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. 

What's Your Thinking Style? AUDITORY!

For those of you who think in sounds or words the problems you will face are vastly different from writers who are visual.

Now there are pros and cons to being an auditory thinker. Classically, most writers ARE auditory, but there are many successful writers who are also visual. Why is this so? Well, it goes something like this:

Auditory thinkers often have a "voice" talking in the back of their heads. By simply "tuning" in to this voice, writers who are auditory thinkers can splurge copious amounts of text. When they're in the groove there's no stopping them.

And therein lies the problem for most splurgers. They hate going back. They don't like editing or rewriting. They get bored and don't see - or hear - anything wrong with what they've written.

So these are some tips for those writers who are auditory:

1. Leave anything you've written to go fallow
2. When you go back read your work ALOUD - this somehow objectifies what you have written. You can often HEAR errors that you cannot with the eye alone.

Another issue that auditory writers have is one of structure. Auditory writers can produce great quantities of text and once "out" they often believe, incorrectly, that it's perfect. How can you overcome this?

1. Understand structure - think of it as the rising tempo of beats as you reach the climax/cliffhanger. The tension should be rising and the peak should be just before the end.
2. If you start with a bang then more bangs should follow!
3. Wait a few days or weeks and then go back and re-read what you've written and do it ALOUD! You'll be amazed by what you hear.
4. Find a good reader who gives great feedback - these people are the rarest people on earth! And listen to what they say, although whether you make changes must always be your choice!
5. Read about the art of writing fiction.
6. Keep writing
7. Keep rewriting

ZHZ. 

What's Your Thinking Style? VISUAL!

Writers who are visual often claim they have "writer's block". The reason is quite simple:

Visual people have hot and intense visual narratives running through their mind's eye: the moment they put a pen in their hand and touch nib to paper or fingers to keyboard keys their imagination flags. 

How is it possible to take a picture made up of a thousand words and start it with one word?

Actually, it's quite easy. You storyboard. That doesn't necessarily mean you draw something!

Take a story that you're writing, don't tell me what it is, I want you to go and play the story in your mind from beginning to end...

Go on, go and do it.

...

...

Have you done it yet?

...

Now go and do it again and I want you to count each "scene" that you have. If the story starts with a scene of a soldier returning home after the Iraq War call it the "Coming Home" Scene and that's No 1.

Go on...do it...

...
...

How many scenes do you have in total? One? A hundred?

The next step is simple.

For each scene, get a separate piece of paper (recycled of course!) and put the name of the scene and its number at the top.

Go on - do it!

...
...

Now that you have a series of scenes in order I want you take the next big step...ask questions...

Say we jump back to the first scene in "Coming Home" which is No 1.

• What is the character wearing?
• What colour are his eyes?
• What is he/she wearing?
• What expression is on his face?
• How is he/she walking?
• What colour is the door?

Get the drift?

You see, visual people arleady SEE the story. Once you start to ask questions, the scene becomes CLEARER and CLEARER.

Now go and ask all the questions for the first scene...
...
...

Done it?

Then do the next...

And the next...

What you are compiling is all the TEXT that you will need to tell your story.

...

Once you have done this, I can guarantee you that if I were to ask you to tell me the story it would simply ripple off your tongue. Now, isn't that magic!

ZHZ.