You can find more information via the links above or at Masterclasses. Classes earlier this year paid attention to the narrative content that makes up our stories: character, setting, plot. In these autumn classes we’ll think about ways to enhance how we tell those stories and bring them to rewarding conclusions. We’ll also talk about practical matters and real-world contexts: readers, feedback, revision, knowing when to be done. All classes are stand-alone and run live on Zoom from 6-7.30 pm London time.
2. As a taster for Perspective & Style later this month, I made a post on Substack about literary style: A Case of Style. I used Kent Haruf’s Our Souls At Night as a case study, and also talked about classic prose style, minimalism, maximalism, and what I call blockbuster style. (Ah! How I miss blockbuster style.)
3. Over the summer I also posted a few of my older stories and essays on Substack: Fiction & Essays. I’m not sure I got many new followers – I’m not sure I’m very good at that part of social media, and you do wonder if you’re just adding to the noise. (I never want to hear the word coach outside of the context of public transport again – and it’s part of my job!) But sharing my stories was more satisfying than I expected – it was good to connect my writing with various friends, colleagues and other people who, e.g., don’t have access to literary journals gathering dust on bookshelves in libraries in Colorado.
4. I’m no longer using Twitter. You can find me on Instagram for work and play (which currently is mostly gardening, even if that too feels a bit too much like work at the mo). And Substack too, of course. I guess Substack might replace some of what I’ve done here on my blog, but for now I’m keeping this going with occasional updates, and there’s an extensive archive of resources here too.
5. A quiet summer. I visited Kew Gardens frequently. Enjoy a couple of pics below of the Palm House and inside the Water Lily House. Also enjoy this lovely profile of Kew botanist and water lily specialist Carlos Magdalena from the New York Times: Risking His Own Extinction To Rescue The Rarest Of Flowers.
I’ve now posted details for my writing masterclasses for Autumn 2024 – see links below:
16 September, 6pm-7.30pm London, Zoom Perspective & Style Techniques to power your storytelling Elevate your writing with this masterclass investigating the craft of perspective. We’ll discover how persona, point of view, tense and narrative distance can make your storytelling brighter and bolder, and sample a range of literary styles to help you develop a distinctive voice.
14 October, 6pm-7.30pm London, Zoom Showing & Telling Weaving scene and narration into stories Find the balance of dramatic scene and narrative summary that’s required for any story. We’ll grasp the fundamentals of creating memorable scenes through action, dialogue, description and subtext, and understand the pitfalls that are best avoided. Using examples, we’ll also analyse ways to forge a strong voice for narrating your stories and captivating your readers from start to finish.
11 November, 6pm-7.30pm London, Zoom Genres & Readers What’s your genre and who are your readers? Explore the conventions of writing genres for the ways they help in shaping and pitching our stories. We’ll probe the intersection of taste and technique in various categories of writing, from page-turning commercial genres and upmarket fiction to literary works and experimental prose. We’ll also navigate feedback, survey the querying process with agents and editors, and discuss writers’ relationships with publishers and the book trade.
9 December 2024, 6pm-7.30pm London, Zoom Endings Resolutions, revising, and knowing when to stop Identify ways to give a story a memorable conclusion. We’ll review the strengths of open, closed and ambiguous endings, and inspect plot twists, grand finales and other means of creating emotional impact for the resolutions of our stories. We’ll also survey some practical strategies in revising and drafting, and discuss how to know when your story is truly done.
The masterclasses carry on from those held earlier this year – Beginnings, Voice, Character, Setting & Situation, Story & Plot, and Form & Structure – but they are designed to be stand-alone, so that writers can drop in for a refresher on specific topics. You’ll also be sent reading suggestions and writing exercises to try in advance, and after the class you’ll receive a workbook packed with craft notes, recommended resources, and writing experiments to try at your own pace. You can click the links above to book your space.
I’m planning to repeat these classes next year, along with new offerings. There are a number of regulars from all over the world, both experienced and beginning writers, and the spirit of the classes is convivial, good-humoured and energetic.
I’m no longer blogging so actively here, but you can find me on Instagram and I am starting to use Substack – among other things, I’m going to start sharing some of my short stories there, and in due course I’ll post about the craft of writing and publishing too. You can also sign up for my mailing list here.
Have a good summer! (Or winter if you’re dialling in from the southern hemisphere.) After a wet spring the garden is finally blooming and livening up.
Today’s the day that the days get longer than the nights, and the sun is shining, and my hyacinths are smelling sweetly, and it’s time to sow seeds, and all over social media people are celebrating the joys of spring.
But – and I don’t want to spoil the party – for some reason lately I can’t get away from the idea of suffering. Maybe it’s taking a meditation course, where we’re paying attention to such things. Or maybe it’s hearing yet another story of someone’s sickness, or reading another story about war. Or maybe I’ve just become a winter person. But just because the sun is shining a little longer today, it doesn’t mean suffering is going away. The cycle is just turning.
Also, I’ve come to feel suffering is probably a more substantial and authentic driver for story than conflict. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: conflict is a primary engine in certain sorts of stories (war stories, crime stories, etc.). And it probably features somewhere in most stories in some fashion or other. But conflict feels overemphasised as the core principle of stories, and especially in cookie-cutter creative writing classes. No wonder there’s so much conflict in the world! And no wonder so much writing feels a bit formulaic. Let’s defer to St Ursula (again):
Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing’ – Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft
So how does change take shape in our stories? Experiencing change – or impermanence – is, after all, one of those facts of life that Buddhist teachings say we can’t avoid, and change usually leads to joys as well as suffering, major and minor.
Buddhist teachings also acknowledge suffering as a basic fact of existence; sometimes the idea is translated in a less catastrophic and more everyday fashion as dissatisfaction.
Much suffering is attributed to three ‘root poisons’: hatred, greed, and ignorance. So if we want to avoid suffering for ourselves and others, how might we reduce their presence in our lives?
And to prove I’m not a complete misery-guts, let’s note that these afflictions also have opposite virtues identified as the ‘beneficial roots’ of joy: love, generosity, and understanding. By contrast, how might we nurture these qualities?
Because my default mode is to think about writing and stories, I began to consider the ways in which these descriptions of suffering offer story arcs for our characters, and used these for writing experiments in the masterclass on Character earlier this month.
So for hatred and its related qualities:
How might anger feature in the lives of characters?
How might they have been pushed away or rejected?
And what might they themselves push away or feel aversion towards?
What might they be running away from?
How might they be driven by fear?
How might self-loathing, shame or guilt drive their actions?
What pain have they experienced?
What wounds do they carry, and how might they have injured others?
And thinking about the opposite quality of love:
Where does their open-heartedness begin?
And where might it be challenged?
What acts of kindness do they perform?
And what sort of benevolence has been shown towards them?
How might they show compassion in relieving the suffering of others?
And how might compassion be shown towards them at times of need?
How do they show love to others, and how do others share love with them?
Thinking about the root poison of greed:
How might your characters be defined by attachment?
What are their desires, and how do they shape their stories?
And how are they affected by the desires of other people?
What do they crave or grab or grasp for?
And what do they cling on to?
And thinking about attachment in a more positive way: what might characters in fact gain from holding on to, or committing to?
It occurs to me that too often in less successful stories characters’ commitments or desires don’t really feel earned: so: how do characters earn whatever they gain or lose?
And by contrast, exploring the idea of nonattachment:
What is the role of generosity in their stories: what are they given, and what do they give to others?
What freedom might they enjoy in letting go or giving things away?
What sacrifices have they made in the past, and might they have to make in the future?
And to consider the root poison of ignorance:
How are your characters’ lives numbed out by what they don’t know?
How do misunderstandings cloud their relationships and experiences of the world?
How might your characters be deluded, or held back by illusions?
How might indifference or inertia shape their lives?
How might their stories be driven by doubt or uncertainty?
What foolish decisions do they make?
And on the flip side of understanding:
What might characters gain from knowing?
How might their stories be informed by their increased awareness of the world around them?
What do they come to appreciate?
I recently realised that hope doesn’t really feature in these reckonings of suffering! Which begs the questions:
What is the role of hope in the story?
And also its opposite: despair? Which can be crippling?
This gives me food for thought – about happy endings, which might be hoped for, but which in stories can so often feel trite: unearned or lazy, or simply not set up adequately. In fact, might the clinging and illusory aspects of hope stand in the way of characters seeing the simple joys in the world around them? And the happy ending is already here, and a character finally sees this.
‘There’s no place like home,’ says Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, whose journey takes her from doubt and ignorance to understanding and appreciation. It turns out her suffering and joy are actually bound up together in the same place – they just needed some unravelling and a bit of growing up, which of course required those adventures with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.
I don’t know that it’s necessary to use all of these frameworks: in fact, that might get overly complicated! But these are ideas that might help in developing clear narrative arcs or resolutions for what might at times be subtle storylines. The move from hatred to love, from attachment to freedom, from illusion to understanding: these are journeys that touch on all the big themes and deepen characterisation, and properly explored can bring depth to characterisation and storytelling. You could explore some of these questions in the manner of the notebook practice of Field Work or filling out a Character Questionnaire.
And a final question: how about doing a loving-kindness meditation for your characters: May you be free of suffering. What would that involve?
As I looked back on the books I read in 2023, I was given pause to think about how I read – in new ways and old.
First, I want to mention strategies I adopted in 2023 that made reading more fun. For example, I cast a drag queen as the central character of an Iris Murdoch novel, and that suddenly made a book about the strained mores of postwar poshos much more interesting.
Of perhaps greater consequence, I used the library probably more than I have since I was a kid. In recent years (decades), I’ve bought far too many books I don’t read and then I feel guilty about them lying in stacks all over the place unread – and that doesn’t include invisible stacks on my Kindle. The library is less risky in that way. I reserve a book at the library, and then wait a week or a month or two, and then it comes and I have three weeks to read it, and that creates a return deadline that focuses my mind. This pattern probably made me read more in 2023 than in many recent years.
Looking back over those books I did complete, though, I wonder if my reading was maybe a bit tame and I missed some of the indie treats and works in translation that I often enjoy most. No writer *really* captured me this year as, eg, Annie Ernaux or Lucia Berlin or Robin Wall Kimmerer have in years before. Could have been me! Perhaps that fixed loan period at the library focused my mind on finishing those sorts of bestsellery or reading groupy books that other readers request and are waiting to read. But even so: there were a lot of books I enjoyed there.
I also did a lot of sampling and skimming this year. If the opening wasn’t clicking, I’d scan the body of the book and skip to the end. Sometimes that’s enough, and library books make wider skimming possible. Skimming: ah! That’s a reading practice to embrace.
Breaking my wrist and having to do exercises three times a day also created extra reading time. (Exercises that allow reading: my kinda.) While the fracture was mending, I found it easier to read hardbacks (the library again) or my Kindle. Paperbacks with tight spines are more work to prop open.
So: I actually read (completed) far more books this year.
Though too: reading isn’t about productivity, is it? So much of my most significant reading is rereading.
I am never sure about the idea of ‘best’ books – best is so subjective, and often boring – so, most recent first, these are the books that probably left most of an impression on me in 2023:
I haven’t finished The Bee Sting yet, but on the basis of the first 400 pages, which have consumed me over the last couple of days, its immersive storytelling is a winner.
The standout is probably North Woods. Formally clever, imaginative, poignant. Actually, maybe something did capture my attention this year. I would like to reread it.
Special mention also to Kent Haruf, whose entire canon I completed/reread this year. I think it’s very good to reread your favourites, and he is one of the great prose stylists. Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me surprised me – a lot is missing there, but too I realised, duh, it’s one of those awful child star stories. Other notables were Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet, M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, Rebecca Smith’s Rural, Justin Torres’s Blackouts, and Catherine Lacey’s The Biography of X (the last two have a similar feel, and I note both were published by Granta in the UK). Yellowface was fun, and one of the more astute descriptions of publishing I’ve come across in fiction.
I should also mention this year’s ongoing read of Ovid’s Metamorphoses aka Long Ovid. Next we are making a start on the Bible. Our original plans were to read the Old Testament in 2024 and the New in 2025, but we’ve decided simply to finish Genesis in January, then take it from there. I was exposed to the Bible a lot as a child, but I’ve spent less time there as an adult, and I’m curious to see what I remember, and also to think about literary as well as broader influences.
I’m currently listening to My Name Is Barbra – wow, surely the audiobook of the year, all 48 hours of it. Apparently the audio has lots of asides that aren’t in the print/ebook edition. Barbra Streisand is a wonderful narrator.
A special mention also for Bobbie Louise Hawkins, whose story The Child was picked by George Saunders for his Story Club.
Elsewhere, I encountered a LOT of namedropping. Some of it was amusing, some of it was embarrassing, most of it was crammed into three literary memoirs. Writers! As my husband said of one: this reads like a bunch of Instagram captions.
Also elsewhere: some fantastic manuscripts. It’s a real honour to be trusted to read work in progress, and sometimes this raw and unpolished writing enjoys an energy that perhaps only unfinished work can achieve. Hmmm, something for the editor to ponder. I hope these books get finished and find homes with publishers, or get out into the world in some way.
In watching, off the top of my head I enjoyed: The Last of Us, Happy Valley, The Diplomat, Fisk, Wheel of Time, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Reservation Dogs, Slow Horses, and a fantastic series of documentaries on wild dogs. And I’m glad Succession is over. It was too glib for my taste, and reminded me that good writing is about more than lots of shiny surfaces and showing off on social media.
Perhaps the most memorable viewing was Timothy Snyder’s 24-part Yale University lecture series on YouTube on the making of modern Ukraine – which is so much more than that too: a specific take on empire and colonialism and domination and take, relevant in many contexts throughout the world. A camera in a lecture theatre with a brilliant mind communicating brilliantly: sometimes that’s all we need. The words.
Also on YouTube I have recently enjoyed the comedy of Matteo Lane and Bob the Drag Queen. Again, a camera and a sharp mind being quick and very funny: bare brick walls, and words. (Note for sheltered minds: some of these words are also very, um, bawdy.)
Didn’t see a lot of art, but the Mat Collishaw exhibition Petrichor at Kew Gardens is out of this world.
My last post of 2023, on the last day of the year. Look for me on Substack in 2024. And support your local library! I’ve even started recommending books for our library to add to its collection.
And before I go, another mention for my new Zoom masterclasses on writing – to paraphrase one of my musical icons, we start at the very beginning, with Beginnings, on 8 January.
Happy New Year! For some reason, I’m liking the numbers 2 0 2 4. Here’s a pic taken outside Birmingham’s fantastic new library.
In January I am starting live monthly masterclasses on Zoom. They are designed for writers who want to explore craft and process in writing while learning more about the business and culture of publishing.
Masterclasses will run live on Zoom for 90 minutes. They will include discussion on that month’s topics plus a brief writing exercise and a session of Q&A.
Every masterclass unit will also come with homework, e.g., brief preparatory readings as well as a writing exercise or two. This will be emailed to you a week before we meet on Zoom, and will be optional – you don’t need to have completed these activities to take part in the Zoom class.
Each unit will also come with a workbook that will be made available after the Zoom class. It will include notes on craft, resources, and reading suggestions, and most importantly will give you writing experiments and ideas to try out in your own work. The after-class mailing will also include any further recommendations that might arise from our class discussion.
Classes are live, so recordings will not be available if you can’t make them at their scheduled times.
Future masterclasses for 2024 will cover: setting and situation; story and plot; point of view and narration; showing and telling; structure and form; genre and readership; endings. A prose style intensive in the summer will look at: parts of speech; sentences and paragraphs; voice and style.
I’m also hoping to run pop-up Zoom workshops on topics such as tarot and writing, the Four Elements practice, and specific genres or techniques. I might run a workshop focused on specific pieces of writing and feedback later in the year too. More on all that anon.
You can drop into individual stand-alone classes, or you can take them in sequence across the year as a comprehensive foundation in the basic tools of good writing. Think of it as a craft course for an MFA or MA in writing – you might like to sign up for some of these classes as a supplement to the DIY MA in creative writing.
The emphasis of the masterclasses is very much on craft, though January’s unit on Beginnings will pay attention to matters of process too: getting started or restarted, and maintaining a writing practice. I’m a great advocate of drafting as well as exploratory practices such as Field Work. Later classes will draw more explicitly on my experience in publishing, e.g., when we talk about genre and readership. (Note: I use the word readership rather than market.)
To pace things, I’ll probably focus each Zoom class on maybe half a dozen key tips or takeaways, though the workbooks will offer resources that will let you take things deeper at your own pace.
Beginning as well as experienced writers are welcome. I find a mix in most of the classes I now teach, and I am always a big believer in cultivating Beginner’s Mind to keep writing fresh and authentic.
I’ve been teaching online in some form or other for twenty years – Naropa’s low-residency MFA was one of the pioneers in online learning. My teaching style is informal and enthusiastic, and I welcome questions. I want to be able to help writers wherever they are in their writing, empowering them with what they need to know: questioning myths, overcoming doubts, guiding writers to understanding. I’m particularly interested in cultivating intuitive methods in writing, and my classes often bring in contemplative practices, tarot, or other approaches that take us beyond the page.
Like many teachers I feel that reading is one of the best ways to grow your instincts in writing, and I often do some close reading in my classes, or invite writers to root around their own bookshelves. I frequently use Annie Proulx’s long short story Brokeback Mountain, as it contains a novel’s worth of story while being short enough to be read in one sitting by anyone coming to a workshop, and it covers so much that’s relevant to discussions of craft: character, setting, scene, structure, prose style – basically, everything. There will be plenty of other literary references too: bestsellers, prizewinners, fan favourites, cult classics, works across genres and forms.
Also in 2024: I plan to continue my discussions of craft and publishing on Substack. As a result, I’m not sure how frequently I shall be blogging here. I’m no longer sure about blogging! Interaction has rarely been as lively as Instagram or Twitter/X (though I’m not at all active on Twitter/X any longer, and I fear my Twitter self never really came to life anyway).
Substack has potential; I worry about information overload, with lots of writers writing about writing(!). But too that denotes serious intent, and community, plus a number of people I know are active there. And I was thrilled to pieces that George Saunders chose to discuss The Child by Bobbie Louise Hawkins for his Story Club on Substack this year. The interaction really enlightened me to the possibility for engagement on Substack.
Hope to see some of you there – or on Zoom! More information on the classes can be found here. Meanwhile, I’ll be maintaining this website, not least as a home for all of these writing experiments.
