Writing
Character Building
They were talking about writer’s notebooks on Radio 3’s Freethinking – Writers and their notebooks (21st May 2014)
Now, I love notebooks. In fact I love all stationery (apart from hole punches which, to my mind, are too Stalinist to count as proper stationery) Everything else, however, excites me – from fountain pens to pencils, from foolscap to stencils. Perhaps it’s because I can sense the budding creativity each item might help bring forth. Or, perhaps, I’m just weird.
My love reaches its fetishistic peak with notebooks. Spiral-spined, leather bound, plain, lined, squared, A5, A4, thick or thin papered. It doesn’t matter, they are all potential receptacles for my literary lust.
Shudder.
Anyway, part of the programme was a short interview with David Mitchell (the author of Cloud Atlas, not the ranting comedian) and he spoke about some of the things he kept in his notebooks.
Some of the previous guests interviewed had confessed to lists of random things or conversation snippets or brief descriptions of unusual objects or scenes. All of these things are predictable and useful. I’ve done the same and enjoy flicking through an old notebook, trying to work out how the flotsam and jetsam of thought might have fitted together when I was jotting it all down.
But David Mitchell described an entirely original (to me) use for his notebooks. He writes letters in them. Fictional letters to and from the characters appearing in his current work in progress. He said it helps him get under the skin of the person he’s imagining. Obviously, from the content of the letters, he can learn explicit things about them. But he can also imply more subtle information from the style, the vocabulary, the tone.
I think this is a brilliant idea which I am going to steal. It could lead to truly interesting revelations about all sorts of people. I can write any letter, asking any question to any character at any point – before, during or after the events in my novel. Their letter back surely can only make them richer and more vivid in my mind’s eye.
One of the other tips for writing I’ve frequently heard is: “just write rubbish if you’re stuck”. There are various versions of this. A famous author, whose name I have forgotten, wrote that when she stumbled into a Writer’s Block she’d drink some gin, write two pages of nonsense and go to sleep. Upon waking she would find the Block behind her. Other luminaries have professed to writing a few hundred words of waffle first thing just to get the juices flowing, like an athlete limbering up before a race. I’ve always liked the idea, but found it impossible to find rubbish to write about. I’d end up spending half an hour trying to decide what to write and end up having to hurdle two Writer’s Blocks instead of one…
But this is perfect.
I do declare that from this day on I shall write a letter to or from one of my own characters. This time next month I shall post some of the 30 letters I’ll have written…
From Elation to Depression in 560 Characters
I am too disappointed today.
And I’m not using the modern version of “too” which seems to means “very”. I mean I am more disappointed than I should be and I can see the clouds of depression rolling in. Which is stupid.
I know it’s stupid and although that doesn’t relieve the disappointment it might, just might, help me keep things in perspective. As writing this moaning post might…
“Why are you disappointed?” I hear my zeros of fans cry. “Have you had some terrible news?”
“Yes.” I moan. “I haven’t been shortlisted for a competition I entered.”
“Which competition was this?”
“I’m glad you asked… It was the Write-a-thon for Nibfest. I had to write 5000 words using a prescribed opening line as my starting point. Which I did and was really pleased with my effort.”
“Oooooo.” Nobody says. “Well that doesn’t sound fair. You should’ve automatically won…”
“It’s not fair! And I worked myself into a froth of excitement by reading too much into the tweets leading up to the announcement of the result. Especially this one:”
“Ooooo. That bit where it says “time-bending fantasy” could be talking about your story.”
“I know!”
That’s exactly what I thought. And I congratulated myself on impressing the judges with my talent and daydreamed my way all the way to winning the lunch. And securing Laetitia Rutherford as my agent. And getting a book deal. And buying an island…
Then we went and saw Godzilla at the cinema… And even that 300 metre monster could not stop me thinking about the lunch I’d won.
I’d turned my phone off for the cinema. I managed to wait at least four seconds between the credits rolling and checking Twitter for any more updates. And then, slowly, over the course of three tweets, my absolute elation dissolved into abject disbelief.
So, heartfelt congratulations to @FinlaysonPalmer, @KMcCnoo (twitter doesn’t seem to know who this is, so perhaps it’s actually a misspelling of @mythagowood – me!) @Topkitty, @EssJayBaxter, @CassieLeedham, Jenny Butler-Smith and Jack O’Donnell.
In my last post I wrote that one of the reasons for this site was “To motivate myself by transforming each rejection from a personal slight into a mere statistic.” Although this seems to be much more than a statistic I’m beginning to believe in my previous wisdom. This is, after all, only the second writing competition I’ve entered and The Writing Dead will only be the third and if I don’t win that I’ll do some more…
Perseverance is the key.
To prove that success is possible here are the thoughts of a couple of the shortlistees…
The State of the Thing
There were a number of reasons that I started to keep this blog:
- To practice this writing thing as often as possible; to give me an outlet where I didn’t need to concentrate on characterisation or plots.
- To record and document my progress towards getting published, as a history for me and any other aspiring author.
- To motivate myself by transforming each rejection from a personal slight into a mere statistic.
Recently, I’ve been busy.
“That’s no excuse. Writers write. You can’t publish a blank sheet of paper.”
I know. I know. I know.
But I have been busy. And I’ve still been fairly productive in the writing department, so shut your face.
I’ve now had a soul destroying 29 rejections for “The Clockwork Butterfly” and 3 submissions have timed out following an email asking me to assume the worst after a period of time. The last rejection I got was 10 days ago and so I’m beginning to assume the worst for the rest of them as well seeing as though the longest one has been out there for 91 days now…
Still. Nevermind. I’ve almost got Charlie’s Worries to a point where I can start submitting it, so I’ll be able to go through the whole heart rending process again. (It really helps that it’s only about 30,000 words long, rather than 150,000)
I entered Hot Key Unlocked and managed to write about 2,000 relevant words, following the brief laid out by the rules of the competition. Although I’d been thinking a lot about the plot I only put fingers to keyboard on the Sunday it had to be submitted. Of course, I knew I wouldn’t win. I’ve never written anything sexy or spicy before and found it hard to find the balance I wanted. In the end, though, I was pleased with what I produced and as the days went by I’d fooled myself into thinking that I might win.
I didn’t.
And I was disproportionately disappointed by this. After a day or so, after realising that I’d actually entered it to test my focus, rather than become the new Barbara Cartland (or more probably Dame Sally Markham) , I got things back into perspective and saw it for what it was: a good exercise and excellent writing practice.
Next up is NaNoWriMo and I’ve got a nicely absurd idea for this. I need to remember that this is another exercise to work my writing muscle and not necessarily an attempt to create a novel fit for publication. I want to try and have fun with it.
So, by the end of November I should be ready to start my next project “The Motley Life of Edison Swift”
Undisciplined Writing
For me, one of the hardest things about writing a story is keeping the plot under control.
Most authors seem to be able to construct a nice, orderly line which connects each scene and pushes the plot sensibly towards its resolution. When I try to do it, I feel like I’m wrestling with an uncooperative python. Whole new characters and concepts erupt from the page like pirates, hijacking my meticulously planned narrative and steering it wildly off course.
“Aha! Simon-lad! You weren’t be expectin’ a dragon to raise its head there now, were ye?” This literary usurper even has a pirate voice.
“No. Of course not. There aren’t any dragons in this story. It’s about an accountant.”
“There be dragons now! Deal with it, landlubber.”
This can be fun and I know it’s led to some good ideas – I sometimes feel like I’m discovering the story for the first time, rather than distilling the thoughts that have been clogging me up all day.
But it means that I don’t tell the exact story that I set out to tell.
I tried to write “The Clockwork Butterfly” as a simple, linear (although obviously incredibly exciting) fantasy story. Six years later it turns out that it includes a massively complex time travelling paradox (and Vikings and vuryl and the Carnival Umbretico) that will require at least seven more huge tomes to explain. It certainly, to my mind, makes the novel richer and more interesting, but it bears only passing resemblance to what I imagined when I started.
“Charlie’s Worries” seems to be taking a similar diversion at the moment too. I was thinking about this problem yesterday morning and I decided that I would use the upcoming NaNoWriMo to exercise my focussing muscle. After a few moments thought though I realised that this wouldn’t be appropriate really. NaNoWriMo celebrates the wild flights of fancy that come and encourages the writer to be as free as possible. It would be counter-productive to impose any self-imposed constraints.
So I shrugged and forgot about it for a bit.
Later, while trying to match various agents with their twitter accounts, I came across a link to Hot Key Unlocked. A writing competition sort of thing? A competition where I’m given a strict outline to work to? A competition that is absolutely what I would not usually write?
This is surely too much of a coincidence. This is the perfect opportunity to test my focus. To write the first 2,000 words of a 20,000 word novella about romance and love and sexy stuff will test me to the limit.
It’s got to be submitted by 13th October. So I’m going to give it a go.
How can I “write what I know” when nothing interesting happens to me?
When I was younger, I desperately wanted to go to Narnia.
I had a remarkably specific theory that my adventure would begin in a shop. So, whenever I went shopping with my mum, I would spend most of the time rooting around each shop trying to find a magic wormhole. Now I’m more grown up I can see that this might have been distracting or perhaps even slightly annoying, but at the time I was utterly convinced that one day I would be successful.
I wasn’t.
As I got older and the seventies turned into the eighties, I began to resent the ordinariness of the time that we lived in. In days of yore there were battles to be won, dragons to be slain and damsels to be rescued. In the future men would travel to the stars where there would be space battles to be won, aliens to be disintegrated and space maidens to be rescued.
But now? Now, all we had was a brook, a disused railway line and a forest. But where was the excitement in those? We whiled away our time catching sticklebacks or wading as far up or down stream as our inadequate wellies would allow. We followed the railway line to its ends, scurrying through the hostile areas ruled by the teenagers from the “Scotch” estate. And we’d lose ourselves for hours in the dark recesses of the acres of woodland. But it wasn’t an adventure. You couldn’t write a book about it.
The eighties became the nineties. I went to university and began the long project of working out how women work. A project doomed to failure as I loved and lost and loved again. My heart was broken a few times and then finally fixed when I met the love of my life. I lived on the breadline. Sometimes using change from WH Smith vouchers to buy some food and I joined a startup company that might have changed the way computer games are written. But none of this was worth writing about.
And then in the noughties I became a husband and a father. I watched a tiny human develop from vomit producing helplessness into belligerent disdain. We bought a house and I lay awake worrying about the size of my mortgage and how my careless sarcasm might affect the children sleeping in the rooms across the landing.
More recently, my better half has had professional injustices thrust upon her. She’s fought against despair more bravely than I certainly would and yet she has been sorely wounded. This is my time to shine. I can be a hero by being gentle and kind and just loving her with all my heart. Here are different battles to be fought and more complex dragons to be slain. And literally a beautiful damsel in distress to be rescued.
I never quite realised how many stories there were.
Where should I start?
Is “Huge” bigger than “Massive”?
One of my friends at work (and by friend I mean annoying colleague) gave me some advice about writing the other day. He basically said that good writing didn’t repeat the same word over and over again when referring to the same thing. It was better to trawl through a thesaurus for another word that had a similar meaning, rather than repeat one he’d used before.
For example:
The sailor gazed up at the colossal ship. He watched the mariners aboard the gigantic vessel, busying themselves with seafaring duties. The enormous craft’s massive masts soared high above them, immense sails, huge against the midday sun.
I have resisted the urge to punch his face until now, but I can feel my ire stirring again.
Stephen King says in his book On Writing that the aspiring writer should never use a thesaurus. Ever. I may be misquoting him, but I think he means that your writing should flow from your own personal font of words, not contaminated by someone else’s subjective list.
Sometimes I (to my eternal shame and probable literary damnation) do use a thesaurus. It occasionally gives me the inspiration I need when I’m searching for just the right word or phrase to express my exact meaning.
But it has to be used wisely.
Go to thesaurus.com and look up Majestic. You’ll find a marvellous list of synonyms from august to superb. Click on Lofty and you’ll link through to another list containing Tall. Click that to find Lanky. And that to find Meagre.
So, Majestic sort of means Lofty, which sort of means Tall which sort of means Lanky which sort of means Meagre.
How can this be? How can a word sort of mean something that sort of means its opposite?
Well, the answer is that most thesauruses (thesauri?) are completely context-free. Or, to put it another way, they are only one-dimensional.
“A one-dimensional thesaurus?” I hear you say. “Have you gone completely bonkers? Are you suggesting that we should have a two-dimensional one?”
Well, sort of. Perhaps a multi-dimensional thesaurus would be more appropriate. Or better still, because it sounds more scientific and less science fictiony, an n-vectored thesaurus.
“I give up.” You say. ” I’m a writer, not a nerd and this is changing into a geekfest.”
“Don’t go!” I plead. “I promise not to use n-vectored again.”
What I’m trying to say is that a thesaurus doesn’t understand the context of the word you’re looking up.
I’m not only talking about the fact that words can have many different meanings. In the sentence “Time flies like an arrow while fruit flies like a banana”, both “flies” and “like” mean two different things. “Like” means both “similar to” and “enjoy”; “flies” means both “the act of flying” and “those pesky, six-legged things that do the flying thing”.
What I want to draw attention to is the fact that to an adept reader most words convey more information than merely their defined meaning.
Mary stood, unaccompanied, at the orphanage door.
To me, there is little to infer from “unaccompanied” other than the fact that she’s the only person there. It’s a very matter-of-fact word that seems to hold very little emotion.
Mary stood, alone, at the orphanage door.
Now we start to get subjective. I think there is slightly more pathos in this sentence. She’s not milking the scene, but alone probably pulls on the reader’s own memories of feeling alone rather than being unaccompanied.
Mary stood, forlorn, at the orphanage door.
Now, forlorn’s main dictionary definition is “desolate or dreary” and so the reader is forced to assume that while Mary might be on her own, she is definitely sad. And this is what I mean by vectors of meaning. Forlorn has (at least) two in this context. “Desolate and dreary” and “Unaccompanied”
Mary stood, forsaken, at the orphanage door.
This implies someone has left her alone there, which adds a third vector. I would also read a level of sadness into it too. But is it less sad, or more sad than “forlorn”? What is the sadness vector’s magnitude?
This is a hugely subjective question that probably depends on all sorts of factors: what you’ve read, where you were brought up, general outlook on life. It could even be that you’ve seen one specific usage of that word that struck a particular chord with you. But the point is, changing one word for another that sort of means the same thing can change the emotional context of your writing.
It gets worse too.
Mary stood, isolated, at the orphanage door.
In this case Mary could be surrounded by people, but distinct from them for some reason.
All these words are synonyms for alone on thesaurus.com and each one serves a different, specific purpose.
So, beware!
Related articles
- 23 Quotes By Stephen King To Help You Become A Better Writer (stilettosandtequila.wordpress.com)
- Response to Stephen King’s “On Writing.” (laurengroenig.wordpress.com)
- Great Writing Tips from the King… Stephen That Is (writeofmind.wordpress.com)
- Using a Thesaurus: Good or Bad?: 2013 365 Challenge #229 (writermummy.wordpress.com)
I was listening to Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs where the guest was Daniel Kahneman He’s obviously a hugely intelligent chap, and he chose a thesaurus as the other book he would take to the island. The reason he gave was to play a game with it to while away those endless castaway days. And the game was to identify the differences between the words put forward as synonyms for each entry…
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