Category Archives: Creative

First Lines

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Here’s an old trick. Lost your writing mojo? Can’t think where to start? Where better than the first line of a famous literary work? You don’t need to be familiar with the original story; in fact it works better if you aren’t. When you’ve finished your piece, you can go back to the beginning and delete the first line – I guarantee you won’t need it by then.

In no particular order, here are some of my favourite first lines. I’ve read, enjoyed and can highly recommend all of these books, though I can’t profess to have remembered all these beginnings without some help. Some of the novels are a delight, to be kept and revisited, some of the others are more of a challenge. I’ll let you decide.

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How long is short?

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I’ve been reading some Mary Higgins Clark short stories recently. Well I say short, but the first story in the volume is 50,000 words long. The others incline more towards the 4-5,000. Which begs the question, how long is short? I’ve heard of people e-publishing ‘novels’ of 5,000 words, which isn’t even a novella, but I suppose that’s the beauty of an e-book: it can be any length you like. And if you’re writing material that feels natural at this amount of words, where else are you going to get it published? Certainly the old, established markets for the short story are gradually drying up – women’s magazines are a prime example. More and more magazines are dropping their fiction pages in favour of real life, how-I-overcame-this-dreadful-situation-and–lived-to-tell-the-tale type stories.

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What if?

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Continuing the theme of writer’s block, here are some prompts to use when faced with that daunting blank page. I’ve used most of them at one time or another; they’re great for getting your imagination going. Sometimes just changing the sex or occupation of a main character can trigger lots of ideas. They work well when you’re free writing – just putting down the first thing that comes into your head frees up your writing muscles. You can arrange them into some sort of cohesion later, or if it’s no good, throw it away and start again. They’re particularly good if you’ve written yourself into a corner and trying to find an ingenious way out.

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In Conversation

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What’s the difference between dialogue and conversation? In creative writing, dialogue may only be a conversational exchange between two or more people, but it’s got to have purpose, otherwise it’s just chat. Conversation is the way people talk; dialogue contributes to the plot. Dialogue must move the story on, by revealing something about the characters or the plot. Good dialogue is the mark of a fine writer; forced and clunky dialogue betrays the bad.

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Happy Ever After?

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Talk on the interweb today about a new digital novel by Caroline Smailes. ’99 Reasons Why’ is a family drama about obsession, told in 99 short chapters. So far, so normal. But Caroline’s book comes with a sting in the tail: a choice of eleven alternative endings, which are influenced by the reader’s tastes and mood and on their answers to a series of multiple-choice questions on colours, numbers and objects.

Caroline came up with the idea when she learned that several readers were unhappy with the rather gloomy endings of her previous two books. Readers with a Kindle or other e-reader device are asked simple questions about their interpretations of the characters to determine the ending of the story. If they’re still not satisfied, they can answer the questions differently to get an alternative ending.

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Recycling Works

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It’s a tried and tested technique: take an old, familiar storyline and recycle it for today’s audiences. Sondheim and Bernstein did it with West Side Story, inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; Helen Fielding based Bridget Jones’ Diary on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. So we’re in good company.

If imagination fails, old publications are great places to find inspiration. I work for the History of Advertising trust where we have large collections of vintage magazines; a quick browse reveals a storehouse of letters, problems and stories waiting to be recycled. There’s no copyright on ideas, so there’s no problem retelling an old tale, updating the setting and changing the characters.

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My Hero

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Try this as a creative writing prompt:

Choose a well-known hero or heroine – doesn’t matter what sphere they inhabit.  They could be literary, cinematic, artistic, philosophical, historical; fact or fiction, living or dead. Maybe they’re a favourite fictional character, or a hated politician. They might be the same sex as you; they might not.

List their attributes – these traits can be positive or negative.

Now think yourself into the character and build a story, from the point of view of this real or imaginary person. Mould this 2-dimensional cut out into a real person. What motivates them? What do they like? What do they fear?

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Word Association Football

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What are your favourite words?  What makes them favourites? Do they have a particular feel on the tongue, or sound in the ear?

Some of my particular favourites: –

Serendipity; Bliss; Sandwich; Wimple; Shiver; Cornucopia; Jelly; Flatulence; Fabulous; Thimble; Blether; Lollipop; Bishibarnibee  (that’s a ladybird, or ladybug in this part of the world); Fluorescence; Blancmange; Doodle; Bowling; Scribble; Bubblewrap.

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Memories

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I attended a Reminiscence Therapy seminar last week. Part of the morning was spent in an interactive Life Story workshop, where several poems on the theme of memory were recited. Then – pause for collective intake of appalled breath – we were all encouraged to write our own poems.

I don’t do poetry (unless you count a series of humorous poetic monologues in the style of Stanley Holloway that I composed when I was at college), and judging by the reaction of almost everyone in the room, neither did anyone else. However, and this might be a particularly British trait, we all knuckled down without a complaint and produced something.

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Words, words, words

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If you want to succeed as a writer, you have to read. All the advice from the experts is the same: Read. Make time for it; enjoy it; learn from it.

Discovering a new author is thrilling; I have to read their entire back catalogue as soon as possible. The excitement I get from reading a truly great book is, funnily enough, beyond words. It’s one of the most satisfying things I know. I couldn’t put it better than Holden Caulfield, J D Salinger’s protagonist in ‘Catcher in the Rye.’

‘What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

Obviously, I’m endeavouring to be that special author, but simultaneously I’m a devoted reader and it all takes time, which I never have quite enough of. I wish there were 26 hours in a day and 8 days in a week. I wish I was independently wealthy and didn’t need to go to work – it seriously impedes my writerly progress.

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