I’ve adopted the role of outsider most of my life. You’ll find me circling perimeters, hugging walls at parties (actually, worse – avoiding parties altogether), hovering helicopter-like over conversations, hating small-talk. From these vantage points I get to see the big picture, the overview. Which can be very handy when writing a novel. The downside is that I often miss out on the details.
On a writing workshop, they set us a task: Your character is at the supermarket, filling up her trolley with goods. What’s in there? And oh no, you can’t get away with ‘hair products’ or ‘vegetables’. You must lovingly describe the detail of each – the make, the quantity, any little extras along the way:
Nice n’Easy comb-through highlights (No.2 – Ash Blonde); one organic avocado, reduced from 99p to 50p due to squeezing; Take A Break magazine, featuring Jordan’s latest explosion at Peter Andre and Your 2009 Horoscope: Will Love Find You This Year?
One small tin of Lyons Golden Syrup; The People’s Friend; two slices of ham; one tin of potatoes; one carton of strawberries (reduced to 50p); one brown plastic comb; three tins of Whiskas (Tuna, Liver and Lamb).
6 cans of Red Bull; two Cup-A-Soups (Chicken and White Wine flavour); one loaf of white bread (thick-sliced); multipack of Walkers Crisps (Cheese and Onion flavour); Heat magazine; one packet of ribbed, SupaSized condoms.
Who we are, how we live – it’s all in the tiny details, the tics, the little eccentricities and oddnesses that make a person who he is. The dust on the dressing-table; the dead fly on the kitchen sill; the grey woollen socks (one inside out) hanging half out of the overflowing laundry bin. The momentary question in the eyes, the veins running like roots over the back of the hands, the down-at-heel slippers. In the details lie the secrets, the taken-for-granted intimacies, the white lies, the small betrayals, the unacknowledged passions.
Looking for examples for this post, I opened Jane Austen’s Emma. Though I’ve always felt a great sense of place in her novels, I realised that Austen hardly ever describes places or people objectively. Rather, she reveals these things through the tiny details of her characters’ conversations. Through their subjective eyes, we ‘see’ places, people, situations, and we see them in the minutest of detail:
"- there was a little disappointment. The baked apples and biscuits, excellent in their way, you know; but there was a delicate fricassee of sweetbread and some asparagus brought in at first, and good Mr. Woodhouse, not thinking the asparagus quite boiled enough, sent it all out again. Now there is nothing grandmamma loves better than sweetbread and asparagus – so she was rather disappointed; but we agreed we would not speak of it to anybody, for fear of its getting round to dear Miss Woodhouse, who would be so very much concerned."
Dylan Thomas, in Under Milk Wood, uses lists to great effect:
"Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead."
All this brings to mind Sam’s recent blog post about obsessive/compulsive disorder and the flood of responses to it. Maybe writers need to be obsessive about the little details, to return to them again and again. As Barbra Streisand said:
"I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good."
They say the devil’s in the detail. Maybe the alchemical gold lies there too.
Guest Blog by Sarah Hilary - Finding Inspiration in Family History
It’s a humbling experience for a writer to discover words written by people in extremis. People without recourse to what we take for granted – pen, paper, food, freedom – who nonetheless are compelled to write, even when the act of doing so is a punishable offence which must be kept hidden at all costs.
Until recently I was in the habit of complaining quietly to myself when the light wasn’t right in my office, or if my favourite brand of notebook wasn’t immediately to hand. ‘How can I write under these conditions?’ was doubtless prompted by an unconscious desire to avoid work on that particular day. Then I discovered a series of diaries written by men and women interned by occupying forces during the Second World War, a period of time when my grandparents and mother were prisoners of the Japanese, suffering captivity for nearly four years.
Finding this writing was a revelation, not least because it demonstrated that the imperative to write is not the reserve of writers but can strike anyone with an urgent sense that they have a story to tell, words which must be heard and should not be forgotten.
In one instance, the writing I discovered was nothing more than signatures. Dozens and dozens of signatures. The names of every woman and child in the prison camp, written on a tea-towel and embroidered into place, the dates of internment stitched at the top. To see my grandmother’s handwriting as part of that testament was extraordinarily affecting. I wanted to abandon all other writing projects and focus on finding out everything I could about her experience. Did she know she was signing her name as such an astounding testament? Did she believe she’d survive to tell her story to grandchildren and great-grandchildren? How was she feeling at the precise moment when she wrote her name on the cloth, and her child’s name?
Some of the words written by internees have been preserved in museums (the tea-towel is part of an archive held by National Museums Scotland) but these stories deserve to be resonating right now. People risked their lives to record these details. The accounts are alive with colours, scents, tastes. You couldn’t hope for better examples of the old maxim ‘show, don’t tell’: unsentimental even inconsequential chatter that takes you right under the skin of the authors, directly into their lives.
On scraps of paper or cloth, concealed under stones, in the hems of skirts and under floorboards – these diaries survived thanks to the ingenuity of their authors. To read them is a privilege, and a responsibility. You feel the weight of the words, and want to add your own. This is inspiration at a gut-level, life-changing. It’s altered the way I feel as a daughter and grand-daughter, and the way I feel as a writer.
It’s exciting and daunting to take custody of family history in this way. I hope I can do justice to it.
Sarah is an award-winning writer whose fiction appears in Smokelong Quarterly, The Fish Anthology 2008, Prick of the Spindle, The Best of Every Day Fiction, and in the Crime Writers’ Association anthology, MO: Crimes of Practice. Sarah blogs here.
Until recently I was in the habit of complaining quietly to myself when the light wasn’t right in my office, or if my favourite brand of notebook wasn’t immediately to hand. ‘How can I write under these conditions?’ was doubtless prompted by an unconscious desire to avoid work on that particular day. Then I discovered a series of diaries written by men and women interned by occupying forces during the Second World War, a period of time when my grandparents and mother were prisoners of the Japanese, suffering captivity for nearly four years.
Finding this writing was a revelation, not least because it demonstrated that the imperative to write is not the reserve of writers but can strike anyone with an urgent sense that they have a story to tell, words which must be heard and should not be forgotten.
In one instance, the writing I discovered was nothing more than signatures. Dozens and dozens of signatures. The names of every woman and child in the prison camp, written on a tea-towel and embroidered into place, the dates of internment stitched at the top. To see my grandmother’s handwriting as part of that testament was extraordinarily affecting. I wanted to abandon all other writing projects and focus on finding out everything I could about her experience. Did she know she was signing her name as such an astounding testament? Did she believe she’d survive to tell her story to grandchildren and great-grandchildren? How was she feeling at the precise moment when she wrote her name on the cloth, and her child’s name?
Some of the words written by internees have been preserved in museums (the tea-towel is part of an archive held by National Museums Scotland) but these stories deserve to be resonating right now. People risked their lives to record these details. The accounts are alive with colours, scents, tastes. You couldn’t hope for better examples of the old maxim ‘show, don’t tell’: unsentimental even inconsequential chatter that takes you right under the skin of the authors, directly into their lives.
On scraps of paper or cloth, concealed under stones, in the hems of skirts and under floorboards – these diaries survived thanks to the ingenuity of their authors. To read them is a privilege, and a responsibility. You feel the weight of the words, and want to add your own. This is inspiration at a gut-level, life-changing. It’s altered the way I feel as a daughter and grand-daughter, and the way I feel as a writer.
It’s exciting and daunting to take custody of family history in this way. I hope I can do justice to it.
Sarah is an award-winning writer whose fiction appears in Smokelong Quarterly, The Fish Anthology 2008, Prick of the Spindle, The Best of Every Day Fiction, and in the Crime Writers’ Association anthology, MO: Crimes of Practice. Sarah blogs here.
Anytime-of-day pages
Do you keep a writing journal? Or are you more a ‘morning pages’ sort of person? For anyone who doesn’t know, morning pages were the brainchild of Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way. The idea is that you take time every day – preferably first thing in the morning – to write anything that comes into your mind. You do it in longhand and don’t show anyone what you’ve written. This way you allow your brain to spout any old nonsense it feels like and in the process [the thinking goes] it frees up your creativity.
My mornings are more about wrestling boys into school uniforms and stopping them from killing each other over the Weetos than sitting at my window and writing in my beautiful leather journal [if I even had such a thing]. Plus, I can barely handwrite a shopping list these days. But I like the principle. I have a file on my computer where I can spout nonsense, work out knotty problems with my plot, jot down ideas and rant and wail about the submission process without ever being told to put a sock in it.
But it’s also taught me something about the way I process my emotions and reminded me how just therapeutic writing can be.
Just over a year ago, my four-year old child fell out of the tree he was climbing in the local park. He didn’t fall far – probably no more than two feet - but he landed at an awkward angle and broke his arm very badly. My elder son was there too and as we waited for an ambulance, we watched someone we love in more pain than I’d ever imagined possible. The ambulance duly came and my son ended up having emergency surgery to re-set the arm. With typical small boy resilience, he seemed to get over it all in no time.
But I didn’t. I kept having flashbacks of him lying under that tree, his arm with a new, unnatural bend where no bend should be. I’d written about the whole episode in my writing diary as a straightforward sequence of events but over the following week I kept returning to the subject. And then I had a breakthrough. I wrote about how it had felt as though my little boy was broken, not just his limb, and in that moment, I understood why I was unable to get over this thing. The horror lifted and I felt immediately better. I could accept that my little chap in his big blue cast was on the mend. It had just been a bit of nasty luck.
I wouldn’t like to suggest that I have major breakthroughs like this all the time. Most of the time I’m writing rubbish. But I do know that my writing diary, un-morning-page-like as it may be, is something I now couldn’t be without.
PSM and Whine Flu
I’m suffering. From acute PSM. No, that’s not a typo. I do mean PSM not PMS, though PSM does share similar symptoms to those of that other well known nasty acronym. For example, at the moment, my mood swings vary from elation to manic panic. Elation, when I manage to convince myself I’ve written the best novel possible and then immediate manic panic when the word ‘deluded’ comes to mind and I think of what must come next. I’m mildly irritable and want chocolate. I have stomach cramps. My long suffering husband can see my red aura of oversensitivity and knows not to offer an opinion, unless I ask for one.For those of you who are afflicted by this debilitating condition, don’t despair – it’s actually quite common amongst and almost exclusive to the male and female writing fraternity.
The good news? Pre Submission Mania, along with another condition common in writers, Whine Flu, do have temporary remedial alternatives to finding an agent and a publishing deal. Although to be fair, it is only either or both of these options that have been proven to provide an actual cure... There are encouraging alternatives available which provide immense symptom relief during the manic fear phase of PSM. The trick? To encourage the writer to think of anything else other than actually submitting their manuscript. I personally have self medicated during the height of acute symptoms by:
- Taking a long evening walk, followed by Sky plus recordings of Judge Judy accompanied by alcohol.
- Facebook stalking, not scary stalking, just watching what others are up to.
- Positive mantras e.g. ‘Marion Keyes, Who IS she? Marion Keyes, Who Is she? repeated in the mirror.
- Chocolate.
- Lines. You know the punishing school type ones? My favourite is, “I must not whinge, ‘But I want to be PUBLISHED’ to my husband anymore.” This particular one does only provide relief to Whine Flu symptoms and I’ve found it’s a lot quicker to type it out, rather than write it longhand?
- Ebay (It’s amazing what people sell) Write words and other writerly sites.
- Buying the envelopes and folders for the submissions, then staring at them with my hands over my ears singing, ‘La, La, La, La…..La, La, La, La’
- Googling Johnny Depp to see if he’s still married to that French woman.
- Burying my copy of The Writers and Artists Yearbook in the garden whilst eating maltesers.
- Washing, ironing, cleaning, recycling. You get the gist.
Engine Trouble
The first thing I wrote was a short story. Before writing it, I read over four hundred stories. A friend was freelancing for a national short story competition then got the chance to go travelling before he’d judged his quota of stories. He passed the job to me.
The stories arrived at my flat in cardboard crates, like fruit. I remember staring at them in wonder. Hundreds of characters from across the world, loving, thieving, grieving, killing and running away now squatted in the corner of my living room. They could have glowed or hummed, they seemed so charged.
Until I read them. A few were illegible or illiterate. A few were so good my stomach flipped. It was the majority that puzzled me. They were well-presented, well-constructed little tales of no discernible value. The characters weren’t vivid. Their behaviour wasn’t believable. The situations they were put in and their responses to them, uniform. There was simply no breath of life in them. The more I read, the more I longed to write life as I saw it. In these stories children played happily on carpets unaware their parents were fighting. Whereas children I knew reacted to fights by acting oblivious to appease or disarm their parents. That so many writers seemed unaware of the intelligent dissembling of children (many of these stories were about divorce) made me ache bullishly to put them straight. My first story came from an evangelical urge to preach: children are young, not stupid.
Years on, I’ve written a novel. It’s a double-spaced, immaculately punctuated, seventy-thousand word thriller. Bet you can’t wait to pick it up on the strength of that description. It’s an accurate description. It sums up the attitude in which it was written. Jaw set, joyless typing. I wrote it because people kept telling me I should. Short stories don’t sell. I know. But neither do novels written for the wrong reasons.
I’m convinced it doesn’t matter what drives a good author. There are dollar signs behind every Harlen Coben hook; maternal fear behind each dying-child-dilemma Picoult; political and social ideals behind Hosseini and Coetzee’s work, despite their radically different styles. What succeeds across all genres is when an author is driven by something surpassing the desire to secure an agent or get into print.
This should be obvious, but is it? What motored you when you first sat down to write? Does it drive you still? Has that drive deepened and matured or has your conviction been diluted with shoulds and industry standards and advice from well meaning professionals? I’m not suggested we flout good advice. But it can turn us into mechanical authors, and if it does, it’s time to clear out the accrued wisdom and return to the origins of our urge to write. I know when I’m connected to the work. My blood feels like it flows faster. My muscles seem warm and stretched, as if on a long run. Writing is visceral. Another writer described it to me recently as sending a wire down into the heart. Precisely.
Of the hundreds of stories I read for that first competition, maybe 2% possessed that urgent drive. You know it if you have it. And if you have it don’t lose it. Nothing is more important for a writer than keeping that alive.
Finding Voice
Of all the characteristics that make up a writer, “voice” is one of the most elusive, and potentially the most powerful. It’s difficult to define, but unmistakeable. It’s that moment when you pick up a book, and you realise within a few sentences that even if the name on the cover had been blacked out, you would have known who wrote it. It’s not about being literary – Jackie Collins has a voice, as much as does James Joyce. It’s not about being deliberately quirky, or self-consciously high falutin. It’s simply there; it’s the essence of what makes a writer who they are, and it’s the greatest advertisement for your work that you can get. So how on earth do you go about getting one?Perhaps there are some writers who go from cradle to grave with the same essential voice. I’m not one of them. When I look back at my early notebooks, they read to me not so much as the work of a child from the 1980s as one from the 1920s. My characters all use words like “ripping”, go around in wide-brimmed hats and faint at the slightest provocation. Of course, this wasn’t my voice – it was Agatha Christie’s. As a child I devoured so many of her books in quick succession, and admired them so greatly, that what I was producing were ultimately pastiches, or to be kinder, homages. Later, in my teens, my voice shifted dramatically. Now all my characters were Cockneys, or at least Mockneys; they made wry observations on life, fought and drank and had unsuitable sex, and there were occasional wild veerings-off into bitingly cynical authorial observations. Yes, I had been reading a lot of Martin Amis.
Slowly, I grew to realise that the trouble with being a writer is that you are generally a reader first. Most writers have role models to emulate, and in the absence of a voice of your own, the easiest thing to do is to latch on to someone else’s. I readily admit that my first published novel, The Art of Losing, was inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s After You’d Gone. But somehow, when I finished the novel and read it back, I thought I caught something else there – a voice that was not hers, or anyone else’s, but my own. I couldn’t quite define it; I still can’t, but when I wrote what will be my second published novel, I tried to hang on to it. Suddenly people were describing my writing as distinctive. It was one of my proudest moments when my agent, having read the opening scenes of Novel 2, wrote to me and said that within the first few pages, she knew that she was “reading a Rebecca Connell novel”. Of course, this voice isn’t set in stone, and I fully expect it to develop over time… but now at least I feel I know where I’m going.
In my own case, I think my themes found me my voice. Finally I was writing about issues which suited me, and about which I had something to say. Others might find their voice through characters, or settings, or something else entirely. So what do you think? Have you got one, and could you even begin to sum it up?
Learning the Hard Way
Yesterday I was surfing the net, as you do when, frankly, you ought to be writing book four.
In fact I’m addicted to the internet with all the ardour of a junky, or one of those saddos that spend twenty three and a half hours a day watching porn.
But I digress.
In fact I’m addicted to the internet with all the ardour of a junky, or one of those saddos that spend twenty three and a half hours a day watching porn.
But I digress.
I have, of late, been having a crisis of confidence and so I did what I always do ( instead of the obvious which is to write the next book!) and began looking for a creative writing course.
This annoys my husband who points out, not unreasonably, that this is like bolting the stable door etc...
What popped up was astonishing. There are courses at colleges across the land. There are internet courses. There are even, for the full writerly experience, residential courses in misty, remote Shetland Islands.
Now, I’m always honest about the fact that before I wrote my first book I had never attended a creative writing course. To be fair, I was working as a lawyer at the time and had baby twins. Where was I going to fit in a few hours a week to discuss the misuse of adverbs?
But once Damaged Goods was sold and I was under contract to produce book two sharpish, the worry worm appeared. What if DG had been a fluke? What if those 90,000 words had simply fallen into a random, yet coincidentally, pleasing order? More importantly, how could I ensure that the next 90,000 wouldn’t disappoint even my Mum.
So I booked myself onto a course. I swallowed my doubts that the simple act of paying over a few hundred, hard earned quid could magically turn my work into art, and signed on the dotted line.
I won’t say where I went, but suffice it to say it is an establishment that is well thought of in the trade and the course was a sell out. I was excited.
Day one and I arrived wearing a rather fetching baker boy hat and carrying my WIP under my arm.
When I saw my fellow students my hopes for literary alchemy lessened. For a start there were thirty of us. How can you learn anything in a class that size? – are you listening Ed Balls - ?
A quick fire round of Q&A confirmed that no-one was a writer. Now I’m not one of those that thinks you have to be published to ‘be’ a writer, but you do have to take it seriously. You do have to think like a writer. At the very least you have to actually be writing something. This particular group of charming retired accountants, tax inspectors and civil servants were happy to chat and drink tea. But write? No, nothing at the moment.
Enter a nervous lady in muddy boots ( this was central London) who announced herself to be the teacher. Later she divulged she was a poet who had been suffering from writers’ block for five years. Hmmm. We spent the first session discussing font size.
Though it galls me to give up on anything, especially when I have paid up front, I didn’t go back. I simply couldn’t afford the time.
Now I'm at that point again. Perhaps a different course, a different teacher? I know folk who swear by them, adamant that their writing has evolved tenfold as a result. I’m tempted.
What popped up was astonishing. There are courses at colleges across the land. There are internet courses. There are even, for the full writerly experience, residential courses in misty, remote Shetland Islands.
Now, I’m always honest about the fact that before I wrote my first book I had never attended a creative writing course. To be fair, I was working as a lawyer at the time and had baby twins. Where was I going to fit in a few hours a week to discuss the misuse of adverbs?
But once Damaged Goods was sold and I was under contract to produce book two sharpish, the worry worm appeared. What if DG had been a fluke? What if those 90,000 words had simply fallen into a random, yet coincidentally, pleasing order? More importantly, how could I ensure that the next 90,000 wouldn’t disappoint even my Mum.
So I booked myself onto a course. I swallowed my doubts that the simple act of paying over a few hundred, hard earned quid could magically turn my work into art, and signed on the dotted line.
I won’t say where I went, but suffice it to say it is an establishment that is well thought of in the trade and the course was a sell out. I was excited.
Day one and I arrived wearing a rather fetching baker boy hat and carrying my WIP under my arm.
When I saw my fellow students my hopes for literary alchemy lessened. For a start there were thirty of us. How can you learn anything in a class that size? – are you listening Ed Balls - ?
A quick fire round of Q&A confirmed that no-one was a writer. Now I’m not one of those that thinks you have to be published to ‘be’ a writer, but you do have to take it seriously. You do have to think like a writer. At the very least you have to actually be writing something. This particular group of charming retired accountants, tax inspectors and civil servants were happy to chat and drink tea. But write? No, nothing at the moment.
Enter a nervous lady in muddy boots ( this was central London) who announced herself to be the teacher. Later she divulged she was a poet who had been suffering from writers’ block for five years. Hmmm. We spent the first session discussing font size.
Though it galls me to give up on anything, especially when I have paid up front, I didn’t go back. I simply couldn’t afford the time.
Now I'm at that point again. Perhaps a different course, a different teacher? I know folk who swear by them, adamant that their writing has evolved tenfold as a result. I’m tempted.
And yet something stops me. A niggle. These are businesses, set up alongside the publishing industry. They tap into the zeitgeist where everyone wants to be a writer. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. I totally get it. I want to be a writer. But is the way forward to pay someone to teach me? Or is it just to get on with the writing?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)