is a wholesale destroyer. It does not say: you are weak at dialogue, so let us work on that. It says: you are entirely hopeless and you could not write fuck on a dusty blind and you should probably not be allowed out in public.

The bad critic is also relentless. It is the voice that never stops. It does not just home in on one area of frailty, but gallops from one field of idiocy to the next. Not only can you not write dialogue, but your office is a mess, your hair is a fright, and you can’t cook. You are too fat, too thin, too boring, too verbose, too shy, too garrulous. Whatever you do, it will be the wrong thing. The bad critic says: you might as well give up, because you will never amount to anything.

The wonderful thing about all this is that you have a choice. You are a sentient adult; you have agency. Every time you hear that barking voice of shame, you may choose to listen to it. If you really want, you can let it in, pull up a chair for it, give it a cocktail, and listen to its screeching song. You can do that. Or, you can say, no thanks, not today. I’m busy, and I’ve run out of gin. So fuck off.

Use whatever strategy suits you best. Sometimes, as you may have gathered, I find excessive swearing helps. You may imagine yourself punching the bad critic in the nose. Whatever gets you through the night.

The bad critic is cunning and invasive as bindweed. It may not be possible to banish the sound of shame from your entire life with one act of will. Like almost anything to do with writing, it involves daily practice, building up that particular muscle set through patient repetition. So you may wish to start small. Just tell it to bash off for half an hour. Promise yourself one single morning, with the door shut, whilst the bad critic hammers fruitlessly at the door. She may soon get bored and leave.

The most important thing to know is that this bad critic will not help your writing in any way. Shutting her out is the most generous thing you can do for yourself. With her in the room, your creative self will never be able to unfurl its wings, and you will never know how high you may fly. And that really is a waste.

You have the power. You have the choice. You can fly, if you let yourself.

 

No time for pictures again. Just the obligatory foal photograph. Because IT’S A FOAL: