Changing rooms

Everywhere, no matter how mundane, has an atmosphere. Learn to tune into this in order to create a threedimensional, multi-sensory world.

‘Doctor Who’ used to scare the pants off me. But all it took to drag me back rudely to the real world was for a rock to wobble as an advancing Dalek sidled into it. You need to bring your setting to life. You have to breathe enough magic into those descriptive words to transport a reader into another world, another place and time. This means not only writing well, but also seeing well. Whatever the location, from something as prosaic as a post office to as sensational as a space shuttle, it has its own presence – a unique atmosphere embodied in its layout, design, history, location and relationship to people. It’s vital to pin down the elements of a place that give it this atmosphere if it’s to seem genuine on the page. Honing your powers of description just takes practice and, above all, experience. You should be aiming to make the reader feel as though they’ve visited somewhere personally by the time they’ve finished reading. This means using all of your skills and all of your resources to create a rich, threedimensional, multi-sensory setting.

Do your research. Just because you’ve physically been in a place doesn’t mean you’ve looked at it carefully: don’t take it for granted. Keep your eyes peeled for the small details, the things that usually remain hidden from view: the way the light hits the buildings, the dog hair on the carpet, the way the computers whirr. Jot a plan down in a notebook, including doodles if you want, so you’ve got a list of these insights – as well as more mundane descriptions of furniture, objects, décor – to hand. Even if you never use half of it, it gives you a much clearer mental picture of your location. And remember, just because you can visualise your location when you read back through your work doesn’t mean a reader will. You’ve had the advantage of actually being there (or, if not, having researched and imagined it for hours on end). In order to ensure your reader can picture a scene as clearly as you do, it’s vital first to be able to approach it as they will: from outside. Don’t risk becoming too familiar with your literary locations, try and see them freshly, without prejudice, as if you’d never encountered them before. Again, this means looking at the small details, the ones even you’ve never noticed before.

Of course, you may not be able to visit the scenes you’re using in person. If they’re historical, they may not exist any more; if they’re political, you may not have access; if it’s a foreign country you’re describing, you may not have enough cash to get there and back; and if you’re writing sci-fiwell, you can’t very well nip across to Venus for a research trip. But this doesn’t mean you get off lightly. Use every resource you can to learn more about the setting. Talk to people who have lived there, watch movies filmed in the same location, look on the internet, read relevant novels, travel guides, holiday reviews, astronomy books and street plans. You need to be able to answer any questions about your setting (even if you’re the only one doing the asking).

Above all, remember this: when setting the scene in your work you need to be able to recreate it, not just set out a list of details. Before you can do this, you need to be able to exist in that scene in your mind, to be able to see, hear, smell, touch and taste as if you are actually there. Only by supplying these sensory details will you be able to carry the reader with you. Look at John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men – the first paragraph in every chapter is a master class in creating powerful description.

Surgery or butchery?

You’d be surprised how much even the smallest nip and tuck will improve your finished work. Keep your mind open to revision.

The infamous red pen. We’ve all got one; we all hate to use it. Let’s face it: the thought of taking the knife to a piece of writing we’ve nurtured since birth is tantamount to infanticide. But rest reassured – this isn’t the case. Think of the editing process as more like taking the stabilisers off your kid’s bike. It’s nerve wracking, and you’re worried it will bring them crashing down – but ultimately it makes the ride faster, smoother and a hell of a lot more fun.

When you think your piece is finished, that’s when the hard work begins. Working out what to dice and slice from a piece of writing is simply a matter of observation. But what should you be looking for? In short, barnacles and dead wood: anything that’s clinging on to the flesh of the piece without contributing anything. You may not think this applies to you, but take a really close look at what you’ve been writing.

Are there examples of abstractions and generalisations, clichés, outdated or unrealistic language, unwanted or vague description, condescension, didactics, obscurity, poor rhythm or clumsy rhyme, lazy or automatic use of words, stolen phrases you’d meant to change or just plain old waffle? Look at the list above and honestly ask yourself if you’re guilty of any of writing’s cardinal sins – ask yourself if the piece of writing is unique to you or whether it’s something that anybody could have written.

Start by zooming in as close as you can: ask every component of your writing whether it’s as well developed as possible, whether it’s as good as it can be, and whether it deserves its place in the work as a whole. If it helps, write out sentences separately on a sheet of paper, see if they work as freestanding structures. But don’t get so bogged down in detail you forget about the bigger picture – it’s vital every now and again to take a step back and look at your finished piece as an organic whole. If you’re including everything you’ve written because you stubbornly don’t want to cut it out, you risk a piece of writing full of extraneous detail and devoid of character.

Don’t be afraid to let the red pen get carried away. Pare your work down to its purest state, see if it’s actually saying what you wanted it to in the first place. Use different coloured pens for comments on plot, or character, or dialogue, so you can get an idea of which area is giving you trouble – if you’ve got more green marks than any other colour, you know you’re having trouble with your dialogue. In fact, you don’t even have to limit yourself to a pen. Get messy, attack your draft with scissors and glue, edit the old fashioned way, the messy way – it’s so much more satisfying than using a word processor.

Be brave, try major changes like altering the point of view or including a brand new plot twist. It may mean extensive rewriting, but the result may be far more dramatic than your original. The revision period is your chance to try out these changes, so don’t be shy. Just never forget to keep a copy of the original. I can’t stress this enough. Personal experience has shown me that if you edit on your only copy of a draft, you can never go back, even if you decide the changes you’ve made suck.

So when is it time to stop revising and leave your work alone? There is no simple answer, but eventually, you’ll just know. Like a sculptor chipping away at a block of stone, there will come a point when you don’t want to take off any more, when your writing simply speaks for itself. It may take a while for you to recognise it, but believe me, you will.

Playing God

Every piece of writing has to have a viewpoint. Somebody, or something, has to tell the story, and the choice has profound implications for the way a reader engages with your text. The point of view you select is crucial. It’s the window to your literary world, and if it’s pointing in the wrong direction nobody’s going to want to look through it.

Let’s start off with the holiest perspective: the god’s eye view. It’s one of the great advantages of being a writer: you can create a world all of your own and assume absolute, godlike power over it. The third-person narrator can be everywhere, seeing everything, an omniscient voyeur peering deep inside the mind of any character and poring over their most intimate thoughts. Like a giant laboratory assistant, this narrative voice selects the most salient details from the lives of its lab rats and lays them out for inspection. Just look at Dickens for excellent examples of the god’s eye view at work.

But don’t get too carried away, your almightyship. The most problematic disadvantage to the omniscient third person is a lack of engagement with the world it’s describing. You can be so busy hovering over the landscape, picking out details, dropping in and out of people heads, or floating through houses like an errant spirit that you lose focus, and forget to engage with the characters. In the same way, a narrator faced with such an enormous landscape, and so much scope, confronts a real nightmare trying to decide which things matter to a reader, and which things don’t. Like a kid in a candy store, you don’t always know what to go for first.

Back in the early days of the novel, authors often favoured an omniscient third-person approach because it allowed them to state their mind whenever they felt it necessary. This didactic, intrusive style sometimes worked – take the learned intrusions of George Eliot and the cosy asides from Jane Austen. But the presence of a third-person narrator who offers an opinion on everything that is happening can become a bore. In certain texts it’s OK to venture off on an erudite digression, but don’t lecture people on how they should read your work. It’s far better to take a subtle approach and gently steer people towards your way of thinking. You can push readers in the right direction with clever narration and characterisation, but you can’t boss them around.

One clever way of getting round this is to use your third-person narrator ironically. Yes, it’s that word we all hated at school, but it’s a great method for subtly adding opinion and humour to your work. The key thing to remember is that the best irony is implicit, and only hinted at. If you start explaining why it’s ironic, it stops being clever and just becomes annoying.

To cut a long story short, irony occurs when there’s a discrepancy between what a character or narrator thinks is true and what is really true. This can be with dialogue: ‘“I never eat more than one dish for lunch,” she muttered proudly as she finished her third course’; with beliefs: ‘She stepped confidently into the alley. Nobody would attack a little old lady, she thought, especially in the middle of Glasgow’; with expectations and results: ‘Saddam laughed to himself – the Americans would never invade Iraq’; or with appearance and reality: ‘He stepped forwards. The old rope bridge looked perfectly safe’. These are pretty obtuse examples, but it shows how irony can be used to make a point without rubbing your opinions in a reader’s face.

Show and tell

The first commandment of writing: show, don’t tell. By showing you’re letting the reader project something of their own experience into the writing. Showing is sharing – always the nice thing to do.

What would be more exciting: visiting Disneyworld and riding on every roller coaster twelve times, or listening to a friend going on about when they visited Disneyworld and rode every roller coaster twelve times? Unless you really hate riding roller coasters, I’d guess the actual experience would be more exciting than hearing about it from somebody else. The same applies to writing, whether prose, poetry or drama: show, don’t tell.

If we were to conduct a survey into what words most frequently appeared in workshops and creative writing seminars, we’d probably end up with ‘show’, ‘don’t’ and ‘tell’. It’s so common a phrase now it even has its own abbreviation. But why should we SDT? Aren’t writers supposed to tell stories? Yes, but we want to make readers feel like they are part of our literary world; to become immersed in our text, not just think they’re hearing it from an old man at the bus stop. When writing, we want to transport readers, convince them that this world of words is the real thing: we don’t just want to tell them that the heroine is in danger, we want to make the reader feel that danger, hear her pounding heart, sense the killer’s breath on the back of her neck, try and fight the panic of imminent danger. People don’t always believe what they’re told, but they do believe the evidence of their own senses. Likewise, people don’t always engage emotionally with the characters they hear about in stories, but if they’re put in that person’s shoes, they can’t help but empathise. That’s where SDT kicks in.

No, it’s not an insurance term: it’s telling when you really should be showing. If you start explaining to the reader something that you should be dramatising, you’re not giving a scene the impact it should have: ‘She wanted to tell him how much she loved him’ – yawn! And it doesn’t help if you resort to abstract terms either: telling your reader that a character is ‘madly and deeply in love’ is no substitute for actually showing how that person feels: ‘She was trembling, her stomach in knots. She wanted to feel his arms around her, his fingers on her spine. She wanted to fold her body into his, so whenever he went away next she’d always be there – warm, ready.’ You have to set your imagination to work full time to show things in a way that is moving and believable. Yes, telling is much easier, but if you can’t invest your words with any humanity or any depth, if you just tell the story from a detached viewpoint, you risk a reader shutting off and thinking about what they’re going to make for dinner, or what kind of bathroom cleaner to buy next.

By telling, you’re assuming a reader needs things spelt out as simply as possible. You have to have faith in your reader’s imagination: don’t try and explain everything in a scene, credit a reader with enough creative power to fill in the blanks, to contribute something of her own experience. To truly make readers feel like they’ve been transported to your world, you need to let them bring part of their own life to the text: telling everything – setting, character, plot – in minute detail denies them this and makes the text the author’s empire, a world that leaves no room for them. Showing allows readers to project part of their own experience into the story – it becomes a story for them, rather than one simply told to them.

There may be trouble ahead

The most memorable fictional characters all face up to some kind of conflict – from global threats to personal dilemmas – so learn to treat ‘em mean if you want to keep the readers keen.

Practically all characters in fiction are driven by the conflicts they face and the choices they make. We're not just talking adventure novels and horror tales. Conflict is at the heart of all good writing, it’s what drives it forwards. Novels, screenplays and poems are all journeys undertaken by their main characters. This journey forces them to make choices, many of them extremely difficult, and through these pressurised decisions your characters show their true colours.

It’s vital to know your characters intimately when you are writing, otherwise the way they face up to conflict may seem unrealistic or insincere, and they won't develop. It doesn’t matter if your characters make wrong decisions, only that their choices are realistic and human. It’s this lack of predictability, the anticipation and surprise of expectation and result, which keeps the readers hooked.

You may already have a plot in mind, and be ready to throw your characters into a melting pot of conflict and difficulty. But even if you haven’t yet settled on a story, or are waiting to see where your characters will lead, it’s a good idea to work out where the conflict lies. All good characters are plagued by an internal conflict (and remember, even the smallest, most domestic conflict can seem immense in the eyes of whoever is suffering it). You’ll probably find that the characters you have in mind – even if they are only outlines – are troubled in some way. Without conflict, how can your character even have a view of the world?

Your characters must have a history. Do you know the key events of their past, the ones that made them who they are (the bullying at school, the betrayal of or by a loved one, the death of a parent, the birth of a child)? The conflicts your characters will face may well be something to do with an event from the past, and having a clear idea of what your character has already endured and experienced will help you generate realistic scenarios. Even if you’re focusing on plot, your characters’ reactions to events will be largely determined by the events of their past, so it’s vital to look back as well as forwards. Remember, it’s how your characters deal with the world that makes writing interesting, so give them motivations and reasons for acting the way they do in the face of adversity. You might not use any of this ‘research’ verbatim in your writing, but time spent investigating your characters’ pasts will give you a much clearer idea of who they are, and enable you to keep their behaviour consistent throughout.

As your characters face up to the pressures of the story, they will change. This may be planned (the nerdy cinema usher becomes the hero during an alien invasion, perhaps), or it may come as a surprise. Don’t be shocked if your characters respond to a difficulty in a way you hadn’t expected – when faced with a conflict on the page they may just take action in their own way. The more you know about their past, the greater the sense of freedom and motivation the characters will have, and the more realistic their response. A poorly thought out character will always obey convention, or will defy expectation but in a way nobody will believe. In other words, he will become stereotypical. A character with depth and with a past, however, will surprise you and delight the reader by revealing herself in a new light.

Who’s the daddy: character or plot?

Like it or not, it’s your characters that drive your work. Getting them right will make the difference between writing a masterpiece and an episode of Days of Our Lives. Try to imagine ‘Great Expectations’ minus Pip. Or ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ sans Holden Caulfield, ‘The Great Gatsby’ without Gatsby, Emma without Emma, Harry Potter...you get the idea – if you don’t get your characters right, your work won’t work.

If Aristotle and E. M. Forster ever meet in the Great Beyond the encounter might just end in fisticuffs. These two had a great deal to say about the written work, but didn’t always see eye to eye. Aristotle famously stated that plot was more important than character when it came to dramatic effect. Forster, on the other hand, claimed that in order for literature to work it has to be driven by its characters. Most writers side either with Aristotle in the red corner or back Forster in the blue. In other words, you either have organic characters in mind who are born into your fiction and left to develop much like real people, or you have the action in mind and carve your characters to fit. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but one of the similarities between the plotdriven story and the character-driven story is that in both cases the cast has to seem genuine.

Strong, well-developed characters can become so real in your mind that they drive the story. At one point in my own writing career I thought it impossible for the author to lose control, but while writing one novel I was amazed to find that the characters I had created didn’t always want to follow my plan of action – like your own children finally learning to talk back. When they become ‘autonomous’ in this way, let them lead for a while. You might be pleasantly surprised where it takes you. Be warned, however, that when you let your characters off the leash they may wander errantly in circles and end up accomplishing nothing but boring a reader to tears.

For those of you thinking of approaching from the other side of the fence, a plotdriven narrative can be equally tricky. Writing your characters around a plot will almost always ensure that they do enough to sustain the reader’s attention. The problem here, however, is whether they will do so realistically. Just like bespoke furniture, your characters can look a little artificial, as though they were constructed to fill a particular role and have no existence or history in your written world outside of this.

While literary fisticuffs are always entertaining, a healthy balance between plot and character is the path to success. Or, as Henry James put it, ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’ Plot is basically the result of human activities and adventures, and even if you don’t know what’s going to happen, your characters’ actions will drive the narrative. In other words, if you’ve got a detailed enough understanding of your characters, the plot will evolve itself. If, on the other hand, you’re building your fiction around a plot, then this depth of character is still vital. Remember, even if you know what your plot will entail, your characters still don’t. The incidents that occur in the course of the story will enable them to evolve and grow much like real people, and they must behave and respond like real people in those situations in order to seem real. If you don’t have a grip of who your characters really are, then it doesn’t matter how exciting the action, or how seamless the narrative: none of it will be convincing because the cast won’t seem real.

Blowing your trumpet

If you’re like me, some days you probably think there isn’t much floating around in the memory department of your brain except for a few old episodes of Thundercats. But learn to dive in deeper – your past can be the key to great writing. I’ll bet when Proust was dipping his pastries in his tea that morning the last thing he expected was his whole life to flash before his eyes. Yet this goes to show just how many memories there are in each of us, a vast tidal wave of experience that could break at any time and flood back into our present consciousness. These memories – these stories – are what give us the power to write realistically and evocatively. The key is learning how to harness them.

Yesterday… all your troubles seemed so far away. And not just your troubles either. Memory is like that: how are you supposed to recapture events or conversations that now exist only in the murky depths of your mind? I don’t know about you, but my memory is hopeless. I find it hard to remember what I was doing last week, let alone last year (and unfortunately this has nothing to do with alcohol). But my memory, or more precisely my history, is the foundation of who I am. When Wordsworth said that the child was the father of the man, he was emphasising that the sum of your past experience, including your childhood, is what makes you uniquely you.

I compensate for my fuzzy mind by keeping diaries. They’re nothing special. Most entries are random observations from events or meetings rather than detailed accounts of treasured moments. These scraps of text only mention the odd scent, like Charlie Red on a date, or a tune, like ‘Abide With Me’ from a funeral. But I don’t need any more than that to remember the event. The senses are the key to unlocking your memories. How many times has a taste or smell dragged you back to a precise moment in your past, often so unexpectedly that you have to gasp for breath? Powerful fiction is based on thoughtful use of all of the senses and the emotional memories they evoke.

These sudden, immensely powerful flashbacks are an essential part of writing, and can be miracle cures for a text that is lacking in emotional or descriptive depth. Of course a piece of writing that only features your memories is autobiography, and won’t always interest a reader, but they will enable you to paint a much more vivid picture of your characters and their setting. Your memories enable to you to construct an image that is unique to you, that resonates with your own history, even if ostensibly the plot you’re working on seems a million miles away. This attention to detail, this engagement with elements from your past, can be transplanted from your mind to that of your characters, creating a much stronger illusion of real people. Incorporating the memorable sights, smells, tastes, sounds and touches that mean so much to you will create a tangible atmosphere in your work, one that might feel like a real memory to everybody that reads it, as well as to you. Building memories into writing is a key to writing powerfully, it is why something that isn’t real can have the strength of something that is.

It’s always fascinating to look at what the mind remembers when asked to do so spontaneously. What about your five senses: which seems most important? Visual, most likely, but what other sensory reminders come into play? And how do you express your emotional experience of an event? Look for the strings of associations in your mind that help memories flood back to the present. When they do, make notes, capture the salient details, and allow your mind to follow along the path the memories lead: where were you, what were you doing, how were you feeling? Expand and write a little about yourself and the people you knew back then. What’s changed? These ‘oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that!’ moments are the details that can be inserted into your work to make it that much more convincing.