Category Archives: Creative

A moment in time

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An interesting event this afternoon. Actually, ‘event’ is too grand a word for it. It was more of a moment in time, but quite a strange one all the same.

This week we’ve had some old friends and their children staying with us. Today being the last day of their visit we decided to hire a couple of canoes and paddle up the river to the pub, where we would have lunch. There was a break in the clouds and the sun shone on our little expedition; the river was calm and almost empty of other river craft. Our journey through the bucolic countryside was punctuated with wildlife and the city-dwelling kids were enchanted.

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Why do I blog?

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The day to day tribulations of a writer often have nothing to do with writing. Take this past weekend….

Picture the scene: my partner is (still) a keen amateur cricketer and it was a big day on Sunday when he fielded a team for a friendly match. For those who don’t know, a cricket team is eleven people. I’d been asked, along with the club chairman’s partner, as is the custom, to provide ‘tea’ for both teams plus a couple of umpires and various wives, girlfriends and children. We divided the task between us, she providing the savoury element, me the sweet part. In real terms that’s cake for about forty people. No problem.

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New words for old

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I was watching the news on breakfast telly this morning when a wannabe Olympic athlete was interviewed. Why did she want to be a competitor? the journalist asked. ‘I was inspirated by the success of Team GB,’ came the response.

Inspirated??  That’s a new one on me. It sounded like she was describing a breathing problem. It’s a pretty ugly word. Presumably she meant ‘inspired’. Anyway, it’s a neologism. A new word. How things change.

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Romantically inclined

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My first one and a half novels were love stories. The plots were rather convoluted, and they strayed from the acceptable norm of romantic novels in lots of ways, but basically, they followed the traditional rules of romantic fiction. Even though the storylines featured fraud, death and dishonesty the stories were, at their hearts, romances.

The new novel, however, features much unpleasantness and a lot of humour, but I’m struggling to identify the romantic thread. With this in mind, I revisited the accumulated advice on writing romantic fiction to decide, once and for all, if what I was writing could be considered a romance.

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Beginner’s luck pt 2

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Now that we’ve sorted out the peripherals, we can get down the process itself and examine some of the rules of writing from a beginner’s perspective. A lot of what is written about the art of writing applies to those who’ve been writing a while. It’s easy to get bogged down in does and don’ts even before you pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard.

But before I begin, I must add a note about a point I made a few posts ago. Regulars to this blog might remember I was having a go at Stieg Larsson for leaving a plot point hanging – see the ‘Chekhov’s Rifle’ post. Well, I have some humble pie to eat. I complained that one of the main characters in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ had a perfect opportunity to use a weapon she had previously dropped into her pocket, but she didn’t. I wondered at the time whether Larsson had just forgotten about it.

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Beginner’s luck pt 1

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In which we examine some of the influences that shape our writing lives. In part one I thought I would look more closely at the peripherals – those external aspects of writing, mostly outside our control, that nevertheless directly affect how we write and what we write about.  In part two, we’ll scrutinize the writing process itself.

In my experience, writing isn’t a life choice, like exercise, or dieting. We don’t decide to become writers any more than we decide to become a man or a woman (well, most of us, anyway); by the time we’re ready to make such a conscious decision; writing has already made the choice for us. It’s a compulsion: innate, and as inevitable as death and taxes.

So let’s start with some advice:

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Create some tension

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Are you sure you’re starting your story at the right point? Are you approaching it from the best angle?

There’s an old joke about a driver who stops an elderly man and asks directions. The old man considers this for a while before replying, ‘Well, to begin with, I wouldn’t start from here….’

Sometimes, if you follow the strictly chronological sequence of events, you risk revealing too much to your readers and depriving them of the satisfaction of working things out for themselves. This is equally true of chapters, scenes and even whole novels. Should you describe a scene in detail, as it happens, or would it be better to come in later, after the event and leave the reader to fill in the gaps and draw their own conclusions?

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Chekhov’s rifle

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‘One mustn’t put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’

What Chekhov meant by this excellent piece of advice was that nothing – objects, characters, situations, moods – should be random in our writing. Everything must have a purpose.

So why are you thinking of setting your novel in the recent past?

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Sleepless vigilance

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I had a bit of a mental meltdown this week, and I couldn’t think of anything to blog about until I found myself talking with some like-minded people about the lamentable and ongoing corruption of the English language. That got me thinking. I mentioned a well-known apocryphal tale from the First World War as a humorous illustration. You know the one – the message, “send reinforcements, were going to advance“, is sent from the battlefield back up the chain of command. When it arrives at its destination, the message is received as “send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance“.  It’s an extreme example but it demonstrates how easily our language can be altered and distorted when we rely on the spoken word.

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Who deserves top billing?

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Apart from a few preliminary jottings and an introductory chapter, I haven’t committed much of the new novel to paper or screen just yet. Something is preventing me from getting started and the nub of the problem is this: I want to explore the use of various narrative voices and experiment with different points of view, but I’m not sure I have the expertise to do this. On the other hand, if I don’t try, I’ll never know.

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