Category Archives: Writing Experiments

York Festival of Writing 2013: Mini-Course, Workshops, And Panel

by Andrew | 4 Comments

ChicagoHyphenationChart

Here are some links and notes arising from the mini-course and workshops I led at the Festival of Writing at the weekend.

 

THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF CREATIVITY

Carolyn Forche, ‘The Colonel’ – listen first, then read. Where is the FIRE?!

I used ‘I Remember’ in this mini-course, and it is also a starting point for a Friday Writing Experiment elsewhere on my site. I love this exercise for many reasons, and most of all for how it fosters a natural and easy (instinctive) voice within the writing. All credit to Joe Brainard and his own ‘I Remember’, now in its own very handsome UK edition.

If you’re curious about the tarot images that first inspired me, some pictures of the Rider-Waite deck are linked here. I suggest you look at the Aces of each of the suits/elements – Wands/Fire, Cups/Water, Swords/Air, and Pentacles/Earth – and if you want to go further maybe take a look at Queens, Kings, Knights, and Pages. I love these traditional images. Maybe you can think about ways in which they embody purpose, emotion, thinking, and the material world in powerful, symbolic ways. Maybe the pictures can even give you some ideas about how to use their respective elements in your writing.

One day I hope to write and publish a book on The Four Elements of Writing …

 

GENRE PANEL ON SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

You can find some examples of good cover letters at Mediabistro’s GalleyCat: ‘Successful Query Letters For Literary Agents’ (fiction) and ‘Agent Query Letters That Actually Worked For Nonfiction’. They are American, so be forgiving, and imaginative in how you need to adapt.

I can’t remember if they were mentioned at the panel, but do consider the resources and events of genre organisations such as the British Science Fiction Association, the British Fantasy Society, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. AboutSF has a ton of resources too.

Oh, and sorry if I sounded snippy about the idea of magical realism. I LOVE MAGICAL REALISM, and even write stuff that could fit in that vein sometimes. But this article touches on some of the issues of how it can be more problematic as a working definition for writers than it is as a literary term used by scholars. My biggest issue with magical realism: thinking about it can make the writing too intellectualised, or overthought. (But then overthinking can be a problem when world creation takes over many sf and fantasy stories.)

 

EDITING FOR WRITERS

Okay, I was a bit overambitious with this one, and I apologise for that. It was supposed to be half about what happens during editorial processes at a publisher, and half made up of tips on editing for writers, but I only really covered the first half.

The one thing I really want to emphasise: if you are self-publishing, please build these editorial stages into your workflow:

* structural editing (mostly: matters of shaping the content)
* copyediting (mostly: improving the text word by word and line by line)
* proofreading (quality control: eyeballing of the text in its final format)

I really believe in self-publishing. Really really really do. But there are too many editorially substandard self-published works out there. Yours must not be one of them.

And if you are aiming for someone else to publish you, you can probably (within reason) let their copyeditor worry about your hyphenation patterns and punctuation. We don’t want such anxieties to stifle your creativity. Just be sure your slip is not showing in such a way that you look sloppy or unprofessional.

Also:

* The University of Oxford Style Guide (more academic, of course, but covers many of the basics)
* George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (the full version)
* The Subversive Copy Editor blog (so you know who we fret over, so you shouldn’t)
* Philip Pullman on novels in the present tense (okay, never say never, but really really think through the limits of the present tense)
* In case you really care (and want to come into the Light): That vs Which
* David Gaughran, Let’s Get Digital (okay, he was teaching at York last weekend too, but if you are self-publishing and did not attend his classes you should probably take a look at his books – they are excellent)
* Some coverage of the Joan Collins trial:

Stephanie has a miscarriage and tells a doctor or nurse not to tell anyone, while she goes about trying to adopt a baby. In the meantime, she pretends for eight months to be pregnant. When the husband of her best friend sees her without her pregnancy disguise, she murders him. Then she runs to the forest to give birth to her imaginary child. Or something like that.

An editor should be able to help …

 

HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE

Last week I was cursing myself. What on earth did I sign up for this for six months ago? I’ve not covered this in an hour-long session before, and I don’t have all that grammatical jargon at my fingertips, because I wasn’t taught it either; I’ve had to mug up on it during my years of teaching, and it still doesn’t always come to me instinctively. Or to think about it sideways: my instinct tells me to go ahead and edit a sentence, but I don’t always know why, and as a teacher I need to know why, and I also need to be able to translate all that bloody jargon into something other writers can understand. I mean, come on – even the grammarians can’t agree whether there are eight, or nine, or seven parts of speech …

But I was pleased with how this workshop turned out. You were a great group of patient people (thanks to those who donated sentences!), and I covered the main points I wanted to make even if much of the rest was left to the handouts. Just remember that grammar and syntax are mostly not rules but a working system.

And try to use parts of speech in their best possible ways through remembering that aphorism ‘Opinion is the death of thinking’, and considering how nouns and verbs form their functions there.

Some resources:

* An old and out-of-copyright edition of William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, before E.B. White was involved
* Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax – recommended if you want an accessible introduction to grammar
* Ursula Le Guin, Steering The Craft – in fact, this is perhaps the most accessible guide of all, and includes chapters on: punctuation; sentence length and complex syntax; adjective and adverb; and subject pronoun and verb (you might need to order online)

A snap of that chart of hyphenation patterns from the Chicago Manual of Style is shown above. It’s taken from the 13th edition. They changed some of their own rules for the 16th edition, eek!

 

ET CETERA

I remember forgetting to mention various things at various points during the weekend. I remember that I’ve since forgotten what they were. Oh dear. I’ll remember some other time.

Something I forgot to add when I first posted this was a link to the Erotic Readers & Writers Association for someone I met during a book doctor one-to-one. In general, know thy genre: the conventions used in the writing, the conventions offline and on- where you get to hang out and network (and maybe eventually get published).

And another recommendation for writers of erotica: Elements of Arousal by Lars Eighner. It’s a how-to book on writing erotica that is a little out of date now, thanks to digital publishing, but it has some of the BEST advice on writing fiction of any type (though the faint-hearted might note he also writes gay erotica, and the braver-hearted might find it is out of print, though look around for second-hand copies and also Google the author too).

Something I can’t forget: As ever, many thanks to the lovely people of the Writers’ Workshop (sorry you couldn’t be there, Harry – but: priorities!). And thanks to everyone else associated, and to everyone who came along and made it such fun. I met some people who now feel like old friends as well as lots of new and fantastic people, both writers and industry professionals.

Beyond that, here are links on the book doctor one-on-ones and where you might want to go next (aka a DIY MA in Creative Writing). And also, here’s a more personal response.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 30: Wardrobe Masters And Mistresses

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FaroeseSweater

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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annotations

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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