Writing, Day Three

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Today really is going to be brief, because I am shattered. I sometimes think that giving these writing workshops is the most rewarding thing I ever do. It is partly because of the glorious feeling of being of some, small use, even though I do hear myself rattling on and wonder. It is also because I do it in my own village, so there is a wonderful sense of being part of the local community, which Alfred Adler said was one of the three requirements for human happiness. And it is because I get the thrilling delight of hearing my students' writing come alive, day by day. As an added bonus, I have the sheer pleasure of you, my virtual blogging community, coming here and leaving your intensely kind comments. Thank you so much for them all.

So, it is absolutely good. For all that, I can hardly think or speak when I get home.

Today, I spoke mostly about fiction:

I banged on quite a lot about the vital importance of knowing your characters. Hemingway said they are like icebergs: even if you only write the visible one eighth above the waterline, you must know the invisible seven eighths. Live with them, talk to them, interview them. I find this last one exceptionally helpful; I pretend I am John Humphreys, and throw them hardball questions. I like to do this in the car, which can lead to embarrassment when I am stopped at traffic lights and people can observe me talking away into vacancy.

The main reason for knowing your characters to their toes is  so they come alive on the page, and you are not left struggling with types, or stereotypes, or poor, one-dimensional creatures. The second reason is that I believe story comes from character. If you start off with a vital protagonist, plot will come. If you begin with a strict story, no matter how fiendishly clever, and try to shoehorn characters into it, you may find yourself in terrible trouble once you hit the half-way mark.

Both story and character start with the question: what if? You cannot ask it enough. What if, what if, what if?

The seed for a character can be the most mundane, unremarkable thing. It could be a mania for order, a fear of heights, a habit of singing tin pan alley songs out of tune. Follow where it takes you. Imagine a woman who hates anchovies. Why does she? Was there a terrible anchovy-related incident in her dark past? Does she merely dislike the idea of anchovies? Did the person who broke her heart eat them straight from the tin?

Character arc is important. If the heroine of your story ends up exactly the same as she began, your readers may experience a swooning sense of disappointment. The character development does not have to be violent or operatic or illogically vast; small, subtle shifts are the most realistic and satisfying.

Think of the idea of tension and momentum. Resist the temptation to explain everything, to dump too much information at once, to spell everything out. Drop a teasing trail of breadcrumbs for the readers to follow. Trust them to read between the lines. You want them to ask the question: what happens next?

A brilliant trick is to start a scene half way through. Your hero does not have to open the gate, walk up the path, wipe his boots on the doormat, lift the latch, enter the hall. Have him in the room. BANG - he is there. Remember the magical capacity you have as a writer to shift your characters through time and space.

Kurt Vonnegut said a glorious thing about character:

'When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make the character want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralysed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.'

So, in that vein, I always ask: what do they want? What do they fear? What is at stake here?

I get furious about the old saw of: write what you know. Someone cleverer than I once said, 'What did Kafka know? The insurance business?' I think you should write what fascinates you, what you want to find out about. That is what the great resource that are the internet and your local library and books written by experts are there for.

Resist labels. (I think one should do this in life, as well as in writing.) No one is just a beauty, or a brain, or a swot, or a man of action, or a sinner, or a saint. There is a fatal human tendency to put people into nice, neat little boxes. Most people are seething morasses of complexity and contradiction. Don't be afraid to give that to your characters.

 

Two more general notes:

Try not to fall into the terror of not being original. There are seven stories in the world, and they have already been told. The point is: you have not told them. No one else on earth has your exact set of experiences, collection of neurones, or spiralling strands of DNA. You are unique, by your very nature. If you learn to trust your own voice, you will be original, without even trying.

Keep a constant guard out for dead language that lies on the page like an old, fat fish. Worn phrases, clichés, platitudes, jargon, are all death to good prose. At the same time, it can be self-defeating to turn yourself inside out like a pretzel in order to come up with some new coinage. Play around with the familiar; sometimes a simple change in word order may make an ancient collocation fresh again. Sometimes, you may want to use an old, known phrase, because you love it, or because it feels right. I'm not sure you have to banish every single cliché on principle. I think that if there is a rule, it is: never use one without thinking about it first.

 

Ah, as always, not quite as brief as I intended. One day, I shall learn the art of saying what I want to say in seven mere lines.

If you want to see what I did this time last year, follow the link here.

Today's pictures are the roses from my garden, for no particular reason at all:

 

Happy writing.

Writing, Day Two

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

It always amazes me how these classes work. I say classes, but I am not really teaching. I don't think you can teach someone how to write. I tell my students everything I can think of that I know about writing, every last thing I have picked up over twenty years, and hope that some of it sticks. Sometimes, it is hard to know whether it is of any use. They are very polite, and listen quietly as I talk and talk and talk, and I cannot quite tell whether any of what I am saying is relevant to them, or what they signed up for, or of any practical use at all. Sometimes I see them looking gently puzzled, and I think: am I talking absolute nonsense? Are they fearing for my mental health when I speak of living with the voices in your head?

The problem with offering any writing advice is that what works for one person does nothing for another. I keep saying: there are no unimpeachable rules. Then I give them three golden rules. Kill your darlings; question all your assumptions; never use any other word except 'said' when writing dialogue. (She trilled, he sneered, she shrieked, he chortled are proper writing crimes, and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.) Then I say: of course these are only rules if you want to make them so. A slight look of confusion comes over the class.

Anyway, yesterday I spoke of the great Dorothea Brande, and her seminal book, Becoming a Writer. Her great idea is that you should get out of bed every morning and go straight to your desk and write, without thinking, for twenty minutes. In this way, you build your writing muscle, and you tap into the subconscious, the dreaming part of your brain that is only accessible before the daily demands of the world catch you in their quotidian grip.

I think that twenty minutes, the moment you wake, is quite a lot to ask. But I do love the idea of this kind of free writing, as a regular exercise. Even if it is only five minutes, some time towards the start of the day, it can produce unexpected miracles.

Today I said, tentatively: did anyone do morning writing? Hands shot up; faces broke into smiles. I was astounded. One gentleman was so excited by his morning writing that he asked if he could read it out.

It was marvellous. It was poetic and mysterious and unexpected. He was so thrilled by what he had done that his enthusiasm filled the room. 'It was like a gift,' he said. It shifted the entire dynamic of the group. Everyone else seemed to catch his excitement; I felt amazingly vindicated, thinking that perhaps what I was saying did have some use after all. A new purpose and spirit entered the class. I threw away my lesson notes, and talked instead of some of the things that had come up in the short piece of writing we had just heard.

People seemed emboldened. There were interesting questions and intelligent interjections. We did a five minute writing exercise, which produced such tremendous work that we did not even stop for lunch, but just charged on until two o'clock.

They are good and brave, my students. Today, I asked them to write about fear, and even though it frightened them, they did it well and honestly. I can tell them about voice and point of view and whether you should make a detailed book plan or not, but I think the most important thing I can do is try to give them a safe place where they can allow their own unique voice to take wing. I want them to leave their doubts at the door, and show themselves what they are capable of.

 

Here are a few of the things I said today:

I talk a great deal about writing habits. This does not just mean getting into a solid routine, or learning to still the cruel critical voices in your head, or doing your free writing exercises. It is also about state of mind. I think that writers notice everything, question everything, invest small, overlooked things with significance. Nothing is dull, to a writer. Even dullness is interesting, once you really start thinking about it.

If there is one rule it is: read, read, read. Read until your eyes ache and the light is gone. Personally, I think you should read up. You may never reach the diamond perfection of The Great Gatsby, but read Fitzgerald to see what a master can do with prose. Read the best writers in your chosen field, so that you have something marvellous to aspire to. Set the bar high. Do not be intimidated if you fail to reach it; you will never be quite as good as you wish to be, and that's all right. If you are shooting for the moon and you miss, at least you will be aiming in the right direction.

If you feel stale and tight, and you have a day when your savour for language is gone, and words feel dusty under your fingers, go to the great poets. I find a salutary dose of TS Eliot will bring vigour back, every time. That yellow fog that rubs its back along the window pane; those women, in the room, coming and going, talking of Michelangelo. Do I dare disturb the universe? Do I dare eat a peach? Yes, yes, yes, I do.

There are some people for whom a short word is always better than a long one. A short sentence and a brief paragraph always go better than long, winding efforts. The lovely William Zinsser is a great advocate of this school of thought. I sometimes love a long word; occasionally, I indulge in the sub-clause. There is a matter of subjective taste, here. But I do think that this simple idea gets at a deeper truth. When people begin to write, they often think that there is such a thing as the Literary Style. They believe that they must Write, with a capital W; they cannot just be a writer, they must be a Writer. They put on their metaphorical Sunday best and sit up straight and adopt a sonorous voice. In doing this, they instantly lose their own voice, their lovely idiosyncrasies, their distinct sound. To your own self be true, my darlings. There is no Literary style; there is only your style.

On this theme: a short, clean, everyday word is often better than a longer, pretentious word. House is always better than residence. Car is always better than vehicle. Me is always, always, always better than myself.

Never forget the power of the plain, declarative sentence.

It is obvious, and sometimes tiring, and occasionally maddening, but: practice, practice, practice. You cannot play a sonata unless you do your scales every day. Good writing does not fall like magic on the chosen few. It is the product of work and thought.

Remember the Buddhist idea of being in the moment. It is a hard but good idea for life, and it is a brilliant tool for writing. Stop thinking about what happened yesterday, or what you must do tomorrow; still your mind, and concentrate on the instant. Be present.

 

For what I did on this day last year, follow the link here. You will see that it was quite different from what I ended up talking about today. I rather love that this year's class took on a life quite of its own, deviating wildly from what I had planned. Plans are made to be broken.

 

Today's pictures are from the garden, taken last night at about nine o'clock:

My lovely old-fashioned tea rose has suddenly burst into flower. I swear that was not there the day before. I actually exclaimed out loud when I saw it, as if someone had sent me a present.

The first of the nepeta is just coming into bloom.

The astilbe is putting on its pomp.

My newest geranium is slightly out of focus, but rather delightful for all that.

And over it all was a deep, singing sky, traced with blue clouds.

PS. Thank you so much for all your enchanting comments of the last two days. Forgive me for not replying to them individually; this writing class takes enormous reserves of energy and when I come home I find it is all I can do to write the blog and prepare tomorrow's lesson.

Writing, Day One

Posted by Tania Kindersley

This is the week I give my annual writing workshop at my local arts festival. Last year, in a bit of a blog experiment, I put up edited versions of each day's lesson so that my readers could follow along. I think that the posts were rather too discursive, and also not madly well written, because I was typing them up when I came back in, and by that stage my mind had gone all to pot.

This year, I am just going to put up a few of the most pertinent things that I talked about, in case they might be of interest. That way, I shall not make hideous demands on your precious time.

This is a skeleton version of what I said today:

Good writing is hard. If you do not find it difficult, you are not doing it right.

Write the book you most want to read.

The single most fatal thing that will stop you writing is fear. The Fear takes many forms. It may be fear of failure, fear of ridicule, the fear that you do not have the right stuff. You may be terrified that people will laugh and point. But what is the worst that can happen? You may not succeed; people may indeed laugh and point. Sod them if they can't take a joke. It is not death or destitution. If you do not risk falling flat on your face, or chance the criticism of strangers, you will never know what you might have achieved. Sit down at your desk, tell the carping voices in your head to bugger off, and write, in joyful defiance of all the forces, real and imagined, arrayed against you.

There is no secret handshake. You do not need to have been born into a literary household, or have gone to a grand university, or to live like F Scott Fitzgerald. A writer is someone who writes. All you have to do is put one word in front of another. (Admittedly, this is not always as simple as it sounds.)

Try and write every day. I know that there are twenty-seven other demands on your time. I know that it is often not easy to carve out a space to write. Even if you can only manage five minutes, you can say: I wrote today. Miracles can happen in five minutes. If you make writing a habit, it ceases to be an exotic, distant ambition, allowed only to the chosen few, and instead runs alongside you like a faithful hound.

Give yourself permission to do a really rotten first draft. Even the greatest writers will do baggy, incoherent, plain bad first drafts.  The secret of good writers is that they then go back and do second and third and fourth and fifth drafts, so no evidence is left of the initial shocker. Show it to no one, not even the person you love the most. Especially not the person you love the most.

Carry a notebook with you wherever you go. Those brilliant, coruscating, immortal thoughts that fly into your head will disappear into the ether if you do not write them down.

Trust your own voice.

On a bad day, a little Mozart at full blast can really help.

Resist the temptation to talk your story away. You may long to tell someone of your fascinating idea, or your quirky characters, or your ripping plot. Keep it a secret. This is not because someone might steal your perfect notion, but because once the thing is spoken, it is out there, and the impetus to write it may be lost. Hold it close to your heart until it is done.

The work involved in writing does not just consist of putting words on a page, or typing them into a computer. The gazing out of the window is also part of the graft, even though it may not look like it, to the untrained eye. My friend The Man of Letters likes to remind me that he is working even when he is in the bath, or shopping in the supermarket. Think, think, think of your work in progress every moment you can. When I am in the thick of a book, it is the first thing I think of when I wake in the morning, and the last thing I contemplate before I go to sleep at night.

Try, if you can, to get a routine going. Be ruthless. Shut the door and turn off the telephone. People can wait.

Even though it is hard, and it should be, remember that it is also the thing you love. It can be fun. Allow yourself to be playful. Sometimes you can just throw words up in the air and see where they fall.

Know your strengths, and play to them. Be aware of your weaknesses, and do not fear them.

 

Hmm. Turns out that was not quite as skeletal as I had hoped. Even when I attempt to be pithy, I cannot resist the temptation to bang on. I do apologise. Still, I hope that this may prove of some utility.

If you would like to read last year's full version, click here.

Today's pictures are of foxgloves and ferns: