Next up for my online course:

Staying alive: real poems for unreal times ed. by Astley

Abigail's Party - play on DVD, Mike Leigh

The latter is the one I saw the first time round back in the 1970s, so that jogged a few memories ...  Very 1970s indeed (Demis Roussos et al) so it's now a period piece - or is it? :)

Only one item missing now, due to the seller being rather tardy.  May have to go elsewhere for that - hope it's not the first book referred to ...

Signed in for the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) so have spent a bit of time working out what's available.  One student (from Greece!) had already introduced herself at the Virtual Cafe, so I added my tuppence.  The first 'class' will be initiated on 4th October, and I'm dying to know how this is all going to work :)

Just got the first of the texts on the absolutely essential (not my emphasis) reading list for the creative writing course.  That was a ruddy quick turnround, as  I only ordered it on Wednesday. Anyway it is:

The Making of a Poem by Strand & Boland

I expect to be at least as good as Pam Ayres by the time I finish the course
;-)  If not, I shall ask for me money back!  (joke)

Four more to come.  At the end of the course, I presume I shall be able to sell them all. 

btw, I only had one of the books on the list already on my shelf:

The Creative Writing Coursebook by Bell & Magrs (ed)

Until recently I'd never heard of a writer editing, unless their day job happened to be with a publisher. As I've always used the words, editing is done by editors, and what I do, after I've got the first draft down on paper, is revising. But now I keep hearing aspiring writers say, "I'm editing at the moment." (Just to clarify, I tend to think of re-writing as what I'm doing when I leave behind a story which hasn't worked, and start again with some of the same ideas and characters, and approximately the same purpose, and polishing as the last pass to pick up minor slips and idiocies.)

But surely the important point is that anyone trying to write recognises that getting the first set of words down on paper is just the beginning. Does it matter what we call the next stage? I didn't think so, until I started hearing a scary number of aspiring writers saying "I've written the novel, now I've only got the editing to do and I'll be sending it out." From the talk on such threads it's clear that they see editing as a close-up process: excising unneeded words, bringing out a character more clearly, tightening up sentences. Of course, that's terribly important, and can make a huge difference to how well your story comes over; I often liken it to cleaning the windows on the Orient Express: if they're grubby enough you'll be able to tell mountains from deserts and night from day, but not much more, and who'd buy a ticket if that was all they were going to see? But it seems as if many beginner writers think this close-up attention is all that's needed once the story is basically told.

"Okay, but when did the revising happen?" I want to ask. When did you stand back and look at the whole novel? When did you really examing the structure of the bridge, counting the piers, measuring the spans, testing their structural integrity? When did you prod each character to see if they're really alive, and throw them at each other to check they really would behave as the plot requires? Now that you know what the story's really about, did you ask yourself if you've told it through the right pairs of eyes? In the right tense? Started and finished it in the right place? When did you open your ears and ask yourself if the voices are voices that a reader is willing to listen to, and for a whole novel? "Revising" is derived from Latin, to re-examine, but to me it also has a sense of "re-visit" or "re-vision". When did you revisit all those decisions you made before you began to write or on the fly so you could keep going, and make sure, with all the new knowledge you have now you've got to the end of the story, that they're still the right decisions? When, in other words, did you make sure that the train will actually start, run, stay together and arrive safely at its destination, passengers and all? What about the heavy engineering?

This kind of stuff, which I think of as revising, is what publishers call the structural edit. Since professionals have good reason to work out the most creatively and financially effective way of doing things, it's worth thinking twice before doing things differently. What beginner writers have taken to calling 'editing' is what publishers call the line edit and, if it's a separate stage, will always be the later one. And then the last stage, polishing, is not unlike the copy-edit: picking up dodgy commas, typos, wayward formatting, final checks for the minor idiocies which inevitably creep in whenever you start doing stuff. Checking the toilets, as it were, and straightening the magazines in the rack.

Clearly, macro and micro - engineering and window-cleaning, wood and trees, revising and editing in my terminology - are different conceptually, even if they coil tightly together in the final novel, and some writers would say they do them together.  One writer even suggests that it's only in the close-up work that he uncovers any major structural problems. It's certainly true that if you're struggling to write how a character does something something the plot needs it may be that the character shouldn't do it, and is doing his best to tell you that: you're going to have to change either plot, or character. But the talented and/or experienced writer works with a feedback loop, whether it loops once an hour or once ever six months: big thematic changes, for example, need to be carried through at the level of sentences, while a change of tone which evolves in a particular scene may make you realise that there's something awry in the novel as a whole.

What worries me is to hear so many would-be writers using a word which suggests to me that they simply don't know that the chances of the wood being the right shape from the beginning are small, that it almost certainly will need chainsaw work, and that no amount of trimming twigs is going to make it the right shape if it isn't. I think it's because so much writing-teaching focuses on the small scale. That's partly because prose is easier stuff to read and write and teach on in class-sized chunks, than structure is. And it's partly because of the focus, in teaching beginners, is on how to find material inside and outside yourself, and then learning some tools to shape a single little piece.  So writers embarking on their first novel are often quite aware of the micro-work it takes, but much less aware of the macro: in the Writers Workshop one-day courses I teach, our exercise making people write a two-sentence summary of each of the first five chapters is an absolute revelation to many students.

But if the smaller stuff is easier for teachers to handle, I'd suggest that it's also easier for the writer to face dealing with, and that's where you need to take your Anti-Writing Demon by the throat and kick him out of the room. It's frightening for a beginner writer to stand back and try to recognise if some of those fundamental decisions have turned out not to be right. Taking a long, hard look at the heavy engineering may mean you realise that a) you've got the wrong train for the route, or the wrong route for the train and b) you may need a consulting engineer to work out what to do next. It's much easier to concentrate on excising passive constructions, and whether they really did use 'wonder' to mean 'speculate' in 1710. Unfortunately, there's no point in polishing the windows for the best view of the approach to Venice, if the train won't pull your passengers up the first incline out of Victoria, let alone get them safely and happily to Istanbul.

A few months ago, in the piece I did for the Independent's My Book of a Lifetime slot, I found myself saying, "Both my first novel, The Mathematics of Love, and now A Secret Alchemy, are about love, war, and the life of the spirit. At the most fundamental level, I sometimes think, what else is there to write about?" The rhetorical question was designed to get readers disagreeing, and of course it's only partly true of my own work, let alone anyone else's. There are a million other things to write about, from being conceived, to hunting a great white whale, to chasing a nose which grows legs and joins the Russian civil service.

But both the WIP, working title Kindred and Affinity, and the little squeaks of a new story, maybe novel-sized, which I can hear in the gaps, are probably also encompassed in that definition (prescription?) of 'love, war and the life of the spirit'. This evening - maybe it's the Autumn blues - I'm wondering if it's a bad thing to stick with these same basic preoccupations; or is it simply a bad thing that I've become aware that I do? After all, a novel by definition is novel: something new. And I'm also aware that the first two preoccupations, at least, are in some ways the easy option, the safe bet for writers who can't be bothered or aren't able to try harder and write fresher, and whose fiction is therefore dull, formulaic or actively meretricious: cheap in the aesthetic rather than the financial or literary sense. Am I doing the same? Goodness knows I don't sit and think 'war sells' or 'love makes readers cry', any more than I sat down and decided that The Mathematics of Love was going to be a cross between Possession and Birdsong (not least because I hadn't read either). But here are my characters - people, times and places - and the more specific themes I want to explore - say voyeurism, surrogate fathers, enclosed societies. I start to think about how and where to build those lives so as to give the themes a chance to grow and set shoots, to dramatise them in different shapes and times. And the answer to how and where so often seems to be love and war, under the eye of a God or some transcendant and immanent force which my characters - some of them, sometimes - seem to believe in.

And yet when I look at the work of any writer I admire, I see that they, too, return time and time again to the same fundamental meditations, even if each time what the novel dramatises is individual lives: contingent, particular and, yes, new. Granted, as a human being you can't entirely escape your particular preoccupations and tastes, but to turn the question on its head why, if you're driven to examine fundamental things, keep dressing them in new clothes?

I think the newness of a novel is not accidental, nor is it superficial, but equally the oldness is neither laziness nor tedium. Perhaps it's because only it's only new things which we look at properly, being lured by their novelty into examining each bugle-beaded bonnet or pagan tattoo hard enough to see the shapes beneath: the old, fundamental things which underlie them. In other words, perhaps the oldness only works if the newness does too. A small child asks for the same story over and over again not because they've forgotten what happens - heaven help you if you change a word - but because they want to re-live the fear of the wild things, and then the comfort of getting home: it's the new (re-)speaking of the words which conjures up the oldest feelings in the world.

For my own work, I don't know. Because what I most notice in excellent writing is the things I couldn't do myself, and someone else's ideas which I must work to apprehend, I associate excellent writing with ideas and things I don't do. In which case my writing - which by definition is ideas and things which I do do - is not excellent. But maybe I'm just having a wobble about how crude the basics - for which read oldnesses - of one's writing can look, because any broad generalisation, whether it's a blurb or an elevator pitch or a snide, dismissive review, can seem a reductio ad absurdum of the complex of ideas and feelings which is a novel. The whole novel, on the other hand, not reduced thus, gives those ideas and feelings human form, so that they can dwell among us humans, and we in them.

Hi all,
This is my first ever creative piece of writing. I am co-owner of a small communications agency in Belgium called Pyramidion so do know a thing or two about writing.  I recently attended the crime fiction workshop in Oxford, and wrote a little review for my company's website. Let me know what you think. One tiny note - I'm a Dutch national so forgive any Denglish ;-)

A passion for crime...

 

Sherlock Holmes, Chief Inspector Barnaby, Dalziel and Pascoe, Miss Marple. We all love reading and watching detectives. But why exactly is that, what makes a detective successful? To find this out, I recently attended a crime fiction writing workshop in Oxford, England. With great enthusiasm, I dived into the world of suspense, betrayal and murder, and soon learned that writing crime fiction is no small order.

 

The setting for the workshop – the Oxford Union - could not have been more appropriate. There’s something about the creak of aged oak staircases and long corridors framed with pictures of professors and students. Standing in one of The Union’s rooms, fitted with wall to wall bookcases and Victorian oak tables engraved with leather I felt a strong presence of long-gone literary authors.

 

‘Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary’

In-depth plot and character discussions and challenging writing exercises quickly revealed that writing fiction calls on many talents. The ability to create a credible protagonist (or ‘hero’ if you like), for instance. For the reader to relate to your character, or at least be intrigued by him, he has to be a genuine person - a three-dimensional human being with curious habits and internal conflicts. Who doesn’t know the eccentric Sherlock Holmes, perfectly skilled in astute observation and deductive reasoning but with a serious cocaine addiction? The same goes for the antagonist, the villain. Let your imagination run free to create a dangerous psychopath like Hannibal Lecter, or a less daunting villain like the Sheriff of Nottingham.

 

Twists and turns

There’s no such thing as a bestseller without a decent plot. Remember the film Seven? Two homicide detectives hunt down serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey), who justifies his crimes as absolution for the world's ignorance of the Seven Deadly Sins. There’s an incredible pace to this story. It keeps the viewer in suspense and wondering what will happen next. And the surprising twist at the end – where Brad Pitt performs the last of the seven sins – revenge – is the icing on the cake.

 

Show, don’t tell

I was pleased to find that communications and crime fiction writing have a lot in common. Be clear on who your audience is, what you want to tell them, draw them in and get them involved. In crime writing in particular, tone of voice, point of view and ‘Show, don’t tell’ can make the difference between fame and failure. ‘He confessed’ is just not as imaginative as ‘He buried his head in his hands, tears running down his old and sun-burnt fingers. Avoiding Barnaby’s eyes, he murmured softly: ‘I just couldn’t take it any more, she simply had to go…..’

 

Hester Regoort

21 July 2009

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
3. Employ the vernacular.
4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
6. Remember to never split an infinitive.
7. Contractions aren't necessary.
8. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
9. One should never generalize.
10. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
11. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
12. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
13. Be more or less specific.
14. Understatement is always best.
15. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
16. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
17. The passive voice is to be avoided.
18. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
19. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
20. Who needs rhetorical questions?
21. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
22. Don't never use a double negation.
23. capitalize every sentence and remember always end it with point
24. Do not put statements in the negative form.
25. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
26. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
27. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
28. A writer must not shift your point of view.
29. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.(Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
30. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
31. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to the irantecedents.
32. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
33. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
34. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
35. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
36. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
37. Always pick on the correct idiom.
38. The adverb always follows the verb.
39. Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; They're old hat; seek viable alternatives.