Category Archives: Reading

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 →

It’s writing,Jim, but not as we know it.

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It’s been one of those weeks where, on reflection, I would say that I’ve got no writing done at all. Sure, I’ve written stuff; in fact I’ve been busy writing stuff all week. But I’ve made very little progress with the actual writing of the new novel and there’s been almost no output of a creative nature (by that I mean made up). However, when I think about it, I haven’t been idle.

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No time to write? No excuses.

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On the premise that you can’t edit a blank page, get something written down. If you’re experiencing the same kind of angst as me – too much to do and not enough time to do it in – consider this piece of advice I read a while ago: if you gave up just one of your soaps every evening and concentrated on writing something instead you would have the best part of a novel by the end of the year. Now, I’m no-one to talk, I’m a sucker for quiz programmes and whodunits myself, but there is some merit in the idea.

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Beware of the Librocubicuralist

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That’s an unnecessarily long word, a bit of a tongue-twister, so what does it mean?

It’s a personal thing. These days, I may describe myself as my partner’s significant other, but I’m also a librocubicuralist. It’s not an either/or situation; I can be both, because the definition of the word is ‘someone who reads in bed’. Though how I’m going to introduce that nugget into my novel is anyone’s guess. I’ll have to file it with runcible, hirsute and discombobulate until a suitable occasion presents itself.

But I digress…..This post was supposed to be about A Literary Ramble.

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Last Lines

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If my previous post didn’t help free up the creative juices, here’s a list of last lines – writing a story from the end, backwards, requires a different sort of imaginative leap, but it can be very entertaining. As before, you can delete the last line after you’ve finished. One of these last lines is the conclusion to one of the novels from the first lines list.

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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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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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Heroes and villains

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I was on local radio yesterday evening, reading one of my stories and it occurred to me that the majority of the short stories I’ve written have happy endings and are mostly about quite pleasant people who come into contact with something or someone horrible. But I actually find it much easier to write about villains – malevolent people in horrible situations. Maybe it’s an unconscious urge to pit myself against the horrors of life and see who comes up smiling, or maybe it’s art reflecting reality. I can think myself into a villain’s mind without a problem – but does that say more about me than my creative ability?

Yesterday’s offering features one nasty piece of work, but it’s mainly a feel-good story. It’s called ‘Charity Ball’ and you’ll find it under the Short Stories tab.