* Take some key word from a piece you are working on and do some rooting around in the history of that word, e.g., at Etymonline.com.
E.g., let’s say you are writing a story about a witch – let’s take a look at magic. One bit of this Etymonline definition that I take away is the following:
to be able, to have power (see machine)
So: really think about the relevance of your finding to your piece of writing. In this case, how does your writing embody, feel, think, bring to life (in this case) this idea of having power or ability? And how are various aspects of craft working with this idea, and how might they be developed within the work?
* Set a timer for five minutes, and write these thoughts out in your notebook by hand, e.g., for the words magic/ability/power: Magic is important to me/my book as … The idea of ability can be embodied in my book through … My characters show their powers by … I have found magic in my world/family in …
You might event want to copy out the definition first: see which words excite you as you write them down. You can also do this with a passage of your own writing. Which words sizzle as you write them?
* Continue to reflect on this definition further, and see what else you might need to bring out in your drafting and revising.
* Most of all: how are you giving the reader something of this definition in the writing? Writing is always an act of giving. Writing is a gift to someone else.
Further note: Don’t worry too much about the precise origins of a word. Sometimes they will have direct correspondences with the place or time you are writing about, and that sort of synchronicity has a magic of its own. The goddess is looking down on you! But, too, sometimes word histories can come from entirely different places, and unless you are writing about a particular context using particular constraints that doesn’t really matter. What matters is making the writing you are doing in the here and now relevant and powerful.
(If you are writing fiction, especially, your duty is to use your imagination rather than labour some other form of truth that might never be proven anyway.)
If possible, the first time you do this, rather than reading ahead, read each stage and follow its instructions before scrolling down to the next stage. (I hesitate to use the word instruction, because writers can be a bolshie lot who take instruction poorly, but in this case just do as you’re told as constraints are good for you.)
Give yourself about twenty minutes.
1. Have a timer, notebook and pen at the ready, and a favourite book at hand (probably a print book but could work with ebook).
2. Close your eyes. Open the book at a random page. Put your finger on the page. Open your eyes. See what word your finger has landed on.
3. Take the first letter of that word. Set the timer for three minutes and write/brainstorm a list of as many words that you can think of that start with that letter of the alphabet.
4. At the three-minute bell, stop.
5. Look over your list quickly and circle your two favourite words. Trust your instinct here.
6. Now close your eyes and use your pen to stab your piece of writing: whichever word you land on is your third word.
7. Set your timer for fifteen minutes, then take these three words to generate a flash fiction or scene or the start of a short story or first chapter.
Adapt this as necessary, but again, stick with the exercise and its constraints for a while if you can.
(And yes, I post this on a Wednesday, but it was a Friday when we first did it at the Festival of Writing 2016. And someone did generate a really good one and email it to me by first thing Monday morning.)
Yesterday I book doctored at the Writers’ Workshop Getting Published Day at Regents College. It was a lot of fun. I met some really lovely people and read samples from some interesting works-in-progress. One in particular was very exciting for me: witty, intelligent, and a strong story concept. My enthusiasm had no bounds! (Though the said writer does now have the challenge of writing the second-best opening line in English literature.) I hope the rest of the manuscript is as strong as the opening chapter and synopsis, and I also hope others will soon feel the same. At this point, the prospect of getting published comes down to taste, and finding people who share your vision (agent, editor, readers).
And before taste dictates, it’s usually important to get the craft right. Things that came up in the book doctor surgeries included: bringing more of an edge into the narrative style; deciding what should be revealed when within a story; building the pacing and narrative tension around key moments within the story; the importance of setting; establishing mood; sharpening the prose style. I found myself asking various writers: what are you giving a reader? A good question for any writer who wants to be published (hope it doesn’t prompt an existential crisis).
I also led an hour-long workshop on prose style: Style Brings Substance. There’s never enough time to say all that could be said on such subjects. So it was a brisk romp.
I discussed how I break down my thinking about any piece of writing in terms of: its context; its narrative content (including its dramatic situation); its narrative style (including its structure); and most important of all its prose style, because that is where writing is ultimately experienced – and judged.
I feel that the natural speaking voice is usually the best foundation for our writing, even if it sometimes needs adapting or embellishing. Mood is important in creating intimacy with the reader, and creating an impression relies on our use of style, moment by moment in a piece of writing. I suggested that style is as much about what we leave out of a piece of writing, and what we leave to the reader’s imagination, as what we explain.
Much is a matter of taste, again, but much too can be improved through a strong grasp of the craft, and I stressed the importance of understanding how the different parts of speech work. A few simple pointers:
* Verbs bring energy to a sentence, so aim to be energy-efficient. In fiction, sentences are often most effective when a strong and simple verb of action is used as the main verb of a sentence. A sentence such as ‘He realised he could easily identify at least seven enemy soldiers rapidly running in his direction’ has less force than ‘Half a dozen enemy soldiers were running at him’ or even ‘Half a dozen enemy soldiers ran at him’ – the realising and the easily being able to identify don’t add much, really, do they? They just get in the way. We often simply don’t need realise or remember or sense verbs (e.g., see, hear). Auxiliary verbs (e.g., can, must) can often be lost too.
(And while we were at it, we cleaned up that weirdly precise ‘at least seven’ – we usually want specificity, but I don’t think it works here.)
* Nouns serve as anchors, grounding the writing – which sometimes is necessary, and sometimes is not.
* Interrogate the need for every adjective and adverb in your writing. As Ursula Le Guin says: ‘Adjectives and adverbs are rich and good and fattening. The main thing is not to overindulge … The bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if it’s going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat.’
* Even prepositions have their moments, e.g., at in ‘Half a dozen soldiers were running at him’.
* Dependent clauses create, um, dependence within a sentence, and sometimes it makes sense to connect clauses in a simpler manner that creates self-contained action, e.g., by breaking the sentence down into separate sentences, or by using the simple conjunction ‘and’ between recast clauses. So (with a few other tweaks for tartness and economy): ‘When he glanced quickly over the top of the freestanding plexiglass partition of his cubicle, he realised he could easily identify at least seven enemy soldiers rapidly running in his direction’ could be improved as ‘He shot a glance over the partition. Half a dozen soldiers were running at him’. The edited version feels much less cluttered.
* It is usually good to let the idea or action within a sentence unfold chronologically.
* Think of the paragraph as a unit of thought or action.
We considered the use of parts of speech as we listened to the opening of Kent Haruf’s fantastic novel Our Souls At Night, whose plain style is beguiling. Here is a writer, I stressed, who gets out of his own way and lets a story simply tell itself.
Revision exercise: Take a piece of your own writing and reduce it to only those nouns it contains. Then the verbs. Then the adjectives, and then do the same for other parts of speech. (This reminds me of an article on reducing books to their marks of punctuation.) What does this tell you about the way in which words are working in your writing? Do you spot any words/habits that might need changing?
I also shared a couple of pages of the intense reading experience that is Garth Greenwell’s novel What Belongs To Me, (am very excited to see him read tomorrow). This book includes one section that is a 41-page paragraph – a stylistic choice that certainly pays off. As I also stressed: we don’t run marathons without lots of training! But it’s fun to try. And how about another writing experiment?
Revision exercise: Knock every paragraph break out of a piece of writing. How might what remains read differently? Does the new version suggest any changes? Then without referring back, add paragraph breaks back in.
I also link lots of useful things for writers on this page: Resources.
Reading recommendations I made yesterday included: Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft; Stephen King’s On Writing; Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey; and Ronald Tobias’s 20 Master Plots. I also suggested that people writing in that area take a look at Emma Darwin’s Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction from the Teach Yourself series, which comes out this week (I’ve not read it yet, but if it’s by Emma it must be excellent). In addition I recommended the Writers’ Workshop own online self-editing course, run by Debi Alper and Emma Darwin.
My fellow book doctor Shelley Harris also signed my copy of her book Vigilante – out this week in paperback.
Only sad note of the day: losing my lovely linen scarf on the way home 🙁 so in memory of that one of the great poems from one of the great poets: ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop.
Thanks again to the Writers’ Workshop for asking me. Their events are always the best – meeting old friends, and making new ones, all of us joined in our love of writing and books. Stories shared, secrets revealed, dreams inspired – and sometimes set on the road to success. I always come away thinking how writers and book folk are the most interesting people, and the best fun.
The first day of spring, yay! According to my own logic, the first day of spring is that day when the first of the bulbs you planted in the autumn comes into flower. A daffodil opened in the window box on Thursday – see attached. (We do have other blooms in the garden, but they were narcissi we got from the pound shop to jump the gun for a bit of yellow.)
And Friday was very sunny, and I had finished other work, so I finally started my late winter/early spring pruning and mulching. Of course, because I tend to do things arse about tit, I set about mulching first, then pruning afterwards. But how could I resist slitting open those bags of rich, claybusting bracken and scattering scoops on our beds of claggy soil, dumping and raking and levelling and mounding? And first of all I had managed to repot some heathers, which I’d put on top of tulips in the autumn, not thinking that heathers like acid soil or knowing that tulips like alkaline, so now the heathers are doing their own thing in pots of their own, while tulips are topped with heucheras and hart’s tongue ferns and maidenhair ferns.
So this got me thinking about writing and processes in writing in terms of gardening analogies. I find that making changes in the garden comes much more easily than cutting and making changes in writing – to my own work, or someone else’s work I’m editing. Maybe it’s because I’m new to much about gardening, and freer about taking risks, even foolhardy. Maybe it’s simply that I am not overthinking it.
And I also found it so much easier to do the work that had to be done this year, now that I’m gardening more seriously and have a proper garden to play with (first things first: have something to work with). For example, I’ve always been cautious about pruning in the past in my half-hearted containers, just trimming the straggly bits while preserving old growth, but I’ve now looked up the requirements of different roses and clematises and perennials, and (though I am yet to see if this all goes to plan) I noted that some things need pruning hard, even right to the ground; the life is still there, in the roots, of course, and sometimes things need cutting back in order to flourish later on.
And what’s the worst that can happen?! I murdered several acers last year, so am restarting the survivors and new ones in pots that I can dot around in sun or shade to see whether I can avoid the leaves turning to a crisp this year. (It’s a mystery whether this was sunburn, over- or under watering. The ones I’d grown in pots in the past always flourished.)
Forthis writing experiment: Take any piece of writing you’ve already done (a story, a chapter, a poem, a whole novel), and imagine how you’d work on this if it were your garden at the start of spring. By this, I mean that we should really be thinking about the physical work we do as gardeners, and translating that into the things we do as writers (who too often get stuck in their own heads). Some things (e.g., cutting) will be obvious, while other things will not, but sometimes it’s the striving that really forces us to bring on the work in fresh ways.
Think and work symbolically. I’m not going to relate these examples to writing, because you can do that for yourself, but hold these ideas in your mind – and body – as you look over the writing.
Pruning: What can be cut? What might be diseased, damaged, or dead? Which crossing shoots are clashing or crowding each other, and need thinning out? What needs pruning as it’s heading in the wrong direction? What growth needs encouraging? When is a plant pretty much done in terms of size?
Potting and repotting: What needs to be moved? What is growing in an unsuitable container, and what might be more fitting for both container and contents? What suits any planting as a bedmate – compatible, pleasantly surprising company, a clash of personalities? Do different needs require their separation? Does it make more sense to experiment with growing some things in pots, before planting right into the ground? Pots can, of course, be moved around as needed. (Though I wasn’t going to butt in with writing parallels: might it be worth experimenting with short fiction rather than running the marathon of a novel?)
Mulching: What layers of mulch (compost? bark? manure? gravel? grit? leaf mould?) can be added to amend and enrich what you already have?
Landscaping and remodelling: Do the larger structure and design need greater thought? Another flower bed here, a raised bed? How can needs of light, shade, water, drainage be negotiated: is it really possible to create a garden full of sunlovers when you get so much shade in the summer? Are different plantings needed or desirable? And what shrubs or architectural plants can be used to created accents? Could boundaries and borders be made more debfined? Can more light be brought in by cutting down a tree, or even just an overhanging vine? And is it really worth all that time and money and space trying to grow vegetables when Waitrose is just a five-minute walk away?
Roots: What lies beneath, within in the roots? What has yet to show itself, but can be fed for fresh growth?
Variations: If you’re not a gardener, consider the work you do instinctively or nonverbally in other areas – cooking, or yoga, or mechanics, or football. How would you take stock of a project in that field with the aim of improvement? The point of this is to get beyond the usual words we use to think about writing and to work symbolically instead. Really feel – as a physical instinct – what the writing needs in terms of what you do as a gardener, cook, or football player. Try to get beyond thinking.
Method: Hack away at a printout of a manuscript of your writing. You probably need to do this in a physical reality, rather than on screen. I really do think writing is a somatic process, and we have to force ourselves out of our screens/headspace/neuroses at least every now and then. You can use a pencil or pen rather than secateurs. Or you could do a bit of planning: maybe write yourself some notes in the form of a memo answering some of the questions above, as well as questions of your own creation. One definite outcome: a fresh draft in a month’s time. Though allow yourself till summer if you really want things to bloom.
Btw, be sure to paginate your manuscript. This will be useful for yourself, and make life easy for any readers you try this out on. Just saying.
Further reading: If you want a serious guide for pruning and other tasks in the garden, to help you continue with these analogies and others, you can consult the Royal Horticultural Society’s many resources.
In another blog post this week, I write about shame – not so much a personal shame but a cultural one. It could just be wishy-washy liberal guilt, but writing (and sharing) this got something off my chest.
For this week’s writing experiment: get something off your chest. Consider something that gets you mad, makes you feel shame (either personally or politically), arouses your passions. An injustice, a cause, something political, something you give a shit about. Then get it off your chest.
Maybe try to avoid opining. Oh wait: maybe that’s not possible! Maybe just try to avoid whining, and micro-aggressions?!
Don’t worry about forming a coherent argument. I found it useful to use that form of a list of numbered points, joining them as dots.
