That Which Separates

I have often found that two things separate would-be writers from taking wing into the sky of words that they dream of.

They read little.
They write little.

Yet they expect an instant masterpiece to appear out of the nib of their favourite fountain pen.

I encounter such writers so often that I have fallen into the habit of asking them "who" they read and then I ask them "what" they are writing.

And the usual answer?

Hmmm.
Well.
Cough.
Ahem.

And then the million dollar phrase: "but X said that my writing was really good".

Enough.

This is all you have to do - and yes, you have to keep doing it.

1. Read.
2. Write.

Who said life wasn't simple? :-)

ZHZ

Descriptive Writing

How do you describe an object, an animal or person and using the alchemy of word transform it into something utterly real in the mind of another?

Use the precise word.
Use the apt word.
Use the senses: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory...
Use verbs of motion - even for something static...

And take your time. Look, really look. Wait, really wait. Observe and catch your observations on cool white paper cut with clean black lines of Indian ink...

And your words will rise form the page, organic and pulsating with the clenching tension of life. And then you'll sit back in your chair and gasp at your creation and wonder how you did it, how you spun letters onto a flat sheet of A4 and made the words...live.

ZHZ. 

A Writer's Life: 9th March 2009

I've completed the final draft of my current novel.

I shall rejoice for a heartbeat and then I will plunge back into its dark deep depths. To polish it.

Over the last few months I've read an enormous amount about the craft of forging fiction. I've learned some hard lessons along the way and I pause for a moment to tell you where I'm at so that it might help you too.

I hit a wall in December. The novel, T.S., is technically a difficult one and I was unhappy with the draft. I withdrew for a period and read as much as I could about fiction. I scrutinised the different opinions and then I removed the scum from the top.

And then I rewrote huge swathes of the novel to ensure the conflict was constantly rising and that the stakes grew from chapter to chapter. I wrote every day. I took my laptop everywhere, I plugged in my headphones and kept tapping away on the keyboard.

In the final draft I deleted almost 35,000 words. I currently have 75,000.

The scenes are lined up, the prose is good - but not perfect - and now comes the scalpel and the magnifying glass and the reading the text aloud. This is when I will polish it, shine it so bright they'll be able to see it from the moon.

And of course, what I hope to do is to create the 'uninterupted fictional dream'. Will it be easy to do? The question doesn't even matter to me.

ZHZ. 

The Aim of a Story

ALL writers must create what John Gardner termed the 'uninterrupted fictional dream'.

What does this mean?

When you pen a story you must aim to ensnare the reader in a waking dream so evocative that the reader cannot even break their gaze for a single second. The toast will burn, the kettle will boil and all the water evaporate, the final minute goal by Manchester United will be missed, the tile will fall from the roof and smash the window and they won't hear it...and all because what you wrought with words was so mesmeric that the reader couldn't look away.

Once you have this as your aim then you can ask the right question:

how do I do it?

Good question :)

ZHZ. 

Love & Hate

To make any story come alive you need characters that breathe, make you smile, irritate you, who throw their fists in the air and rant and rave.

So how do you do it, how do you make a character come alive?

There are so many methods, but one of the techniques I teach is called "Love and Hate".

Take any character...I don't need to know their d.o.b. or their height, in fact, I don't want any of the usual biography stuff. I simply want two things:

1. What does the character hate most in the world?
2. What does the character love most in the world?

Then go deeper:

1. What would your character most love to happen?
2. What would your character most hate to happen?

And then go deeper still:

1. What does your character want more than anything in the world - in fact they would die for it?
2. What does your character not want - and would die rather than have happen?

It is such a simple exercise, but it suddenly makes you realise the inner motives, the powerful compass that direct your character.

But what do you do once you've got this information?

Ah, that's the easy bit, believe it or not.

You start to take away the things the character loves and you start to make the things the character hates to happen...and depending on how you want your story to end, you will either make their deepest want come true at the end of the story - or the opposite.

So go back to the story you were writing, or look to your next.

Look at the character's Loves and Hates. Then make the bad stuff happen. Make the character struggle for the things they love and if you do this right you'll create the most important thing needed for any story to come alive.

Conflict.

ZHZ.