Summer Hiatus: R&R (Reading and Refreshment)

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Summer is here. Ah! There’s nothing quite like the feel of warm sun on your face at last.

I’m unplugging a bit for the coming months. The writing experiments are on hiatus until the autumn. But over the summer you might like to do some active reading. Maybe put your writing to one side for now, and use this as the chance to explore your genre. Look out bestsellers in your field, and maybe read some of the classics too. Read far and wide too: read works in other genres, maybe finding examples of things you can bring across to your own work. Read like a writer (Reading Like A Writer by Francine Prose might be helpful for this), and understand what makes the writing tick. Soak up these books, and free yourself of thinking about your own work; you’ll return to it the stronger later on, and it’s likely that good ideas will emerge for you anyway.

Good writing can’t be rushed, but needs to percolate. Slow down. (If you are one of those restless types, just console yourself that summers are quiet in publishing anyway.) Okay, I’m lazy, but trying too hard can make writing feel as if it’s, um, trying too hard, and what’s probably more important is possessing ease: an ease of voice, a natural balance in the writing. Perhaps set a vague long-term goal, if you really have to, but meanwhile rest in the moment and let your sensibility grow through becoming a better reader, a reader more useful to your own writing.

Most of all, have fun. Don’t task yourself too hard: no To Do lists of books you must read, but simply a stack on the bedside table to dip into, or on standby on your ereader. (Yes, relaxing can be the hardest task of all for some people.)

And beyond that, take a break from some of the noise (as well as creating it?). A holiday from Facebook? A little less Twitter? Yes, you know it makes sense. (Do 24% of British women really check their pages at least ten times a day, as I read this morning? I think I used to be a British woman. Maybe two British women, even three.) We don’t need Likes this summer. Just licks of a nice ice lolly, time with friends and family, trips to magical places, and good food and good books.

My own summer reading recommendations include the novel The Round House, by Louise Erdrich. It’s one of those books that really makes me aware of how much I love great American writers writing great American stories. It has a brilliant first chapter that establishes everything we need to know about the characters, setting, and dramatic situation that will lead us into a compelling story. (When you’re ready to submit your own work to an agent or publisher, read that first chapter and ask yourself if you’re close to achieving what’s accomplished there; if you can say yes, you must be in with a chance.)

And if you’ve not yet read George R.R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire, it’s about time. Perfect summer reading.

Enjoy the summer.

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Friday Writing Experiment No. 30: Wardrobe Masters and Mistresses

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A featurette in today’s Guardian talks about the clothes characters wear, especially in crime fiction and thrillers: tweed, pipes, spectacles, trenchcoats, Faroese sweaters. Clothes make the man and woman, and clothes can also be great tools for revealing characters. You can even have some fun with the cliches.

This week, create a wardrobe for a character of your own. You could do this as a complete catalogue of a wardrobe or a dressing room, or it could be a simple pen portrait. Perhaps you can even put this character into some scene with action that somehow involves the clothes they wear. Go to town; think about brands or no-brands and fabrics and colours. Undress. Put on another outfit. Fetishise. Take them shopping. Dress them up for a day at work, or an interview, or a night out. Dress them to impress, or for seduction. (Always impressing the reader, always seducing the reader.)

As always, be concrete and specific.

A variation of this might be to do a makeover for a character you’re already working with. See how a new outfit might bring fresh perspective or adventures for him or her.

 

Friday Writing Experiment No. 29: Great Annotations

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A fascinating article called ‘Writers’ Second Thoughts’ in today’s Financial Times describes a remarkable auction that’s being organised by rare book dealer Rick Gekoski on behalf of English PEN:

J.K. Rowling is one of more than 50 authors who have agreed, at his invitation, to go back to a first edition of one of their books and annotate it at will. However unlikely it sounds, that a writer would revisit a work he or she finished decades ago and risk uncovering its errors, to say nothing of the potential agony of rereading a younger self, this is exactly what they have done. The resulting copies, with their anecdotal scribbles, deleted paragraphs and occasional exclamations of self-loathing, are to be auctioned at Sotheby’s next month in aid of the writers’ charity English PEN, which defends the rights of writers and readers and promotes freedom of expression around the world.

The list reads like a roll call of major British, Irish and Commonwealth authors from the past half-century, including 16 Booker prize winners and plenty more shortlisters, two Nobel laureates and winners of other literary gongs. Seeing the spines all lined up on a shelf at Sotheby’s is like seeing a collection of paintings made by a collector with a judicious eye: Julian Barnes, Seamus Heaney, Tom Stoppard, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Bennett, John Banville, Joanna Trollope, P.D. James, Howard Jacobson, Philip Pullman, Nick Hornby, Frederick Forsyth, Colm Toíbín, Helen Fielding, Nadine Gordimer, Graham Swift and many more.

Do read the original article in full; I imagine many writers, readers, and editors will want to read some of these annotated texts, where the great and the good offer insights into their own creative process and maybe even have second thoughts about what got into print first time out. The doodles alone would be fun. You can get glimpses of some of the pages at the auction’s website: First Editions, Second Thoughts.

It also makes me think how in the age of ebooks it’s going to be easier to produce director’s cuts and variant editions, possibly all bundled into one text.

In this week’s writing experiment, let’s reread our younger selves. Take a piece of writing from your past – probably not from something you’re currently actively working on, but something older. If you’ve published work before, that might be particularly relevant, as it will force you to face down any atoms of self-loathing, or perhaps allow you to give yourself a pat on the back.

Then go to town with your own annotations. Delete, insert, cut final sentences (I once did this for a story of mine at proof stage, and this was a story that I’d had kicking around relatively unedited for a couple of years, and I know the story gained much from it). Add rewrites in the margins, rewrite on the line. Scribble, doodle, illuminate initial capitals, correct typos or continuity errors (oops). Add notes of commentary, explain a point of origin for a particular image, or just say where and when you were when you got the idea for that piece. Use Track Changes and Comments, if you’re working in Word, or simply find your favourite pen and fill it with your favourite colour of ink (mine: Levenger’s Always Greener). If you are feeling bold, you could even write your former self an editorial memo offering deeper suggestions. Maybe this could lead into an entirely new work …

If you can, share the results with a reader of the original text.

Also support the work of PEN!

Updated 18 May 2013: The Guardian has a gallery with close-ups of what seem to be most of the annotations. As I type this, the Lynne Truss selection is labelled with a misspelling of her name (happens to me all the time …).

Friday Writing Experiment No. 28: Plantings

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It’s that time of year (maybe it’s been that time of year for a while where you are …) when gardens are finally showing some colour: pink hyacinths, red maples, white hydrangeas, purple pansies, and green leaves shooting up where there was nothing a couple of days before (I’ve had plenty of yellow daffodils the past few weeks, but little else other than green grass and foliage).

Write something about a plant – tree, flower, shrub, weed, or some other type of flora – and how it somehow interacts with someone or something else.

If you like, do a bit of research to get you started, or to take you deeper.

Alternatively, introduce a plant into something you’re already writing in order to give it more life.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 27: My Own Private Heidi

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In a blog post on the idea of Right Speech yesterday, I mentioned a recent article by Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wondered why the many ‘searing indictments of Thatcher’s Britain’ failed really to undermine her; Margaret Thatcher was, after all, brought down by her own people.

So what should an artist do, he asked? I’ll repeat an anecdote I quoted from Boyce:

A few years ago I was interviewing a young woman who had been a victim of ethnic cleansing. Abducted as a child, she’d been raised inside a cold, regulated, racially defined institution. But she’d grown up to be an articulate, engaging advocate for refugees. At the end of our meeting, I asked her how she had known – growing up in such an unloving environment – that life could be more. “I read a book,” she said. What book? A searing indictment of Thatcher’s Britain? “Heidi.”

There is nothing more subversive than a definition of happiness, a vision of how things could be better.

What’s your Heidi? This week, write something that brings to life your own vision of how things could be better. Inhabit a concrete setting with people performing specific actions that embody some idea of how the world can be a better place.

Want a spur or inspiration? In a week when violence and destruction have been in the news, and when lawmakers have had little success in passing measures to try to contain some of that violence, I’m thinking of Simon Armitage’s super millennium poem Killing Time, and the sequence devoted to his take on what happened at Columbine High School in April 1999.

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