Category Archives: Creative

Plot generation

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Finding myself with ten minutes to spare and faced with a blank page the other day, I started plotting. The outline of the new novel and its overarching narrative has been established, but the story needs a subplot to allow me to explore the characters’ personalities more deeply and examine their motivations.

I idly searched ‘plot ideas’ on Google and was rewarded with a plethora of plot generator sites. Blimey. A better way to waste my precious few moment of writing time I have yet to find. It’s fascinating; a bit like watching an accident on television: you want to stop, but you can’t look away.

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If I were a man…

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Sometimes I wish I’d been born a male. Then I wouldn’t have a guilty conscience about leaving the washing up in the sink or neglecting to keep the refrigerator stocked up. The dog would go un-walked and I wouldn’t care; I need to write and all other petty considerations are secondary.

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New beginnings

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After casting around in the wilderness for a while, tinkering away at the second novel – the one I began during last year’s NaNoWriMo – I have belatedly realised that I don’t want to continue with it. Not at the moment, anyway.

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Starting Out

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When I first started to write a novel, I thought I knew what I was doing. After all, I figured, I’d read lots of them. What could possibly go wrong?

Just in case there was something I might have missed, I enrolled on a 5-day residential novel-writing course. I won’t mention the name of the organisation. Suffice it to say it is very highly regarded in the field of literary endeavours. Maybe I just hit a bad week, but it was a pretty expensive waste of time and I won’t dwell on it, except to say that I’ve since heard an interview with one of the tutors where she actually admitted how bad she’d been that week. (I think she only did it once; she wasn’t temperamentally suited to the concept of coaching at all.)

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Out of time

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This really annoys me – when you’re reading an otherwise gripping novel or watching an absorbing film, and you’re suddenly yanked out of the moment by a glaring anachronism.

Maybe it’s just me, and I’m overburdened with information. I don’t mean to be glib but sometimes I wonder if too much knowledge is indeed the marvellous thing it’s purported to be. Would it be better not to know? Is ignorance really bliss?

Let me explain. Last night I was watching ‘Atonement’, the film of the book by Ian McEwan. I’ve read the book and seen the film before, and although I thoroughly enjoyed both, there’s always been a little itch, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, that prevented me from enjoying them as much as I should. Last night it finally clicked. My problem hinges on the use of one little word.

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As if

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‘I’d like to write a novel; I just don’t have the time.’ How many times have you heard that one and gnashed your teeth? As if writing a novel is that easy and all you need to perfect the art is the time to do it. Would they say the same to the doctor they meet at a party? ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to be a heart surgeon, but I just haven’t got the time.’ Sounds ridiculous in that context, doesn’t it? And what about the financial markets?  We’d all be millionaires if we only had the time to play the stock market.

I don’t think so. These aren’t pastimes you pick up on a whim. They are professions that take dedication, practice, and, dare I say it, talent. You’ll never be a concert pianist (as I know to my cost) unless you practice, but more importantly, you’ll never get off the starting blocks without some innate talent.

Writing is the same. It’s a vocation, whether you’re getting paid for it or not. It’s a need.

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Giving it all away

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There’s a trick to storytelling, to capturing our readers’ attention, and it’s not just about piling on the details and descriptions. We have to maintain some mystery. If we reveal too much too soon, our constant reader will work out what’s going to happen, their curiosity will wane and they’ll lose interest. In the process, we’ll destroy the narrative tension. There’s no harm in dropping hints along the way; that’s how we hook our readers attention and keep them gripped.

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Things aren’t always what they seem

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I was going to write about observation today, particularly the writer’s habit – or is it just mine? – of jumping to conclusions about the events and scenes we witness every day and introduce into our fiction.  Do we write a true representation of what occurred, or let our imaginations running riot? I’ll come back to that. But first, and rather off the point, I want to share something else with you. Continue reading →

Playing hooky

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They say procrastination is the thief of time, but sometimes it has its advantages.

Last weekend I fully intended to get down to some serious writing. I switched on the PC, checked my emails (displacement activity no.1) and was all set to exit the internet for the day (displacement activity no.2 – I have to be firm with myself otherwise time just fritters away), when I decided to have a quick peep at my daily horoscope (displacement activity no.3).

What a delight! My astrologer of choice told me to take a day off. She also predicted that whilst I was busy doing nothing, I would have a brilliant idea. She explained that this would happen if I distracted my conscious mind, because it would allow my creative mind, or subconscious, to roam free.

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Actions speak louder than words

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Non-verbal communication is usually understood to mean the process of creating or representing meaning by sending and receiving wordless, usually visual messages. These can include facial expressions, gestures, body language and eye contact. But how, I hear you ask, can this possibly help the writer? We need to examine the concept in a little more detail.

Previous posts have discussed the art of showing, not telling. Non-verbal communication falls firmly into the ‘showing’ category. Our characters don’t have to say anything to convey how they are feeling. The postures they adopt, their facial expressions and unconscious actions or tics will all reflect their moods and tell the reader more about the characters’ thoughts and feelings than long paragraphs of description, speech tags and adverbs.

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