THE CREATIVE
WRITING STUDENT’S

HANDBOOK

Cathie
Hartigan and Margaret James

The Creative Writing
Student’s Handbook

Copyright © 2014
Cathie Hartigan and Margaret James

Additional material
copyright © the contributors

Published 2014 by
CreativeWritingMatters

www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk

The rights of Cathie
Hartigan and Margaret James have been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or others, without the prior permission of Cathie Hartigan and
Margaret James or a licence permitting restricted copying

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licenses are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 –
10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS

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Table of Contents

Introduction

How do you become a successful writer?

CHAPTER 1

What a creative writing teacher can and can’t
do

Inspiration

Finding your voice

But where can you find these ideas?

Helping you to improve

Information

Don’t be told but do listen to reason

Who are you?

Nobody but you

No guarantees

Life saving

Exercise

CHAPTER 2

The craft of creative writing

Character or plot?

Character

Plot

Openings, developments and endings

Narrative viewpoint

Dialogue

Exercise

Exercise

CHAPTER 3

Building Your Story

How is it for you?

When, where and how will you start?

Questions your reader may ask

Where’s it happening?

Why should they talk about it?

Maintaining tension

Words

Exercise

CHAPTER 4

Pitfalls

It must be love

Yet more words…

Nice words, wrong style or setting

Showing, not telling

Repetition

Look who’s talking…

Over-explanation or saying the same
thing or something quite like it, in another way, perhaps over and over again.

Nothing but the truth

Generalisation

Missing something?

Right or wrong?

Do you know best?

Exercise

CHAPTER 5

Flash fiction and short stories

How long is short?

Short stories

Beginnings

Let’s get going

Moving on

Who are your readers and what might they want?

Endings

Flash Fiction

Do we need to know?

Exercise

CHAPTER 6

Novels

What is a novella?

What is a novel?

A marathon task

Characters

Looking at life

Openings…

…and continuations…

…and pacing yourself and your
story…

…and getting it written…

…and rewarding
readers…

…and finding resolutions

Exercise

CHAPTER 7

Getting out there

Why are you writing?

Competitions

What’s our best advice?

A winning story grabs the reader’s attention
with the very first sentence, and retains its grip until the last

Promoting yourself

The Internet

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Blogging and websites

Self-publishing

Exercise

CHAPTER 8

The Bad Stuff

Jealousy

Mutual support

Writer’s Block

Where can you find inspiration?

Rejection

What was actually said?

Coping with rejection

Manners

Exercise

CHAPTER 9

I am a writer

Writing communities

Reading, writing and book groups

Starting a group

Exercises

Exercises to do together

CHAPTER 10

Making Some Money

Exercise

CHAPTER 11

Readers of novels – what do they want?

Who is your reader?

How do you find your ideal reader, and – if
you want to please this reader – what should you write?

Literary agents, publishers,
editors – do you need them?

What about your actual novel?

What sort of cover will I get and does it matter?

Exercise

CHAPTER 12

The roads more or less travelled

Who are you?

What course?

Following your own path

Exercise

CONCLUSION

Teaching And Learning

A good creative writing teacher will:

What qualities do most teachers of creative
writing hope to find in their students?

What do they hope they won’t find?

As a student of creative writing, what do you
need?

Believe in yourself

Exercise

Introduction

How do you become a
successful writer?

You’ll need commitment, passion, determination and a good
teacher.

But you’ll also need to be a good learner.

As teachers of creative writing, we have had the huge
pleasure of seeing many of our students achieve publication and win or be
shortlisted for prizes. Our students have become confident, articulate writers
who have learned to use their own special talents to their maximum potential.

We notice that the students who are most likely to succeed
are those who enjoy engaging in all aspects of the writing process and are also
good learners – who listen, are willing to take direction and are open to
suggestion. Good learners are happy to take part in constructive discussions
and have plenty to offer the teacher in the way of student feedback.

Our aim is to help you to discover the pleasures of creative
writing and become a successful writer yourself.

CHAPTER 1

What a creative writing teacher can and
can’t do

A creative writing teacher can:

Inspire you

Enable you to find
your writing voice

Help you to improve

Provide you with
information

A creative writing teacher can’t:

Tell you what to
write

Write it for you

Guarantee publication
or competition success

Save your life

Inspiration

Human beings love stories. They like to tell, hear, read and
write them.

Stories are one of the ways in which we respond to, make
sense of and communicate with the world.

Creative writing teachers are usually writers themselves.
But they don’t have to be bestselling or prizewinning novelists. They need to
be committed and enthusiastic teachers. A teacher with a passion for the
subject can be hugely inspirational. So that’s the sort of teacher you’ll need
to find.

All creative writing teachers should encourage you to read
widely. They should also tell you that reading the sort of story you want to
write is essential. So don’t listen to people who say: don’t read this or that
because you might be influenced by its style or content. Of course you might be
influenced.

When you admire (or shudder at the very thought of) other
people’s houses – their decor, their furniture or their DVD collections
– this can be an enriching experience.

Perhaps you’ll think: a sofa like Jane’s would look grand in
my sitting room. But fancy putting it with that carpet! A sheepskin would look
much better. Or perhaps a Chinese rug? I wouldn’t have blue walls, I’d have green.

Soon, you’ll have a whole new imaginary room. It isn’t like
Jane’s, but it does have a splendid sofa which is the same as hers. Strangely, this sofa looks quite different in
your room.

If you lived on a desert island with nothing but the
complete works of Shakespeare to read, it’s likely your own writing style would
come to reflect his. It’s a fact that much of what Shakespeare wrote still
enhances and enriches our language. Some of his expressions are now so
commonplace that we think of them as clichés – for example: this is the long and short of it. (Merry Wives of Windsor Act 2 Scene 2).

The journalist and author Bernard Levin once wrote a
humorous piece quoting many lines from Shakespeare which are used in our
everyday speech. It is available on a poster from the Globe Theatre – http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/shop/product/quoting-shakespeare-poster/87.
But language is constantly developing new means of communication and this can
be seen in changes to writing style. Since Shakespeare’s time, we’ve all read lots of other things, and we’ve absorbed
them into our collective literary
consciousness.

If you read widely, you will increase your vocabulary, notice
many different ways in which you can structure your writing, and you’ll have
access to the best resource of all: a wealth of ideas. There’s no copyright on
ideas!

Finding your voice

Nobody writes in quite the same way as you do. So, the
moment your pen touches the paper or your fingertip presses a key, something
wonderful might happen. You could find you start to write creatively using your
own unique voice.

If you then realise you’ve written something like the cat sat on the mat, however, it’s
likely this has come from your memory.
A creative writing teacher will focus on helping you to tap into your creativity. You can access this creative
source in a variety of ways, and one of the best is to write every day.

But – to write what? Well...try shutting your eyes,
turning your head in another direction, opening your eyes and writing about
what you can see. Or close your eyes, listen, open your eyes again and write
about what you heard. Or write about what you had for lunch, the last shop you
visited or a walk you took. Write about what is bothering or upsetting you or
write about what makes you happy.

Write freely and, at this early stage, don’t allow your
internal editor to comment on your work. Keep going and always write a few
lines beyond the point at which you first thought of stopping. Change the
subject, change it back, write without worrying about making mistakes. Make
notes instead of sentences if you can’t get your thoughts down fast enough.
Don’t worry if your spelling isn’t all that grate (sic). In fact, don’t worry if what you write makes no sense at all.

How on earth can this be a good plan? Nobody will publish an
incomprehensible story full of mistakes. It is unlikely to win a competition.
But...

...every field of human endeavour, whether it’s sculpting,
gardening or writing a cracking good story, requires a coming-together of both ideas and craft. We learn some elements of the craft of writing at school. If we’re to pass our exams, it’s
essential we get to grips with good writing practice – that we get our
heads round conventional grammar, spelling and punctuation. Commercial
publishers certainly expect us to get our basic presentation right.

But sometimes we are so afraid to break the rules that our
imaginations are stifled. Free-writing as it is sometimes called, allows us to
break all those rules. Who knows what we might find outside their confines?
Some interesting ideas, perhaps?

After you’ve allowed your imagination free rein for a while,
and have accumulated lots of ideas, you’ll need to think about how you can put all
this material into a story. We all organise our writing into sentences and
paragraphs, but it is the order of
our ideas that makes for a good
story. So this is where the craft of
writing comes back into play.

But where can you find these ideas?

If you’re stuck for ideas, these can certainly be generated
by reading the work of other writers. Reorganised, polished and
newly-presented, these ideas might end up making good stories. Authors of fan
fiction and of modernisations and/or continuations of existing stories are
inspired by the work of other writers. The award-winning Nice Work by David Lodge is a very successful reworking of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of published and unpublished novels
based on Jane Austen’s characters – what happened to them next, what
became of their children, how these characters might behave if they were alive
today…

But what about new ideas? The ones that pop into your head
from nowhere? How do you sort the good ones from the bad? If you write every
day, you’ll find you start to see what might work and what definitely won’t.
Writing down everything that comes into your head and covering ten or twenty
sheets of A4 paper might seem labour-intensive and also very wasteful. But,
when you’re panning for gold, an awful lot of mud and gravel is likely to get
shifted!

Don’t leave home without a notebook or your phone. Often,
ideas will pop into your head at inconvenient times and you’ll need to write
them down because otherwise they might vanish forever. This is especially true
of those brilliant ideas which come to you while you’re half asleep, dozing off
or waking up. Leave yourself messages on voicemail, on your landline’s answering
machine, or record voice memos.

Take photographs that illustrate what you’re thinking about
right now – photographs not only of places but also of objects you come
across which might be relevant to your story. As you’re passing shop windows,
maybe take snaps of clothes your characters might wear.

Listen to conversations and people-watch. Write a journal, a
diary about what’s happening to you and in the wider world. Have opinions about
things. What would it be like to have other
opinions? Imagine what it is like to be someone else. Imagine being lots of other people.

A creative writing teacher can encourage the writer within
you. When you start to think like a
writer, your unique writing voice will become all the clearer.

Helping you to improve

Hardly anybody actually likes
criticism. So, although some people will agree their writing is probably all
the better for it, others will stop writing at the first hint of anything less
than adulation.

But only an irresponsible and dishonest teacher would praise
anything and everything. An effective teacher will instil confidence in the
novice writer by pointing out what is good about his or her writing rather than
by dwelling on what is bad. This approach will provide the student with a
much-needed defence against despair and disenchantment for times when the going
gets really tough.

Students usually learn good practice by reading and
analysing examples of successful writing, then by working through practical
exercises on specific issues, such as characterisation or dialogue. Sometimes,
the exercises a teacher sets may not seem relevant to the sort of writing you
want to do. But nothing is lost by having a go at them. Often, the results can
not only give you a pleasant surprise but also reveal an unsuspected talent.

You’ve written what you feel is a good story and are very
proud of yourself. You take it along to a class or to your writing group, read
it out and gradually the horrible truth dawns – everyone hated it. Or
perhaps they didn’t understand it, were bored or felt misled in some way. Of
course, you might have written a masterpiece so brilliant and so far ahead of
its time that everyone else is floundering. This could be so! But, all the
same, you need to allow other people access to your work if only to steel
yourself against those who tell you your writing is bad, you’re wasting your
time and not to bother.

Achieving what you set out to do is the measure of success.
If you wish to write a passage in free-writing mode, as suggested in the section
above, and you do it, that’s fine. Pat yourself on the back. But if you write
what you think is a perfect crime story which turns out to be so perfect that
even you can’t solve the crime, then you haven’t
succeeded.

As you begin your writing career, try to enjoy what you do.
Aim to write for the sheer pleasure
of writing. If your only goal is to write a bestseller and make a fortune, you
might spend much or all of your life being miserable, especially if you don’t
really enjoy the writing process. When are you happier – while you are
actually writing or when you stop writing and can have some time off? All
writers need to take breaks, but they also need to enjoy the writing process,
even if this is sometimes a rather masochistic pleasure.

Most of us need another pair of eyes to see between the lines we’ve written.
Critiquing our own work can be akin to looking at ourselves in the mirror but
with our noses pressed up against the glass. Yes, we can see, but not very
well. Putting a story to one side and looking at it again some time in the
future can be helpful when it comes to spotting flaws. But discussing the story
with an astute and experienced teacher can be a quicker and more productive
process.

Information

You should expect your teacher to know about the craft of writing. We’ll talk more about
this in Chapter 2, but for now…

In a class or group situation you can learn a great deal by
listening to other people reading their work aloud and by sharing your own
writing with your peers. But, if you wish to take your writing further, submit
it to a literary agent or publisher, or perhaps enter competitions, advice from
someone who is a little (or a lot) further along the writing road will probably
be of most benefit. A teacher or one-to-one mentor, with whom you connect
face-to-face or find online, will be able to follow your progress closely and
tailor his or her comments to what you are writing. But you will need to find
someone you can trust and who understands your work. Be clear about what you want
to achieve, then your mentor will be able to help you get there.

As is the case with most things human beings do, the more
you know, the more you will realise how much there is still to know. One of the
many joys of writing is that there is no end to experimentation, invention and
possibility.

At any level above beginners, and definitely at university
level, you should receive guidance about where and how to submit your work if
it’s to have the best chance of commercial or competition success. If you wish
to publish your own work either in hard copy or online, we advise you to seek
editorial help before going ahead.

Don’t be told but do listen to reason

You can write about whatever you like.

But, as a writer, you are a communicator. So you need to
respect those with whom you are communicating – or trying to communicate.
Some students wonder why their short stories have been rejected or don’t win
competitions, but further investigation reveals they neither read nor like the
genre in which they chose to write that story.

Writing in various styles and in different genres, done in a
spirit of exploration and learning, is all to the good. If, however, a teacher
suggests you should write a romantic novel about a wannabe fashion designer in
the nineteen-fifties, when you’d thought of writing about the first human
settlement on Mars, ask your teacher why the suggestion was made.

It will probably be based on the teacher’s observation of
where your writing strengths lie. Perhaps all the struggle you had with the
Mars colony will drop away when you dress your heroine in bobby socks and the
furthest distance she wishes to travel is into town on a Saturday night.

If you write frequently – if you keep journals, write
reams of stream-of-consciousness material or structured short stories, flash
fiction or novels, and you keep all this as hard copy – it won’t be very
long before you start wondering whether to buy more shelves!

Who are you?

As a writer, who are you? Do you have your own distinctive
writing voice? If you’ve never looked through your body of accumulated work, it
might be worth checking it out in case you are missing something important
about your writing. Is there a subject to which you keep returning? Is your
writing fantasy-oriented or is it rooted in fact? Or both? Do relationships
matter? Romance or Family? Crime or Comedy? Is your style conversational or
rather formal? Do you write verse but are you reluctant to call yourself a
poet? Do you have a wide vocabulary? Is your writing suitable for children or
young adults rather than over-eighteens?

Among these pages you might find lots of good ideas you have
forgotten, surprising insights about yourself and perhaps a clear way forward
for your writing.

Nobody but you

It’s a fact that even the best creative writing teachers in
the world cannot make you into a great writer if the potential isn’t there.
They may offer advice and guidance, but they cannot do the actual writing for
you.

Fortunately, the writing world has always been wide, and
these days it’s even wider because the world has come into every home in the
shape of an oblong screen. Writing which does not make it into high street
bookshops through the usual channels can be made available to the reading
public on screen. Life writing, blogs, erotica, fan fiction, commentary,
non-fiction: it’s all out there on the net. Millions of people everywhere are
tapping on keyboards and making it happen.

No guarantees

You have a master’s degree in creative writing. Your tutor
loves your story. So does your mother and your husband or wife. In fact,
everyone you know loves your story. They’ve never read better. You choose your
competition carefully. Yes, you’ve read the rules, sent it in before the
closing date and paid your fee.

You don’t win. Or come second or third. How can that be?

You’ve redrafted your novel four times. It’s taken you
eighteen months. Your mentor is happy. You send it for a professional critique
which comes back saying that with a few minor revisions it will be wonderful.
It wins a prize. A literary agent likes your first three chapters and wants to
read it all. She takes you on. You have an agent and you dare to dream. The
agent doesn’t sell your book. Publishers love it but say they don’t know how to
market it. It’s not what they’re looking for right now. Last year, yes. Not
now; too dated.

Both the examples above are everyday occurrences for
writers. We live in a subjective world. The infinite number of ways in which
words can be put together to produce all the myriad stories there are in the
world is a source of wonder. But getting those words in front of millions of
appreciative readers is often down to luck, to a fluke, to chance.

It’s easy for us to say this, but – never give up. You
can’t always arrange for luck to come your way, but you can try to make things
happen for you by going to writers’ conferences and festivals, by meeting
people who might help you, by learning about the publishing process and by
talking to industry professionals in a relaxed, informal setting. So keep
writing, because nobody can publish what you haven’t yet written!

Life saving

Creative writing can be very therapeutic but a creative
writing teacher is not a therapist.

A creative writing student will often be given this advice
– write what you know. But what do
you know? It’s a colossal question. There is immediate information: we know
about ourselves, our feelings and relationships. We know about our surroundings
and the experiences which we keep in our memories. We also have acquired
knowledge – for example, we know there are distant galaxies and that in
1066 William of Normandy came and conquered England. We have so much knowledge
that we can see into the future, too. I shall visit my friend tomorrow. The
weather forecast is stormy and I must remember to take my umbrella when I go
out. Already I am constructing the story of my tomorrow.

Your own personal experience is the most vivid to you and is
full of the kind of detail that can help to bring your writing to life. But our
lives are sometimes painful or unhappy and recalling certain events in them can
be distressing. When this distress is reflected back to us on the page, in our free-writing
or through the mouths of our characters, it can be very shocking, so a measure
of distance or detachment might be required. Often, when we are writing about
our own experiences, a sense of humour is definitely desirable.

But aren’t you writing fiction? What if you are writing a
novel set in the tenth century or that one about the first colony on Mars? You
can imagine the surface of Mars and it will probably be nothing like the real
thing. But it will do, and you can explore as you go along, much as those first
colonists did.

If your book is about imaginary Martians, rather than
humans, you can make them up too, but
always bear in mind that it is the complexity of humans, their intellects and
emotions, likes, dislikes, ambitions and fears, all their myriad foibles and
the lives they lead that make characters in fiction interesting. If we’re to believe
novelists and film makers, it seems a great many aliens share human
characteristics. Perhaps they might be missing the more benign of our
qualities, and their greed and aggression might make them terrifying. Or
perhaps, like E T, they share our good points, and we are charmed.

Writers need to know about humans. Like actors, we create
lots of different characters, so imagining what it is like to be someone else
is part of our job. We both are and are not our characters. You might have
invented a villain who is the vilest murderer who ever lived, but this doesn’t
mean you are a wicked and depraved person yourself.

The imagination conjures up the good, bad, the hideous and
the beautiful.

Exercise

Close your eyes and think of a room that is very familiar to
you. Try to see it in your mind’s eye. It could be your home or place of work
or maybe somewhere you remember from your childhood. Think of what you like and
dislike, what you value about it. Don’t get too involved in what may have
happened in this room. Look, listen, pick things up if you like. Run your
finger tips over the surfaces.

Open your eyes and write a paragraph or two about the room.

Now imagine you are one of the following three people:

1 - A burglar

2 - An old acquaintance you haven’t seen for years

3 - A small child

Then write about the room again, this time through his or
her eyes.

CHAPTER 2

The craft of creative writing

What is a story?

Character or Plot?

Character

Plot

Narrative Viewpoint

Dialogue

We are creative writers, so we write stories.

But what is a story, and what does it need to do?

A story is a description of human behaviour, and this
behaviour needs to have consequences – in other words, it needs to have a
plot.

The story must introduce the reader to a person or people
(or to animal(s) or robot(s) or toy(s) or alien(s) standing in for people) who

want something,
and

try to get this
something, and

make some kind of
physical and/or emotional and/or moral journey.

In a story

actions have results,
and

characters make
choices which determine what happens next, and

all (or most of) the
questions which are asked at the beginning of the story are answered at the
end.

If you’re writing a series of interlinked stories or novels,
you can sometimes leave one or two questions unanswered, as Janet Evanovich
does in her Stephanie Plum stories – will Stephanie and Joe Morelli ever
make up their minds about each other?

Something all story formats have in common is that they are
(or they should be) about a character or characters who do things, make
choices, meet challenges, come up against problems, who find themselves in
conflict situations, and whose actions and choices affect what happens in the
end.

When you’re thinking about writing a story, you’ll always
need to ask yourself seven things:

1 - Whose story am I
telling?

2 - What does this
person (or what do these people) want?

3 - Who or what is
going to help them to get what they want?

4 - Who or what is
going to get in their way?

5 - What will go
right?

6 - What will go
wrong?

7 - What will happen
in the end?

This may sound shocking. Surely it can’t be true? Your
favourite books reduced to providing the answers to seven simple questions?

But analysing your favourite books by asking and answering these
seven questions will show you how a story works:

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings:

1 - It’s Frodo’s story.

2 - He wants to destroy the One Ring (okay, he must rather than he wants to destroy it).

3 - The Fellowship, Elves, Dwarves etc. The good,
particularly his friend Sam, help him.

4 - Orcs, Black Riders, Sauron’s armies etc. The bad,
particularly his adversary Gollum, hinder him.

5 - He reaches Mount Doom.

6 - He is wounded in all sorts of ways.

7 - He’s successful but at a price – his wounds never
really heal.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

1 - It’s Elizabeth Bennet’s story.

2 - She wants to marry a man she can respect, but if she
doesn’t marry Mr Collins her mother and sisters will lose their home on the day
her father dies.

3 - Her strength of character and her father’s backing help
her to say no to the awful Mr
Collins.

4 - Wealthy Mr Darcy proposes, but his pride prejudices him
against her family. Elizabeth’s pride is stung by his prejudice, plus she is
seduced by Mr Wickham’s lies which prejudice her against Mr Darcy.

5 - Both Mr Darcy and Elizabeth realise they have been
wrong.

6 - Lydia’s inappropriate behaviour threatens Elizabeth’s
and Mr Darcy’s relationship. Lady Catherine de Bourgh seeks to forbid their
marriage.

7 - Although they are confronted by all sorts of reasons why
they shouldn’t marry, the love between
Elizabeth and Mr Darcy overcomes all obstacles.

You can see this structure in operation in even the simplest
of nursery rhymes:

In Incy Wincy Spider:

1 - It’s Incy’s story.

2 - She wants to climb the waterspout.

3 - There’s nobody to help – she’s on her own here.

4 - The rain hinders her by washing her out.

5 – But, even though she’s being discouraged by fate
and circumstances, she has a strong character and she’s still determined to
climb the spout.

6 - The sun dries the rain.

7 - Success – Incy climbs the spout again. (This could
go on for some time).

Think about other stories you know and try to answer all the
questions we’ve suggested above – whose
story, what does he/she want, and so
on. If it’s not immediately obvious, don’t give up. Unless you are thinking of
something very experimental, you will find these specific questions are
answered in all the stories you choose.

Once you’ve finished your novel, you’ll have to write a
synopsis or outline of it for a literary agent or publisher to see. Analysing
how your story actually works will help you to write this synopsis. We’ll talk
about writing synopses later in the book.

Character or plot?

People who write stories are often asked: which do you think
of first, your character(s) or your plot(s)? This is a bit like being asked:
does day follow night, or does night follow day? When we set out to tell a
story, we need a character or characters, and we need interesting situations in
which these characters can act.

Some stories are predominantly character-driven, while others are predominantly plot-driven. But all kinds of stories
need characters, and every story must describe some problematic or interesting
situation, then show how this situation is ameliorated or resolved.

The classic worldwide bestseller Catch 22 is predominantly character-driven.
Although most of us want to know what happens to the American airman hero
Yossarian – if he will be killed on a bombing mission or if he will
manage to get himself grounded and out of the conflict – most readers
find they are just as interested in the rest of the characters and their
personal histories, even if these people are only tenuously linked to
Yossarian.

The traditional fairy story Cinderella is predominantly plot-driven.
We’re not told much about Cinderella herself, so we have to make assumptions
about where she lives, her age, her appearance, her likes and dislikes. We
learn nothing about the hero except that he’s a prince who falls in love with a
stranger. This is acceptable because most of us already know all about
fairytale princes and princesses, and because it’s fine to encourage your
reader to use his or her own imagination – to make Cinderella herself blonde
or brunette or red-headed, and to make the prince traditionally handsome or
maybe not. We read the story because we want to know what happens – if Cinderella escapes from her life of drudgery and
marries the prince or maybe not.

Most jokes are plot-driven. A man walks into a pub, but it
doesn’t usually matter what he looks like, what he’s wearing, or which pub.
It’s what happens next that’s important. A man walks into a pub and he says or
does what? This is the start of the story.

Your own story could take the form of a novel, a novella, a
short story, a piece of flash fiction, a screenplay, a drama intended for film,
television or radio performance, a comedy sketch, a narrative poem such as Hiawatha or Paradise Lost, or even a single joke.

Character

A story is always about a human being (or a rabbit, a
machine, a fairy, a ghost or some other entity standing in for a human being)
who wants or needs something, even if at first it’s not apparent to the
character or to the reader what this something might be.

It’s usually possible to identify the parts played by
different characters and to work out how they contribute to the development of
the story.

Who is your hero or
heroine?

For the purposes of this book, we shall refer to the main
character of any story as the hero or heroine, even if their behaviour is not
at all heroic. He or she is the protagonist
– the person whose fate matters most, who wants something, and who hopes
to get it. The heroes and heroines of romantic fiction want to find their soul
mates. The heroes and heroines of crime fiction want to solve crimes. If you
take the hero or heroine out of your story, the story will not exist. The hero
and heroine are the people with whom you’ll want your reader to identify or
even to fall in love. Or, if you’re writing a savage farce about people who are
all basically unpleasant, your hero and/or heroine will be the people about
whom you’ll want your reader to care
or at least be curious. Tom Sharpe’s classic
satire Blott on the Landscape is a
good example of a story in which everyone is fairly horrible, but most readers
probably find they care about the fates of the hero and heroine, the ingenious
gardener Blott and his beloved Lady Maude.

Your villain or villainess, who is sometimes called the
antagonist, is there to stop the
hero or heroine getting what he or she wants. It’s often great fun to write
about wicked people, but they shouldn’t be more interesting than your heroes or
heroines, or more sympathetic, and your reader shouldn’t cry when they die. An
attractive, clever, lazy bad guy can sometimes end up being much more
fascinating and appealing – to both author and reader – than an
honourable, decent, hardworking good guy. So when you’re creating protagonists
and antagonists you’ll need to be careful. The bad guys mustn’t overshadow the
good guys or steal the show.

A story doesn’t necessarily have to have a villain or
villainess in it. The hero or heroine can be thwarted or challenged by
circumstance(s), accident(s), coincidence, fate, his or her own personality, or
even by a well-meaning character who doesn’t intend to cause a disaster but who
does so (or comes close to doing so) all the same. A good example of a
well-intentioned saboteur is Donkey in the Shrek
series of films. Donkey tries to do his best for his friend Shrek, but screws
up all the time.

The hero or heroine should always be challenged by someone
or something, even if the challenge comes from inside himself or herself
– if, for example, he or she has to deal with fear, suspicion or pain of
some kind. Will Traynor, the hero of Jojo Moyes’s bestseller Me Before You, is challenged by his own
determination to put a stop to all the stuff that’s messing up his difficult
life and also by his growing affection for the heroine, Louisa. If your hero or
heroine isn’t challenged, you won’t have much of a story.

Your major characters will sometimes need to have friends, enemies, mentors, guides, confidantes and facilitators
– people who will help or hinder them as they try to get what they want.

Suspense, crime and mystery stories often introduce the
reader to characters who might be good guys or bad guys – people who seem
well-disposed towards the hero and/or heroine, but who might be working towards
their destruction. In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca,
for example, the grief-stricken housekeeper Mrs Danvers is working towards the
heroine’s destruction from Day One, but it takes the heroine a long time to
work that out.

You can always let your reader wonder about your characters,
at least at the beginning of the story. A bad guy doesn’t need to be hideous or
have cloven hooves. A good guy doesn’t need to be physically gorgeous or have
angel’s wings. A little or even a lot of complexity of character is always a
good thing.

Hero, heroine, villain, villainess, friend, enemy, mentor,
guide, confidante, facilitator, man or woman of mystery who might be a friend
or a foe – whenever you read a story yourself, try to identify which
roles the various characters are playing. Then, when you write your own
fiction, give your characters specific parts to play.

Plot

If a character goes to town, does her shopping, comes home
again and puts her feet up with a welcome mug of coffee, all that won’t add up
to a plot. This is because unless she spills her coffee down her best frock
and/or ruins her new carpet and/or scalds her foot and needs to go to A&E
where she meets a gorgeous doctor and falls in love or gets kidnapped by the
taxi driver taking her to hospital, there are unlikely to be any consequences.

But if she goes to town and meets someone she hasn’t seen
for years – someone who knows something which your character would not
want to be generally known, and which could ruin her life – you will have
the genesis of a plot, because this scenario asks questions. It suggests the
character will need to make some choices and is likely to be challenged in some
way. It invites us to wonder what will happen next.

How do you start a story, how do you develop it, and how do
you end it?

Openings, developments and
endings

A good opening is
one that asks questions to which the reader will want answers. Who killed the
murder victim and how will this person be caught? Who will marry whom? Where is
the Michelangelo drawing? You need to suggest your most important question as
soon as possible, because doing this will get your reader interested, and also
suggest why this reader should read or listen to your story.

So try to avoid starting any kind of story with any of the four
following:

1 - A description of the scenery. Of course, it is possible
to point to a host of classic novels which begin just like this. But the
nineteenth century reader did not access the world in the way we do, through
airline travel, photography and the computer, cinema and television screens. It
is very unusual for a contemporary novel for adults to contain illustrations,
but when Charles Dickens’s novels were serialised they were splendidly
illustrated by George Cruikshank, probably because readers felt they wanted and
needed illustrations to set the scene.

2 - A scene in which something happens that isn’t actually
going to matter. In Pride and Prejudice
there is a scene in which the Bennet sisters walk to Meryton to buy ribbons.
While there, they meet some army officers, including the charming Mr Wickham.
If they’d bought their ribbons and gone home without meeting anyone, the scene
would have no purpose in terms of moving the story forward.

3- An overview of the main character’s life history. It’s
possible that your hero’s or heroine’s schooldays might have some bearing on
your plot. If this is indeed the case, consider filtering in this backstory at
appropriate times, on a need-to-know basis, rather than telling the reader all
about your character’s schooldays right at the beginning of your novel and
effectively putting off starting your actual story.

4 - Once upon a time…
It was a dark and stormy night… Tom/Jane opened his/her eyes and got out of
bed… In a land far away… These
openings are clichés and so, if you want to use them, you will need to subvert,
re-imagine or twist them in some original way.

As for development
– while a reader reads your story, you’ll need to retain this reader’s
interest. You could do that by revealing a secret, by introducing a new
character whom you might have mentioned in passing earlier in the story, by
letting your romantic hero or heroine be distracted by a new lover, or by
letting your investigator start to follow a false trail.

A new objective for a central character is almost always a
good thing. Your hero or heroine could resolve to win back a faithless lover.
Your investigator could believe he/she knows the identity of the killer and
arrest this person, but then someone else could be murdered, and the
investigator will have to rethink the whole investigation.

This sort of forward progress will hopefully keep your
reader reading.

But don’t let the excitement peak too soon. Save your
biggest drama or showdown for towards the end of the story.

The ending will
answer all or most of the questions you asked at the beginning of your story
and will hopefully leave your reader feeling satisfied rather than mystified,
cheated or annoyed. A good story shouldn’t merely hang a series of portraits on
a narrative wall and invite the reader to look at them. Most readers hope to be
shown how things work out for your characters. These readers want to leave your
characters in the places where they want and/or deserve to be.

Does all this always have to be the case? Well, in a murder
mystery the victim probably doesn’t deserve to be dead. But if the story is to
have any reader-appeal, you will probably need to bring the murderer to
justice. You might know of one or two stories in which the killer gets away
with it. But remember there are several million others in which he or she
doesn’t! The reason for this is that storytellers need to offer
reader-satisfaction. If a killer gets away with murder, it makes for an
unsatisfactory read. It feels wrong because murder is inherently wrong, and
because most of us believe murderers should be caught and punished.

Do you always need to offer the reader a happy ending?

No, you definitely don’t, even if you’re writing mainstream (in category fiction published by Mills & Boon, a happy ending is
obligatory) romantic fiction. But you do
have to offer the reader the right
ending, and it can be difficult to decide what the right ending should be.

Charles Dickens wrote two endings to Great Expectations, the second at the behest of his novelist friend
Edward Bulwer Lytton. But, in this second ending, it’s still not clear what
really happened to Pip and Estella. I saw
no shadow of another parting from her – what does that mean? Did Pip end up with Estella
or not?  Did they marry or did they
part? Does it matter? Maybe not, because by the end of the novel Pip and
Estella have reached a better understanding of each other, and this is what really needs to happen if the reader is
to close the novel with a sigh of satisfaction.

Narrative viewpoint

You need to decide through whose eyes you want to see the
action of your story. You’ll probably have noticed already that in narrative
formats like novels, the action is usually seen from the point(s) of view of
one or more of the central characters. But which character(s) should you
choose?

Most traditional stories are told from the point(s) of view
of the hero and/or the heroine, in either the first or the third person. You
don’t have to do it this way, but you should bear in mind that if you write
from the viewpoint of your bad guy, for example, the reader is likely to start
identifying with him. You might not want this to happen. If you give a
character a narrative viewpoint, he or she is likely to become the reader’s
friend. So choose your viewpoint character(s) carefully.

The first person
viewpoint (I did this, I said that) is the most intimate, and
it is often chosen by first time writers. Its main drawback is that it is
difficult to let the reader know anything which the viewpoint character cannot
or must not know. Also, if your viewpoint character isn’t attractive or
charismatic in some way, the reader is unlikely to become involved in your
story.

Here are two examples of first person narrative viewpoint:

The first narrator is young Pip in Great Expectations by Charles
Dickens:

The man, after looking
at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets. There was
nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself –
for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and
I saw the steeple under my feet – when the church came to itself, I say,
I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously.

Here is Jane in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre:

As I rose and dressed,
I thought over what had happened, and wondered if it were a dream. I could not
be certain of the reality till I had seen Mr Rochester again, and heard him
renew his words of love and promise.

The reader is in these characters’ heads, feeling what they
feel – fear, panic, doubt, anxiety – and identifying with them
completely.

The third person
viewpoint (he/she/it did this, he/she/it said that) is much more
flexible. If you wish, you can tell your whole story from the point(s) of view
of the hero and/or heroine. Or you can tell just some of it from their point(s) of view and, when they are off the
page, someone else can take over.

When you decide to write in the third person, you will have
a big choice of viewpoint characters. But maybe you should restrict yourself to
one or at most two in a short story, and up to about five or six in a novel,
because otherwise you will find you are changing the narrative viewpoint all
the time, and that your story will become disjointed.  There will be far too many people trying to have their say,
and your reader might get tired of listening to them.

Does the postman have to tell the reader what he feels about
delivering letters on a wet winter day? Does the bus driver have to complain to
the reader about the stroppy, rowdy passengers eating fish and chips on the top
deck of his bus? If these characters and these events do not advance the action
of your story, almost certainly not!

It’s probably most engaging for the reader if you can write
each scene in your story from just one or two characters’ points of view,
because otherwise you will end up head-hopping and your reader will be trying
to listen to three or four or even more characters at the same time.

Here is an example of head-hopping:

Tom willed the lift to
go faster. Suddenly, in its mirror-glass wall, he noticed a white patch of
dried toothpaste on his chin, which he slapped at roughly. As soon as the doors
opened wide enough for him to get through, he was running down the corridor.

Damn, thought Tom,
when he saw everyone was already seated. I’m last. I wonder what they’ve been
saying. I bet they think my spaceship is too expensive. He rubbed his chin
again in case any toothpaste remained.

‘Ah, there you are,
Tom,’ said Carol, wondering if he knew he had toothpaste on his chin. ‘We’re
glad to see you.’

‘This spaceship of
yours looks promising,’ said Steve, but as he spoke his mobile rang. ‘Sorry,’
he said, and went to take the call in the corridor. It was his wife…

We began with Tom, hopped into Carol’s head when she thought
about the toothpaste on Tom’s chin, and then hopped into Steve’s head,
whereupon we left both Tom and Carol behind to go with Steve into the corridor.

When you write any scene, it’s a good plan to imagine you
are holding the hand of the character with whom you want your reader to engage
throughout. In the above extract, we have to let go of Tom’s hand, run round
the table to see Tom through Carol’s eyes, and then we follow Steve into the
corridor. This sort of thing can be very effortful for readers!

When you do change the narrative viewpoint, you should
normally indicate this by a line break. Then your reader will realise he/she is
now in someone else’s head.

Jane Austen’s six major novels are all written in the third
person, almost entirely from her
heroines’ points of view.

Here is Emma observing Frank Churchill and Harriet:

At first it was
downright dullness to Emma. She had never seen Frank Churchill so silent and
stupid. He said nothing worth hearing – looked without seeing –
admired without intelligence – listened without knowing what she said.
While he was so dull, it was no wonder that Harriet should be dull likewise,
and they were both insufferable.

Jane Austen Emma

But Anthony Trollope writes in the third person from several points of view:

Eleanor was herself
the widow of a medical man, and felt a little inclined to resent all these hard
sayings. But Miss Thorne was so essentially good-natured that it was impossible
to resent anything she said. Eleanor therefore sipped her wine and finished her
chicken.

Mr Harding winced at
the idea of the press. He had had enough of that sort of publicity, and was
unwilling to be shown up a second time either as a monster or as a martyr.

Mr Arabin looked at
her piteously. It seemed to him as though he were being interrogated by some
inner spirit of his own, to whom he could not refuse an answer, and to whom he
did not dare give a false reply.

Anthony Trollope Barchester Towers

It’s possible to combine the advantages of the first and
third person points of view by writing in the deep third person. What is deep third person viewpoint? It’s a
style of writing which takes the reader deep inside the head (and heart and
soul) of the character in the way a first person narrative viewpoint does extremely
effectively, but which also allows for the multi-viewpoint flexibility of a
third person narrative.

A passage written in deep third person narrative viewpoint
looks like this:

What the hell did he
think he was playing at? Madeleine checked the screen one more time. Yes, there
was the text. She hadn’t imagined it.

Bastard.

She’d give him hell
when he came home. Shame he’d forgotten his BlackBerry that morning.

Shame for Jack,
anyway.

If you look at the example above again, you will see that it
could easily be reworked as a first person narrative because it is so intensely
focused – the reader is invited to become
the character as he or she reads the story. A traditional, classical, more
detached third person narrative might not be quite so immediately involving for
the reader, especially if the author has a voice himself or herself – if
the author butts in, as some authors do, and writes things like Madeleine was very angry with Jack.

A deep third person narrative perspective tends not to need
so many speech tags or indications of who is speaking because this is usually
perfectly obvious.

Nowadays, many novelists write in the deep third person in
order to make sure they dig that little bit – well – deeper! You
can find more notes on deep third person narrative viewpoint on this link: http://theeditorsblog.net/2011/11/16/deep-pov-whats-so-deep-about-it/

What about the second person narrative voice, in which the
reader is told you did this or you said that? In some cases, you means I, the narrator, and this often seems to be a literary affectation.
If you mean I, why should you write you? Or it can mean you, the reader, and this can sound somewhat accusatory.

There are some notes on second person narratives on this
link – http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SecondPersonNarration.
If you’re a first time novelist aspiring to commercial publication, we don’t
suggest you go for this narrative option unless you feel very strongly that you
have no choice.

It’s also possible to tell stories from the perspective of
the all-seeing author or God, and sometimes Anthony Trollope does – he
writes from his characters’ narrative viewpoints and also from his own. This
eye-of-God method of storytelling is not hugely popular with readers nowadays,
and it sometimes tends to result in a rather detached, matter-of-fact story.
The author manipulates the characters, and the reader can often see the
strings, whereas in an ideal world the reader of a novel should forget about
the author and connect with the characters one-to-one.

But, if you want
to write from your own authorial point of view, there’s nothing to stop you,
and you will be able to find examples of this approach in both classic and
contemporary fiction. If the author has a particularly attractive voice, this
approach to story-telling can work very well. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote
Vanity Fair from his own authorial
viewpoint, and the American novelist Fannie Flagg often makes her own voice
heard.

Lastly, we should mention the narrative viewpoint of the
sympathetic (or sometimes unsympathetic or downright hostile) observer, a
person who is not directly involved with the fates of the protagonist(s) in a
story, but who is instead looking on and taking notes for the reader.

The tenant Mr Lockwood and the servant Mrs Dean are the
narrative voices in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a story in which
the central characters are not particularly attractive, have a rather bad time
and end up being the architects of their own destruction. But the two narrators
are very ordinary. They are people like us. Perhaps it’s easier to identify
with people like us? What do you think?

Dialogue

You’ve created your characters, you’ve given them a drama in
which to act, you’ve decided who is going to have a narrative viewpoint, so now
let’s hear these characters talking.

What does effective dialogue do?

It reveals personality, it takes the action forward, and it
helps the reader to connect with the characters. It allows this reader to
forget the story is all invention, and he or she needn’t believe a word of it.

As we read a story, most of us want to believe!

If you look at the following two examples, you will be able
to decide which style of storytelling works more effectively.

Example 1:

She told him it was
all over and she wanted to split up.

He was very upset and
wanted to know why.

Example 2:

‘It’s all over,’ she said.
‘I think it would be best if we split up.’

‘But why?’ he demanded, staring at her in disbelief. ‘What’s gone
wrong? What have I done?’

‘You haven’t done anything. It’s not you, it’s me. My feelings have
changed, all right?’

‘I know you’re having a bad time at work,’ he said, and reached out to
touch her hand. ‘You want to leave this town and do something new. I can’t say
I blame you. But surely you don’t have to throw everything away?’

‘I told you, it’s over!’ she snapped, and shook him off. ‘What don’t
you understand?’

‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’

‘No,’ she said, and turned away from him.

‘Then it must be about me, and I’m entitled to an explanation.’

‘I can’t give you one.’

If you read that second passage aloud, you’ll be able to
hear the different tones of voice, which in turn express the characters’
personalities, feelings and states of mind.

She is determined to take a specific course of action.
Perhaps she is afraid he’s going to try to stop her leaving. So she ends up
being mean to him, probably because she’s scared that if she tries to be kind
he’ll talk her out of going, and she doesn’t want to give him the chance. She’s
behaving like a trapped insect. She’s desperate to escape, and she doesn’t care
if she hurts herself or anyone else in the process.

He is puzzled, upset, and at first he tries to empathise
with her feelings. But then – because we all like to understand how we
have upset someone, and why they are offended – he becomes suspicious,
and determined to have an explanation.

She is equally determined not to give him one. But the fact
that she turns away when she tells him no one else is involved will make him
and the reader suspect she is having an affair.

The author hasn’t had to explain to the reader that these
two characters are anxious, worried, bewildered, determined, mean, sympathetic
or suspicious, because it’s all there in the dialogue.

Look at this section of dialogue:

‘You’re telling me
you’re afraid?’

‘I’m terrified.’ Alex looked at Rose. ‘I didn’t use to be. I thought
the men who shirked and cried were cowards, who should be put against the wall.
But that was in another life, before I dared to hope. Rose, when I had no hope,
I had no fear.’

‘I know it must be horrible.’ Rose took his hand and stroked the
scarred, bruised knuckles. ‘I know I
would be scared.’

‘Rose, you don’t understand. I’m not exactly scared – most of the
time I just get on with it. Sometimes I enjoy it.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, because it’s all a game, and I’m quite good at it. But soldiers
are supposed to fight, and what we’re doing these days isn’t fighting.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘We’re murdering each other, and it’s not the same.’

Margaret James The Silver Locket

Do you see all that white space? Does it make the page look
welcoming and reader-friendly? Big blocks of narrative and long paragraphs can
be very off-putting, encouraging the reader to skip or skim. But lots of white
space on a page somehow makes it seem accessible and inviting.

Dialogue tends to be written in short paragraphs, is
intimate and confiding, and readers are far more likely to remember what
they’ve read in dialogue because, even after they have finished reading the
story, they will hear the voices of the characters inside their heads.

It’s worth thinking about how your characters speak because otherwise there’s a danger they
will all sound like you (or perhaps
like people you know or have heard on the radio or television). This could be
unfortunate because it’s unlikely you will want your characters to sound like
the Queen or the man in the newsagent’s shop.

If you are writing about a tiny island community which has
had no outside influences for several generations and, as a result, everyone
uses the same vocabulary and phraseology, there’s a possibility the reader will
have difficulty distinguishing between the people in your story. But, even in
such an extreme situation, your characters should probably have their own
recognisable voices, and you should be able to find ways to make their speech
patterns and diction individual.

Novelists need to be able to pick up the patterns and
rhythms of real dialogue and to reproduce these patterns and rhythms in their
writing. But, when you’re writing dialogue, you don’t need to include every
single word you’d probably hear in a real conversation. In everyday speech,
common expressions such as to be honest
or know what I mean, and words like well and anyway litter our conversations, but we don’t tend to hear them. On
the page, however, they draw attention to themselves. So don’t overuse them.

Here are the four main influences on the way we speak:

1 - Age

2 - Geographical locality

3 - Social class

4 - Peer group

Every group of people has its own vocabulary, use of
expression, manner and jargon. There is no substitute for keeping your ears
open and listening, not only to what
people say, but how they say it.

Imagine you have been introduced to someone new and you are
telling a friend all about him. Would you say:

He’s a nice chap
or he’s a good bloke or maybe he’s a cool dude? Perhaps you would say
he’s a guy, a nerd, a plank or a dork, or maybe an altogether spiffing fellow?

Perhaps you
wouldn’t say any of the above – but a character might. Each term or
expression comes with its own connotations which the reader will then interpret
in order to learn more about the speaker.

Character, plot, narrative viewpoint
and dialogue
– if you use these effectively you will end up with good stories.

Exercise

Think of someone you know, or from the media, and then make
a short list of attributes which you associate with this person.

Perhaps these could include a job, an item of clothing, a
favourite place, a mannerism and a hobby? The list could be longer if you like,
but you’ll need to repeat the exercise by making a list for three, four or five
different people.

Randomly choose attributes from each list and imagine a
composite character. Write a paragraph about this character in a few fairly
commonplace situations. Shopping, in a waiting room, at a party, perhaps? How
do they behave? Are they shy or confident? Patient or pushy? Funny or boorish?

How do they speak? What interests them? Can you look at the
world through their eyes? Would you like to talk to them at that party or would
you avoid them?

Are they somebody a reader might be interested in? If not,
why not?

Exercise

Look at the paragraph below. It’s the opening of Middlemarch
by George Eliot. It introduces
us to Miss Dorothea Brooke and her sister, Celia.

What is your reaction to how it looks on the page?

Read the passage through and write a couple of scenarios in
which these two sisters (or two other sisters) might be introduced in a contemporary novel. Storytelling
techniques, style and diction – who would write thrown into relief by poor dress nowadays? – have changed a
lot since this novel was first published in 1874.

Miss
Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor
dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not
less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian
painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the
more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion
gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one
of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually
spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister
Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings;
and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister’s,
and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain
dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The
pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections,
though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good:" if you
inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any
yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers - anything lower than an admiral or
a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman
who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of
all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.

CHAPTER 3

Building Your Story

How is it for you?

Questions your reader
will ask

When, where and how
to start

Maintaining tension

Words

This chapter will discuss these important subjects in
detail.

How is it for you?

There are many ways in which you can build a story, and sometimes
it’s hard to find the one that’s right for you.

When you’re first thinking about a story:

1 - you could write a detailed plan or synopsis and stick to
it, or

2 - you could write a vague outline and be prepared to
change it, or

3 - you could do no planning at all and hope your characters
will show you the way.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these three
working methods?

Once the planners
have their plans in place, they tend to feel relieved. Now, they’ll always know
where they are going, so they’ll rarely suffer from panic attacks, and they’re
unlikely to get blocked. But they’ll also risk losing interest in their stories
because they’ll know exactly what happens before they write a single word of
the stories themselves.

The vague outliners
have the security of a road map, but they’ll wait until they start writing the
actual story before they finalise the details of their characters’ journeys.
They’re not likely to become bored because they’ll always be willing to let
their characters surprise them. They’ll be happy to change their original plans
if they think of something better or more interesting for their characters to
do. They might panic once in a while because they don’t always know what to
write next. But, if this should happen, they know they can always write a few
key scenes which come later in the story, and then join the dots or build a
bridge over the ravine!

The planning phobics
often say planning stifles their creativity. They fear that planning a story in
detail might make their writing seem leaden and dull. But authors who don’t
plan anything are also at risk of writing themselves into dead ends or of getting
depressed when they find a story line isn’t developing as well as they’d hoped.
Sometimes, when they are several thousand words into a story, they realise they
don’t actually like their characters and/or they really don’t know what to do
with these people. They often spend their precious writing hours fretting or
staring out of the window because they don’t know what to write today. So they
tend to waste a lot of time. They’re the ones who are most likely to write the
first three chapters of a novel or to start a short story with huge enthusiasm,
but then to run out of steam and inspiration.

Most commercially-published novelists have to be planners,
at least to some extent, because if they are under contract to publishers they
usually have to keep their editors informed about any current work-in-progress
and/or to let these editors have outlines or short synopses of what they intend
to write next. What are you writing now
and what are you going to write next
– professional novelists are asked these questions all the time.

When you write your stories, do you tend to over-write or
under-write?

Almost all of us do one or the other!

Some authors deliberately over-write, putting in absolutely
everything they think might have a place in their stories. This is fine as long
as they are aware that some of this material – episodes which are
complete in themselves, perhaps, and don’t contribute anything to the great
scheme of things, or characters who appear and later disappear without doing
anything to advance the action – will end up being redundant and will
need to come out.

Other authors begin with notes and sketches. They gradually
build their stories from the inside out, adding to their word counts day by
day, and always aware of how much they have yet to do. This approach can make
for good time management because they hardly ever have to cut anything –
everything they write will be there for a purpose. It will reveal character
and/or it will move the story on.

Planner, vague outliner or planning phobic, over-writer or
under-writer, here are some guidelines which should help you to write a better
story.

When, where and how will you start?

A good place to begin could be when your hero and/or
heroine:

1 - needs to make a choice, or

2 - is presented with a challenge, or

3 - meets the person who is going to change his or her life,
or

4 - changes his or her status – marries, is widowed,
become a parent, is orphaned, is abandoned by a husband, wife or lover, leaves
school, leaves home, starts a new job, retires from a profession, or

5 - must deal with a setback of some kind – is injured
in battle, is bankrupted, is attacked, is bereaved, is made homeless, or

6 - makes an important decision, or

7 - makes a mistake.

As a result of any or all of the seven situations above,
your hero and/or heroine will need to do
something, and this need to act will give you a foundation on which to build
your story. It will get your reader asking questions, which the reader will
wish to do.

Questions your reader may ask

Some good questions include:

1 - Who killed whom?

2 - Why and when and how did someone die?

3 - Who will marry or end up with whom?

4 - How will a beleaguered, wounded, frightened or unjustly
imprisoned hero or heroine fight back?

5 - What happened to the money/baby/locket?

Where’s it happening?

You’ve dreamed up your characters, you’ve given them choices
and/or challenges, and now you need to think about your set-up.

Where and when is your story taking place? In what
situation(s) do your characters find themselves when your action begins?

You’re not writing a history book or a travel guide. So
you’ll need to suggest your set-up, which can include giving your reader some
information about the physical setting of your story – past, present,
town, countryside, East, West – without going into huge geographical or
circumstantial detail.

One easy and painless way for you to describe your set-up
and for your reader to understand what is going on at the start of your story
is to let your characters talk about it.

Why should they talk about it?

Dialogue is always more reader-friendly than narrative. Direct
speech wakes a story up, whereas long stretches of narrative tend to put it to
sleep. When you’re reading a novel or any other kind of story yourself, which
do you find more appealing and engaging – dialogue or narrative? We’re
prepared to bet it’s dialogue.

If you describe a set-up and/or setting in dialogue, as one
character shows a scene to a second character, or as they both arrive somewhere
new and talk about what they see, or as they discuss a problematic situation,
the reader is likely to remember it.

You’ll also need to ask yourself where your characters would
like and/or deserve to be at the end of your story. If you’re having trouble
getting started, knowing where you want to go and working towards this might be
a way forward for you.

But, if you can’t envisage the ending yet, don’t worry
– work towards the middle of your story, towards a turning point or a new
challenge for your hero or heroine. Perhaps he or she could have a flash of
intuition, inspiration or enlightenment? When you get to that point, your hero
or heroine could then decide what to do with this enlightenment, inspiration or
intuition.

Perhaps the mistress nobody knew existed turns up at the
funeral of her married lover? Perhaps a child dies? Perhaps a woman who
believed she could never have children becomes pregnant? Perhaps a husband
tells his wife he is gay and is leaving the family home? Perhaps…perhaps…

Maintaining tension

As you write, try to maintain tension and reader-interest by
leaving your characters in difficult or interesting situations before moving on
to a new set of circumstances or characters, rather than by turning out bedroom
lights and letting these characters (and probably your reader, too) fall
peacefully asleep.

Do you know the story of Scheherazade from Tales of the Arabian Nights?

She was ordered to tell her husband, who happened to be the
Sultan, a story. Once the story was finished, she would be put to death. But,
unlike many brides before her, Scheherazade realised that if she stopped at an
exciting moment and promised to tell the rest of story the next day, she might
keep her head a little longer. Eventually, the Sultan was so taken with her
story that she kept her head for good.

When you write each chapter of your own novel or scene in
your short story, it might be worth bearing the following maxim in mind: begin with intrigue, end with jeopardy.

Both intrigue and jeopardy come in subtle shades. Intrigue
isn’t necessarily of Byzantine complexity and jeopardy isn’t always life
threatening. All they need to do is tempt your reader to turn the page.

You will need to suit your pace to your story.

A crime or mystery story usually needs to be fast-paced
because, if events move too slowly, the reader might solve the crime before the
hero or heroine does. But fast-paced doesn’t mean rushed, confusing or
breathless. You’ll need to strike a balance between keeping the story moving,
keeping the reader guessing, and giving the reader time to guess – but not too much time! You’ll also need to
develop your central characters so that the reader will care about these people
and want to know what happens to them.

Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series of novels, which began
with Case Histories, are great
examples of fast-paced, exciting stories in which there is plenty of
character-development. Readers of crime novels tend to love series and to
become attached to the central characters in them. P D James’s Dalgliesh and
Colin Dexter’s Morse have their own fan bases, as does Ruth Rendell’s Wexford.
So, even though most crime and mystery novels are plot-driven and need to be
fast-paced, they need to introduce the reader to well-rounded central
characters, too.

A traditional romantic story in which the hero and heroine
are eventually going to find themselves happily united can be more leisurely in
pace. But you’ll still need to keep the tension tight and to give the reader
some surprises. Since the reader will already know the hero and heroine must
end up together, discovering how they
find their happy-ever-after is what will keep this reader reading.

Try not to allow your characters to chat aimlessly –
instead, always let their dialogue move the story on in some way and tell the
reader (or even your characters themselves) something he or she doesn’t already
know about your characters’ personalities and/or motivation.

If you tell your readers anything they don’t need to know, you’ll risk confusing them and making them
wonder if they need to remember all this – or not? Dialogue in fiction
should not be as discursive and casual as chatting in daily life. It must earn
its place in your story, as Jane Austen pointed out to a young fan who sent the
great novelist a story of her own:

The scene with Mrs
Mellish, I should condemn; it is prosy and nothing to the purpose.

Jane Austen Selected Letters

If dialogue is prosy
(is just casual chatting) and nothing to
the purpose (doesn’t move the action forward or tell the reader anything
he/she needs to know), it definitely needs to come out – to be literally condemned.

Jane Austen gets it absolutely right herself in the piece of
dialogue we’ve quoted below, which reveals character and moves the story on in
a small but very significant way.

‘Oh! Very well,’
exclaimed Miss Bates, ‘then I need not be uneasy. “Three things very dull
indeed.” That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull
things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I? – (looking round with
the most good-humoured dependence on everyone’s assent) – Do you not all
think I shall?’

Emma could not resist.

‘Ah! Ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me – but you
will be limited as to number – only three at once.’

Jane Austen Emma

Emma is suddenly made aware that she – the beautiful,
talented, rich and gracious Miss Woodhouse, to whom the whole district must
defer – can be pointlessly spiteful and cruel. This comes as a very
unwelcome or even shocking revelation to someone who has an extremely high
opinion of herself and sets herself high standards of behaviour. Miss Bates, on
the other hand, is made newly aware of her inferior social status.

This is a defining moment in the story, the one which
finally gets Emma to realise how smug and self-satisfied she can be, and which
makes her want to become a better, kinder person, the woman Mr Knightley will
want to marry.

If your story contains big
life events like births, marriages or deaths, try to make sure they justify the
space they take up in your narrative by having something dramatic happen at the
same time.

Or use them to change the direction of your story.

Jane Eyre is about to get married to Mr Rochester, but the
arrival of the brother of the first (and still living) Mrs Rochester puts a
spoke in that particular wheel:

‘The marriage cannot
go on: I declare the existence of an impediment.’

Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre

If you’re a noter and a sketcher, rather than a deliberate
over-writer, you’ll probably be asking yourself if a scene is earning its keep
all the time. You’ll develop the characters and situations as you write your
story, and probably give yourself and your characters lots of surprises, too.

If you’re a deliberate over-writer, however, you’ll need to
be strict with yourself and your characters, cutting scenes which don’t move
the action forward, which don’t reveal character, or which don’t tell the
reader anything he or she needs to know.

Words

If you can make all your words earn their place in your
story, you’ll end up with a more compelling, interesting and involving piece of
work.

Verbs and nouns are the heavy hitters in writing,
so you’ll always need plenty of those. A sentence containing a verb and a noun
or two will give the reader information in the simplest possible way:

Children play games.

Cats chase mice.

Pigs eat anything.

Adjectives are
the literary equivalent of chocolate, gadgets and shoes – they’re often
irresistible, but sometimes they’re bad for you. They add colour and interest
to your work, but they also slow the pace of your story. This can be disastrous
if you’re writing a fast-paced adventure in which the hero is racing to find
the lost gospel or city before the bad guys do.

Here’s an example of adjectives slowing pace:

The old iron key was
blood-red with rust, its blade dull and streaked, its intricate and
elaborately-worked bow discoloured by the inevitable grime of a great many long
centuries.

This is almost certainly overdoing a description of an old
key. If you’re tempted to write like this, you need to keep asking yourself
– what does my reader need to
know?

Sometimes it isn’t just a question of how many adjectives you don’t need, but where you don’t need them.

In the example below, the pairs of adjectives draw lots of
attention to themselves, and not in a good way:

It’s a cold, wet day.
I shiver and pull on my warm, fleecy jogging-pants and thick, hooded jumper
over my damp, chilled body. I head
for my warm, dry car.

Adverbs also slow
the pace. You’ll need to use adverbs some of the time, but think of them as the
seasoning in your literary cooking, not as a main ingredient. They’re useful
when they’re needed – for example, when you want to qualify a verb or to
refine its meaning:

I don’t usually
come this way into town.

You must not drive so carelessly.

He occasionally
drinks spirits.

But you will almost never need to write anything as involved
as this:

I walked slowly and
hesitantly down the darkening alley, breathing harshly and laboriously,
hopefully trying to be quiet but fearfully fretting that I was noisily and
dangerously announcing my presence.

If you can use a strong, appropriate verb in the right place
at the right time, this will probably be more effective than using half a dozen
adjectives or adverbs. But don’t feel you need to use strong verbs like screamed, howled or shrieked all
the time, especially if asked or said will do, because you’ll risk making
your characters seem hysterical, and your writing might look overblown.

Think about the effect you would like your story to have on
your reader, and about what emotion(s) the reader might want to feel while
reading it.

Thrillers and mystery stories, for example, often use lots
of action verbs – people zoom, scream, race or hurtle to their
destinations rather than merely go.
These action verbs add to the excitement – and excitement is the emotion
most readers of thrillers and mysteries want to feel.

But romantic heroes and heroines rarely need to zoom or hurtle anywhere.

What about just, now, but,
so, and – these five little
words tend to be over-used by all of us. They’re useful because they can add
nuances of meaning to your narrative, but try not to start every other
paragraph with but, just, now, and or so!

A story needs to keep moving and things have to keep
happening. But this doesn’t mean you must keep your characters in a state of
breathless activity, because emotional
development is often as important as physical
action. A romantic story usually shows the characters making emotional
progress, learning a lot about themselves and about the nature of love, as well
as doing things like becoming world famous conductors or surviving a global
conflict.

You’ll also need to think about your writing style. Ask
yourself – is your style suited to your story?  Romantic fiction is all about emotion and feeling, whereas
action or adventure stories don’t always need to go into much or indeed any
detail about feelings and emotions. If the big question in the story is where is the lost painting, that’s what
the reader will really want to know, probably more than what the finders of the
painting thought about discovering it.

As you build your stories, think about pace and style, and
try to make sure they’re always appropriate.

Exercise

Write a short – a few paragraphs rather than a few
pages – scene which contains a lot of action. Perhaps it features running
for a bus? Or maybe there’s an accident? Or there could be a crime – maybe
a burglary or a mugging? Or what might happen when a lion escapes from the zoo?

Once you have written your scene, use it as a starting point
for various kinds of stories. Try reworking it with different characters in
different situations. Alter your sentence construction, perhaps making it more
complex, perhaps simplifying it. Use more (or less) dialogue and more (or less)
description. Try increasing the pace and slowing it down. Change the point of
view. Try looking through the eyes of:

1 - A victim

2 - A witness

3 - A perpetrator

4 - A bus driver

Try writing your scene without using any adjectives or
adverbs. What is lost and what is gained? Can you strengthen your verbs?

Consider the following three sentences:

1 - He went through the door quickly.

2 - He ran through the door.

3 - He dashed through the door.

We’re not insisting any one sentence might be better than another. You need to decide
what form of words suits your style and scene best.

Use the few paragraphs you have as tools for experimentation,
and keep all your drafts to compare the results.

CHAPTER 4

Pitfalls

Here are just a few:

Falling in love with
every word

Over-writing

Nice word, wrong
style

Telling, not showing

Repetition

Over-explanation: a
bit like repetition

Letting the literal
truth get in the way

Generalisation

Clichés and other
hackneyed expressions

Thinking you know the
right way

Leaving out vital
information

Believing you, the
well-read author, always know best

It must be love

Every now and then, creative writing teachers spot a
particular gleam in a student’s eye. It isn’t a gleam of excitement about the
subject. The student hasn’t suddenly had a brilliant inspiration. It’s
something apparently positive but potentially harmful.

The student has fallen in love. Not with a fellow student,
or with the teacher (although that is possible), but with every word they
write. Every single word, from it to apocalyptic, is the student’s very own
baby and must not be harmed.

With any luck, this is merely an infatuation and it won’t
last long. If the student is in a group, the teacher’s careful handling of the
love-sick one is usually supported by the other students. But the lone writer
at home is far more likely to have a protracted affair.

It can be energising and motivating to write without
allowing your internal editor to interfere. But, at some stage, learning to
edit your work is going to be essential.

As we have already pointed out, thinking about character,
dialogue, plot and narrative viewpoint is essential when you are getting to
grips with the craft of writing. Use
these four elements well and you will probably end up with an effective story.

The key word here is effective.
In the early stages of your writing career it would be a mistake always to
think in terms of good or bad writing, particularly if you are
toning up your writing muscles and trying out different techniques, styles and
genres. But it is very useful to ask yourself if your writing is as effective as you hope it might be.

As children, we learn best through play. When we are very
small, play is an unstructured activity, experimental, imaginative, and we give
little thought to the outcome. Gradually, however, more formal games with rules
and results become the norm.

This is also true of our writing, and it’s a good thing,
too.

If you are writing in order to communicate, there needs to
be a commonality of understanding. At various stages in our lives, most of us
need to write thank you letters, business proposals and maybe coherent essays
– that’s if we wish to keep our friends, get decent jobs and pass exams.
In all these circumstances, intellect certainly comes into play, while
imagination is perhaps not quite as important.

But storytelling requires the imagination and the intellect
to work together, not to allow one to
overshadow the other. In the early stages, this relationship can take a while
to settle down.

Creative writing teachers see the results of unhappy unions all
the time.

What do you make of this passage below?

Over-writing…

…or contributing more
to the page in terms of word count, complexity of syntax and vocabulary than
might be thought or deemed strictly necessary, or indeed, in any conceivable
way, desirable, is not going to
advance or move forward the novice student in his or her authorial
accomplishment.

There is much in this sentence that could be left out or
rephrased, probably resulting in greater clarity.

As for fabulously constructed metaphors, teetering towers of
adjectives and similes as smooth as the steel cladding on a skyscraper –
these can be very pleasurable to read, but they draw attention to themselves.
Then, the point of a particular
passage might be lost.

Experimenting with language and finding different ways to
express ideas are all part of the creative writing brief – and sometimes
brief is best. Redrafting and reworking are often essential. Perhaps you have
thought of ten different metaphors to describe a beautiful sunset. But a reader
will understand what you mean if you use just one. So do you actually need more? It is advisable to keep the
question of need in mind!

This is where asking the effectiveness
question is a good plan. What sort of story are you writing? If it’s a learned
monograph, then yes, complexity might be a requirement, but your readership
will no doubt be familiar with academic jargon and will probably be small in
number. Remember that while a lofty style might make the author look clever, it
could also affect fluency and leave the reader confused, alienated and probably
not anxious to read the rest of your story.

Yet more words…

We have given you an illustration of over-writing at single
sentence level. Also common, particularly at the beginning of a story, is larger
scale over-writing, unkindly called information-dumping.

This is usually the result of the author informing himself
or herself about a character or setting. All writers of fiction need to bear in
mind that complex back-stories of minor characters, highly descriptive accounts
of places or journeys, and reasons why every character is where/what/how they
are, act like black holes, absorbing light and pace.

If we are told everything there is to know in Chapter 1 of a
novel or on the opening page of a short story, there’s going to be little room
for later revelation – and gradual revelation is one of the more
desirable elements of story-telling.

Nice words, wrong style or setting

Unusual, archaic or inappropriate words act like sudden
braking or even emergency stops on your reader’s journey through your story.

After checking her
emails, Tracy took the baby out in the perambulator.

Out in the what? Which century are we in?

Whereas Nanny was
required to push her charge in the perambulator but she couldn’t help sighing
whenever a hansom cab passed by doesn’t seem so odd.

On the mantelpiece, a metal contraption with a flex and
shade blazed into light when switched on.

Please! It’s a lamp! But – the room was dark as pitch. Holding his hands out he felt for the cool
marble of the mantelpiece and further fumbling found a metal contraption with,
yes, a flex and a shade. It blazed into light when switched on – is
fine.

The susurration in the next room grew loud.

An excellent word. It sounds like its meaning – indistinct
whispering or rustling. Sometimes only one particular word will do.

Showing, not telling

Show; don’t tell
is a phrase the student writer hears all too frequently. It causes considerable
worry and confusion. But it needn’t. Stories require both telling and showing, but too much telling can
make readers feel as if they are being given a lecture.

If you write Tom was
very tall you are telling us something we will understand.

But now consider:

Tom banged his head
every time he went through a door.

Tom pulled up the
trousers of his spacesuit. As usual, a band of flesh flashed between the
turn-ups and his socks.

Thank you for your
enquiry about the Mars expedition, Tom read, but the Health and Safety
regulations state that no astronaut should be more than six foot seven inches
tall.

These three examples give us a direct understanding of how
tall Tom is. Can you imagine Tom more clearly now?

Let’s look again at the first example. While Tom banged his head every time he went
through a door is more visually arresting than Tom was very tall, it is still a case of the author telling the reader. The reader has to
imagine the pain of a bang on a head and also the myriad doors Tom has ever
walked through. What about:

Tom ducked to get through
the door of the space capsule but he didn’t bend low enough. Pain exploded in a
thousand stars before his eyes. Not again, he thought. When will I ever learn?

Of course, writing a short passage like the one above
requires more thought and effort than merely writing Tom was very tall. Also, there are times when Tom was very tall might do very well, and anything more would fall
foul of our advice about over-writing. But in the last example we now have a
direct experience of Tom’s height and we understand what he feels and thinks
about it. We have been shown, not told.

Repetition

All teachers know they have to repeat themselves. There is
an old adage that says tell them (your
students) what you are about to tell
them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them.

If you wish to impart information, repetition is a useful tool. But, like a chain saw, it requires
respectful handling.

Nobody would write John
had brown hair, John’s hair was brown, brown was the colour of John’s hair
in a story unless they had a very good reason for doing so. But repetition can
mar a story in other, more subtle ways.

The following is an exaggerated example:

John decided to go to
the supermarket. He got in the car and drove to the supermarket. He parked in
the car park. In the supermarket he filled up a trolley. He filled the trolley
with enough food to last at least a month. He didn’t like shopping much and he
didn’t want to have to come to the supermarket every week. He was very glad to
get back home with all his shopping. John ate well that evening.

In the paragraph above, not only are words and phrases
unnecessarily repeated, but also the repetition and the sentence construction
result in an immature, childish style. It is a He He He paragraph. The same subject opens every sentence.

Sequences of paragraphs or sentences which all begin with he, she,
it, they and the are common
in the work of beginners and, while the vibrant content of the actual writing might
make the work successful, it’s worth looking to see if it’s possible to add a
little sparkle by doing some rearranging. One of the markers of interesting
prose is a variety of sentence construction (or, a variety of sentence
construction is one of the markers of interesting prose).

Sometimes, when an author wants to make a particularly
strong impression, he or she might use lots of deliberate repetition. Consider
this extract from Bleak House by
Charles Dickens:

‘Dead, your Majesty.
Dead, my Lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every
order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And
dying thus around us every day.’

It uses a very effective repetitive tool, alliteration: the
repetition of consonants at the beginnings of words. D for dead certainly, but also for dying
and day. R for Right, (W)rong and Reverend.

The idea of Right
and (W)rong Reverends is deliciously wry and suggests another effective way of
using repetition: it can be amusing.

Tom couldn’t resist
listening to it again. He turned up the volume of his iPod and shut his eyes

On the console a
little red light began to wink and a tinny voice spoke through the other
headphones lying on the desk.

‘Hello, Tom. Houston
speaking. Are you receiving me?’

The music swelled in
Tom’s ears. David Bowie, another starman – he knew all about space. Tom
hummed along, oblivious to everything around him.

‘Hello, Tom. Houston
speaking. Are you receiving me?’

Tom knew it was only a
matter of time, of lengthening the trousers on his space suit. One day, he’d be
sitting in a tin can along with David Bowie.

‘Tom! Houston
speaking. Are you receiving…’

The red light went
out. The track finished. Tom sighed and opened his eyes. No sign of activity on
the console. But then the red light began winking rapidly. Tom swapped
headphones in one quick flourish.

‘’ound control to
Major Tom,’ sang the tinny voice.

Tom gasped. David
Bowie was surely a god!

Every advertising copywriter knows repetition is useful
because it draws attention to itself. So, if that’s the effect you want, fine. But
it’s worth remembering that using a word or phrase twice can look like you’ve
made a mistake or been lazy, whereas using it a third time reassures:

That night the sea
raged, whipped up by the wind, black waves muscling over the sea wall and
frothing across the prom. It raged past the boarded-up ice cream kiosk, the bus
shelter, over the Welcome to Dawlish flower bed, until it crossed the road,
lost its way and pulled back leaving nothing but a line of sand under the
window of Tom’s flat. Inside, nose to glass, Tom raged against the weather, the
world and Sarah Jones from finance, who had turned him down yet again.

Look who’s talking…

As for when you are writing dialogue and need to make it
clear who is talking – does it matter if you write said, said, said over and over again, or should you
aim for variety?

Compare and contrast the following:

Example 1:

It was no good. Tom
needed help so he decided to go to the library.

‘Hello?’ he enquired.
‘Is anybody there?’

‘Yes, I am,’ affirmed
Jane, ‘but please keep your voice down.’

‘I’m looking for a
book,’ he whispered, ‘about building a spaceship.’

‘What sort of
spaceship?’ she quizzed.

‘One that will get as
far as Mars,’ he explained.

‘Try DIY,’ she
replied. ‘Over there on the right.’

Example 2:

It was no good. Tom
needed help so he decided to go to the library.

‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Is
anybody there?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said
Jane, ‘but please keep your voice down.’

‘I’m looking for a
book about building a spaceship.’

‘What sort of
spaceship?’

‘One that will get as
far as Mars,’ he said.

‘Try DIY. Over there
on the right.’

In the first example, the pace is slowed considerably by the
insertion of so many speech qualifiers. In the second example the word said almost disappears. It merely
reminds the reader who is speaking, and that’s all it needs to do.

It’s also worth noting that a new paragraph indicates a new
voice. So we don’t need to write said
every time someone speaks. In the above example it is self-evident.

But, if there were several
characters standing at the library desk, and if each of them had their own
ideas about where Tom should look for his book, you would need to make it clear who was who, and some variation on said might be desirable.

Over-explanation or saying the
same thing or something quite like it, in another way, perhaps over and over
again.

This is repetition in disguise.

Below is an example of over-writing of the kind creative
writing teachers see all the time:

It’s very cold out.
The wind icy and freezing. I’m glad I’ve put on my warm overcoat. I have
to get to the supermarket before it shuts, otherwise there’ll be no dinner.

There’s a new one
opening soon near the big swimming pool on the corner of Church Street by
the station. It will be much more convenient for me to go there. I look
forward to it opening. I’ve heard it’s going to be soon.

I haven’t yet made up
my mind what to buy for supper. I fancy fish, but the kids always moan
unless it’s with chips. Bob’s not keen either. He’d always rather have a
great big steak, one of those that covers the whole plate so there’s no room
for anything else. The wind is whipping up, getting stronger by the feel
of it. Maybe it will snow.

What’s the matter with this passage?

The phrases underlined are either repetitious or redundant.

The location of the new supermarket is a good example of
unnecessary explanation. Excellent directions, bus numbers and the times of
trains, boats and planes to imaginary destinations are often included in
students’ work. Where these are relevant and add authenticity to a piece,
they’re all to the good. In this case, however, saying the supermarket is more convenient is enough, and providing
one rather than three points of location would be sufficient. A case could be
made for leaving them in only if all three locations are significant in the
story.

Nothing but the truth

Oh no, not the truth again! How it gets in the way. Yes,
it’s a good plan to write what you know. Well, up to a point! But, if you’re
writing fiction, don’t let the literal truth distract you or prevent you from
altering the facts to suit your story.

It’s not unknown for a student to be shocked when a teacher
suggests doing this. The student will say but
my brother/teacher/boss would never have done that even though the
character based on their
brother/teacher/boss desperately needs to do that very thing.

The challenge for all writers of fiction is to tell the general truth about human nature in all
sorts of interesting and unexpected ways.

If everything that’s happened in your own life really does
add up to a jolly good story, perhaps you should be writing your autobiography,
rather than (or as well as) fiction?

Generalisation

Tom went to the shops.
The weather was awful. He met Penny, a girl he vaguely knew. She smiled at him
and he asked her for a date. She said yes, and they arranged a time and place.
He went home happy but then remembered he’d forgotten to do any shopping.

Could this be any more tedious? Poor Tom, no wonder he wants
to go to Mars. What is so seriously lacking here is any specific information. Clearly, we don’t need a complete résumé of
Tom’s activities – for example, how many and what sort of shops he went
to, or detailed descriptions of the weather – but does he ask out every girl who smiles at him? What was
it he liked about Penny? Where are they going on their date? Cape Canaveral or
the Ideal Home Exhibition?

Imagine a film being made with the camera always at the same
distance from the action – no aerial views, no panning back or forward,
no close-ups. Yes, the story could be told, but it is the specifics which would have the most resonance.

‘What’s she like?’ Tom
asked Howard.

‘She’s great!’

‘Yeah?’

‘Really fantastic.
Beautiful, amazing and fantastic.’

‘And?’

‘You’ll like her, you
really will.’

‘That’s good,’ said
Tom, looking doubtful. ‘Does she like Dr Who?’

Here, Tom’s own question about Dr Who reveals more about Tom
than either of the other two characters in this extract do.

Missing something?

Most novice writers feel the need to include more detail
than is necessary, but occasionally the opposite is true. While an essential
element of a good detective story is the cunning withholding of information
from the reader, not providing any
information and then introducing the murderer in Chapter 29 of 30 is another
crime – that of not playing fair.

Supposing Dickens hadn’t
opened Great Expectations with the
marvellous scene in which Pip meets the convict, Magwitch? What if we, the readers,
had no reason to believe or even to suspect, Miss Havisham wasn’t Pip’s benefactor? Then, hey presto, Magwitch popped up in
the penultimate chapter and was revealed to be a convict Pip had helped when he
was a boy prior to the opening of the
book? Magwitch would then become a plot device, an easy solution, and all
the pathos of the book would be lost.

Who was the man in the shadows? What was the knocking sound
coming from the basement? Why did Harry Potter have a scar? It has to be
remembered that most readers aren’t psychics. Yes, it’s a good idea to withhold
information in the name of building tension, but at some point the reader has
to know. Last page revelations can be cathartic, but you do have to get your
readers there. If you have starved these readers rather than offered them an
occasional snack – or, even better, one or two square meals – they
may seek sustenance elsewhere.

Right or wrong?

Oh dear. A great many students worry about being wrong. They
ask questions which begin Is it all right
if I…? or Should I…? or Am I allowed to…?

A week or two later they’ll be complaining, pointing out you said I shouldn’t do that!

And they’re probably right to feel aggrieved.

Sometimes, albeit rarely, a piece of writing that contains
little plot, poor characterisation or terrible, clunky dialogue isn’t dead in
the water, but skips about on the surface making faces at us leaden-footed
writers on the shore. This sort of writing is a rare being, though – and almost
worthy of worship.

Do you know best?

Of course there’s a
right way, says the occasional student. I
know this because I’ve spent my life reading everything there is to know about
writing, rather than actually doing much writing myself.

If this sounds like you, beware!

Exercise

Rewrite: Tom went to
the shops. The weather was awful. He met Penny, a girl he vaguely knew. She
smiled at him and he asked her for a date. She said yes, and they arranged a
time and place. He went home happy but then remembered he’d forgotten to do any
shopping.

Include
specific detail about the shops, Tom and Penny, the weather and where they are
going. Write their dialogue. Then redraft what you have written, taking out all
unnecessary repetition, adjectives and adverbs.

Then
write about their date. What went right? What went wrong? What happened in the
end?

CHAPTER 5

Flash fiction and short stories

How long is short?

Commercial or
literary?

Beginnings

Moving on

Endings

Flash fiction

What’s it about?

How long is short?

The first piece of prose a creative writing student produces
is usually a short story rather than a novel. Short in this instance can mean
anything from 500 to 5,000 words.

What do we mean by flash fiction and how does it differ from
a short story?

Sometimes known as a short
short story, flash fiction is also called micro or nano fiction. It can vary in length from five
to a few hundred words. Flash fiction, while not a new form, has become
increasingly popular in the last few years. The Internet has many websites
devoted to its charms and competitions abound. When entering these competitions,
an exact word count is sometimes
mandatory.

Both flash and short stories are (or should be) carefully
crafted and can take hours, weeks or even months to construct. They are read in
minutes, usually in just one sitting. But most fans of short fiction feel these
minutes are often well spent, adding something special to their day.

Apart from length, what are the differences between a novel
and a short story?

Short stories don’t offer the reader long-term involvement and excitement. They don’t feature the thrill
of cliffhangers at the ends of chapters, which are there to encourage the
reader to turn the page and/or pick up the book up again. A short story isn’t
carried around for weeks while the action and all its consequences play out.

A good short story makes itself comfortable in the memory in
much the same way as a good poem. As a virtual and benign guided missile, a
short story can deliver a powerful emotional punch and/or be intellectually
stimulating as well as satisfying.

Short stories

If you’re determined to become a successful writer of short
stories, we advise you to be voracious in your reading of them. While you’re
finding your niche and while you’re exploring your own strengths and
weaknesses, read every short story that comes your way. Try to work out what
kind of story most appeals to you – action-packed, reflective,
intellectually-challenging, emotional, philosophical, humorous, complex, simple
and direct?

If you decide you wish to write for women’s magazines, which
is the biggest – indeed, practically the only – commercial market
for short fiction in the UK, do your homework. Read the magazines to which you
are going to submit your work, read their submission guidelines, and then
adhere to these guidelines. If your story doesn’t fit the bill, the magazine
won’t take it.

When students first start writing short stories, they
sometimes say things like I know this
isn’t very good, but I thought it might be suitable for a women’s magazine.

So – what do these students mean and what assumptions
are they making? That women’s magazines publish only mindless rubbish? That the
editors of women’s magazines are so desperate for copy they’ll publish
anything, however bad? That readers of women’s magazines are so stupid and
uncritical they will read everything the author is happy to share?

It doesn’t work like that!

Who exactly reads these magazines? The advertising and
features will give you some clues. What kinds
of stories do readers enjoy? You’ll need to study twenty or thirty examples from
one specific title before you can hope to find out.

How long are the stories, how old are the characters, and in
what sorts of life situations do they find themselves? Don’t guess – read the magazines, and
then you will know if writing this
kind of commercial fiction is right for you.

This is a useful link for aspiring writers of women’s
magazine fiction – http://womagwriter.blogspot.co.uk/.

By the way – if you want to write for mostly female
readers, you don’t have to be female yourself. Being male need not hold you
back, and don’t worry, you won’t have to write hearts and flowers romance if
that’s not your thing. Crime, mystery and even science fiction stories are
published by these magazines both in the UK and in other territories world
wide.

If you wish to write literary rather than commercial, mainly
women’s-interest short stories, you will probably find it’s hard to interest
the mainstream publishing industry in your work. But it’s not impossible. Some
independent publishers such as Salt – http://www.saltpublishing.com –
have always championed the short story. The web is awash with short stories
because, at last, writers themselves can place these in the public domain. Most
literary writers enter their stories for competitions, which we will discuss in
Chapter 7.

Short stories may contain many of the attributes of a novel
– a sense of place, strong characters, dialogue, action and consequences.
They are, however, unlikely to feature a large cast, several subplots or an
exploration of philosophical ideas.

But Grace Paley’s
Conversation with my Father is a complex and multi-layered story which
comments on the writing of a short story and is well worth reading. You can
also listen to the free podcast here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2010/dec/07/alismith-short-stories

Beginnings

It’s very common for a novice student to ask if any piece of
creative writing which comes out at longer than a few hundred words is a short
story. The answer is often no because there is no actual story. A large
percentage of competition entries don’t get anywhere because the essential
story-telling, cause-and-effect, actions-followed-by-results elements are
either completely absent or are very weak. Instead, the competition judge is
confronted with an excellent descriptive piece or a character sketch. Reading a
story of this sort is a bit like getting into the passenger seat of a car only
to have the driver draw your attention to the interior features, but then get
out and walk away.

Sometimes, the writer realises that there is no plot and
shoe-horns the whole story into the final paragraph:

Tom woke early on the
morning of the rocket launch. The sun speared through the curtains, straight
into his eyes… (another 250 words about getting out of bed and ablutions)

Bacon, sausage and a
fried egg for breakfast. Yummy, thought Tom. This might not be the wisest
breakfast to have before experiencing 3g in the shuttle but it may be my last,
so I’ll risk it…(250 more words on the virtues of a full English breakfast)

Tom took a taxi to the
launch pad. The driver told him a story about another astronaut he’d taken to
the space centre. What happened was…(indeterminate number of words)

Eventually, in the final paragraph, we might find:

When Tom, the only
survivor, walked away from the spaceship crash, he was assumed to be a god by
the population on planet Prehensile. He married the queen and she bore him
several children who grew to adulthood in the equivalent of six Earth months.
All the girls had useful prehensile tails but the male children had only the
stunted bottoms of Earthlings. Before long a bitter gender war raged until one
night Tom’s wife slid her tail all the way round his neck and pulled tighter
and tighter...

The End

How about beginning that story when the spaceship crashes?
Has anyone survived? Only one: lucky Tom, who was thrown clear on impact still
strapped to his seat. Maybe we could find out about Tom’s breakfast habits as
we go along? Or not, with any luck.

Let’s get going

It’s always difficult to decide where to begin a story. We
have seen that a long preamble can at best be distracting. At worst, your
reader won’t stay the course.

Asking a direct question or seeding a question is a good way
to involve your reader:

Am I tough enough for
this mission? thought Tom, as he gazed at the sky/full English breakfast.

The postman handed Tom
a large parcel. He wasn’t expecting anything but there was no mistaking his
name and address written in bold italics on the label. From the outside it
looked as if someone had sent him a space helmet.

Letters, parcels, boxes and bags are always intriguing.
Already, we’ll be wondering whether Tom’s parcel does contain a space helmet.

Anything readers can’t see draws them in: Tom looked over the wall and was astonished
by what he saw…

Or, even better, in direct speech: ‘Good Heavens!’ the postman said to Tom. ‘Take a look at that.’

Both of these examples seed the question: what are they
looking at?

Passive statements make for rather weak openers:

It was
raining/Tuesday/my school reunion.

There was a sale on in
the shoe shop.

The bus was late.

But if a passive statement says something unusual it can work very well.

Raymond Carver opens his short story Why Don’t You Dance? with this:

In the kitchen, he
poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard.

Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Daughters of the Late Colonel opens with:

The week after was one
of the busiest weeks of their lives.

Both of these examples are simple sentences that beg
questions. In the first, why is there a bedroom suite in the yard? We note he is having another drink. In the second, it is the presence of the word
‘after’ that acts as a waving flag. After what?

Be wary of generalisations that leave the reader hunting for
context. For example:

He walked down the
road. The rain gradually got worse and by the time he reached the traffic
lights it was sheeting down. Ankle-deep puddles soon formed in the gutters and
cars sent up waves of water. He put his newspaper over his head but it got
soggy almost at once and was a poor substitute for an umbrella.

So far, the most we can glean from this beginning is that
the setting is urban and it’s a wet day. Someone walking down a road isn’t a
very attention-grabbing opener. If the next sentence were to be in some way
remarkable this might not matter. But, sadly, it isn’t at all remarkable.

We don’t know the protagonist’s name or whether he is twenty
or eighty. Why he is walking down the road? Is he in London, Glasgow or Cape
Town? As yet, nothing has happened, and if something intriguing doesn’t happen
very soon there’s a strong possibility we might give up on this story.

A little specific information might help. What difference
would it make if he sheltered under The
Times? Or The New York Times? Or The Financial Times? Perhaps nothing,
perhaps everything. What difference would it make to readers if they knew his
name was Cedric or Hassan? Or Prince Charming?

But don’t worry too much and don’t let the hunt for a good
first line prevent you from getting started. Writing a story is a slippery
business at the best of times and so, if you have an idea about where your
story goes rather than how it begins, we suggest you get going and sort out the
first line, paragraph or first thousand words later.

Moving on

It’s worth remembering that taking one step back means
you’ll need to take two steps to move forward again.

Tom ambled towards the
nursery. He remembered running down that same corridor for the first time five
children ago. It had been a dark and stormy night and the roof on the banana store
had blown away. The second time, it was foggy…

We’re already afraid Tom might need to remember what the
weather was like on each of the five previous occasions he’s walked to the
nursery, and that’s before we get back to the present…

If some back-story is necessary,
that’s fine. Perhaps the weather has religious significance on this planet, or
babies’ names are weather-related.

In Chapter 2 we considered what makes a story. In addition
to thinking about the points made there, it’s worth asking your story itself a
few questions, either as you go along or when you have finished the first
draft.

For example:

1 - How old and from what social class or educational
background is your ideal reader?

2 - What sort of story is it – action-packed,
reflective, philosophical, simple, complex?

3 - When and where is it set?

4 - Whose story is it?

5 - If you were to sum up your main character in two or
three words, what would they be?

6 - Do you need every character?

7 - Is it wise to name your characters Ted, Ed and Ned or
Joan, Jane and Jan? And consider Alex, Sam and Chris carefully, too. Male or
female?

8 - What problems do the characters face?

9 - What attributes do they reveal in trying to overcome
them? Perhaps bravery impatience and/or cruelty?

10 - What are you going to hold back from revealing, so the
reader keeps reading in order to find out what this  could be?

11 - What does the main character learn/realise/overcome by
the end?

12 - What has changed by the end of your story?

Some of those twelve questions might be inappropriate. But,
if you feel they could be pertinent and you have trouble answering them, try to
put yourself in the heads of your readers. Are you communicating what you want
to communicate? Do you actually want your readers to struggle to understand your story? Do you think they will bother?

This isn’t to say your writing must be so transparent as to
be bland. But clarity and accessibility are desirable in any kind of fiction.
So don’t make your writing obscure or convoluted because you think doing this
will make you sound intelligent, and don’t sacrifice content to style.

Stories which are all style and no substance can be very
disappointing. Tom the astronaut’s breakfast could be a banquet, eloquently
described to the point of tasting which side of the bush the sage leaf in the
sausages came from, but we’ll still want to know what happened after breakfast.

So – what did
happen? Perhaps we found out more about the warring Prehensiles? Maybe Tom’s
indigestion was so bad he never made it to the launch pad? How disappointing
that would have been – for readers and for him.

Let us assume Tom didn’t feel too bad. What became of him
next? Later, what problem(s) did he have to overcome – was it one big
problem or a several small ones?

Who are your readers and what might they want?

As for your target readership – if you happened to be
a reader who loved science fiction, in particular stories about space travel,
by now you’d probably be very fed up with Tom.

But most other readers probably wouldn’t be very happy,
either. If Tom’s indigestion turned out to be a rare disease, difficult to
diagnose, and Tom was suddenly at the centre of a thrilling life-and-death
medical drama, fans of medical dramas might never have got to read your story because
at the beginning they would have been so seriously misled. If Tom and Penny
ended up blasting off into a happy sunset and setting up home in a country
cottage, rather than taking a spaceship to Mars, romance readers wouldn’t know
about it because they wouldn’t have got that far into the story.

Do some market analysis and ask yourself it you would you
send your own story to Stethoscope
Monthly magazine or Rocket Romantics?
Ask yourself what sort of story you
want to write and then try to work out what kind of readership might enjoy it.

Endings

What happens in the
end?

Here are five possibilities.

1 - They find the treasure/murderer/missing child/way
home/secret of the universe.

2 - They get married/realise they love/can’t stand each
other.

3 - They realise they’ve been
wrong/deluded/misled/wicked/right all the time.

4 - They repent/celebrate/go and live in a cave.

5 - They die and go to Heaven/Purgatory/the Grey Havens.

Of course, they
could also be she, he or the alien equivalent.

Doesn’t a short story
have to have a twist in the tale? Not always. But students often write
stories which have a twist welded on to the last paragraph. Surprise! He was
really a dentist, terrorist, transvestite, prehensile, after all. Or she did it
because she was jealous, mad, drunk or the bastard child of royalty.

The ending of a story needs to reveal what happened as a result of the action which has gone before. So a sudden revelation could be seen
as cheating. Yes, delivering this kind of ending might be very tempting if you
have plotted your way into a dead end and/or come up against a brick wall. But
a satisfying twist has its seed
planted early on and its roots embedded during the story. Talking of walls, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman contains a fine example of a great twist in the tale. It’s
downloadable for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1952

Flash Fiction

This is a short, short story with all (or most of) the
characteristics of its longer sibling. Storytelling is still to the fore, but
brevity requires much to be suggested or implied.

Small on the page; big in the mind – this is a good
maxim.

One example, sometimes attributed to Ernest Hemingway, is:

For sale: baby shoes,
never worn.

A sad tale comes immediately to mind. We may not know the
details of what happened, but something has clearly gone very wrong. Was there
a death? A sudden illness? A kidnap? Time has passed in these six words. There
was hope for those little shoes but it was dashed. Now they are for sale. Not
given or thrown away. Someone must need the money.

How different this story would be if the word baby had been left out: For sale: shoes, never worn. Also,
consider how different it would be if it were to read: For sale: baby shoes, worn.

In a very short piece of flash fiction every single word
matters:

They both fell: she –
over his suitcase, he – head over his heels.

Out of the sea, down
from the trees, into Marks and Spencer!

Fortunately for us, most flash stories are longer than a
dozen words and we can luxuriate in a couple of hundred or more.

What about creating a world or alternative reality for the
reader, how does something as short as a short story or a piece of flash
fiction manage to do that?

A determined author can take the reader there in a very few
well-chosen words and phrases. See how successfully Exeter Novel Prize winner
author Su Bristow creates a sense of
place in her short short story Train:

Train

We waited, huddled in
the long grass. It’ll turn your sixpences into shillings, they’d said. There
was no sound yet, other than our own too-loud breathing, and the everlasting
larks that you could hear but never see.

Sally clutched at my
arm. The rails were singing! She dug her nails into me, and I didn’t shake her
off. The sound grew, like distant starlings. A rising rumble, a vibration in
your bones, and then the great black whoosh of it tearing a hole through the
world. And it was gone, leaving nothing but a stain on the air.

Shakily, we climbed
down to the tracks. They’d told us wrong. Hers was bent, misshapen, useless.
Mine, strangely, was not changed at all. The larks exulted, on and on.

Let’s look at how this story of one hundred and twenty-seven
words, not counting the title, has been constructed.

In the beginning, the scene is set by the title and the
first sentence. An immediate intrigue is set up in the second. Tension is
created with too-loud breathing and Sally clutched at my arm and dug her nails into me, and I didn’t shake
her off.

In the middle, something happens – there’s exciting
action which is, in the end, life-changing. It’s suggested how life (the train)
will be for the two children (the two sixpences) and that the universe (the
larks) is indifferent to our fate. This story is a lesson in not believing
every thing we are told.

So here we have the classic three section story structure: set-up, action and consequence,
with a dash of enigma to make us
think.

Short stories don’t have to be obvious and explicit. They
can also imply, and trust the reader to pick up on the implication. The shorter
the story, the more implication might be needed. It will require deft handling.
If your readers have to do too much work, you might lose them. Imagine you’re
going on a treasure hunt. How would you feel if vital clues were missing, which
meant the treasure was impossible to find?

In the following story, the protagonist appears to take
against her neighbours because they have their television on too loud and they
shop at a supermarket she does not
frequent. But that isn’t the real
reason she doesn’t want to invite them back for tea.

Every morning Linda
drank tea from a cup and saucer, the last of her grandmother’s favourite set.
How maddening then, to break the cup. She haunted charity shops.

When new people moved
in next door they invited her in and lo, their dresser bore a single cup
bearing the same rosy pattern.

‘Oh!’ said Linda, ‘I
have the saucer.’

‘Do you?’ replied her
neighbour. ‘That’s wonderful! I’ve been searching for one for ages.’

Linda did not reply.

At home, she gave the
saucer on her own dresser a hard stare. A return invitation would have to be
issued soon.

But weeks went by.
Their television clapped and chatted through the wall and shopping deliveries
came from a supermarket Linda never frequented. What a relief she hadn’t
invited them back. Clearly they weren’t her cup of tea at all.

Cathie Hartigan Weak or Strong

Writing flash is both illuminating and entertaining, but it
should be remembered that flash fiction isn’t merely a synopsis of a longer
story. It needs to be well-crafted and emotionally compelling, too.

Do we need to know?

As creative writing teachers and judges of competitions, we
have been fortunate enough to read thousands of short stories. We have enjoyed
most of them and learned a great deal about what works and what doesn’t,
fiction-wise.

But something which increasingly saddens, worries and can
also bore us is the increase in disturbing or sensationalist content that has
little bearing on the actual story.

Does a story have to be bleak and miserable in order to be
meaningful? Too often we have been confronted with casual murder, child abuse,
sexual violence and cruelty of the most imaginative kind for no good reason. We
repeat – no good reason.

We are not squeamish wimps who faint at the sight of a swear
word or a bloodstained corpse. We are not suggesting that the above elements should
never be present in a story. But a
description of a murder or an abusive sex scene isn’t a story in itself, although the prelude and/or repercussions might
well be.

It’s worth noting that gratuitous sex and violence can
seriously mar your story rather than enhance its chances of success. So ask
yourself if these elements are relevant
before you include them in a story.
What actually needs to be
there?

Exercise

Try writing a story then reducing it by at least half. If
you have a story already written, so much the better because you will have
written it without this exercise in mind.

Once you have halved the word count, halve it again. What do
you want to retain and why? What can be stripped out without losing a) the
meaning and b) the story’s charm?

Begin by asking yourself if whole scenes are necessary. Cut
big sections first, then sentences, then single words.

CHAPTER 6

Novels

Novellas

What is a novel?

Characters

Openings and
prologues

On with the story

Resolutions

If you’ve decided that creatively-speaking you’re a long
distance runner as opposed to a sprinter, you’re probably going to want to
write novels rather than flash fiction, short stories or even novellas.

What is a novella?

It’s a story which doesn’t always have the depth and
complexity of a full-length novel, but is much longer and more involved than a
short story. It allows for sub-plotting and there’s more scope for character
development than is usual in a short story. It’s much closer in form to the
novel than to the short story. The notes on novels which you will find in this
chapter also apply to the novella.

A novella is typically between about 15,000 and 50,000 words
long, but these limits are flexible and some novellas are very short –
hardly longer than a traditional short story.

Many novellas are available as ebooks from the usual sources
such as Amazon and Smashwords. Most women’s magazine serials are round about
novella-length and some are also published as large print or ebooks.

The novella has a long and respectable literary history.
Here are some famous examples – Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, Philip Roth Goodbye,
Columbus, and Joseph Conrad The
Secret Sharer. It’s been argued that Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize winning
novel The Sense of an Ending is
really a novella, coming in at about 150 printed pages – see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/20/booker-prize.

Of course, some authors write and are published across the
whole spectrum of fiction. They’re equally adept at flash fiction, short
stories, novellas and novels. But most of us find we have a natural affinity
with just one or two kinds of story-telling. So we work hard at getting better
and better in our chosen fields.

What is a novel?

It’s a story which is between about 50,000 and 150,000 words
long. These numbers aren’t set in stone, but nowadays a commercial print
publisher will probably be reluctant to consider anything shorter than about
50,000 or longer than about 150,000 words unless there is something very special
and commercially attractive about the story or the author or both.

These restrictions are partly down to the economics of print
(as opposed to digital) publishing. A very short book can look like poor value
for money and most people like to get good value for their hard-earned cash. A
print publisher’s production costs aren’t going to be significantly lower than
usual even if a novel does come in at
under 50,000 words. As for novels over 150,000 words long – they’re
bulky, they’re heavy, they take up lots
of warehouse and bookshop shelf space, they don’t fit easily into pockets or
handbags, and the paperback editions tend to fall apart.

So – if you want to see your novel commercially
published as a print book, as opposed to an ebook, we advise you to go for a
length of between 50,000 and 150,000 words – no less and certainly no
more. About 80,000 – 120,000 words are going to be fine for most
commercial print publishers. But, if you’re aiming to submit to specific
publishers, always check their requirements first.

What if you intend to write a series of novels, as Stephenie Meyer must have done when she
planned the Twilight series, and J K Rowling certainly did when she planned the
Harry Potter stories?

This is fine, because most readers love series. But you’ll
have to make sure each individual volume of your story is complete in itself.

What do we mean by that?

Let’s look at an example or two. Twilight is the opening story in a series and it’s complete in
itself because it resolves one of the important issues. The ending of Twilight shows the reader that Bella and
Edward are now committed to each other, whatever the risks and difficulties that
lie ahead. At this point in the whole story, Bella could have walked away from
Edward. But she doesn’t – she makes the choice to stay with him and be
part of his life.

Similarly, in the Harry Potter novels, Harry manages to hold
off or to defeat Voldemort for the time
being at the end of every volume. But of course Voldemort bounces back time
after time, and isn’t finally overcome for good until the end of the final book
in the series.

So, if you too are writing a series of novels, your own
first volume will need to show your characters coming to some kind of
conclusion, settling some important issue, and getting ready to meet the next
challenge. Series stories are somewhat like battles in a war – at the end
of each volume, the reader will need to know who won that particular battle,
but will be prepared to wait until the end of the series to find out who won the
war.

A marathon task

A novel is a big undertaking. As a novelist, you’re setting
out on a long and sometimes difficult journey, so you’ll need to give yourself,
your characters and your readers plenty of good reasons to make this journey.

We’re talking about an investment in time of several days or
weeks of your reader’s life, and maybe several years of your own.

How do you set about making this investment worthwhile?

By writing about interesting characters with whom the reader
can identify or even fall in love, and by putting these characters in
challenging, problematic, difficult, dangerous, life-threatening and/or
intriguing situations.

Your reader’s initial reaction to hearing about your
characters and their life-situations should be: all’s not right in your world, is it? What are you going to do about
it, then? How are you going to cope?

Characters

We suggest you get going on your novel by making friends
with a character or characters with whom you will want to spend lots of your
time. This person or these people will have to carry your story and make the
reader want to know what happens to them.

So choose a central character you like, and about whom you
want to write, as Jane Austen did when she began writing Emma, a novel starring a heroine the author said she thought no one but myself will much like. If you love or at least like your hero
and/or heroine, the chances are you will be able to persuade your readers to
love or at least like these people, too – as we’re sure Jane Austen knew
perfectly well!

How do you encourage readers to love your characters?

If you give a character a narrative viewpoint, you’ll have a
much better chance of getting the reader to identify with this person. In
fiction and in life, it’s quite hard to dislike someone who tells us their
deepest, darkest secrets. We’re flattered to be trusted and to be in the know.
A character who seems confident or even arrogant as far as other people in the
story are concerned, but who reveals a softer, gentler, more sympathetic and
more appealing side to the reader, is likely to become the reader’s friend as
well as your own.

So maybe spend a bit of time with your central character or
characters before you write a single word of your story, getting to know these
people well, making a few notes about them, and perhaps, if you’re handy with a
pencil, even sketching them? Then you can decide:

What they look like
– are they handsome, deformed, beautiful, interesting, plain, pretty,
ugly, mutilated, scarred, fat, thin, tall, short?

What they feel about
their fellow men and women – do they love them, hate them, like them,
or are they indifferent to them?

What religious,
moral, ethical and political views they hold – if they have any, and
what they might be?

What happened to them
before your story starts?

What they feel about
their families – are they close to their families, estranged from
their families, do they even have
families?

Where they came from
– what are their ethnic and social origins?

Where and who they
are now – where do they live, how do they live, what is their social
class?

You’ll think of many more things you would like to know, so
jot them down as they come into your head – colours of eyes, colours of
hair, special likes and dislikes, hopes, fears, addictions, phobias, strengths,
weaknesses, names of first pets, if these people have brothers or sisters,
step-mothers or step-fathers –anything that seems relevant to you.

You could also sketch out a few scenes in which they appear,
and you could get them talking to you by composing a few monologues and/or by
writing some dialogue between them and your other characters. Speak some of
your dialogue out loud and try to hear
how your characters speak. Do they have regional accents, are their voices
soft, deep, low, harsh, loud? Do they shout, do they whisper, do they order
other people around or do they try to persuade? Give them opinions of their
own, which may or may not be your opinions, too.

You probably won’t use all this material in your actual
story. But, if you get to know your characters well, they will become real for
you, and when you are writing about them you will sometimes feel as if you are
taking some kind of cosmic dictation as they talk to you.

If you don’t get
to know your characters well, you could end up creating stereotypes – for
example, grumpy old men, damsels in distress, wicked stepmothers, lecherous
uncles, and so on.

Appealing characters are individuals, whether they are
heroes or villains, mentors or facilitators, major protagonists or have minor
parts to play in your story.

Looking at life

Don’t worry if you find yourself taking various attributes
of people you know and giving these attributes to characters of your own.
Sometimes, it helps to imagine how a real person would react to a given
situation, or even to remember what a real person actually said and did when he
or she was bereaved, became a parent or lost a job.

But it would probably be unwise to put a whole real person
into a novel. There’s no knowing how this real person might react. It’s likely
that many of your non-writing friends, family members and acquaintances will
see themselves in your stories even though they never entered your head
throughout the whole writing process.

People who have limited imaginative lives themselves often seem
to find it hard to believe that novelists make
things up!

Openings…

You’ll need to start your story by making lots of promises, which you’ll then need to
keep. You’ll also need to ask or suggest lots of questions, such as what’s going on here, what’s the problem, who is trying to hurt my hero, who
is my heroine going to marry?

Some novelists love writing prologues, and these can be very effective appetisers preceding the
main course of your story. But you may not know if you need a prologue until after you have finished your novel,
especially if you aren’t a detailed planner.

A prologue will be useful if you feel you need to:

1 - Offer the reader some essential backstory?

2 - Drop hints about what is to come?

3 - Set the style and/or pace and/or tone of your novel,
which may not be possible in Chapter 1 if this first chapter begins when all is
well in a central character’s life, but everything is soon going to change for
the worse?

4 - Let the reader see some of the action from the point of
view of somebody who is not a main viewpoint character but whose opinions are
going to matter?

If you don’t need to do any of these four things, you
probably won’t need a prologue. You’ll be able to get going in the here-and-now
by writing Chapter 1 and presenting your central character with something which
will get your reader hooked – a challenge, a choice, an encounter with
someone who is going to love him, hate him, marry him or try to kill him, or
some other life-changing event which you find intriguing, and hope your reader
will find intriguing, too.

As with any kind of story, you will need to suggest to your
reader there’s something he or she needs to find out. This is why we read any
kind of fiction – to find things out. A good story both educates and
entertains us. It makes information easy to absorb and thus to retain. Many of
us know all we’ll ever know about horses from reading Black Beauty, all we’ll ever know about Victorian London from
reading Oliver Twist, all we’ll ever
know about BDSM from reading Fifty Shades
of Grey.

…and continuations…

When you begin your novel, you probably won’t have time to
do a lot of scene-setting, and you probably shouldn’t even consider it. This is
because you will need to get your story moving, and scene-setting is
essentially static.

As citizens of the 21st century, we’re accustomed
to instant gratification in many aspects of our lives, including the arts.
Contemporary theatre and cinema productions have taught us to become restless
and impatient if a story doesn’t get going straight away. We’re often annoyed
if we have to wait for anything to be made clear.

So, we 21st century novelists have to use plenty
of narrative cunning and to entice readers into our stories by filling our shop
windows – our opening pages – with exciting and wonderful things
such as crisis, conflict, challenge and change.

If you feel you absolutely must set the scene and show the
reader where and when the action is taking place, try to do this in dialogue or monologue while your characters are doing something important
– meeting, arguing, kissing, killing, dying – or as they’re asking
themselves and the reader some important questions.

American novelist Eowyn Ivey manages this brilliantly in the
opening of her debut novel The Snow
Child, which begins as her heroine contemplates suicide in the Alaskan
wilderness where the novel is set.

If you’re writing romantic
fiction, try to arrange for your hero and heroine to meet or at least hear
of each other in the first few pages. If you’re writing crime, thriller or mystery fiction, try to kill someone or
to make something perplexing take place as soon you possibly can, because
– as we’ve seen – these days most readers expect to get some kind
of instant gratification from a story, and they become impatient if they don’t get it.

They want to be hooked straight away, and days of the
average reader being willing to slog through the first fifty pages of a novel
before anything significant happens are lost in the mists of time – which
is a cliché, by the way, and you
should try to avoid clichés.

When you’re writing something as long as a novel, it’s easy
for several dozen or even hundreds of clichés to worm their way into your
prose. We can all get away with a few. But, when they do turn up, it’s good if you can manage to subvert them or make
them sound a bit more intriguing than usual.

As cold as what
– not ice, not snow, not charity, but what about as cold as an Eskimo’s
vodka martini or a penguin’s toes?

If you do take your
time to get started, and if your writing is
full of clichés, a literary agent or publisher’s reader probably won’t get as
far as page five, let alone fifty, because these professional readers expect to
be hooked, entertained and intrigued from page one.

…and pacing yourself and your story…

As you write your novel, actual physical fatigue is unlikely
to kill you. But you, your characters and your readers will probably enjoy the
journey more if you take frequent breaks.

Some novelists give themselves time off between chapters to
write other kinds of fiction, or to update their blogs, or to catch up on
Twitter and Facebook, or generally refresh themselves by doing something like
walking the dog or mowing the lawn before going back to the novel-in-progress.

Some deliberately break off at an interesting, tantalising
or dramatic high point, even if that point is half way through a paragraph or
sentence, because they know if they do it this way they’ll be keen to get back
to the story.

They’re also aware it can be dangerous to stop when they’re
flagging or they don’t know what to write next. If they take a break at a
critical point, the chances are they’ll never
know. It’s hard to press on when the going gets tough, but professional
novelists force themselves to keep moving, and promise themselves a reward when
they’ve struggled through a difficult or challenging part of a story.

Just keep going
– that’s always going to be good advice to a novelist. Nobody can read a
novel you haven’t written. Like a lot of good advice, however, it can be
difficult to take, especially when you’re tired and disenchanted. Most
novelists tend to be very good at finding other things to do, and on days when
their writing isn’t going well almost anything else can seem irresistibly
attractive. But the prospect of a reward or two can give them the impetus to
carry on.

…and getting it written…

As you write, don’t worry too much about getting it right at
first draft stage. These days, most of us compose at the computer keyboard.
This means we can move text around, expand, delete and revise at will, and we
can also keep older versions of our work in case we decide we were right the
first time.

It is worth setting up a dedicated online account (Google’s
Gmail is ideal) which will keep your mail forever. If you then send each day’s
output to yourself as an email attachment, it will stay on this provider’s
server and it will all be in date order, too – an electronic record of
the development of your novel.

…and rewarding readers…

Readers need rewards in the shape of cliffhangers and
questions which will keep them interested as they travel through your story.
But you don’t need to make your readers feel breathless and in need of a lie
down. Once your readers are hooked, your action shouldn’t need to zoom along at
breakneck speed. You can vary the pace, and all-action scenes can be
interspersed with comparatively quiet stretches where your characters are
taking stock, having a break from their many trials and tribulations, or just
enjoying a bit of peace and quiet before the next storm.

Readers of romantic fiction are often relieved to see the
hero and heroine having some fun together before the next obstacle to
everlasting happiness trips them up. Later on, making choices and meeting
challenges give both author and reader a reason to continue the journey in the
hope that something wonderful or fascinating will always be on the horizon.

In Pride and Prejudice,
for example, it seems likely Mr Darcy and Elizabeth will find their own
happy-ever-after when they meet at Pemberley and realise they could be ideally
suited after all.

But then Lydia elopes with the wicked Mr Wickham, and it
looks as if Elizabeth won’t be marrying Mr Darcy now. The reader’s and
Elizabeth’s hopes are dashed, but now they both have an incentive to continue
the journey to find out what happens in the end.

…and finding resolutions

At the end of your story you will need to leave your
characters in the places they want and/or deserve to be. You probably ought to
know roughly where they’re going, but ideally you should be flexible enough to
let them give you and the reader a few surprises, too.

Storytellers have long since realised action arises out of character
and situation. So, you should refer
to your notes on your characters frequently and, as these characters develop,
grow, mature and change, the action should develop, too.

Exercise

Think of a problematic situation, big or small, which might
take some time and ingenuity to resolve.

Perhaps a man has lost his money, his home, his wife, his
children or his dog?

Perhaps a woman has lost her job, her boyfriend, her parents,
her handbag or her cat?

What will he or she do now?

You’ll need to start developing a story line which takes
your characters’ personalities into account. How well (or badly) equipped are
they when it comes to solving their problems? What obstacles are they going to
face? What is going to go right for them and what is going to go wrong?

How are they going to move on?

They mustn’t drag their heels but they don’t need to rush.
They have about 80,000 words in which to turn their lives around.

CHAPTER 7

Getting out there

Why are you writing?

Competitions

Promoting yourself

The Internet

Self-publishing

Why are you writing?

Unless you are already a celebrity, nobody is going to knock
on your door and ask for your novel, story or piece of flash fiction.

Perhaps that doesn’t matter because you are writing purely
for your own pleasure and don’t want anyone else to read your work?

But, if that’s the case, why you are you reading this book?

Something inside you is interested in the writing process.
Maybe you have found it hasn’t gone smoothly or there’s something you’re not
sure about? You care enough to want to improve. When this happens, it isn’t
long before the vast majority of people who write seek a reader. Or even lots
of readers.

Competitions

One of the best ways to acquire a respectable writing CV is
to win or be placed in competitions. If you google writing competitions you may be amazed at the number which exist.
Be warned, though – it’s not a good plan to enter dozens of them, and/or
the ones with the most prize money, without first doing a little research.

There are several generous individuals who keep a rolling
directory of competitions, often with useful bits of information attached. Some
helpful links include http://www.jbwb.co.uk/writingcomps.htm
and http://www.writersreign.co.uk/Short-Story-Competitions.html.

The Bridport
Prize offers tempting prize money. It also offers immediate and huge kudos
if you are placed. However, a little look at the previous winners reveals the
calibre of the entrants. Nearly all are published already and have won other
prestigious prizes. Another stark fact worth thinking about is that in 2011,
according to their website, they had 11,440 online entries!

Our advice before entering any competition is: read the
stories that have won in the past. Often they are on the competition website.
Or you may have to buy an anthology. You aren’t looking to copy the previous
winners, but you may get a sense of the writing styles and subjects that tend
to be successful.

But judges change and, unlike in the case of women’s
magazine fiction, there probably won’t be any guidelines. Do check, though,
just to make sure.

Our experience as competition judges is that considerable
numbers of stories aren’t stories at all. They might be well-written and about
interesting subjects, but there is no or very little development.

The ending of a story needs to be significant even if it
doesn’t deliver the classic gasp/twist. Put yourself in the judges’ shoes and
ask yourself: is the ending of your story satisfying and/or relevant? Or does
the story just stop?

What’s our best advice?

It’s read the rules
several times and adhere to them, down to the smallest detail.

We know from experience that in any competition there will
always be a considerable number of entries which immediately disqualify
themselves because the entrants haven’t obeyed the rules.

If a theme is
mentioned, don’t send an entirely unrelated story ‘just in case’. Check your presentation. A story that is single-spaced when the requirement is
for double-spacing will not be read.
What a shame, to do all that work for nothing. Your entry fee will still be cashed, so in effect you will have paid somebody to open an envelope,
glance at your story then put it in the
bin, even if that story is brilliant.

If you use a very small font, your entry might not be
read. 12 point Times New Roman, Arial or Bookman are ideal.

Don’t make it hard for the judges to like your story.

A winning story grabs the reader’s attention
with the very first sentence, and retains its grip until the last

This isn’t to say your story needs to shout loudly all the
way through. Sometimes a small thing, a lost message or an overheard comment,
is enough to hook and hold your reader.

Easy, no?

Well, it would be easy
if we all liked the same things and our moods remained the same from day to
day. But judges are human too, and a winner one day might not be a winner the
next. In a competition with hundreds or perhaps thousands of entries, all the
stories on the shortlist and maybe even the longlist might make worthy winners.
So put all your own successful
listings on your CV.

Promoting yourself

You might have a big family, lots of colleagues and a wide
circle of friends, but if you sit down and add up the actual numbers, what’s
the total? Of those tens or dozens or even hundreds of people, how many do you
think would open their purses or wallets and buy your book?

Celebrities have agents and publishers ringing their
doorbells because many thousands, perhaps even millions, of people have heard
of them – and that means big potential sales.

The local newspaper
is the usual conduit for news and, if you have writing success in the shape of
a published book or a competition win, that’s news! What about sending out a
press release? There is some good advice from Cake Publicity here: www.cakepublicity.co.uk/guides.php.

Your local radio
station(s), both BBC and commercial, can reach even bigger numbers. They
are usually keen to interview published writers, so it is well worth ringing
them. If you aren’t commercially published but your book/poetry/article is of
local interest, still ring them. Remember that local interest could mean all
sorts of things, even if your book is set on Mars. After all, you are local. Write down what you are
going to say before you ring so that you sound attractive and appealing.
Practise with a friend. This isn’t being overly obsessive. It’s merely being
sensible.

Serendipity plays
a part, but you can put yourself in its way. Self-published author Pamela Vass
attended a workshop with the crime writer Simon Hall and gave him a copy of her
book Seeds of Doubt. He liked it,
recognised a strong story of local interest and, in his capacity as the crime
correspondent for BBC Radio Devon, recommended her as a guest on a popular
show. Consequently, she was asked to serialise her book for the station. That’s
a result.

Do you have any business
cards? If you have a book to promote, what about getting bookmarks or
postcards printed, featuring the cover art? Don’t assume a publisher will do
these things for you. Having something nice-looking to give the people you meet
is more professional than handing out names or numbers on scraps of paper. If
you believe in what you do, gradually the embarrassment of self-promotion will
diminish.

What is going on in your area that might somehow relate to you and your work? Don’t
worry if the link is rather tenuous. Ask yourself how your presence could be of
help to some other individual, group or organisation. With the answer to that
in your opening gambit, ask if you can give a talk, answer questions, sign your
book or give a reading.

The Internet

These days, everyone is short of funds. Publishers have had
to cut their marketing budgets and they now expect authors to be energetic in
promoting their own work, doing much more than a launch and a few signings.

This can be terrifying for authors who spend an enormous
amount of time on their own. Most writers are very comfortable or even happy to
be alone. But those who regard the sociability of the Internet with suspicion,
fearing an invasion of the world every time they fire up their computers, don’t
realise it is vital for the promotion of their work and that, for the shy and
introverted, the Internet can be their best friend.

It is not unreasonable to expect a literary agent to google
the author of a submission which looks interesting. Perhaps the agent has two
authors from which to choose. The author with the more attractive online
presence is more likely to be of interest.

Let’s imagine the first author has a Facebook page that is blocked to the general public, and/or a
mention or two about their job which is in a field not relevant to their
writing.

But the second submission comes from someone who has a website devoted to his or her favourite
books and/or personal writing experience. The site features an up-to-date blog that connects to a Facebook page sporting five hundred
friends. This same author has Twitter
and LinkedIn accounts and is maybe a
member of a few relevant writing or literary online groups, too.

Apart from wondering how this person finds the time to write
a book at all, the agent will realise that here is someone who’s serious about
what they do and is willing to work at getting themselves known. From the
agent’s point of view, that means good potential sales.

The reality today is that nobody gets commercially published
unless their work seems likely to make a profit for the publisher. Once the
bestsellers might have subsidised less profitable books, but now times are hard
for loss leaders, too.

Twitter

There are some people who apparently spend all their waking
hours writing messages of one hundred and forty characters. You might not be
one of them, but rest assured it’s very easy to set up your own Twitter
account. Go to www.twitter.com and follow
the instructions.

If you click on a button asking to be notified when a
specific person tweets anything, the chances are this person will notice and
will follow you. The number of followers you acquire will depend on how much
time you spend trying to attract these followers – unless of course
you’re already famous, in which case people will follow you without being
asked.

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking site which encourages people
and groups to befriend each other. Go to www.facebook.com
and get started by designing your own page. You can put up photographs, too.
There’s plenty of information available which will help you to do this, either
on Facebook’s own pages or elsewhere online.

There’s virtually no limit to the length of a Facebook post,
so Facebook is especially popular with writers, probably because writers tend
to be people who always have a lot to say and who like to keep in touch.

If you find any people you know are already on Facebook,
invite them to become your Facebook friends. As your list of friends grows,
your posts will become available to more and more people and you will become
more widely known.

Learn how to put up links to other websites. Reply to people
if they mention you. Comment on what they said. Retweet/share messages to/with
all your followers/friends. But don’t be irritating and/or continually try to
sell something. Make it clear you’re a human being, not a robot churning out
spam.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking site. The
user’s profile displays their curriculum vitae and members can endorse one
another’s skills. http://www.linkedin.com

Blogging and websites

If you’re new to writing fiction and you’re not yet part of a
writing community, either face to face or online, you should consider joining
one soon. This is because it will be useful and encouraging to meet other
creative writers who also talk to imaginary people living inside their heads,
and who don’t think this behaviour is particularly strange – which
ordinary members of the public and non-writing family members and friends often
do!

You’ll find a popular UK chat room which is free to join on
this link: http://talkback.writers-online.co.uk/,
and details of local face to face groups in your district at your local public
library, or on the National Association of Writers’ Groups website at http://www.nawg.co.uk/. This website features
many local and national writing competitions, too.

You could start your own blog using Blogger or Wordpress (a
Weebly website includes a blog page), in which you write about your journey
towards publication. If you sound friendly and approachable, other writers will
want to follow your progress. If you ask published authors for interviews they
will almost always oblige. Many interviews on blogs take the form of question
and answer sessions – you provide the questions, the author answers them
by email, then you post the results on your blog – simple!

Join social networking and fan fiction groups, then you’ll
meet other authors, published and unpublished, experienced and just starting
out, in a friendly and informal setting.

These days blogs and websites are easy to make and manage,
even if you have only shoestring funds or no funds at all.

margaretjamesblog.blogspot.co.uk/

is a blog generated from free Blogger software available from
Google.

www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk/

uses the Pro version of a Weebly website and is very
reasonably priced. It has a few more bells and whistles than the free version,
which is still brilliant and easy to use. http://www.weebly.com

If you want to have your own domain name, Weebly can help or
check out the availability at www.123-reg.co.uk/.
You may have to pay a small annual fee for a domain name.

There are plenty more blog and site providers on the web,
either free or for a small sum. www.youtube.com
is a great source of help if you get stuck. Type in the name of the software
you are using and the chances are a list of short, explanatory videos will come
up.

If you don’t have much spare time and your computer is a
machine of mystery, but you do have
the financial means and would like a sophisticated online profile, consider
paying a professional to arrange this on your behalf. Don’t be surprised by the
high prices, though. Remember you are paying for both design skills and IT expertise.

Self-publishing

There is no question that self-publishing your work can be a
viable and sensible alternative to commercial publishing. It might even be your
fast track to fame and fortune. The publishing industry has changed
considerably in recent years, and it is not unknown (although it’s still rare)
for a self-published book to be taken on by a major publishing house and be a
big hit.

Self-publishing is not the same as vanity-publishing. Vanity
publishers make their money from authors, not books, and are in it for the cash
they can extort from the gullible, the deluded and – yes – the
vain. If you self-publish your book,
however, you will pay a percentage of your earnings to Amazon or Smashwords and
the like, but after that all the profit is yours.

The commercial publishing industry, personified by literary
agents and editors, has always been the gatekeeper of quality as far as
presentation and indeed everything else is concerned. But, now that everyone
can upload their books on to various selling sites, the Internet is flooded
with poorly-produced copy. So it’s important to get your presentation as
perfect as is humanly possible. Mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation
can result in changes of meaning. Compare Father
Christmas is coming! with Father,
Christmas is coming!

Do you want your reader to understand you? If so, hiring a
professional copy-editor to check through your final version might be money
well spent.

If you don’t employ any professionals, ask several people who have the appropriate
skills to read your manuscript. It is a fact that the subconscious brain can sometimes
correct mistakes which are in front of our eyes. At any rate, you certainly
won’t see all your own mistakes straight away and, if you put your manuscript
to one side for a few weeks, then look at it afresh, you will probably be
horrified to see how many blunders you previously missed.

Once it’s published online, your book will swim around with
all the others in the online sea. The statistics for the Amazon UK site alone
are astonishing. In the first year of ebook publication, ten thousand titles
were uploaded. The last time we looked, the figure was over two and a half
million. How are you going to get your book noticed? Look carefully at the
uploading information. Make sure your book is tagged and flagged in as many
categories as possible. Then promote it on Facebook, Twitter and on your own
blog for all you are worth.

Exercise

If you don’t already have Twitter and Facebook accounts,
open these soon.

Also consider setting up your own website and/or starting
your own blog. While you’re thinking about it and/or working out how to do it,
look at and comment on the posts on other people’s blogs, and also follow these
blogs.

Then, when you start your own blog, other bloggers will
hopefully follow you and comment on what you say. You’ll soon be part of the
online writing community.

CHAPTER 8

The Bad Stuff

Jealousy

Writer’s block

Rejection

Manners

Jealousy

It’s great when life is going well. When it’s going badly,
however, everything is more of a challenge. It’s hard to stay positive and
optimistic when things are going wrong for you, especially if you have friends
in the same life situations who are having a wonderful time.

We all know jealousy is an unattractive and destructive
emotion, but it can be hard not to feel jealous of even a good friend who gets
the job you wanted while you remain unemployed, announces her engagement to the
man of her dreams while you’re still trying to get over being dumped yet again,
or sells her first short story or novel while you’re attempting to be philosophical
about your latest rejection.

We’re all members of the top species on this planet, and
most human beings are competitive. As writers or aspiring writers, we’re in a
hugely competitive profession in which someone we know is almost always going
to be doing better than us. So it’s probably best if we can admit to ourselves
that yes, we are sometimes jealous of our more successful writing friends.

Then we need to channel this jealousy into trying to do
better ourselves, and into concentrating on finding ways to sell or promote our
own work so we become better known and more successful.

Mutual support

Many artistic people seem to be (and apparently always have
been) unhappy, restless, angry or depressed. It seems to go with the creative
territory.

Perhaps, however, perfect happiness is not particularly
conducive to creative endeavour? If you have a lovely family, why would you
wish to spend your time in the imagined hell of a dysfunctional one? If you are
happily married to the love of your life, why would you want to write about
people who are thwarted or unlucky in love, and what would you know about it
anyway? Maybe some trouble and strife
actually need to be added to the mix
of most authors’ lives?

You’ll almost certainly find that when you are feeling down
other writers will be extremely supportive and encouraging. This is because we
can afford to be supportive and
encouraging, as well as because most writers are lovely people who can’t help
walking in other people’s shoes and empathising with their friends.

We writers are in competition with each other, but –
unlike many artists and musicians – we hardly ever have to compete for
something as specific as a hanging space in a gallery or a place in an
orchestra.

Once you have Twitter and Facebook accounts, you will be
able to share your good and bad news with your fellow writers. Whenever things
go wrong for you, remember there will always be a demand for stories and there
will always be room at the top for the next big thing.

Writer’s Block

What do you do when you’re stuck, blocked, can’t find the
energy to go on with a story, or think it might be better for your health and
sanity if you give up writing completely?

If your writer’s block is of the emotional kind, then rest
assured, we all feel like that sometimes! Do
it anyway may sound unfeeling but can often be the way through if the
expectation of what you can achieve is realistic. Otherwise, talking it through
with someone who understands, going for a walk or writing something unrelated
to your work in progress may help.

If your writers block is as a result of a problem with your
plot, you might consider  piece of
advice we were given recently. If you’re
stuck, have someone come in with a gun and shoot somebody, and we would
agree wholeheartedly with that.

We don’t mean shoot somebody literally, of course, although
if you’re writing mystery or crime fiction perhaps you actually could put a few rounds into a
character’s chest. This will certainly stir things up a bit – or a lot!

Otherwise, shooting somebody could consist of:

1- Giving an established character such as your protagonist
or antagonist a shock, a challenge, a setback or a surprise.

2 - Weaving a new plot strand into your story.

3 - Creating a new character and giving this person
something exciting and/or interesting to do, but also remembering to make sure
this something is integral to your story.

4 - Changing the direction of your story by putting in a
turning point. Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth at the midpoint of Pride and Prejudice is a classic and
much quoted example of a turning point.

4 - Letting someone who is (or is going to be) important in
your story be born, get married or die.

5 - Changing the circumstances of a character’s life –
making this person richer, poorer, happier, unhappier, more successful, less
successful, and letting this change have a knock-on effect throughout the rest
of your story.

Do any of these five possibilities work for you?

You could also try putting your work-in-progress to one side
and writing something, anything else – a poem, an article, a letter to a
newspaper, an email to your best friend.

Where can you find inspiration?

If you have a file full of suggestions, thoughts and
jottings, get it out and look through it. If you don’t have such a file, start
one now. We keep interesting cuttings, photographs, articles and postcards
which we hope will inspire us when we’ve run out of steam, and often they do.

Actually touching or otherwise investigating an inanimate
object can be seriously inspirational. A piece of china or porcelain, for
example – what does it look like, feel like, what is its history? Who
owned it last? Who owns it now?

Maybe you could go to the sort of museum where visitors are
encouraged to interact with the exhibits, and have some new experiences there?
Maybe you could play a gamelan or try on some period costumes?

Or perhaps you could listen to a piece of music? Movie
music, which is written specifically to create a certain mood or even several
moods, can be especially inspirational.

If you’re writing romantic fiction, an adventure story or
heroic fantasy, you could try listening to the music from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Howard Shore) or from Gladiator (Hans Zimmer) or almost
anything by John Williams – it’s all highly motivating stuff.

If you are feeling seriously blocked, to the point where
every sentence written is a Herculean task, then try listening to music that is
new to you. If you’re a popular music fan, try opera – and vice versa.
Don’t be concerned about whether you like it but do be interested in what makes
it work. Think about its rhythm, melody and mood. Imagine people and places.
Music is constantly moving. Perhaps journeys come to mind.

In classical music terms the nineteenth century is often
referred to as the Romantic period. Composers wrote a lot of ‘programme’ music
which is descriptive and contains a recurring theme. In some ways this is
similar to having a main character.

Try listening to:

Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

Berlioz Symphonie
Fantastique

Mendelssohn Fingal’s
Cave

Stravinsky The Rite of
Spring

Karl Jenkins The Armed
Man

David Bowie Space
Oddity

It’s very common for one art form to inspire another. In Appassionata by Cathie Hartigan http://www.womanandhome.com/news-and-entertainment/295059/appassionata
the cor anglais solo in Dvorak’s New
World symphony provided inspiration. In Cathie’s story City Break http://www.womanandhome.com/news-and-entertainment/435094/city-break
it was Raeburn’s painting of the Reverend Robert Walker.

Rejection

This is the Big One, the monster, the thing all writers hate,
even experienced, established writers, even writers who have told themselves
over and over again that rejection is not about them, it’s about market forces,
it’s about the idiosyncratic preferences of editors, it’s about the person who
wrote the rejection letter suffering from a painful and intimate medical
condition and wanting to take it out on somebody.

Does it help to know there can’t be many or even any
published writers who have never had a rejection of any kind? Or that some now
hugely successful writers wear their early rejections as badges of honour and
actually laugh about these former setbacks? Or that commissioning editors at
major publishing houses have lost their jobs when they’ve let a big fish swim
away?

What doesn’t kill me,
makes me stronger, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he of
the astonishing moustache, is
supposed to have said – and which many other people must have said, too.

When you get a rejection, give yourself a few hours to get
over the initial shock, outrage, anger or dismay. Then, after you’ve had a
drink, and maybe also something good to eat, reread the message/letter or
replay the telephone/face-to-face conversation in your head. It probably wasn’t
all about you, was it? Or even about your work? It was also about the state of
the market, the current trends in publishing, the difficulties of promoting new
writing by previously unknown authors. It is
time-consuming, challenging and expensive for a publisher to launch a new
writer, especially a novelist. All commercial print publishers want to see a
good return on their investment.

What was actually said?

If you were given any practical advice about your work,
think about what was said. Maybe the person giving you this advice is right?
Maybe your adventure story isn’t
exciting enough? Maybe your romantic hero isn’t
particularly attractive? Maybe your romantic heroine, who you meant to be sharp
and funny, is a bitch? Maybe you do take too long to get started on your
story? Maybe your story, which you meant to end with a triumphant firework
display of action and/or emotion, does
fizzle out? You can do something about any or all of this.

It’s never easy to be told you’re unwanted and to go away,
and maybe in future it won’t happen to any authors any more. As the digital
revolution gathers pace, we’ll all be able to self-publish our work on websites
and as electronic downloads, even if we’re the least technically-minded people
in the world.

The only people we will have to court, cajole and delight
will be our readers, and we’ll wait in fear and trembling for them to give us
their opinions in the form of reviews on public websites which the whole
English-speaking world will be able to read.

Nowadays, commercial publishers respect and even court
reviews on ordinary readers’ websites. It’s becoming commonplace for publishers
to quote Amazon reviews by ordinary readers in commercially published novels.
See, for example, the reviews for Sophie Duffy’s second novel This Holey Life, published by Legend
Press.

As recently as twenty years ago, most writers probably
didn’t think about their readers very much, or even at all. Their big challenge
was to impress a literary agent, a magazine editor or a commercial publisher,
and to worry about what readers might think of their work much later in the
process.

But these days we have to think about our readers from the
outset. This is both comforting and alarming, but we find it mostly comforting.
Nowadays, a writer who believes in his or her work can self-publish online, on
Amazon, on a blog or on a fan-fiction website, and see what happens next.

In the case of E L James, author of the Christian Grey
trilogy of novels, quite a lot happened next! The stories were originally
published on fan-fiction websites, created a big buzz, and ordinary readers
made those books the success they are today.

It will cost you nothing to publish your work on your own
website or blog. If readers like your writing, they will read it online, they
will tell their friends about it, and one day they might even pay money for the
whole book.

We’re not in the business of fortune-telling, but it’s been
suggested by many people in the industry that in future print publishing at the
expense of a commercial publishing company could well be restricted to
children’s and gift books, and maybe even those will go digital in the end.

But, in the meantime, many of us will still have to cope
with rejection letters or rejection emails from literary agents, magazine
editors and commercial publishers.

Coping with rejection

Do we, the authors of this book, have any practical
experience of dealing with rejection?

Yes, indeed we do. So, whenever we receive rejection letters
or messages, we work through our six
stage plan:

1 - We read the
letter or email.

2 - We have a good
grumble both to ourselves and to our friends.

3 - We screw the
letter up and chuck it in the bin or we relegate the email to the delete folder
with a nicely satisfying click.

4 - We have a treat
– a chocolate éclair or a custard doughnut always hits the spot, so we
keep some in the freezer for emergencies like these.

5 - We fish the
letter out of the bin or get the email out of the folder.

6 - We read it again
to see if it says anything sensible, which actually it might – and, if it
does, we resolve to act on the advice, but not
until we are feeling calmer and more philosophical.

If your short story didn’t win a competition or was rejected
by a magazine, it might have been because it wasn’t the right sort of story, or
because you didn’t follow the magazine’s submission instructions or obey the
competition rules.

If your novel was rejected, check to see if you sent it to
the right sort of publisher. Mills & Boon publishes only romantic fiction,
but this doesn’t stop people sending in all kinds of writing – crime,
mystery, fantasy and family saga, to name but four kinds of fiction which Mills
& Boon definitely doesn’t
publish, at least at the time of writing this book – only to get it
straight back again.

Some subjects were fashionable once but aren’t fashionable
any more. If you’re writing about last year’s hot new subject, the chances are
a publisher will have been swamped by submissions already, and won’t want
yours. Publishers are always looking for the next big thing.

What is the next big thing going to be? This is a very good
question, one to which publishers don’t always know the answer, so it’s a
problem for authors and publishers alike.

Publishers were all slow on the uptake in respect of Fifty Shades of Grey, probably because
most of them believed erotic fiction was still a niche market with a
comparatively small reader base. We feel it’s likely that the Fifty Shades-and-its-many-imitators
furore will eventually die down and erotic fiction will become a niche market
once again.

Or will it?

Who can tell?

The world of publishing is full of surprises. Who would have
thought a story about a boy wizard would make its author one of the richest
women of all time?

We feel the best advice we can give is to write what you want to write, what makes you happy, and
– while you are writing – to keep trying to put yourself in your
reader’s place and asking yourself: if I were a reader, would I like this?

While you’re waiting to see if you’ve cracked it,
next-big-thing-wise, bear in mind that even J K Rowling had to go through a
long-winded rejection process before her first Harry Potter novel was snapped
up by Bloomsbury. A seven volume story about a boy wizard, scoffed most
publishers – that will never
sell!

A story about rabbits searching for a new home – who
wants to read about rabbits? Luckily for Richard Adams and a small independent
publisher who believed in him, it turned out that quite a few million people wanted to read Watership Down.

So have faith in yourself, enjoy the writing process, and
with a bit of luck you will make it in the end. If you decide you can’t be
bothered with the commercial publishing process – and this is what many
writers are deciding nowadays– go straight to your readers online at
minimal or no cost to yourself.

You’ll soon find out what your product consumers –
your real, live, human readers – think of your work.

Manners

We’ll round off this chapter with some thoughts on manners
– the bad sort – for readers and
writers.

You’ve probably read a few (or maybe even many) short
stories and novels which you’ve hated? Perhaps you didn’t finish them, but you
felt very strongly that what you did
read was a total waste of your time?

Maybe you hated one or two (or even more) so much that you
told your friends and family not to read/buy them because you were offended,
revolted and/or bored out of your mind?

Perhaps, in the case of a novel, you even fired off a short
one star or two star review to Amazon or Goodreads full of emotive words like rubbish and stupid and awful?

What did you say?

Did you try to help the author and the reading public by
explaining what you felt was wrong with the book and suggesting how the author
could improve?

We hope you did!

But, if you didn’t, how do you think you would feel if you were on the receiving end of a review which
trashed your work without saying
anything helpful or constructive? A review which was merely gratuitous abuse?

When you become a published author, your literary baby is
out there naked and alone in the world. It has no defence against anyone who
wants to hurt it. You’ve read as far as Chapter 8 of this book, so we assume
(and we hope) you are planning to join the ranks of published authors some time
soon. You know how much effort and emotional energy goes into making a work of
fiction. So now, when you find you really dislike the work of another author
– and it will happen, because
we don’t all like everything – try to work out why you hated it, and perhaps send the author a private message via
the author’s blog or website, before you go online, spoil that author’s day,
and maybe suggest to the world that you
get a kick out of being spiteful?

As for when you are speaking to published authors – here’s a checklist of questions which are likely to rile/upset/dismay any
writer, especially if they are asked in a social group or at a
meeting/event/conference rather than in a private conversation.

How much do you earn?

What advance did you
get for your last book?

How many books have
you sold during your writing life?

Does your
husband/wife mind you being a writer?

Do you ever wish you
could write like (name one or more of your own favourite authors)?

My
son/daughter/husband/wife has written a really good novel, but nobody will
publish it. I happen to have it here in my bag. So will you read it and give us
your professional opinion?

Why can’t I find your
books in W H Smith/Waterstones?

Why can’t I find your
books in charity shops?

Why aren’t your books
in the bestseller charts?

Do you think you have
any chance of winning the Booker Prize?

Here are some questions authors
are almost always happy to answer:

Do you come from a
family of writers?

How long have you
been a writer?

Where do you find the
inspiration for your stories?

What are you writing
now?

Do you enjoy writing
and where/how do you find you write best?

What time of day do
you write?

Where can I buy your
books?

I’ve brought along
one of your books – please will you sign it for me?

What advice would you
give someone who wants to be an author?

When you become a commercially published author yourself,
here are some things it would be tactless
to ask the reading public – even or especially if they’re what you
are really thinking and would like to know!

If you don’t like the
sort of stuff I write, why are you at this meeting/talk/event?

Sir/madam, have you
actually read any of my books?

Why don’t you tell
this audience what you earn?

How successful are
you in your own career?

Although thousands of books are published annually in the UK
alone, the publishing industry is a small one. Readers and writers and
publishers and literary agents remember compliments and they also remember
insults. We can’t always be kind and generous to each other, but in this
hothouse industry it’s always wise to try.

Exercise

Find a piece of commercially published writing which you
absolutely hate and then try to work out why
you hate it. What’s wrong with it, and – this is much more important
– what’s right with it?

Okay, it doesn’t appeal to you. But why did it appeal to
someone else, someone who was prepared to spend their own money producing,
publishing and promoting it?

As a writer and communicator, it’s not enough to say any
writing which you hate is just not your sort of thing. You need to go beyond
that and work out why other people
might like it, even if you don’t.

CHAPTER 9

I am a writer

Doing and being

Writing communities

Writing groups

Starting a group

What sort of group?

1 - Are you a creative writing student, or are you a writer,
pure and simple?

2 - If someone asks what you do, can you say I am a writer without feeling
embarrassed or fraudulent?

3 - Do you want writing to be your hobby?

4 - Or do you want writing to be your life?

Each of the four questions above should make you ask
yourself if writing is an integral part of your being and is what you need to
do in order to make sense of the world? Or if it is just something you do in
your spare time.

We’re not suggesting writers have to spend their entire
lives in front of a screen. How much money they earn doesn’t come into the
equation. Unfortunately, not all writers make a living solely from their
writing. Many supplement their incomes from teaching or part time jobs, or they
have supportive parents or partners.

Constantly regarding all our experiences as fodder for our
writing is normal for writers. Being curious, obsessing over minutiae and
daydreaming about possibilities are all central to the writer’s life. In
addition to being an artist and a craftsperson, being a searching critic and a
staunch fan of your own endeavours is also desirable, while having a sense of
humour can be life-saving.

You might think you will always be a student, and to some
extent this is the case. We writers are in a profession in which we are always
learning. But, after a certain amount of time, success or the completion of a
body of work, there may come a shift in consciousness, and being a writer will
become your natural state.

Writing communities

We don’t mean you have to forsake your family and friends and
go to live in a community! But writing can be a lonely and isolating
experience. So meeting other writers for tea (or stronger) and sympathy is
beneficial even if their opinions don’t line up with yours. They do have an
understanding of what it means to write.

If you are comfortable about using the Internet (and it’s
worth becoming comfortable) and/or you can’t get to a face-to-face writing
group, you may well find an Internet forum to which you could contribute.
Somewhere online there will be a forum for every sort of writing you can
imagine. Some of these forums are genre or author based, and if you google them
you will easily find them. Fan fiction abounds, particularly in Fantasy.

One of the benefits of Internet forums is that you can read
the work of a colossal number of people even if you don’t contribute a word of
your own writing. While this might not be in the spirit of the thing, you can
learn a lot from reading a wide variety of work by other creative writers
working in all genres.

Many university courses have forums for students to critique
each other’s work. But we would like to sound a note of caution about receiving
and writing critiques on line: it’s very easy to click send. It isn’t so easy to rebuild someone’s fragile self-confidence.

You probably don’t need to take critiques which feature
comments like I don’t read this sort of tripe
and other direct insults to heart. As we suggest in our comments on bad
manners in the previous chapter, there is evidence that some strange people get
a lot of pleasure from writing malicious critiques whether or not they have
actually read the work.

Reading, writing and book groups

Nowadays, almost every city, town or village street boasts a
book group. If you’re a writer, it’s
a very good plan to belong to one. Apart from the enjoyment you’ll get from
meeting up to discuss something you enjoy doing, most people find a major
benefit is being encouraged to read books they would otherwise shun, or of
which they would be unaware. Earlier in this book, we discussed the benefits
that reading widely can have on your writing.

A writing group is both like and not like a book group.

Many writing groups
consist of enthusiastic amateurs, although some contain published authors and
some only published authors. If you
wish to join a writing group it’s important to find one which will not only
suit you, but will also be happy to have you.

Ask yourself: what do you hope to gain from being in a
group?

Useful advice?

Critiquing of your
work?

Career advancement?

To tap into the
collective imagination?

To socialise with
other writers?

Not all groups will be able to provide all these things. You
won’t need to take much notice of destructive critiques which are obviously
based on personal opinions and prejudices (critiques which begin with I can’t say I like stories which feature
lots of sex/violence/unusual pets/interplanetary exploration are always
going to be suspect), rather than on an understanding of what you are trying to
achieve.

Belonging to a writing group will not automatically further
your career unless some of the members know something about the publishing
industry. If you find yourself in a group which has members who are
commercially published, make sure you listen to what they say.

The atmosphere in a room of writers busily writing is very
special. On a good day, it’s almost possible to hear the creativity humming. A
positive and generous group will share ideas in an atmosphere of respect for
each other’s efforts.

Being in a group of writers who write, as opposed to in a group of writers who merely talk about writing is going to matter,
unless you are there just for the company and don’t mind what you discuss.
Writing is an interesting subject, after all. Besides, there might be tea and
buns, too.

Consider what you have to offer your group. Apart from your
genius, that is. Are you a good listener and able to give a fair critique of
someone else’s work?

New writers understandably feel daunted by the prospect of
joining an established group, but we hope you’ll be brave and give it a go.
There’s a lot to be learned on your writing journey and hardly anyone is
confident at the outset. If you join a friendly group, its members will be keen
to find and encourage your talent.

Starting a group

If you can’t find a group nearby, or your local group is
full, or you’re not keen on the way this local group operates, consider
starting one yourself. If you are a student in a class, you might find you have
a ready-made group by the end of the term or year. Or maybe you have friends
who are keen to have a go at writing? The fact that someone hasn’t written
before doesn’t mean they can’t write at all.

Drawing up an agenda, perhaps spread over the next few
months or even a whole year, is a formal way of deciding what topics the group
should write about and what else the group might like to do.

Often, someone will suggest a subject or an exercise and the
results will be read out at the next meeting. This sort of thing might not be
appropriate for every group, especially for those made up primarily of
novelists, whose time-frame for completion is long, which means they are often
unwilling to read from work in progress.

As for exercises – primary school teachers know the
value of subjects like: My day out
and: What I had for dinner. When
children write about these things, the teacher gets considerable insights into
the lives of the children as well indications of their abilities. For adult
writing groups, keeping the exercises simple will do much the same thing. Listening
to the host of different ideas that come from the same stimulus is a valuable
learning experience.

We’re assuming the atmosphere in your group is one of
generosity rather than competition. It’s okay to think: I wouldn’t have said that. It’s not
okay to say: you shouldn’t have said that
unless – and this is significant – the writer isn’t achieving what
he or she set out to achieve, or is making factual or grammatical errors which
sabotage their work.

Exercises

All of these would make good exercises for writers of any
age.

We have deliberately kept them general in the hope they will
encourage a wide variety of responses from individuals or from writing groups
as a whole.

If you’re in a group, most value is likely to be gained by
everyone reading their work out loud. Although it doesn’t seem likely,
listening to ten pieces of writing about one object can be a more enriching
experience than ten pieces about ten objects.

Experiment with how you carry out the exercises below.

Objects

If we asked you to write about a desk, where would you
begin? With your own school or work desk? A desk you would like? What’s in or
on the desk? Where is the desk? Whose desk is it? The writing riches one can
mine from objects are dependent on the questions you ask about them.

Consider writing about any of the following objects:

The desk (or any piece
of furniture)

The cup

The key(s)

The carrier bag (or
any sort of bag)

Characters from
objects

Let’s approach a character from an oblique perspective.
Clothes say a lot about us. Think of a specific person’s coat. What sort of
coat is it? Old or new? From a charity shop or a designer boutique? Who does
the coat belong to? What’s in the pockets? How would someone feel in that coat?
What would the coat say about them? Writers need to be chronically curious
about every aspect of human beings – their mannerisms, their foibles,
their hopes, their fears, their dress sense.

Consider writing about the owner of:

A bomber jacket

A mink coat

A blazer

A cape

Characters from
occupations

What we do in our lives has a direct bearing on who we are.
Think about the following occupations and, while avoiding stereotypes –
Tom is rather tall to be an astronaut, after all – can you write about
the following characters?

A Big Issue seller

An astronaut –
hello, Tom!

A Hollywood star

A dentist

Dialogue

How a person
speaks may reveal more about them than what
they say. Check that your characters have their own voices and don’t all sound
like you. Consider age, origin and, especially in Britain, class. Peer groups
and professions often have their own vocabulary and jargon.

Consider writing some dialogue inspired by the
settings/situations below:

Two strangers stuck in
a lift

The waiting room

The audition

The laundrette

Tension

Every story contains (or should contain) some tension. It’s
the thing that pulls us through. We catch hold of the thread on the first page,
then find we can’t let go. Tension makes our imaginations create entire worlds.
It makes the hairs on the backs of our necks stand up and our hearts beat
faster. Will they/won’t they – that’s what we ask ourselves.

Consider writing a scene which features:

Escape

The race

A natural disaster

The secret

Themes

Tension needs fuel. Why are the lovers/brothers/children running
away? Why does she want to kill/marry him? Something has to motivate your
characters.

Consider writing about:

Betrayal

Passion

Ambition

Revenge

Exercises to do together

Everyone sits in a circle. In the middle is a ball of wool.
The first person to pick it up begins to tell a story. After a minute or two,
this person throws the ball to someone else while still keeping hold of one end
of the wool.

The new person holding the ball carries on with the story.
Gradually, the middle of the circle becomes a woolly star, then a cat’s cradle,
until the story draws to a close – hopefully before too many knots have
been formed.

Doing this is fun and, if you’re in a group of like-minded
writers, an almost credible story can emerge from it. Crucially, it’s a told story as opposed to written one. Our experience of written
chain stories is that they usually end up as unlikely tales full curious
tangents, deliberate diversions and differing writing styles. Again, they can
be fun to write, but not that productive for the individual.

There are other exercises that require the participation of
everyone and can be useful as well as enjoyable:

The story
generator

This requires a chart the size of a landscape A4 sheet of
paper with four columns, and between six and ten rows. The headings for each
row are:

Who? (A
character’s name, age and occupation)

What do they want?
(This can be a life ambition or a small desire)

What’s the problem?
(Or obstacle they must overcome to achieve their ambition)

How do they overcome
it?

The best way of filling in the chart is to keep passing it round having written in
just one box. Go down each column before starting the next.

Eventually, the whole chart is complete and it is possible
to see a simple story outline emerge by reading across a row. Here is an actual
example generated by a class:

Who?

What do they
want?

What’s the
problem?

How is it
overcome?

Katherine 46 vet

To win X-Factor

She’s not that good a singer or anything else

She trains her pet duck to perform with her

Tami 21 cashier in betting shop

To go to Las Vegas

She’s not got enough money

She fiddles the till

Carlos 23 waiter

To become a lorry driver with a full HGV licence

He is an illegal immigrant

He looks for a UK bride

Bruce 20 bungee jump instructor

To impress girlfriend with his cooking

She likes Pot Noodles

In bed

Brian 48 carpenter

To climb Everest

He is in a wheelchair

Learns to walk with blades. It’s a start!

Andrea 39 museum curator

To get together with John, the Head Archivist

His wife

Locks the wife in sarcophagus

Donald 57 captain of industry

To take over the competition

He is facing fraud charges

Escapes to country outside extradition treaty

Other storylines may be generated by drawing a line that doesn’t go straight across but zig-zags through the columns. Although
not obvious to begin with, the most
interesting and unusual stories come from reading across in this way. The
trick is to make them credible even though at first glance they may be
preposterous. It isn’t necessary to stick exactly to the brief. Andrea can
become Andrew very easily if that makes for a better story. He might not be a
curator; he could be on holiday in Egypt. It isn’t cheating if another idea
comes along that inspires you. This sort of exercise is about lighting the
imaginative flame.

Consequences

Many people have played this as a party game. Like the story
generator, the paper is passed round but in Consequences each line written is
folded over and hidden from the sight of the next player. Part of the enjoyment
is pairing Napoleon with Cleopatra and discovering they met on the London Eye.

For writing groups, avoiding the use of historical figures
or contemporary celebrities and introducing some conflict or difficulty in step
7 usually produce a viable (with a few tweaks) storyline.  Here is a version suitable for a class
or group:

1 - Name plus age and
occupation

2 - Another name etc

3 - Met at...

4 - One said (a
problem?)

5 - The other replied
(some advice?)

6 - So they went…

7 - What went wrong…

8 .- The consequence
was…

Speed dating (not
exactly)

This is a very useful exercise for clarification of a story
or for talking through difficulties.

The group divides into pairs. One person stays put
throughout the exercise and the other person moves around the room.

One person tells the other about the story or piece he or
she is writing, outlining the characters and plot in a few sentences. The other
person then asks relevant questions such as those mentioned in Chapter 5:

How old and from what
social class or educational background is your ideal reader?

What sort of story is
it – action-packed, reflective, philosophical, simple, complex?

When and where is it
set?

Whose story is it?

If you were to sum up
your main character in two or three words, what would they be?

Do you need every
character?

Is it wise to name
your characters Ted, Ed and Ned or Joan, Jane and Jan? Consider Alex, Sam and
Chris carefully, too – male or female?

What problems do the
characters face?

What attributes do
they reveal in trying to overcome them?

What are you going to
hold back from revealing, so the reader keeps reading in order to find out what
it could be?

What does the main
character learn/realise/overcome by the end?

What has changed by
the end of your story?

An acute listener will pick up where the writer is hazy or
confused and flag this up. It’s a good plan to take notes. After swapping
roles, the ‘stayer’ then moves on and the process is repeated. Different
pairings reveal different aspects of the writing needing attention.

If everyone says the same negative things, it’s probable
there’s an issue with the writing.

Don’t be surprised if there is a lot of waffling the first
time you try this. Both writers and listeners will improve with practice.
Gradually, the waffling will diminish, to be replaced by tightly-focused
questions and answers – we hope!

Being able to talk about your work clearly and concisely is an important skill.
Remember that the first thing you will be asked when you say you have written a
story is: what’s it about? Most people don’t want a ten thousand word reply.

What sort of
group?

Think carefully about what sort of group you want. Exeter Writers, our own local
group, has twenty-five members, a committee of six, an annual agenda, a bank
account and a website. It holds fortnightly meetings in a church hall and runs
an annual, open short story competition.

Other small groups meet at intervals in each other’s houses
solely to share work, and there is no bureaucracy involved at all.

You could also meet in a pub, in a local community centre,
in a library or in a school. If you have to hire a venue, money is going to be
an issue. What’s the minimum number of members you will need if the group is to
be sustainable? What’s the maximum the room can hold? How many people should
you have in your group if people are to be able to read their work aloud
without those in the queue behind them breathing down their necks and getting
restless?

CHAPTER 10

Making Some Money

Short stories

Competitions

Articles

Most people who are new to writing fiction find themselves
drawn to short stories, probably because they are short. A short story isn’t
going to be anything like as big an investment of time, energy and emotion as a
novel, so it seems an attractive proposition. Or at least not a daunting one.

Authors also wonder if it might be possible to earn some
actual money from writing short
stories.

The good news is – yes, it’s certainly possible, and
writing short fiction has been a stepping stone for many authors who have then
gone on to write novels.

These days, lots of people are putting their collections of
short stories up on Amazon Kindle and on other websites such as Smashwords.
Some of these ebook collections are selling very well.

Commercial publishers have noticed, and they’re getting in
on the act, too – asking their authors to contribute to collections of
short stories which will hopefully encourage readers to buy their novels, too.

The bad news is – the most lucrative markets for short
stories, which in the UK are women’s magazines (these pay between about £50 to
£300, or more if you are a bestselling/celebrity author, for a 1,000 –
3,000 word short story) and national and local radio stations, have contracted
considerably in recent years. It’s almost impossible to interest a commercial
publisher in a collection of short stories, even though some very talented
authors do manage it – for example, the young Nepalese writer Prajwal
Parajuly, whose debut from Quercus is a collection of short stories entitled The Gurkha’s Daughter.

As for novels – you get paid what other people think
you are worth, and it’s not really possible to suggest how much this might be.
A commercial publisher will probably offer you an advance against royalties,
but this will be negotiable, and you won’t earn anything more until you have
earned out this advance. If you’re self-published, your income will directly
reflect your sales.

A novelist whose work appears as printed volumes can also
earn respectable sums of money from the sale of subsidiary rights – large
print, audio, foreign/translation and digital – and from Public Lending
Right, for which authors have to apply: https://www.plr.uk.com.

But don’t despair because another market has expanded, looks
set to go on expanding forever, and this market is – competitions. Online
and postal competitions are thriving, with new ones cropping up almost every
day.

Many of these competitions are for short fiction and have
entry fees, which pay for the cash prizes.

What, you have to pay people to read your work?

Yes, we’re afraid so. But perhaps you could view entering
competitions as you would view making a small investment on which you hope to make a return, while not depending on it.

At first, you might not win anything much. Or anything at
all. But – as time goes on and as you develop your story-telling skills
– you should start getting longlisted, then shortlisted, then winning
runner-up prizes, and finally some third, second or even first prizes,
too.

Our tip is to look for new competitions and small, local
competitions with relatively modest prizes, and gradually to work your way up
to short story competitions such as the Bridport – http://www.bridportprize.org.uk/
– and the Fish – http://www.fishpublishing.com/
– international competitions which attract literally thousands and
thousands of entries. So everyone’s chances of winning the Bridport and the
Fish are always going to be slim, however brilliant their stories might be.

There are competitions for novelists, too, run by various
local authorities, by private individuals and societies, and by publishing
houses. If you do some googling, you will find them easily.
CreativeWritingMatters organises and administers the Exeter Novel Prize, which
was first awarded in March 2014. See www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk
for details.

Although this book is intended for creative writing students
– that is, for writers of fiction, for people who make things up –
we feel we should talk a little about writing non-fiction, too.

This is because people who write non-fiction also tell
stories, and because for many writers the road to paid employment is paved with
commissions from magazines, newspapers and small publishers who are sometimes
willing to pay freelances to write for them.

We say sometimes
because local newspapers don’t always pay freelances for stories. But, if you
want to start a cuttings collection of your published work, featuring those
all-important bylines which get your name in print, your local paper might
offer you some great openings, and – in due course – maybe even a
paid column every week.

A non-fiction article for a magazine or newspaper is or
ought to be a story:

which is true, and

which can be
open-ended – you might not know what happens next, but this won’t matter
if you can follow up events and report back to your readers later the same
day/week/month/year, and

which is about
something interesting, unusual, cheering, sensational or astonishing.

If you’re writing non-fiction, what you write has to be true, and you’ll risk getting
into serious trouble if you embellish, fabricate or lie in print. You could
even end up in court being prosecuted for defamation or libel and, if this
happens, don’t assume the magazine or newspaper will automatically stick up for
you.

So – if in doubt, leave it out.

If you interview or quote someone, try to be sure you
reproduce what this person actually said, as opposed to what you think or wish
he or she said. People can get very upset if they’re misquoted. When you’re
writing your article and quoting your interviewee, don’t make a habit of doing
anything more radical than ironing out a strong regional accent – I done it like her told me can be
replaced with I did what she told me
– and correcting the person’s grammar.

A non-fiction writer starts from the same vantage point as
the short story writer or novelist in that he or she describes places,
machinery, architecture or situations in relation to the human beings who see
them, use them, live in them or experience them. Although non-fiction writers
can write about animals, aeroplanes and landscapes, as well as about people,
they usually tie these stories to the human beings who’ve also been involved:

Man of 105 pilots
Spitfire over Solihull.

Year 7 schoolgirl
becomes online millionairess.

Famous novelist’s
parrot passes Key Stage 1 in English.

You article or news item will need to explain:

Whose story you are
telling.

What this person or
animal did.

What went right.

What went wrong.

What happened in the
end – if you know!

Journalists, novelists, dramatists – they all tell
stories.

If you would like to try writing interviews, start off by
asking some authors, because authors are always anxious to promote their work,
and are usually more than happy to talk about themselves.

You don’t have to be
working for a magazine or newspaper because you could post these interviews on
your own blog. You could also start a book review forum. Once you have some
followers – get your friends and family to sign up – many
publishers will send you review copies of books, and in no time at all you’ll
have a free library.

Questions you could ask a writer include:

Why did you decide to
become a writer?

How did you go about
achieving your ambition?

Who or what helped
you to succeed, and did you have any lucky breaks?

Who or what hindered
you, and what setbacks did you have to overcome?

Who or what inspired
you to write your most recently published book?

What advice would you
give someone who wants to be a writer?

You can think about answers to these questions for when you
are interviewed yourself.

If you’re not yet confident you can do any of the above, but
you would like to receive a small payment for your writing once in a while, you
could try sending off tips, hints, letters, short factual items and stories about
your real life experiences to newspapers and magazines. When you start to get
paid for these, your confidence will increase, and soon you’ll feel ready to
tackle articles and short stories.

Exercise

Practise communicating with strangers, a skill which all
writers need to master, by interviewing someone you’ve never met before. We’ve
found that if you tell almost anyone you are writing a book, they will be happy
to talk to you.

Or, if that’s too daunting, interview a friend or a
relative. Or interview yourself. Or you could interview a character in one of
your stories. There’s quite a fashion for this right now – see http://www.bookbabe.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/penny-bangle-blog-tourgiveawayreview.html#.UJGflW8xqT4.

CHAPTER 11

Readers of novels – what do they
want?

Mostly, they want:

Romantic fiction

Women’s-interest
fiction

Historical fiction

Crime novels

Thrillers

Mysteries

Adventure stories

Fantasy

Science fiction

Literary fiction

Who is your reader?

Romantic fiction
is read mostly by women. A romantic novel usually tells the story of an
emotional (but not necessarily sexual) relationship between two people who fall
in love. The narrative trajectory of a romantic novel tends to be – the
lovers meet, the lovers part or are separated or disagree for some reason, the
lovers are reunited. The RNA’s (Romantic Novelists’ Association’s) website
– www.rna-uk.org – is a mine
of information for both readers and writers. Bestselling authors include Jenny
Colgan, Carole Matthews, Trisha Ashley.

Women’s-interest
fiction is often family-oriented and discusses issues such as adoption,
divorce, domestic violence, child-rearing. Most of its authors are female, as
are most of its readers. Many writers of women’s-interest fiction belong to the
RNA, the RWA (Romance Writers of America), or similar organisations around the
world. Bestselling authors include Joanna Trollope, Rowan Coleman, Diane
Chamberlain.

Historical fiction
is of course set in the past. The Historical Novel Society’s website states
that to be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been
written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written
by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore
approaches them only by research).  See the
Society’s website for more details – http://historicalnovelsociety.org/.
Bestselling authors include Bernard Cornwell, C J Sansom, Maureen Lee.

Crime novels, thrillers and mysteries all ask the question: who did something, and why? This
something doesn’t always have to be a
murder. Although there are thousands of successful male writers of crime,
thriller and mystery fiction, there are also thousands of successful female
crime, thriller and mystery writers, and many female readers love these genres.
The Crime Writers’ Association’s website is a useful resource – www.thecwa.co.uk. Bestselling authors
include Stuart MacBride, Ruth Rendell, Val McDermid.

Adventure stories
are often about seeking lost cities full of treasure, sunken ships full of
treasure, journeying in inhospitable places and/or finding yourself by putting
yourself through a lot of discomfort and tribulation. Bestselling authors
include David Gibbins, Scott Mariani and Raymond Khoury.

Fantasy and science
fiction are read by both men and women with men perhaps predominating,
especially in the case of science fiction. Readers and writers tend to find
each other through fan sites such as http://www.theonering.net/.
Bestselling authors include George R R Martin, Mark Lawrence, Robin Hobb.

Literary fiction
– what is it? If you ask twenty people, you’ll probably get twenty
different answers. It is – or most of the people who write it and
describe themselves as literary novelists seem to hope or intend it to be
– beautifully written in elegant, expressive, emotive language, making
full use of the resources of the language. In much literary fiction, style
seems to be as important as substance. It often asks the big questions –
why do we exist, what are our duties to the planet, to ourselves and to our
gods, does capital punishment deter anyone? What exactly is human nature? There are no dedicated associations specifically
for literary novelists. If you feel you are or want to be a literary novelist,
these links might give you food for thought: http://litreactor.com/columns/storyville-what-is-literary-fiction
and http://www.matthaig.com/30-things-to-tell-a-book-snob-revisited/.

There are of course many other smaller genres and subgenres
of fiction – horror, erotica, ménage and Western, to
name but four.

In this handbook, we do not have the space to cover writing
in all adult genres, or writing for children and young adults. But here are
some websites you might like to access if you
wish to write for these specialised markets:

Horror - http://horror.fictionfactor.com/

Erotica - http://www.filamentmagazine.com/2011/04/nine-ways-to-write-better-erotic-fiction/

Ménage - http://kpiet.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/biphobia-vs-bisexuality/

Western - http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Western-Novel

Children’s - http://greenhouseliterary.com/index.php/site/top_tips

Young Adult - http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/writing-young-adult-fiction-for-dummies-cheat-shee.html.

Whatever kind of fiction you are writing, we hope the notes
in this chapter will be useful to you because – after all – much
fiction contains elements of crime,
of mystery, of romance. Many investigators in crime fiction fall in love, while
husband-and-wife or girlfriend-and-boyfriend teams solve mysteries.

How do you find your ideal reader, and –
if you want to please this reader – what should you write?

If you intend to self-publish your work, either as a printed
book or as an electronic download, you can write whatever you like. Publishers
aren’t always right, and these days self-published books often do very well
indeed, sometimes after their authors have spent months or even years sending their
work out, only to have it rejected by commercial publishers again and again for
all kinds of reasons, including there is
no market for this kind of story.

If you’re writing a novel, literary agents and commercial
publishers are usually very wary of stories which are a blend of several genres
because the received publishing wisdom is that the reading public doesn’t like
these books. This is not necessarily the case, because many self-published
novels on Kindle are selling by the thousand to readers who don’t care if a
novel is a blend of romance and crime
and mystery, provided it’s an
engaging read which tells a good story.

But it’s not usually a good plan to spread your bets by
mixing and matching too many genres
in a single novel: see our example of the kind of submission letter to a
literary agent or publisher which you should never write below.

If you have confidence in your writing, and you are able to
produce a finished book which can be uploaded on to Kindle and Smashwords and
so on without any problems, you might decide to cut out the middleman and go
straight to your readers.

But, if you want to go down the traditional route to
publication and to find a commercial publisher who is prepared to publish your
book at his or her own expense, you’ll have to be a team player and be prepared
to take direction from editors, who might ask you to make fairly radical
changes to your work. The end result should be a well-designed and marketable
printed or digital book which will be stocked by all the independent
booksellers, by all the major high street chains and in all the online
bookstores.

Or that’s the theory, anyway.

A commercial publisher will pay for production, publicity,
marketing, warehousing and distribution, which are prohibitively expensive for
many of us. Also, you are perhaps more likely to be taken seriously as an
author if someone pays you to publish your book. But, as the digital revolution
looks set to change everything about the publishing industry, this might not be
the case for very much longer.

All the same, you still need to be aware of the major genres
in commercially published fiction. This is because even if you intend to bypass
commercial publishers and to self-publish your work, it will still be useful to
think about where you will fit into the great scheme of publishing things and
about how you can best market your work to your readers.

Literary agents, publishers, editors
– do you need them?

What do they do?

They would say they provide the reading public with some guarantee
of quality control, and also ensure good books continue to appear in the
marketplace.

A literary agent
places an author’s work with a publisher in exchange for a percentage of the
author’s gross earnings, which in practice is usually between 10% and 15% of
the author’s royalties, and usually plus VAT. He or she can be a self-employed
sole trader, an employee of an international conglomerate, or something in
between.

It is not an agent’s job to teach you how to write, but many
agents are former editors who are prepared to offer editorial advice, and some
will spend a lot of time, money and energy nurturing a promising writer.

You cannot insist on an agent nurturing you, however,
because an agent doesn’t make any money until he or she sells your work and
collects a percentage of your earnings.

Anyone can set up in business as a literary agent. So, if
you are looking for one, try to find out who he or she already represents, and
if these writers are successfully published – or not.

A literary agent should never charge a fee upfront. Members
of the UK’s Association of Authors’ Agents – see http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/ to track
them down – would hopefully never do this. So don’t be tempted to sign up
with an agent who asks you for a reading fee, a consultation fee, or any other
sort of fee, because all this particular agent wants to do is separate you from
your money.

A literary agent owes it to himself or herself to represent
authors whose work he or she can sell to publishers, and to turn any other
authors away. This is why it is often harder to find an agent than to find a
publisher. But don’t pity the poor agent, who will make sure he or she takes a
percentage plus VAT of any royalties when the author’s books are eventually
sold.

A publisher bears
the whole cost of producing the book, electronic download or whatever form the
work of the author takes. He or she will offer the author a contract which is a legally binding document. So you will
need to read a contract carefully, discuss anything with which you don’t agree,
and clarify any points which you don’t understand, well before you sign. If you
have an agent, vetting and possibly re-negotiating a contract is something he
or she will do for you.

If they don’t have literary agents, UK-based writers should
join the UK’s Society of Authors – see http://www.societyofauthors.org/
– whose experts will vet their contracts for them and offer them sound professional
advice.

Editors and copy-editors are employed directly by
publishers and are on a specific publisher’s payroll, or they sell their
services to one or more publishers as self-employed freelances. It’s their job
to make your work look as professional as possible and also to make sure it is
the kind of work the publisher wishes to sell.

If becoming a commercially published novelist or other kind
of writer is your life’s ambition, your submission letter or email to a
literary agent or publisher might be the one of the most important you will
ever write.

A good submission letter does four key things:

1 - Tells the recipient a little about the book.

2 - Tells the recipient a little about the author.

3 - Makes the recipient want to read the book.

4 - Makes the recipient want to work with the author.

Let’s look at a submission letter which gets almost
everything wrong.

42 Tripe Street

Bletheridge (1)

Hi Andy (2)

I’m sending you the
manuscript (3) of my novel The Gnomes of Sidmouth,
which is about 200,000 words long. (4)

It’s a romantic
comedy in which aliens land on earth and a robot falls in love with a beautiful
elf in a megalopolis of the future loosely based on a small seaside resort in
Devon. The story begins when a town councillor is found dead on a park bench
with a bullet through his skull, and later there is some girl-on-girl action,
too. (5)

You won’t want to
miss this opportunity, so why don’t I come up to London soonest, meet you for
lunch, and we could discuss terms? (6) When you’ve had a chance to look at the
book, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s destined to become a worldwide bestseller, and
you’d be crazy to let it slip through your fingers! (7)

I’m enclosing a
photograph of me and my girlfriend on holiday in Ibiza. You can see I’m pretty
fit and would look good on a book jacket. (8)

Looking forward to
hearing from you, mate!

Cheers

Dave Dumpden

1 - Always give an agent or publisher your full contact
details, including phone numbers and email, Twitter and/or Facebook addresses.
You need to date your letter and write out the address of the recipient in
full, because this is standard business letter procedure, and you’re writing
– a business letter.

2 - You should address the recipient formally as Dear Mr (or
whatever) Surname, unless of course you already know this person and are on
cordial terms.

3 - No agent or publisher reads manuscripts (that is,
handwritten documents) these days. When you first approach an agent or
publisher, you should not send in the whole novel – instead, send a short
synopsis (about 500 words maximum) and the first two or three chapters (about
15,000 words).

4 - This is probably too long for a first novel. A print
version would be hugely expensive to produce, store in a warehouse and
distribute, and it would take up a disproportionate amount of space on a
bookshop’s shelves. A good length for a first novel would be about 80,000
– 100,000 words, which would become a paperback of about 300 printed
pages.

5 - This novel looks as if it’s an uneasy mix of almost all
popular genres – romance, comedy, science fiction, fantasy, crime,
erotica – so it would probably be quite difficult to sell to booksellers,
who might insist the book-buying public wouldn’t like it, so they didn’t want
to stock it.

6 - This sounds too confident and assertive. At this stage,
you are courting the agent or publisher and trying to interest him or her in a
new writer’s work, which might indeed be wonderful, but which might have no
commercial value at all.

7 - Again, this sounds too presumptuous, even if it’s
supposed to be ironic. The use of the cliché about the work slipping through
the reader’s fingers doesn’t promise original, exciting writing.

8 - Contrary to what we are sometimes led to suppose, agents
and publishers seeking new writers are more interested in competent writing
than in good looks. So, although good looks are a bonus, they won’t help if you
can’t write. Also, it’s too soon to be sending agents or publishers your
photograph. They won’t want a photograph until they sign you up, and maybe not
even then.

This letter doesn’t tell the recipient anything much –
or at least, much that is relevant – about the author. While you don’t
need to tell a literary agent or publisher your entire life history, you do
need to give him or her a few relevant
facts. Then, he or she can start to build up an image of you. What do you do
for a living, roughly how old are you (in your twenties, fifties, eighties), do
you have any relevant qualifications – for example, are you perhaps an
accountant writing a thriller about a huge financial fraud which is likely to
bring down the government?

There’s no SAE enclosed for the return of the submission. Of
course, we all hope our submissions won’t be returned, but it’s still good
manners to enclose return postage.

This is a much more appealing submission letter:

Nicholas Armitage

34 Bellstone Court

Salutation Walk

Feltingbridge

FT35 7QZ

Tel 02965 945034

Mobile 06845956435

Email nick@hollyberry.co.uk

www.twitter.com/nickbonedigger

13 January 2014

Mr Andrew Barley

Barley and Rye
Literary Agency

Renton Mews

London SE45 9TZ

Dear Mr Barley

The Sleep Walkers

I’m sending you the
synopsis and first three chapters of my crime novel The Sleep Walkers, which is 100,000 words long and is the first in
a police procedural series featuring maverick Detective Sergeant Mick Lewinsky
of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.

Thirty years old,
working class and a practising Roman Catholic, Mick is of Irish and Polish
stock and is the first member of his family to become a policeman. In The Sleep Walkers, he and his boss, the
curmudgeonly, golf-loving and soon-to-be-retired Detective Inspector Courtenay,
investigate the disappearance of a child from a holiday camp, find a child’s
body washed up on a beach, and begin a murder enquiry.

But, two days later,
the body vanishes from the mortuary. The child turns up alive. A woman throws
herself on to a funeral pyre which she has built and lit on the beach where the
child’s body was found.

At present I am
working as a refuse collector, but I also have a first class honours degree in
archaeology from the University of Feltingbridge. At university I specialised
in osteology, which is the study of bones found at archaeological sites. I am
twenty-six and live in a rented flat with my partner Lucy and our two dogs. My
parents live in Cornwall, where I grew up and to which I frequently return.

I am a huge fan of
crime fiction and would like to become a full time crime novelist myself. I
hope my story will appeal to readers who love the work of Ian Rankin, Mark
Billingham and Jo Nesbø.

Thank you for
considering my work, which I hope you will enjoy reading. If you would like to
see more of the novel, I can send you the complete typescript by post or email.

I look forward to hearing
from you.

All best wishes

Nicholas Armitage

Enc: Synopsis and
first three chapters of The Sleep Walkers

SAE

These days, some literary agents and publishers ask authors
to submit everything by email. Generally, the submission letter will need to be
in the body of the email and anything else will need to be in one or several
attachments.

If you’re asked to submit in this way, you should still
write your email message in conventional English using conventional
punctuation, capitalisation and paragraphing. Remember to capitalise the
personal pronoun I!

Always follow submission procedures precisely – don’t
give the publisher an excuse to delete your message unread.

Your synopsis is
an important selling tool, and some agents and publishers will read this before
they turn to your opening chapters. So try to do these three things:

1- Make it short
– 500 words maximum

2 - Make it clear
– write in the third person and the present tense, outlining whose story you are telling, where it is set, when it is set, what the
big question is going to be, and how
everything is resolved at the end

3 - Make it complete
– provide the reader with an outline of the whole story

Here is an example of a synopsis of a novel which does all
three of those things:

Synopsis

Margaret James

The penny Bangle

The third and final novel in the Denham family saga, this
story begins in 1942 and is set in Dorset, London, Italy and Egypt.

When should you trust your heart?

When nineteen-year-old munitions worker Cassie Taylor
leaves Birmingham to become a land girl in Dorset, she expects she will be in
for a quiet and boring time. But, on arriving at the Denham family’s farm, she
meets Robert and Stephen Denham, army officer twins still
convalescing after being wounded at Dunkirk.

Although she is initially drawn to lively, friendly Stephen,
Cassie falls in love with his brother Robert. When Robert returns to active
service, Cassie joins the ATS, not only because she wants to have adventures of
her own, but also because she wants to be worthy of Robert. When Cassie meets
Robert again in Alexandria, he asks her to marry him. They become engaged but,
as the Allies prepare for the invasion of Italy in 1943, Cassie is sent back to
England.

Stephen is too unfit to go back on active service and is
offered a desk job in London. Stephen is in love with Cassie and, when Robert
is declared missing in action, he assumes he can take Robert’s place in
Cassie’s heart. Cassie explains that nobody could ever take Robert’s place. But
Stephen assumes that Cassie despises him because he is not a hero.

In Italy, Robert is wounded on a mission behind enemy lines
and ends up fighting with the partisans, having been rescued from almost
certain death by Sofia Corelli. Robert and Sofia become lovers.

In an attempt to prove to Cassie that he is as brave as
Robert, Stephen is killed. When Robert is repatriated at the end of the war, he
confesses his affair with Sofia to Cassie, assuming she will understand and
forgive him.

But Cassie is heartbroken. She tells Robert that their
engagement is off, and that she now wishes she had had an affair with Stephen,
who might still be alive if she had pretended that she loved him.

Robert is determined to win Cassie back. She is just as
determined that she will never marry him. But family circumstances bring them
back together, and they finally admit that they both need healing and
forgiveness. They marry and the story ends in Dorset as Cassie gives birth to
Robert’s daughter, Lily Rose.

What about your actual novel?

If you’re making a postal
submission in the UK, the first three chapters of your novel should:

1 - Be typed on good
quality A4 paper in 12 point Arial, Times Roman or another clear font such as
Bookman, in double spacing with wide margins and with the pages consecutively
numbered – don’t start each new chapter with the number 1.

2 - Introduce the
central character(s) and start telling the story from his/her/their point(s) of
view.

3 - Be full of
questions to which the reader will want answers.

4 - End with a
cliffhanger of some kind.

If you’re making an electronic
submission, the same advice applies. But, before you click send, double-check the publisher’s guidelines to see if attachments
are acceptable. Check the file type too. Don’t send your submission as a .doc
file if the publisher only accepts .pdf. Sometimes attachments aren’t
acceptable and you may have to send everything in the body of an email.

What sort of cover will I get and does it
matter?

Many commercially-published authors write with an ideal
reader in mind. So cover art (and even Kindle editions need cover art to act as
their shop windows) will be designed to appeal to these ideal readers.

Here are some examples of standard/traditional cover art:

Romantic comedies
often have cartoon covers,
frequently with a lot of pink or light blue in them.

Crime novels
often have covers done in neutral
colours, or with some black in them,
or with an alarming splash of red.

Fantasy novels
often feature illustrations of heroes
in leggings and tunics and/or heroines in mediaeval-style gowns,
standing in front of landscapes full of castles
and dragons.

Our fictitious Nicholas Armitage, whose letter to a literary
agent we quoted above, knows where his ideal readers might be found.

Where will you fit in?

Exercise

When you’re writing a novel, think about who might want to
read it – someone old, someone young, someone male, someone female,
someone well-educated, someone who left school with no qualifications at all
but who loves good stories?

Then, when you have decided, write a few key scenes with
this reader in mind.

Actors sometimes say that at each live performance they
choose a member of the audience and then play to this one particular person,
rather than to the whole auditorium.

You could perhaps do something similar – write for
your ideal reader, rather than mankind in general.

Then you should stay focused on what you want to do.

CHAPTER 12

The roads more or less travelled

Why go on a course?

Where are you?

What course?

What? No course?

The observation below, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway,
is repeated over and over in conversations about the teaching of creative
writing: There
is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Whoever said that knew what he/she was
talking about, didn’t he/she? So why go on a course?

If you wish to write fiction, but have never written
anything apart from emails to friends and family or reports for work, having
some sort of creative writing training is probably essential, despite what Mr
Hemingway might or might not have said. There will always be those blessed few
whose writing arrives fully formed on the page, but they are blessed and they are indeed few. In fact, the wise amongst them
would probably go on a course anyway, for there is much to be learned about
what to do after the words are
written down.

Most writers find themselves sailing into the doldrums now
and again. Perhaps they’re stuck for ideas. That first flush of inspiration,
which led them to write half a novel or several short stories, has fizzled out.
They find they are writing the same story again and again.

If this happens to you, you might feel you want to move
outside your comfort zone. But you won’t know in which direction to go. The
many hours you’ve spent in an imaginary world have become isolating. You feel
the need for company. Maybe you are sociable and your writing is highly
regarded by those who know you, but you aren’t getting any joy when it comes to
publication. You brood.

Who are you?

Although researching courses on Google or at your local
library is essential, you’ll probably end up feeling the choice is bewildering.
A good deal of self-reflection is advisable before committing yourself to one
course in particular.

It’s important to think hard about what is going on in your
life. Don’t be distracted by wishing it was somehow otherwise or by wishing you
were someone else. Writing requires a lot of enthusiasm, energy and hard work.
Here’s a list of ten questions you could ask yourself:

1 - Do I hope to earn
a living from writing?

2 - Do I want to make
a financial investment in my writing?

3 - Writing is
something I really enjoy and in which I want to excel, but do I see it as a
profession?

4 - Do I like new
writing challenges or do I want to specialise in what I enjoy?

5 - Are
qualifications important to me?

6 - Do I work well
under pressure?

7 - How much time do
I have in which to write?

8 - Do I have plenty
of self-motivation or do I prefer to have a route laid out before me?

9 - What am I aiming
to achieve in five years?

10 - Can I plot the
steps I need to take in order to achieve that aim?

Depending on how you answer these questions, a picture may
emerge of your way forward.

What course?

Over the last couple of decades, creative writing has become
increasingly popular. In 1970 the University of East Anglia offered a
post-graduate Master of Arts (MA) course. Ian McEwan was the only student that
first year, and his anecdotes about the relaxed atmosphere and tutorials over
pints of beer are famous. Now nearly every university and college in the UK is
bursting with creative writing courses at every level.

There are also a myriad author-led workshops, writing
holidays, correspondence courses and one-to-one critiquing services. Agencies
such as www.literatureworks.org.uk, www.spreadtheword.org.uk and www.nawe.co.uk
run career development days.

Think about your writing and decide at what level you want
to enter a course or career development path. If you aren’t sure, then seek
guidance. If you are enrolling for an evening class or college course, ask
either to speak to the tutor or to have a piece of work assessed. But don’t be
downhearted if this work comes back with a recommendation that you should take
a beginners’ class. To put it bluntly, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Besides, if you are passionate about your work, you will be keen to learn as
much as possible. It has been known for students to enrol for beginners’
classes several times, often repeating exercises. In much the same way as Monet
painted his beloved water lilies again and again, seeking different
manifestations of light and shadow, so it can be with writing. In any group
your writing should be assessed on its own merits.

It is now possible to take Creative Writing as a single
subject at undergraduate degree level. There is usually a choice of modules for
specialisation, such as prose, poetry, screen and scriptwriting. Dissertations
are normally required and/or an in-depth critique of one’s own work.

If you are a graduate or a journalist or have some
experience in writing beyond that of a hobby, then a Masters in Creative Writing
might be more appropriate. We asked novelist and creative writing lecturer, Dr
Paul Vlitos, about the degree course at the University of Surrey.

What does studying
for a degree in creative writing entail?

At Surrey (and
elsewhere) this usually involves producing a substantial portfolio of original
creative writing over the course. Students are also required to ‘reflect
critically’ on the writing process – to write an essay or essays about
the work they’ve produced – what they were trying to achieve, putting
their writing in generic/literary/historical/personal context, and reflecting
on how the piece changed and developed during the writing process. Most
creative writing courses at university are based on a workshop model, in which
students first read and discuss a few key critical or creative texts related to
a different theme each week – then have the chance to experiment in
relation to the week’s theme creatively in class by doing some writing of their
own. Over the course people gain greatly in confidence through sharing and
discussing their work with others in a supportive atmosphere, overseen by a
published professional writer.

Does studying
creative writing at university give students a realistic understanding of
commercial publishing in the UK today, and are publishers themselves more
favourably disposed to writers with creative writing degrees?

It is certainly
important for all creative writing courses to emphasise that they cannot offer
a ‘magic ticket’ to publication, fame and fortune. What courses can provide is
a supportive and dedicated workshop setting to help people develop their
writing. I’m not aware of any evidence of publishers favouring writers who have
formal qualifications in creative writing – although a qualification from
a well-regarded institution certainly might help a young writer stand out from
the crowd. One would also hope that with a decent course the evidence would
show in the writing.

How would you define
literary fiction and how does it differ from commercial or genre fiction? These
distinctions seem to matter to the publishing industry, but should they matter?

I think you’d have to
define them in terms of the type of expectations that readers bring to a book
– and the rewards they expect from it. In that sense I think it does make
sense to think about writing (and how to publish it) in terms of ‘literary’ vs
‘commercial’/‘genre’ fiction.

Does the University
of Surrey offer careers advice to graduates of its creative writing courses?

Yes, our BA course has
an optional placement year, which offers students the chance to experience the
world of work for themselves – and many of our students use that to
explore publishing and other writing-related industries.

Does the university
invite industry professionals such as authors, agents and publishers to come
and talk to students?

A solid creative
writing course should also arrange visits from published writers and publishers
to talk to their students. I’m very keen at the moment to get in an editor and
have her talk through the editing process on a recent book with one of her
authors – I think students and readers in general often have a hard time
understanding quite how that relationship works.

If you examine your own circumstances, this will narrow the
field when it comes to choosing the right course for you. If you have a full
time job and/or family, a full time course is probably not going to be
appropriate. Similarly, after you’ve found out what the fees for a degree will
be, you might think twice about applying (although don’t despair because
depending on your circumstances help might be forthcoming).

If attending a face-to-face course is difficult, a
correspondence course might prove to be more suitable. The Open College of
Arts offers modules which can lead to a degree. The London School of Journalism
offers a wide variety of well-established courses, including novel writing,
writing romantic fiction and writing short stories.

More recently, the publishing industry itself has begun to
offer courses in creative writing. The Faber Academy has
the illustrious publishing house of the same name behind it. Legend Press is a smaller independent
publisher which offers various services to authors, including workshops in
creative writing.

Following your own path

Everyone’s writing journey is unique, but each one is likely
to be a long and winding road, rather than a quick nip down to the local shops.
It will almost certainly be interesting and fun, but it’s also likely to be
arduous or even painful at times. You’ll need to take with you the ability to
learn and the energy and passion to keep going.

Your own writing vehicle can come in any shape or size. The
world needs every sort, from delivery van to racing car. So now, imagine your
body of work as a specific vehicle. What kind is it? Do you have a rusty old
jalopy behind the house, rusty because you’ve invested a little here and a
little there when you’ve had time, but mostly you’ve neglected it? Or are you
constantly polishing your Bentley? Perhaps you have joined the Bentley owners’
club, subscribe to My Bentley weekly
and have taken the engine apart several times, re-sprayed the bodywork…in
short, you are obsessed, and have brought all your talent and ingenuity
together to make yours the best Bentley there could be.

But, even if this is the case, at some point you’ll need
fuel to take your Bentley on the road because you’ll want to show it off to the
public at a rally. This is when you’ll need considerable energy of your own.
You may have to push your Bentley to the petrol station. Then, having made it
to the rally, you might find the main interest among the punters this year is
E-type Jags. You had been hoping to sell your Bentley for shed-loads, but you
were offered only a tiny sum. Do you consider modifying it into an amphibious
Bentley and hope it will catch the imagination of a wealthy collector, or do
you think of selling it on the Internet?

If you are writing for the edification and enjoyment of the
next generation of your family, you may think you don’t need to go on a
creative writing course. You have access to all the research you need. But
while there is a ready-made chronological structure to your work, it could
still be worth learning the skills of characterisation and how to employ
intrigue and jeopardy to encourage your reader to read on. A list of events
doesn’t usually make for a compelling story.

Do you want to win the Man Booker and/or sell a million?
Whatever your goals, be decisive and keep them firmly in sight. Of course,
however brilliant you are, you will need a considerable amount of luck. But
imagine how annoyed you would be if luck came along and you weren’t ready, or
you were at home on your own when luck signed in at your local writing group.

You might be writing for your own personal pleasure, in
which case you probably don’t need to go on a course at all. Why give yourself
potential grief? There are, no doubt, many secret diarists whose writing will
never be made public. The simple act of putting pen to paper for their own
entertainment is enough. But, for the majority of writers whose sentences
wriggle so urgently into life, the need is to send their stories out into the
wild and have them read.

Exercise

If you’re not sure if a face-to-face course or distance
learning course or no course is going to be right for you, think about how you
learn best – when you’re working alone or when you’re interacting with
others?

Once you have decided, try doing the opposite and see how
you feel about it. If you’re a loner, pluck up the courage to talk to someone
about your writing. If you lack confidence and don’t tend to trust your own
judgement, enter a writing competition without
first getting feedback.

A professional writer has to be able to work alone and in a team situation.

CONCLUSION

Teaching And Learning

Perhaps you’re now wondering about taking some one-to-one or
class lessons in creative writing? You have lots of choices. You could take a
course of lessons by distance learning, you could sign up for a face-to-face
class, or you could arrange some private tutorials.

Distance learning is the most flexible option because you’ll
be able to work at your own speed and when your writing fits in with the rest
of your life. As we’ve seen, the London School of Journalism offers several
courses and has an impressive record of success, with many of its graduates
becoming well-published short story writers, novelists and journalists. All the
LSJ’s tutors are professionals in their tutorial fields.

A face-to-face class run by a local authority, an
independent organisation or an individual teacher will appeal to people who
like to interact with others, see their reactions and hear what they have to
say.

Many writers, especially novelists, find they end up leading
fairly isolated lives, and some of them feel it can be good to see other people
from time to time.

But some writers actually love being by themselves, alone at
their desks, talking to their characters and writing their stories. These
writers find the real world an irritating distraction, and they can happily
spend weeks alone, never seeing or indeed wanting to see anyone else.

Writers’ retreats are tailor-made for these modern day
anchorites!

Private one-to-one tutorials are the most intense and also
the most expensive learning option. But, if you get on well with your tutor,
these might prove to be your fastest track to learning success. Your tutor will
be able to concentrate on you, and you won’t be held up while other students
talk about work in which you might have no interest.

What should you look for in a teacher and how can you find
one?

As with almost anything in life, it pays to ask around. If
you join a writing group, face-to-face or online, you’ll be able to get some
feedback on the courses or classes other people have taken.

You’ll find plenty of advertisements for classes and courses
in magazines for writers such as Mslexia,
Writing Magazine and Writers’ Forum. Any reputable
organisation or individual will explain what is involved and answer any
questions you might have before you’re asked to part with any money.

You should be suspicious of anyone who doesn’t have an email
address, website or other Internet presence, because these days writers –
and certainly all teachers of creative writing – need to be able to use
social networks. A retired English teacher who has no record of publication and
no contacts in the publishing trade might be able to teach you the difference
between it’s and its, but he or she won’t know what’s going on in the real world of
commercial publishing.

A good creative writing teacher will:

Listen to you

Motivate you

Inspire you

Identify your
strengths and help you to build on them

Identify your
weaknesses and help you to overcome them

Praise you when you
succeed

Console you when you
fail

Realise you don’t need
to hear about the teacher’s own political or religious views, prejudices,
assumptions, belief systems or neuroses. But the teacher should be willing to
hear about any of your own which you wish to share, especially if these views
and so on inform your work and help to explain you as an individual

Know how commercial
publishing works – what a literary agent, publisher, commissioning
editor, copy-editor, publicist and so on do – and be able to give you
relevant guidance and information when you’re sending work of your own to these
parties

Get on with people
and be interested in them

Be a writer too

What qualities do most teachers of
creative writing hope to find in their students?

A willingness to
consider new concepts, suggestions, ideas and approaches to creative writing

A love of both
reading and writing, especially in the genres for which the student is hoping
to write successfully

A desire to learn
from other writers as well as from the teacher

A curiosity about all
kinds of creative writing and a desire to understand what makes or breaks any
piece of work

A willingness to
learn and understand the technical stuff – the bricklaying and wiring and
plumbing aspects of writing

A willingness to
experiment

An acceptance that
some experiments will fail and a willingness to try to work out why they failed

An unquenchable
optimism and determination to see a piece of work through to completion

What do they hope they won’t find?

A habitual
defensiveness which results in every or almost every suggestion the teacher
makes being turned down

A refusal to listen
to advice, even when paying for it

A determination to
know best all the time

An inability to learn
from example

A negative attitude
to some commercially published work which is outside the student’s own field of
enjoyment and/or interest, and a failure to appreciate the fact that these
authors must have got some things right. If they hadn’t, no publisher would
have been willing to spend considerable sums of money on them

A refusal to
experiment

A pessimistic or
paranoid outlook

A determination to
believe there is a conspiracy to prevent the student being successful

A firm belief that
there is some kind of magic key

Some yet-to-be-published writers often wonder if they need
to know someone important in the world of writing, that’s if they’re to get
anywhere in their chosen profession. The answer is yes – and no. It does
help to know people who are already published, so you could certainly try to
make friends with published authors by joining organisations such as the
Romantic Novelists’ Association or your own local writing group, and by signing
up to Facebook and Twitter.

You could also go to writing festivals and conferences,
where you will meet plenty of writers, publishers, literary agents and people
interested in writing, all at different stages of their careers.

All industry professionals are always on the lookout for new
writing talent. But talent is the operative word. Beauty, contacts, money and
success in other fields won’t help much unless you also have writing talent.

As a student of creative writing, what do you
need?

Time

A computer or
word-processor or typewriter or notebook and pen (although if you want to
submit anything to a commercial publisher, magazine editor or enter most
competitions, it will need to be printed out on a computer)

A subject (or
subjects) about which you wish to write, even if these are somewhat nebulous at
the beginning of your creative writing life

Persistence

To believe that the
only people who fail are those who give up

We’re sure that if you can bring optimism, a willingness to
learn and an open mind to your creative writing studies, you will have a good
chance of succeeding in this hugely challenging, competitive but satisfying
field.

Believe in yourself

Now you have read this book, we hope you will be more
confident about your fiction writing skills. You will know what you should bear
in mind when you are writing your own stories.

You will know how to
be a good writer

You will also know
how to be a good learner

You will also know
how to be a good reader

We all learn by experimenting and by imitating – by
absorbing good habits by a kind of osmosis and by putting what we’ve learned
into practice.

So, whenever you read a story which really impresses you, try
to take a bit of time to work out why
you were so impressed.

Asking yourself the following questions should help to get
you started:

Did you like or even
love the central character or characters?

Did you care what
happened to them and were you sad when it was time to say goodbye?

What about narrative
viewpoint – did the author choose the right viewpoint(s) and, as you read
the story, were you inside the heads of the character(s) you liked best?

Did the story have a
beginning which engaged your attention?

Did the middle part
develop the central conflict situation and pull you even deeper into the story?

Did the ending
satisfy you and did you feel it was the right one?

Did you like
listening to the characters?

Did the dialogue
sound natural, did it reveal character to you, and did it move the story on?

You’ll probably find a story which you have enjoyed will
tick most of these boxes.

Your challenge now is to get your reader to tick these boxes
as he or she reads your own work.

We’re confident you can do it!

Exercise

Make a list of your writing goals. Be realistic but also
optimistic. What do you want to have achieved by this time next year? Maybe to
have written half a dozen short stories? Or half the first draft of a
novel?

Try to write every day, even if you manage only a hundred or
so words. Why not get started by writing those first hundred words right now?

About the Authors

Cathie Hartigan
grew up in London, but after studying at Dartington College of Arts, made Devon
her home. An award-winning short story writer, she lectured in creative writing
at Exeter College for nine years and is the current chair of Exeter Writers - http://www.exeterwriters.org.uk

She is the founder and director of CreativeWritingMatters. http://www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk/

You can follow Cathie on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cathiehartigan
or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cathie.hartigan?ref=ts&fref=ts.

Margaret James
grew up in Hereford and has lived in London, Oxford and Berkshire. She moved to
Devon in 2002. She is the author of several contemporary and historical novels,
a journalist working for the UK’s Writing
Magazine, and she teaches creative writing for the London School of
Journalism.

She has a blog at www.margaretjamesblog.blogspot.com
and you can follow Margaret on Twitter at https://twitter.com/majanovelist or
on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/margaret.james.5268?fref=ts

Find out more about her published fiction by accessing her
Author Central page at www.amazon.co.uk.