Seeking The Voice

Crafting a story is dependent on many variables. One of the most important is the narrator's "voice". Theorists sometimes refer to "viewpoint", but that's not what I mean here. The same narrator can have different viewpoints.

Here's an exercise that I suggest you try to train the muscle in your brain that tells stories and to understand the power of "voice":

think of someone you know with a strong personality, with a particular way of speaking, with a peculiar view of the world and then take any story you have written, any story, short or long, and retell it as though you were that chosen person.
Take your mother, your brother, your best friend, someone you admire, perhaps even someone you hate. And guess what? The very story changes, the stress the new "voice" puts on events changes, occasionally only slightly, often it changes dramatically.

That is the power of "voice".

Writers and critics have written that it takes a writer a long time to find their own "voice". Who says you only have one? That would be so boring. One thing that I can say from my own experience of writing: I rarely write with the same voice more than once.

So, select someone and write your story - and of course, you need not tell that person that you borrowed them for a while...perhaps even pick a fictitious character like Santa Claus, Sherlock Holmes, Joan of Ark or Oliver Twist and tell a story form their perspective. You'll already know so much about their idiosyncrasies and foibles, hates and loves...and strangely this can unleash your imagination and take your story to a totally different level.

And if you take if a step further and imagine Sherlock Holmes fused with an avuncular Santa Claus and tell a story from that perspective...the combination of character and voices is endless.

Don't waste any time: go reach for your favourite pen or that wireless keyboard and start writing.

What are you still reading this blog for? :)

Happy writing.

ZHZ. 

Editing: Part 2

Let me begin again in Jean Paul-Sartre style, by stating the obvious:
to edit you must...have something to edit.
The first draft is like a newborn babe. Once born, you raise it, nurture it.
There is a certain way of looking at text that provides a powerful impetus - it is knowing that some day someone is going to read it. When that day dawns the writing you reveal must be the best you can produce and that takes time, effort, will and focus.

So how do you begin the process of editing?

By reading.

Now, what you must not do is to print out all your work with pen pulsing in hand. Nor do you rush to the beginning of the text on your computer screen and start re-typing, changing names, plot elements.

You read it first.

It may be that you need to take some time out after completing a draft so that you are reading your creation with new eyes. Your mind must be clear, uncluttered. So relax. Have a cup of green tea, go for a walk in the park. Listen to the Corrs crooning on your ipod. Do you what you do to relax...and energised.

And then when you return, you'll be mentally prepared. If you have to change the place you normally write in to reach the zone then do so.

Rreading aloud, separating the text from yourself and hearing it captured in the air always gives a certain objectivity. And as you read note things down - unless you are the world's greatest memory monkey that does tricks as soon as the organ begins to grind, remembering a hundred zillion facts at the drop of a coin.

Otherwise, write.

Record your thougths.

There are different levels in editing and I personally believe you must begin with the macro-level: structure, subject, choice of characters, themes. So when you sit down to read that first draft, look out for those things. Do not try and thrust them all into your mind. It is not possible to focus on all those elements simultaneously.

This is one approach.

1. Read for your first impression. What does the reader in you make of it?

2. Highlight parts you like, highlight parts you don't.

3. Notice and note any gaps in the draft, transitions that are missing, inconsistencies.

4. Determine if the pace of what you have written is "rising" throughout. Where does the slope slip and descend where does it level, where does it rise again?

5. Are any characters banal? Are any characters vivid, so alive they could burst off the page? Determine the gaps, identify the strong points.

6. "Hey, does the dialogue work?" He asked, "or is it stilted?"

7. Are the style and tone consistent. Is your comedy descending into farce? Is magical realism transorming into science fiction?

8. Are you telling or showing the story?

9. Is the story still yours to tell?

When you begin editing, don't berate yourself for bad spelling, bad grammar. Those things come much later at the micro-level. You need to get the structure right first. Find the right characters. Otherwise you'll never finish as you'll be seeking perfection from the first stab of the keyboard key, from the first scratch of pen on paper.

Take the analogy of a house. If you move into a new place, you check that your new home sis tructurally sound. You do the main jobs first: the plumbing, the electrics, knock down the walls, move the stairs, put in a new bathroom, a new kitchen. Then you decorate. Be patient.

So return to you manuscript. Look at it with fresh eyes and listen with both ears. Print out the draft, read it off the screen, take your laptop to the park, go and sit in the library. Do whatever you need to do and just edit.

Just edit.

ZHZ. 

The Ear vs The Eye

There is something the ear can discern that the eye cannot. It is rarely mentioned, but it is there like a speck of dust in the corner of your eye...yes, there it is...it is an edge, in fact it is THE edge the ear has over the eye. It is rhythm.

One of the best techniques to aid anyone to write is to read your work aloud. Even better to let someone else read it for you. When the sound of the text that you have written expands and explodes and rumbles in your eardrums and you hear the voices of the characters you created, at that big bang moment they become separate from you, independent, alive. And you hear the gaps, the sighs of the sirens and the groans of the slaves, the waves lashing the rocks, the crunch of a boot on gravel, the weeping of the widow and the laughter of the child. You hear it all. And you know from rhythm alone that is just does not sound right.

Or it does.

The ear is a magical thing. Use it. Perhaps you need to take time out and away from your friends and family so that they do not think that in your solitude you finally succumbed to madness, the kind that comes from looking at the sheer whiteness of the blank page. It is not madness to listen to your words lifted from the page and given life through sound. It is essential.

The eye jerks from side to side and sometimes skips letters and makes up others. It is easily misled. Illusion rules the land where the one eyed man is king. So release those sounds and make your characters real, slip away into the land of sound where even silence carries significance and find your own voice, your own rhythm.

ZHZ. 

Writing the Novel: The End in Mind

If your dream is to be a novelist then begin with the end in mind.

And what is the end? It is this: the book in your hand, the book on the shelf. That is the end you are working towards. What else?

Once you have that, no matter what happens to impede you, to slow you down, if you can firmly hold on to that image of the book in your hand then you have leaped from the realm of possibility to the realm of reality. The human mind does not make the distinction between that which is imagined and that which is physically real.

If you can, make a short trip to your local library and find the spot on the shelves where your book would be if it were published. Make that place your special place, because one day it will hold your name.

ZHZ. 

Editing: Part 1

I have no doubt, that most writing is in fact, editing and re-writing.

Some believe that a short-story, novel, play, poem just pour out onto the page, fully clothed, ready to leap into our imagination. This isn't true. Never was. Until AI systems take over the world and replace us, I think we can safely assume it will remain this way.
So why is it so important to state the obvious?

It is about the mindset required to craft a good piece of writing.

No writer will produce a piece of work ready for publication on the very first go. So why berate yourself if after re-reading the piece you have written you find that it does not match your lofty expectations? Swallow a chill pill, take some time out and have another go.

There are different levels when it comes to editing and re-writing. Without boring you with banality of the science of writing, I think they fall into the following:

Macro and micro. In general, the macro-level is about structure, the choice of subject and so on. Micro is about grammar, spelling. It is these very different perspectives, the forest and the trees, the big and the small that lies at the heart of re-writing and editing.

Nothing is irredeemable, nothing that cannot be improved upon. Whether a piece of writing is worth spending time over…now that is a good question. Only you can answer that. You have one life, but possibly many attempts within you. Do not squander those chances, but also do not give into the demons of despair who urge you to give up. Those demons may be human, or they may be blaring their hoots of derision inside your head. Why waste time listening to them when you could be re-writing your masterpiece?

Good luck.

ZHZ. 

Where do Characters Come From? OR How to Invite a Character to Tea.

I often get asked "Where do you get your characters from?" "Was he based on a real person?" "Does she really exist?" "Is this character based on you?"

I guess what I am really being asked is not where I retrieved and/or created the characters in my stories, but where the questioner can find their own characters...

Now we can analyse what makes a character seem so alive, so special, larger than life, real, but would that analysis lead to a believable character? 

I remember studying poetry at school, taking each line, each shot of silence and cutting it into finer and finer bits and ultimately it was all rather arbitrary and somehow pointless. Did we create a new living thing out of cutting a poem into pieces? I think not.

So where do characters come from? Well, the same place dreams come from, the same place our stories come from. Us. All of us. As for freeing them from the bounds of our imagination and releasing them on to the page so that they are worthy of reading, now that's something totally different...

Let me tell you about one way that I get to know my characters: I invite them to tea.

Yes, sounds strange, I know. I actually imagine what it would be like to have them join me for a hot cup of chaa. It produces a real visceral sense of how well you know some one by the way they sit down, look around, look at you, sip their tea, in slow sips or sharp burning intakes of breath. 

Or 

I invite them to dinner with a group of friends (in my head of course), friends whom I know really well and I imagine how the character would react. Will they be talkative? Will they be seething and silent? Will they glare at the walls? Will they be curious, flirtatious? What?

Once a character is 'real' in my head I can pretty much invite them anywhere. It's like having an imaginary friend all of my own.

I find this little exercise of the imagination sets the mind free to push the boundaries in terms of the reality that revolves around a character and how the character in turn nudges reality back. When a character becomes that real to you it does not matter where they go, whether it is in a poem or a short story or a novella or a novel or a script or a screenplay...they are so real that they can walk and run anywhere they please. You can guess exactly what they are going to say and and do. 

That is when a character is no longer a character. They are a living breathing human being, one composed of words, but real as the people who inhabit our imagination. Funny thing is that long after you and I have gone, those words will still be around. It is odd how something which was once lifeless can become immortal.

ZHZ. 

Do You Have a Story to Tell?

Everything around us is a living narrative, a tapestry of tales. This is how we express the meaning of our lives and give them shape, meaning, a pattern, coherence, voice. There's this saying - you've probably heard it: "everyone's got a novel in them". But do we all have a novel inside us? A story to spin?

Oh yes, I think we do.

Whether or not that novel is worth reading - or writing - is a different question.

Is there really a story inside you? You doubt it?

Then let me ask you another question...do you dream? Of course you do. However, there are many who'd swear they never do, never have and never will. It's truer to say that they don't remember their dreams.

Now, I find when people sigh and say they could never write a novel or pen a short-story they fall into different schools of fish:

1. They lack confidence in themselves
2. They go blank at the thought of writing something
3. What they wish to pen is very, very private
4. They fear rejection
5. They fear success
6. They've never really thought about it
7. They have too many ideas - they don't know which one to choose
8. The idea of writing is a daunting one - it just isn't them
9. They think it would take too much of their time
10. They tried before and failed
11. They tried before and succeeded, but don't think they can do it again...

and so on.

I've got another question for you: which is your barrier, obstacle, self-limiting belief?

Our lives are about learning and discovering truths about ourselves and becoming more than we were and becoming what we want to be.

I don't doubt for an instant that there are potentially billions of writers out there. There are so many stories that are unheard, unknown, hidden, secret - I'd love to read some of those narratives and discover something I never did and perhaps in doing so I'll determine something about myself...and maybe that's why I want to see more new writing from new authors...everything we read is an echo of ourselves and perhaps by reading something totally new we can find something that we could not have discovered otherwise.

ZHZ. 

Writer's Block

Today, someone asked me what I do when I get writer's block. It was an innocent enough question, but it was mooted on the assumption that I get writer's block. I don't, or rather, I prefer not think so. I don't want to believe that an external force dictates whether or not I will write.

That said, if you do suffer from writer's block then I believe, deeply, that if you can define what is holding back the flow of words then you can resolve it, get round it, climb over, demolish it. 

Let me qualify what I mean:

- Does a character lack life?
- Does the plot feel, well, wrong?
- Do sentences lack vigour and vitality?
- Do you lack time to write? Is there too much going on around you?
- Do you feel down?

You see, if you put words to how and what you feel, invariably you will determine the solution by yourself. As soon as you name something, you confine it, master it.

For some writers, it's about getting into the "zone", releasing the muse and they do that by "free-writing", by wildly arranging words and paragraphs to get the words flowing...for others, it's about walking along a beach and breathing in sea air...for others, it's a nice cuppa in a Kit-Kat moment...whatever, it is, it works for them.

If you need more help on how to get "unstuck" then I suggest you try out some of the exercises I've written:

What's your Thinking Style?
Are you a Visual Thinker?
Are you Auditory?

Writer's Block; I don't know if it exists or not. As far as I'm concerned it's like the mythical isle of Atlantis. It makes for great story-telling.

ZHZ.