There’s humour all around us, if we pay attention, and comedic value in many everyday situations. It’s just a case of looking for it.
A few years ago my doctor advised a surgical investigation. Nothing drastic, but it fell into the ‘one of those things I’d rather not do, thanks very much’ category. I was persuaded that it would be a good idea and I agreed.
It’s important to give your main characters a personality, otherwise they’ll appear two-dimensional. They’ll all sound the same and the reader will find it difficult to differentiate between them. You want the reader to care about your characters (and to be honest, why would anyone carry on reading unless they did?) and to empathise with them. So the reader need to know what drives them. Characters need a context, a goal; maybe a challenge; certainly a history.
You may have guessed that progress with my second novel is rather slow at the moment – hence all these displacement activities. I could write a book about writer’s block – 100 ways to beat the block. But would it be just another diversionary tactic? Watch this space.
Other things that are intruding on my time include trying to build up a supply of 400 word stories for the parish magazine and longer ones to read on the radio. If I can do that I’ll be free to concentrate on the novel for a while.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maggie Cammiss 