Zoë Marriott's Blog, page 4

In Pursuit of a PhD & Doctoral Funding (Part 1)

Hello, and welcome to An Eddying Flight, Dear Readers. Today's post (and next week's) is aimed at those of you who are in the same position I was, in back in 2017, when I first began to take the idea of pursuing a PhD seriously... but had absolutely no idea what I would need to do, in concrete terms, to either find a place on a university PhD/doctoral programme or (equally vital) the funding that I would need to take up such a place.

(This might be a good point to quickly skim through my PhD Mallarkey post, if you haven't already).

Even if attending university is not a particularly rare achievement in your family, even if you yourself have a Higher Education degree of some kind, recent or years old, the leap from knowing vaguely that PhDs are a thing to attempting to undertake one is vast. If, like me, you're from a background where no one within your family group or extended community had ever attended university successfully, the absolute deluge of unfamiliar teminology, acronyms, assumed knowledge and unwritten rules involved in a quick scan of any university's pages may very swiftly make you feel so completely unprepared - even stupid - that you could be tempted to give up before you even begin.

Please, don't give up. I promise that you are not stupid - and I think almost everyone coming to a PhD feels unprepared at some point. Even after receiving advice from kind friends, scouring helpful blogs and reading books on the process, I still felt wildly out of my depth and honestly? Despite the fact that I'm now actually doing a fully funded PhD, there are days where I still feel so overwhelmed by all this academy stuff that I begin to get panicky.

Thankfully, once you're on the inside it becomes much easier to admit these feelings and to ask questions, and this usually leads to the other person laughing sheepishly as they realise that they've slipped into jargon, and then explaining things in much plainer and less mysterious terms. It's not that most of these concepts are even particularly difficult; everyone on the inside just always expects everyone else to already know everything (they definitely don't).

This post and the next one are my attempt to make it easier for you to get to the inside. I can't actually open the door and let you through - you have to get to that point yourself - but hopefully I'm putting back the shutters and opening a window. You can lean on the sill as long as you like, observing the goings on inside, until everything seems a bit more familiar, and less terrifyingly opaque.

I'm going to treat you as if you were me, back in 2017, and tackle all the issues that tripped me up and delayed me on my journey to a PhD. To that end, I will need to make certain assumptions about you, because I don't know everything. I only know how I went about proposing my own, independent research project and getting a place and funding in an Arts/Humanities context. Therefore, while some of this information may be useful to other kinds of potential PhD candidates, if you're in, for instance, the sciences, and you're seeking to join an existing project as a PhD researcher or get a position on a collaborative doctoral award, my advice me be of limited use to you. Apply your pinch of salt liberally.

Today's post is more of a general overview of the processes involved in getting started. Next week I'll get really specific (and if there are any particular questions you'd like answered, please don't hesitate to tweet me, comment below, or leave me an FB comment).

Firstly, then - how do you get a PhD place at a (reputable, British) university?

Well, you do need to be somewhat qualified in the topic you intend to get your doctorate in. This may seem blindingly obvious but in fact the definition of 'qualified' can be fairly wide. For some subjects - maths, sciences, engineering, most of those STEM disciplines - often you can progress straight from a bachelor's degree to a PhD, especially if you've done work in that field following getting the degree. In many of the arts and humanities disciplines - English, history or art history, archeology, the social sciences, Linguistics and languages - you will often need to have both a first degree and a master's degree in a field related to your PhD subject.

However, sometimes you may be qualified to do research on a particular subject (and remember, that's what a doctorate is, a research degree) by professional - non-academic - qualifications in certain fields, backed up by a certain number of years of professional experience. This is often the case for fields which would have been considered 'vocational' traditionally - accountancy, animal husbandry/behaviourism, physiotherapy, project management and business, agricultural studies, certain arts subjects, landscaping and design.

And for some subjects, especially in the arts, in English, and in those 'vocational' areas, if you have years of experience in the professional practice of the subject at hand and can demonstrate really high levels of competence - you've had multiple successful shows of your paintings, you've published multiple critically-acclaimed books, you've been employed as an NHS physio for ten years, you've run the Big Cat enclosure at Longleat since you were twenty-one - you may not need any form of formal, academic qualifications at all.

This was the approach that I first took. I had no qualifications more advanced than GCSES, but did have a publication history that showed I was capable of writing and researching, and an idea of the research project I wanted to do. I wrote an introductory email briefly explaining who I was, the main points of my thesis proposal, made sure my CV was updated with all my publications and teaching work, and picked a sample of my creative writing to attach. This email was what I thought of as 'supervisor bait'.

And that's because, if you want to get a place to do independent research on a doctoral programme in the UK, the first step is generally to find a lecturer or professor in your discipline who is interested in you, likes the sound of your research, and is willing, provisionally at least, to supervise you through a PhD.

In order to achieve this, I:

Thoroughly read all the relevant pages on the websites of local universities that had Creative Writing PhD programmes (not many to chose from in my region, sadly). Some unis will have undergraduate and even MA programmes in certain subjects without the capacity to supervise a PhD. Make sure there's specific mention of a PhD programme before you contact a university to avoid wasting your time. Did the same for other unis that were not within commuting distance for me, to see if any of them mentioned either offering a distance learning option for their PhD, or seemed open to flexible working. Many universities don't expect PhD students to work on campus much and don't mind if you live far away. However, some do expect their doctoral candidates to be on campus full-time. AND, vitally, some funding relies on geographical location. If you live far from a potential university and are unable or unwilling to move, then make sure you mention this in your introductory email. Searched those same websites for mentions of funding, either external - which mainly comes from the UK Research & Innovation body, indirectly, and is allotted/awarded to universities through bodies called 'research councils' (there's one for Arts and Humanities, one for Engineering & Physical Sciences, one for Medical etc.) by smaller regional bodies called Doctoral Training Partnerships - or internal, which usually comes in the form of 'faculty studentships/scholarships' which are awarded/alloted internally by the individual university itself. More detail on this in Part 2, don't worry! The important point is to make sure, if you need funding for your PhD, that the university is either in a Doctoral Training Partnership, or has faculty studentships available the year you want to start (or both) and that your subject/discipline is eligible for this funding. Tried to figure out the procedure for approaching each department. This does differ from place to place and it's not always easy to tell from the websites - sometimes you just have to guess. Some unis want you to pick out a single academic from their roster who shares a research interest with you (for instance - you intend to write a historical novel about a Highwaywoman, and the lecturer has research on depictions of 'femme fatale' in 18th century literature and has written a novel about a female serial killer) and send them a personalised, tailored email explaining why you want to work with them in particular. If they're not interested or are too busy, you pick another lecturer from the department, try to see if there's some way that their research coincides with yours, and approach them with another individualised email... and so on, until you find someone willing to work with you. Or not. Other universities have a central point of contact, either a lecturer or an administrator to whom you can send one email with everything attached, and that person will then share your query with everyone in the department and see if any of the lecturers are interested that way. Sent my email out and crossed my fingers.

I was surprised and delighted by how many English and Creative Writing departments warmly welcomed me to apply to their doctoral programmes after seeing my CV. However, many pointed out that while my publication record was impressive, it didn't really show evidence of any skills at academic writing or research. Several universities suggested that I do a Master's Degree first, both to demonstrate my academic ability and to check that I actually enjoyed that kind of practice before committing myself to three-six years of it. And every single one of them, no matter how encouraging, told me that my chances of being put forward by the university as a candidate for either internal or external funding would be low to non-existent in my then-current situation. Without a BA or an MA, I would be seen as too much of a risk.

I should also note that there were a few places who were less kind to me. I was told by one uni that the quality of my writing did not meet the standard expected by the lecturers in their department (this is was in response to a writing sample which had come from a published, critically acclaimed, award-winning work). Another told me that, with such a lack of qualifications, I would clearly lack the critical thinking skills and academic rigour required even to pass their MA, let alone undertake a doctorate. They recomended me to enrol on a Bachelor's Degree instead and 'see if you manage that'. These were both large, well-respected universities.

You will need to brace yourself for rejections and for some people to be quite bewilderingly unhelpful and even rude. A certain portion of the overall population are jerks in general, and therefore so are a certain portion of the people working in the hallowed halls of academia. You also need to be prepared to realise, especially if you need funding, that you may NOT have the qualifications required.

After nearly two years of trying unsuccessfully to find a university who wanted to work with me AND were willing to put me forward for funding, I realised that it wasn't going to happen. I had rewritten my thesis proposal approximately fifty times, had enjoyed some lovely chats and been given lots of good advice - and if I'd had the money, I could have applied for a self-funded place at several different unis. But that was not a possibility, and to get so close without being able to make that final leap to actually doing the thing I wanted to do was agonisingly frustrating. Clearly, the structures and policies of British universities and research funding bodies were not going to undergo a sudden and miraculous change, so I had to make a change to myself if I wanted to get any further; I needed to go and get that Master's Degree.

I'm not going to lie and say it wasn't scary to have to back up and change lanes that way. I was lucky; by that point, here was a government loan available to cover the fees, but financially, it was still dicey. I wanted to do the course full-time and complete it in a year, which meant I'd have to drastically reduce the amount of other work I could take on and live on not much money for a year (little did I know that the pandemic would shortly reduce that work to a big fat zero anyway). I also knew that if I completed my MA and still couldn't get anyone to take me seriously as a fundable candidate, that would be the end of the line. There would be nowhere else to go and I'd have to admit defeat, a year older and a lot poorer in the savings account.

If you, too, get to this stage, you will have to be really honest with yourself about what you need to do to radically change your value and credibility as a potential doctoral candidate, and whether that is realistic given your circumstances, the resources (time, energy, finances) that you have, and your ultimate goals. Maybe you could do a new qualification part time to fit in around work, or maybe you could accept a self-funded place, take out the doctoral loan, use that to support you as you start your research, and then re-apply for funding the next year (some people are successful with this strategy, but it's risky - I couldn't have done it).

Ultimately, I'm incredibly glad that I did the MA. I loved it, and because the course was very dense and academic, it gave me just the grounding in theory that I needed, which boosted my confidence immensely.ut most important of all, it worked.

By throwing myself at the degree with everything I had, passing with distinction, (and even winning that year's MA Creative Writing prize), I transformed myself from a risky candidate with an interesting CV but no academic background into one who had not only a strong record in artistic practice, but also the academic chops to successfully tackle a PhD. As soon as I was able to add my MA to my CV and mention it in my introductory email, the responses that I received from potential supervisors changed dramatically.

Now, instead of expressing interest in me and my research but telling me that funding was highly competitive and gently breaking the news that I wasn't the ideal candidate, people wanted to work with me to get my thesis proposal refined and ready for a funding application. The first time that I got a response like this, without the familiar Good News/Bad News format, I actually cried.

But a funding application is no joke. The hard work was just beginning!

I'm going to share an example of an introductory email to a potential supervisor (based on the one that I wrote and re-wrote for three years) and will also go into (probably quite scary amounts of) detail about what exactly doctoral funding is - including the difference between 'faculty' funding, Doctoral Training Partnership funding, and fee waivers - and what you'll probably need to do to try to get your hands on each kind. I hope to see you then!

(P.S. apologies once again for any weird formatting issues or gibberish half-sentences that may litter this post. I don't think I've screamed so many invectives at the air in years as I have trying to just get this post to look normal and have all the paragraphs that I wrote IN IT instead of half-deleted or displaced to entirely different parts of the post. Why? I have no idea. Apparently copy/paste is Just Too Much for the Wix platform... *Sigh*)

New Year's Pick & Mix

Hello, Happy New Year, and welcome back to Thursday Pick & Mix, your low-pressure, just-for-fun creativity kickstart.

Leisure

(1911) W.H. Davies

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.

Yes, you are allowed to snigger at the squirrels and their nuts, but only if you also absorb the meaning of the poem, which is beautiful regardless of any inadvertant double entendre. What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to write - just for ourselves? Not much of a life, is the answer. So finish slinging your Christmas jumpers in the wash, rinse the glitter from your hands - and let's write.

The Rules:

You own the next ten minutes. Set your timer, pick up your pen or open up your word processing programme, and look at the inviting blank page with anticipation.

Pick a prompt, any prompt - or two, or three - or, if something else occurs to you, go with that instead. Whatever makes you want to write.

Don't waste your imaginative energy editing or revising what you're writing. Put your palm or a piece of paper over the lines as you write them, or set your font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. Who cares about spelling, grammar, awkward phrases, punctuation or typos? This is just for fun.

When you've finished, save your work, close your notebook, and walk away. You don't need to re-read this writing, assess it, fix it. That's not what it's for. It's about joy, not results. Come back later, much later... and only if you want to.

The Prompts:

IMAGE

MUSIC

WORDS

"There is a monster in the forest," whispered the trees.

Write like the wind! I wish you joy.

The Quest for Ultimate Form (& Why it Doesn't Work)

(Apologies in advance for the weird paragraph spacing throughout this whole piece. Wix's blog formatting is a complete mystery, and even deleting and re-typing whole paragraphs doesn't fix it.)

There's a lot of writing advices everywhere right now. It's on YouTube. Twitter. TikTok. Tumblr. FaceBook (and right here, oops). It's on writing courses - both informal and academic. And why not? Creativity is one of the greatest consolations of life, as well as one of its important vocations. A peeve of mine so massive that it's gone beyond 'pet' and may now qualify as 'petting zoo' is the way that our focus on testing and metrics and outcomes in schools routinely divorces kids from creativity as soon as they are old enough to write their names.

How many times as a kid did you hear: Pay attention. Stop daydreaming. Stop telling silly stories. Stop singing and be quiet. Stop doodling on the edges of the workbooks. Your story was funny/clever/imaginative, but your handwring was bad/you didn't use a 'fronted adverbial'/you talked about your dog instead of your family holiday so you fail.

It's no wonder that so many people hear you're a writer and tell you, sheepishly, 'Oh wow - I'm hopeless at anything like that' when, in every single case, as a kid they drew and I made up poems and songs and dances as easily as breathing.

I personally believe that creative writing, in particular, can be an incredibly accessible and joyful practice that not only acts as a kind of 'gateway drug' for other creative pursuits, but really supports good mental health.

Fantastic! Let's all get writing.

But! Let's not allow anyone else to tell us how or why we should write. What our writing should be. What form our creativity should take. That's what bothers me about so much writing advice that I see online: how narrow it is, the things that it often takes for granted about the 'point' of writing. How it creates a kind of assumed, Platonic Ideal of a finished work and urges you blindly to aim for that. Because, as I said in this post, there isn't a Platonic Ideal. A Universal Cheat Code. There isn't an Ultimate Form that anyone's work should be aiming to evolve into (and this insistence that there should be just reminds me, once again, of teachers who are forced to mark down the most interesting homework in the class because it doesn't deploy fronted adverbials).

Let me warn in advance: this isn't really a coherent argument on my part. It's more me venting random reactions to some of the generally accepted writing advice that I've seen bandied about and embraced online, and my reasons for believing that a lot of it can result in writing which is not so good. And please know that when I say 'good writing' I only mean 'writing which expresses the thing you wanted to express in the way you wanted to express it'. Nothing more - and nothing less - than that.

Most of the advice that causes me to give the internet a side-eye comes from this belief that the Ultimate Form, the best and most desirable form for a novel, is to be fast-paced, sparsely written, and 'immediate'. The Ultimate Novel should waste no time on 'boring' exposition, world-building, or the creation of character or atmosphere, but put a reader 'right in the action'. Which obviously can be a great thing for certain kinds of stories in certain genres - and certain kinds of scenes in any book. But I don't think that this fast-paced, action-packed, Hemingway-esque novel is, or should be, the go-to choice in how to tell all stories.

I also think that the ways people go about pursuing this Ultimate Form - or urging others to - can be detrimental not only to the development of a joyful creative practice, but also to the development of stories themselves, not to mention a unique and individual writing style. All the things we surely want to see in new writing? I know I do.

I see quite a lot of well-respected sources - agents, editors, writers - blogging or tweeting about cutting as a kind of panacea for books that aren't 'immediate' and 'fast paced' enough. There's this sense that cutting words is always a good thing, whether it's cutting out adverbs and adjectives, cutting something people call 'filter words' (a term, by the way, that I despise because I feel it presents a profound misunderstanding of how storytelling works) cutting out 'unnecessary' words, cutting out 'unncessary' authorial intrusion. A sense that any and all books can be improved by lessening their extent.

Which makes writers who resist suggested cuts to their work babies at best or unprofessional prima donnas at worst. Which means your editor or agent or critque partner is always right if they think you should cut, and not applying the scalpel forthwith is simply weakness, and failing to rise to the challenge.

But cutting isn't always the answer. Cutting lots of words from a scene (even if some or all of them are adjectives and adverbs and these 'filter' words) will no more necessarily result in something fast paced and immediate than cutting off your legs would reduce your dress size, even if it did reduce your weight. Especially if the scene was not intended to be - or required to be - fast paced and immediate in the first place. Instead, this insistence on treating certain kinds of words or descriptions as 'unneccessary' by default often results in writing that just feels bland, workmanlike, and lacking in any kind of unique voice or personality, as if it might have been written by the Ultimate Form computer rather than a person. Even worse, sometimes you end up with a scene from which the sense has inexorably disappeared until it's not only a struggle to understand what is actually being felt or expressed by the characters, but empty of any emotional resonance for the reader.

I wonder how 'fast paced and immediate' came to be the Ultimate Form? Surely, the idea behind creating immediacy and putting the reader 'right into the action' is to create a strong connection, a sense of empathy, between reader and characters or narrative. But there are actually many, many ways to do that. I worry that a lot of these slightly more subtle, interesting, skillful ways to create empathy and identification between the reader and the characters/story are being stamped out in the rush to create books which conform to Ultimate Form.

All writers have - or should have - different styles. The methods that I employ to create strong empathy between characters/narratives and readers are varied. I try to immerse the reader an emotional atmosphere - to show the unique way my point of view characters' feel about and interact with their world and the other people within it. I try to build a sense of curiosity within the reader, hinting at the characters' formative experiences and vulnerabilities by showing them making interesting choices or underdoing intriguing interactions, until the reader becomes really invested in finding out their secrets, desires, flaws. I rely on intense sensory impressions in my writing, hoping that my readers will experience a ghost of what the character feels, smells, tastes and touches. And I glory in using language to its fullest extent, searching for imagery and descriptions and similes and metaphors which will create an 'eyeball kick' - that is, a phrase so beautifully expressed that for a moment the reader literally sees what I want them to see.

I don't think, in general, that my work is fast paced at all. I hope that it has immediacy where that is necessary for a scene or sequence to resonate, but it's not my primary goal in anything I write. That's not who I am as a writer, and those are not the stories I want to write. And although in the past, editors and my agent have certainly asked me to make cuts as part of the editing process, usually in order to comply with editorial suggestions I end up adding more scenes and increasing the word count of my books. Not because I 'write short' as some authors do, and turn in very spare first drafts. Just because cutting is not the only way to improve a book and good editing, as a process, acknowledges that.

I'm not saying anyone should look at my description of the way I write and try to imitate it. My way is not only way to write, or the right way to write. My methods are, in fact, the merest tiny selection of a vast myriad of methods. That's the point. I'm still learning, and still making mistakes, still figuring out which of the myriad of methods work for me and my stories. When I try something ambitious and different and fail - and oho, yes, fail I do - that teaches me a lesson and improves my skills. Next time I either know better than to try this method again, or know much better how to go about it. Writing is an art and a craft, and that means it should always be an ongoing process.

Each of us has our own unique ways of expressing our ideas, and each of us has a unique take on the ideas that it would be interesting or worthwhile to express, and figuring that out is also part of the process.

But It's very hard to develop such an ongoing process if you're wholly devoted to honing your work to the pinnacle of Ultimate Form instead of honing it to the pinnacle of Ultimate YOU.

Sometimes when I read books or stories or even blogposts or poetry, I'll frown over stuff that strikes me as just kind of... weird. And as I look at it, all puzzled, I'll realise: this is a case of someone trying so desperately to get to Ultimate Form that they have butchered their own writing to get there.

For instance:

"Never!" John gritted.

He gritted what? His garden path?

That piece of dialogue has no connection to the speech tag. 'John gritted', if taken at face value, would conjure up an image of John, as he is speaking, scattering salt/grit crystals. Of course, what the writer actually means is that the character is speaking through gritted teeth. They may even have originally written 'John said through gritted teeth'. Which is a plain, unobtrusive sort of speech tag that at least conveys something relevant about what John is doing as he speaks in a grammatically correct fashion. It may or may not have been necessary - it would depend on the context of the scene, and whether or not John has, for instance, been speaking very calmly, or perhaps shouting at the top of his lungs up to this point, and the tooth-gritting is a signal of a shift due to escalating temper, or pain of some kind, or something else. Maybe it's important for us to know that John's now gritting his teeth. Maybe not. But before the writer could consider any of that, the search for Ultimate Form interfered. The tag was cut down - probably at first to 'John gritted out' (which isn't great) and finally to 'John gritted' (which is even worse).

I know most readers can work out what the writer intends to say here. But then again, most people can understand my meaning if I type:

tihs snetecne is bdlay msipeleld.

Yes, you can figure it out. But as a writer, should I really be asking you to? And why?

Similarly, when reading novels with romantic scenes, I've been struck by how many characters do an odd thing:

John fisted Mary-Beth's hair...

I deeply regret to tell you, but some of my friends make very rude jokes when they see this sort of thing on a page. What's sad, for me, is that I can see the faint ghost of what this used to be. What it should be, actually - a lovely image, a strong, sensory description, something along the lines of:

John's hands curled into fists in the heavy waves of Mary-Beth's hair...

When you read the second, you can imagine, if you have longish hair, the little tug as those fingers curl up against your scalp, and the way it would tilt your face up, just a little. If you're someone who likes playing with long hair, you can imagine the silky strands winding around your fingers and the way the person you touched would maybe shiver just a little.

But you don't get that from the first description, do you? It's been robbed of its poetry and its sensory strength. It's been robbed of its effectiveness. It becomes, frankly, a bit laughable.

Then theres's the apparently unassailable Ultimate Form wisdom of Show, Don't Tell.

Because, you see, 'telling' is boring. It's bad. It's distant and 'filters' the reader's connection with the character. But 'showing' is thrilling. It's good. It is, once again, 'immediate' and 'puts the reader in the action' and those must always be our higest goals.

Only... does it really work that way? The plain answer is 'no, absolutely not'. Yes, it's fair to say that some things must be shown. Some things are so thrilling or vital or moving or important that to merely recount them is a tragedy for the story. But not everything! Sometimes, for instance, there's a need to convey the passing the time between scenes for pacing reasons - rather than simply cutting from one scene to another - but we only need to be 'told' a general idea of what's gone on, rather than being 'shown' the main character getting home, kicking off her shoes, making dinner, bathing and brushing her teeth and finally going to bed and sleeping... and then getting up the next day, brushing her teeth again etc. etc. right up until the moment she spots that intriguing but frightening stranger hanging around outside her workplace again.

That is a case where 'showing' would be anything but 'immediate'. That is a case where 'telling' is the opposite of 'boring' because it literally reduces the chances of the reader getting bored with tonnes of unnecessary detail. Sometimes telling - whether in plain language or with evocative lyricism, is the best and only thing to do. And tying yourself into a pretzel to avoid it results in choices like those of Stephenie Meyer, who movingly illustrated her main character's suicidal depression with... blank pages with the name of the month on them.

She certainly 'showed' us something, there. But did that showing, at a technical level, create any kind of empathy or connection with her character? Show us the day to day realities of living with suicidal depression? Show us any hint of insight into Bella's world during those months? No, it did not.

Rather than trying to show the emptiness Bella felt with literal empty pages, couldn't she just have told us that for four months Bella barely lived? Barely noticed the passing of time, hardly remembered to eat, couldn't bear to sleep - but only just found the strength to force herself out of bed each day? That she wandered through the hours, weeks, months, with little awareness of anything but longing for her pain to end, and the vague wish that maybe, the next day, she wouldn't wake up at all?

I mean, that took a lot less pages, if nothing else.

While twenty blank pages in your already pretty long book is an extreme example, following the Show Don't Tell rule in a quest for Ultimate Form leads many writers to equally ineffective ways of reflecting their character's emotions to the reader. Instead of briefly telling us about a character's mood, like this:

A void seemed to yawn open in Mary-Beth's chest. John's words injured her so deeply; she felt, for moment, that she would have been better of if he'd just reached out and pushed her off the edge of the balcony.

And then, having effectively established their emotional state, moving onto the crux of the scene, the writer gets stuck showing us everything in excruciating detail and it becomes both overwrought and less moving. Because the thing is? There's no real way to show this emotional reaction.

You doubt me. You say: what if Mary-Beth gasps, goes pale, staggers back?

Yes, she could. However, don't those reactions feel a little threadbare and cliched? Afterall, they're the classic way that everyone 'shows' shock and upset. They don't really tell us much about Mary-Beth as an individual - what this means to her as an individual. And because of that sense of generic over-use, you, as the writer, end up worrying that you've failed to convey the depth of her despair. So in order to 'show' how significant this moment is, you have to amp up Mary-Beth's reaction, make it something that can be expressed physically. Thus, you get something like:

Tears dripped down Mary-Beth's face as she rubbed compulsively at her aching, empty chest. Tiny whimpers fell from her lips. She rocked backward and forward, seeking comfort in the repetitive movement.

Immediately transforming Mary-Beth into someone who, regardless of her shock and grief, probably needs psychological help. Which is OK, if that's what you were going for. But if not, and if your narrative accepts this behaviour as 'normal', your writing will begin to resemble melodrama without your having intended it to.

And yet! This piece of writing still isn't Ultimate Form enough for some, because it's transgressed against the rules of sparse-ness and immediacy in deploying adverbs and adjectives, and authorial intrusion too (that's me interpreting Mary-Beth's actions as comfort-seeking, there at the end). In order to achieve Ultimate Form we have to revise again - replacing ad/verb/jectives with 'stronger' verbs and nouns to make up for it, and allowing only showing with no hints from me, the author:

Tears drizzled down Mary-Beth's face as she scrubbed at her chest. Whimpers fell from her lips. She rocked in place.

The impression that Mary-Beth is deeply disturbed rather than just experiencing an emotion is even greater - and we have literally no idea what she's feeling anymore, or why she's reacting this way to her grief at John's rejection. The fact is, this isn't a piece of good writing for a novel.

It's more like an instruction from a screenplay.

In fact, a lot of the tenants of Ultimate Form seem to come from the school of good screenwriting. Fast paced? Check. Immediate? Check. No authorial intrusion/voice-overs? Check. Only show the character's external reactions? Check.

But fiction, memoir, narrative non-fiction and short stories, are not screenplays. And although all forms of writing can improve when they borrow the best techniques from other forms, this inexorable drift toward writing which has been robbed of some of the most effective potential storytelling techniques, which has as little fun or experimental language as possible, and from which the unique personality and voice of the author has been scrubbed, is resulting in not only narratives but also writers that are less, much less, than they could be.The thing is? Narrative fiction and non-fiction - storytelling - has the ability to do something screenplays meant for films and TV simply can't. Something that every actor and director and screenwriter and music director and make-up and costume and set designer is straining every nerve they have to try to replicate on the screen, but which they can never quite manage. Narratives can tell you what's going on inside someone's heart. Their mind. Their soul. That's why they call us story-tellers.

This, by the way, is not a diss aimed at screen or playwriters. You guys go wild. It's a request that we question the prevailing Ultimate Forms which are pushed at us instead of assuming that other people's Ideal is The Ideal. Editors may be looking for books or stories which give them a certain feeling. Agents may find a certain kind of work easy to sell. Marketing and publicity people might think a certain kind of work is hot right now. Authors may be offering advice based on what they've published lately. But these trends and fashions, the zeitgeist itself, changes with the wind. No one ever knows what the next big thing will be before it arrives. It could be you, but not if you're trying your hardest to be someone else.

Sacrificing the unique and fun qualities of language and narrative - sacrificing the hard but wonderful process of working out what kind of thing you love to write and are good at writing - for the supposed Ultimate Form, regardless of what this may be, is the last thing any of us should do.

It's letting the teacher's grade on your funny, imaginative story put you off writing anything funny or imaginative ever again. It's letting someone else control one of the most fundamental aspects of your self - your creativity. Don't allow it. There is no fail or passing grade, there is no Ultimate Form. There is only you. And you, and the unique stories you love to create and share, are enough.

Christmas Pick & Mix

Hello, and happy winter holidays to all Dear Readers! Welcome back to Pick & Mix - the last one before Christmas, and also the last one before my holiday hiatus. I'll be back again on the week commencing 10th of January, posting as normal on Mondays and Thursdays. Don't worry, I'll be working on lots of interesting new blogs during my break; if there are any topics, whether academic or creative, that you'd like me to tackle in the coming year, either drop me a comment below or, if it's too annoying to have to sign in (I know, I know, it's a feature that I can't remove unfortunately) then tweet me on @zmarriott or comment on Facebook.

In the meantime, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, I hope you'll enjoy the festive themed Pick & Mix below. This might be the last chance you get to reconnect with your creative joy before the characeristic busy-ness of the season engulfs you, so I urge you to take advantage of it!

The Rules:

Write for ten minutes. No more and no less. Just long enough to get into the swing of writing, but not long enough to be intimidating or unachievable for anyone, no matter how stressed out or busy It's called Pick & Mix for a reason. Pick one prompt, mix all of them, or write something completely different. Whatever blows your socks off. Don't edit or revise what you're writing while you are writing. it's a waste of your creative energy. This writing is just for you. Typos? We don't know her. Once your ten minutes are up, you're done. Don't read what you've written. I mean it. You don't have to judge, evaluate, fix or revise. That all takes time and energy and it's not the point of the exercise. If no one ever reads your ten minute scribbles, it doesn't matter one tiny bit.

The Prompts:

IMAGE

MUSIC

WORDS

...the marshes were grey-white-dun, black water icy, reeds furred with hoar frost tipped at the very edges with the gold of the rising winter sun...

Happy midwinter - I wish you joy!

This PhD Mallarkey: What, Why and How?

Hello, Dear Readers, and welcome back to the blog. This week I felt like focusing on the academic nitty-gritty again, and answering some of the various questions that I've had from friends, family and acquaintances, both in person and online, since I started the pursuit of a PhD place (and funding).

Let's jump in the puddle!

So what the heck is a PhD anyway?

It's an advanced research degree, Brent.

The Ph stands for 'philosophy' and the D is for 'doctor', although some places (like Oxford) call it a DPhil instead. Interestingly, the custom of referring to a scholarly or learned person or teacher as 'doctor' is the original use of the term, pre-dating its usage as a title for someone qualified in medicine (pre-dating medical degrees entirely, in fact). This is why John Dee, court philosopher and astronomer to Queen Elizabeth the first, was known as 'Doctor Dee'.

A full time PhD takes between three and four years (double for part-time), and while undergoing training in various aspects of academia such as bibliographic techniques, research ethics, teaching, how to write journal entries and how to present work at conferences, you're also supposed to produce an independent, original piece of research called a thesis, which contributes to the sum of human knowledge. This can be anywhere between 50,000 and 140,000 words long, depending on the discipline.

Now, for Creative Writing, the thesis usually consists of two parts, known as the artefact and the exegisis. The artefact is a substantial piece of creative work such as a collection of short stories or poetry, a play, a memoir or a novel, which must be of publishable standard (and many artefacts do go on to be commercially published). The exegesis is a scholarly, analytical work which sits alongside the creative piece and contextualises the process of making it and the theories which underpin it, as well as explicating the discoveries that the researcher made while creating it. Good creative Writing research is practice-led; if you want to develop new knowledge, ideas and theories about the process of Creative Writing, then the best way to do so is by undertaking Creative Writing.

Once the thesis is complete and submitted, the PhD candidate faces a panel of experts from within their discipline (and sometimes from areas which intersect with it) who put them through a rigorous verbal examination on their research. This is called a viva voce, or sometimes (ominously) The Viva.

Following The Viva, you're generally asked to make some changes - 'corrections' - which could be minor or major. Unless you're a genius who passes with no corrections (about 20% of people apparently manage this - including Emma Darwin, Goddess that she is). Once the corrections are made and approved, voila! You're a doctor.

(We shall not speak of those poor, haunted souls who do not pass, or find their research downgraded from a PhD to an MPhil, a Master of Philosophy. *Shudders* I don't even want to think about it!)

A PhD seems like a lot of work. Why do you want to do it?

Good question. The more utilitarian reason is that I want to teach Creative Writing - not just the short online courses or school and library workshops I've run in the past, or even the one-to-one tutoring in writing skills that I did as an RLF Fellow. I want to teach Creative Writing as an academic subject in a university setting. You need to have some fairly heavy duty qualifications for this, and the PhD is (perhaps oddly) both the most basic requirement and the most difficult and time-consuming to attain. True, some very well known writers can gain a lectureship and do this work based solely on the strength of their reputation and published writing, without any formal teaching qualifications, however:

I'm not nearly famous and celebrated enough to pull this off, and In my personal experience, the quality of and commitment to teaching in such cases may not be what students expect or deserve.

However, there's also a less utilitarian reason: I just really, really, really want to.

For a long time - years - there was a loving, encouraging, but also puzzled refrain from friends who were or had been in academia. Why didn't I consider doing a PhD? It seemed like the sort of thing I would love. It seemed like the sort of thing I would be really good at. This was based partly on my tendency to have long, convoluted, analytical conversations about writing with them, and partly on the fact that for about a decade I produced roughly five thousand new words about Creative Writing on my old blog, The Zoë-Trope, each week. These posts were ostensibly aimed at young readers and writers, but were also long, convoluted and analytical and probably extremely boring for said youngsters, although, bless them, they never complained (some of those posts, heavily rewritten, will find a new home on this blog).

Those friends didn't understand, of course. Advanced degrees were not for such as I! Not with my ancestral working class chip on the shoulder and inferiority complex the size of Jupiter, etc, etc. When I finally gave into my own secret yearnings, began to do some research, and discovered that, given a boatload of work and time and persistence, there might be the slightest tiny sliver of a hope that it could be possible for me... I didn't tell anyone. For weeks. Because I was walking around sheltering this tiny, flickering fire inside myself, a flame of joy and optimism that made me feel the way I did as a small child when I knew that Christmas was coming. I wanted it so much, and I didn't want anyone to lean over and say something that would blow the flame out.

As a friend who has a PhD (and is also a very successful writer) confided: "You'd never know it from talking to students and academics - but for me, and I think for most writers, three whole years completely immersed in reading, research and writing for one project is blissful."

I want to get my doctorate just for myself. I believe - and so far have been proved correct - that I will love the process. The qualification is something that I want to achieve, a challenge that I want to overcome. But it's also a chance to write a completely different kind of book, and dive deeply into all the theoretical and geeky analytical parts of the writing process that I never normally have the time or space to paddle in.

How did you decide what research you wanted to do, though? And what is the research about?

Actually, for me it wasn't so much a matter of figuring out what I wanted to research as figuring out how to present the work I wanted to do in an academic way.

I already had a passion project waiting - an idea that I had wanted to write for about eight years. I'd had several false starts on it, written different opening sections and sketched out different versions of the story in outline form. I eventually realised that the reason I couldn't get it to ignite and come to life was that I was trying to write it as a YA novel. It wasn't a YA novel; it was an adult book. And that meant I had no choice but to shelve it. I couldn't afford to take two years out and write a debut adult novel entirely 'on spec' (meaning, without a contract or any guarantee that anyone would ever pay to publish it). So instead of writing this book, I just mooned over it and sighed about it all the time.

When I realised - with quite a lot of excitement - that a PhD would be the perfect opportunity for me to write this long-mooned-over novel, and this long-mooned-over novel would be perfect for PhD research, what I needed to do next was... well, try to place it in an academic context? Try and work out what questions were really driving the creation of this piece, imagine what writing this particular novel would teach me, theoretically, and how those discoveries would be useful to other writers in the future, therefore adding to the sum of human knowledge.

This was not an easy process. I was driven right to the point of wanting to tear my own hair out on so many occasions that I honestly can't count them. I imagine it's a really difficult thing for any creative researcher to do - make explicit all the mostly unconscious and unarticulated interests that weave together to create the central idea of a piece of art and then analyse those for value. But especially for me, because I was coming from outside of academia - I hadn't even started my MA at that point - it felt nearly impossible to present those questions or the knowledge that attempting to answer them would generate in any way that seemed scholarly or important or worthy of being called a 'thesis'.

I've mentioned before that I wrote a lot, I mean an awful lot of thesis proposals. I started in 2018, I think, and I had a lot of kindness and encouragement from various people - people that I'm intensely grateful to - but also a lot of flat rejections, unhelpful judgements on me and my work, and doors slammed contemptuously in my face.

I took what seemed like every wrong turn possible and ended up with some research proposals that had wandered so far in my attempts to seem academic that they had nothing to do with me or what interested me at all. I looked and them and thought they seemed respectable and scholarly and grown-up and the sort of thing that I should want to do. More importantly to me at that point, they seemed like the kind of thing a university might want to fund me to do, which was vital because without full funding there was no way I could do a PhD. But instead of making me feel optimistic, they made me question my whole desire to do PhD in the first place. Surely that couldn't be right?

What it ultimately came down to, and what I realised while working on my MA, was that the answer had been there all along. Before any formal research questions could be formulated, I had to ask myself: why do you want to write this book?

My mooned-over novel was timeslip: a book which depicts people in different time periods who are connected in some way, so that their individual stories in their separate times actually form one story for the reader. I've been passionate about this type of narrative since I was a kid. I love all its possibilities and I read widely within the genre. I get really excited when I find what I feel to be a great example, and get equally cross at writers who don't do it justice.

I had also noticed that very little research had ever been done into timeslip as a genre. Certainly, some famous timeslip books had a lot of scholarship dedicated to them, but never because of those timeslip features. No one else really seemed to be interested in this genre or what made it unique or its potential, but I was; I was fascinated by this topic. I wanted to write my passion book because it was timeslip, because I'm endlessly baffled and delighted by the ways that humans live in and experience time and the way we frame and rewrite our experiences of it, and why.

In my Master's dissertation, I wrote:

Despite the assumption that time transports us away from our pasts – leading to the idea that we ought to naturally ‘move on’ from trauma, grief, suffering – part of the experience of human memory is that all-too-often our pasts keep happening to us. We do not leave the past behind us in time; we carry it with us through time. And not just our own formative experiences, but those of our parents, their parents... we are helpless to prevent the way our past shapes our reactions, perceptions, hopes, fears. In a sense, we are our pasts, constantly seeking to flee ourselves even as we continue to remake our futures to match. This is why time travel is such a poignant prospect. If we could master it, perhaps we could truly be free of the weight of our past selves.

This was what I wanted to focus on in my PhD research. This was the topic that filled me with not only creative interest but scholarly zeal.

Although this realisation wasn't a magic bullet that solved all my issues and made the rest of the process easy, after re-writing my thesis proposal for the final time to embrace this passion, I (*pinches self yet again*) received offers of a PhD place and full funding to do the research from two different universities. So, in academia as in life, it can sometimes come down to that old axiom about figuring out your passion and then having the courage to follow it.

Hang on, what's this 'funding' you keep talking about? Is this like student finance or a grant? How do you go about getting funding to study at doctoral level?

Ah, that's also very good question - but one that is extremely knotty and complex and makes my voice go high-pitched and nervous when I try to talk about it. This topic truly needs a whole post of its own - and I mean, really needs one, because I know there are thousands of other people like me out there, people who are first generation university graduates with no background in academia, and who take one look at the process of trying to get a PhD place and funding and all the stages and misinformation and just nope right out of there in a panic.

So this question will be answered, my-potentially-young-but-more-probably-mature-and-experienced-in-the-school-of-life grasshopper. But not in this post; it's already quite long enough.

Thanks for joining me on my Eddying Flight once again, everyone, and I hope you'll be back for Thursday Pick & Mix. Have a good week until then!

Thursday Pick & Mix (#5)

Welcome back, Dear Readers - I hope that this week has treated you well so far. And I hope you're ready to have some honest-to-dog fun today, and write something that's entirely for yourself, entirely for the heck of it, with no pressure.

If you're already glancing worriedly at the clock and getting an anxious tightness in the chest that says: 'You don't have time for this!' - that's a sign that you absolutely need to make time for this. The sky will not fall down because you did not spend every second of today scurrying around doing things from your endless list of Things That Someone Needs To Do. Let's be honest now. How much satisfaction or joy does the list offer? Doesn't it seem that no matter how many items you manage to scratch off, the list always remains the same length?

Your life is not the list. Your worth is not dependent on the list. The list is not the boss of you.

You are allowed to take ten minutes for yourself. You are allowed to make fun and joy a part of your day. What kind of a life is it, if even ten short minutes to experience joy is asking too much?

You own the next ten minutes. So set your timer (but don't put it somewhere that you can see it or stress out over it!), pick up your pen or open up your word processing programme, and look at the waiting blank page with anticipation.

Pick a prompt. Any prompt! Or mix two, or three - or, if something else occurs to you, go with that instead. Whatever makes your ten minutes fun.

Remember not to waste your imaginative energy editing or revising what you're writing while you are writing. Hide your words if you need to. Put your palm or a piece of paper over the lines as you write them, or set your font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. We don't care about spelling, grammar, awkward phrases, punctuation or typos. They have no power over us!

When you've finished, save your work, close your notebook, and walk away. You don't need to re-read this writing, assess it, fix it. That's not what it's for. It's about joy, not results. No one is demanding to see your work, so leave it alone. Don't read what you've written right now, or even today if you can help it. I mean it. Just leave it alone! Leave it as long as you can - long enough that you might remember it later on with a little blink of surprise and pleasure. When you do read it again, make sure that you do so in a spirit of curiosity and interest, but without expectation. If it turns out to be a deathless piece of prose, that's a bonus - not the goal. And give yourself permission never to re-read this if you don't feel you want to.

Let's go.

IMAGE

MUSIC

WORDS

"...a glitter of falling water in the sun, and then there was nothing left of her but a small pile of river stones, worn smooth, shining wet."

Happy writing - I wish you joy.

The Plot Diamond, Part Three: Turning Plots into Stories

Hello, and welcome back to An Eddying Flight. Today I'm tackling the final part of this process which has taken us from inspiration to idea, from idea to plot, and this week will lead from plot to story.

Last week we looked at the basic Plot Diamond (Cue: unearthly wails from the tower, ominous rumblings in the cellar, the faint stench of burned hair and burned sugar) and I went through each of the five crucial plot turning points that inform the structure of a classic Hero's Journey-type narrative in a fair amount of detail. With any luck you've got a good handle on them now, and how they work, individually and together, to create that useful, bare-bones structure upon which many stories can be developed.

This week I'll demonstrate the nuts and bolts process of filling a plot diamond in with your own particular versions of these events and then using it as a way to parse out the rest of what you want to write, transforming the 'plot' into something resembling an actual story; a narrative which you can realistically tackle putting into words.

To do this, I'm once again going to fall back on a familiar narrative which I believe almost anyone reading this blog will know well: Cinderella.

Here's an interesting note, before we start. Cinderella actually has a straight plot journey, like most of those classic female heroes I name-checked in the first of this series of posts. Her 'happy ending' and plot resolution involve her marriage to a prince who takes her permanently away from her starting point, the family home. In some versions the stepmother and sisters hang out there forever and become withered (unmarried) old hags - in others they are rather horribly killed by the prince. Either way, Cinderella never goes back to have her adventures and achievements admired by her family or community as the traditional male hero does.

But you'll remember that I said one of the useful/terrifying things about the Plot Diamond is that with a little bit of effort you can make stories fit to it even if they don't really have a hero's journey shape? Well, that's the case here. And that's one of the reasons why the Plot Diamond is useful to many writers as an intial tool.

Once you have your events parsed out, you can throw the Diamond shape straight into the bin if you or your story need and want to. Then feel free to allow the narrative to Meander, Spiral or Explode just as it wishes. Don't ever feel that you can't pursue particular developments within the narrative just because it would pull the handy straight lines of the diamond out of shape. The Plot Diamond is a tool, not (as I've emphasized before) the Universal Cheat Code, or The Boss Of You.

With this disclaimer out of the way, let's begin mapping Cinderella's Diamond:

Still very basic, yes. But with the major turning points of Cinderella's journey nailed down and the structure beginning to be clearer to us, we can get onto the process of actually creating a story. And we'd do this by starting to fill in each of the sides of the diamond shape with events - story developments and significant character moments - which logically follow from First Plot Event to Character Action to Major Disaster and so on. What's fun and surprising and joyous to me is that if you and I were to both start out with that intial plot diagram above, we would more than likely come up with radically different ways to get our heroine from point one to two point to point three, involving not only different story developments but different tones/atmospheres in our writing and different character motivations and reactions. In fact, perhaps you disagree with me on which events in this narrative actually fit to the five crucial plot points on the Diamond? If so, great! That's already a sign of how versatile and individual we each are as writers.

Here's my version of the next stage:

This isn't exactly a huge amount of detail - but you can already see the difference. This is a story now, not just a plot. It includes scenes not just of action but reaction, not just scenes that develop the plot but scenes that develop the character. It shows you what events I, as a unique person/writer, think are significant and interesting enough to dramatise. There's some emphasis on the magic here, and apparently I intend to handle the romance angle by leaning into love-at-first-sight as a device. I'm also putting some emotional significance on Cinderella's spirituality and her bond with her deceased mother. Could fairy 'godmother' perhaps be the ghost of her mother, as in some traditional takes on this story? At this stage, the Diamond makes you ask questions, rather than just being a bare list of events.

For a lot of people this would be quite enough and they could start writing. But the way I personally work with the Plot Diamond is to try and fill in the first side of the diamond in as much detail as possible before I start my draft. That way, I have a decent amount of events and characterisation beats working away in the back of my head as I start envisioning the opening of the novel, and my unconscious will often help out by gently infusing my prose with imagery and symbolism that turns out to be significant as I continue writing. This part usually leaves me with something that looks more like this:

I'm aware that this is an intimidating amount of detail for a certain set of writers. No one has to aim for this! However, you'll note that there's still plenty of space for changes later in the story, on the second two sides of the diamond. This is one of the genuinely good, non-problematic aspects of this diagram; you can use it as a living document. It gives you structure, but it also gives you space to let your characters and narrative grow and develop, teaching you about them as you continue to write them.

I generally find that by the time I've reached point two (Character Action) I've grown to know the world, story and characters well enough to be able to go on ahead and fill in the next side with a few more details too, and I keep going that way all along. If I tried to fill the whole Plot Diamond with this level of detail before I started writing, I wouldn't be able to - or, if I did, I would crush all the life out of the thing and probably kill it.

I hope the explanation of this process has been fun and interesting at worst, and useful at the best. If you've got burning questions to ask, different interpretations to share, or just want to talk about the way you would have parsed out Cinderella's story, please do speak up in the comments below. I promise to read and respond.

Thursday Pick & Mix (#4)

Hello, Dear Readers - and welcome back to Thursday Pick & Mix.

Are you ready to take ten minutes out of your day, just for yourself, to write freely and just for fun? If no, do it anyway: I really don't think you'll regret it.

My weekly reminder of the few rules:

Use any mixture of the prompts that you like. One of them, two, all three - even none (go rogue). Write for ten minutes. No more and no less. If you're the type who anxiously watches the clock or checks her watch (like me) then set a timer and put it out of sight but in earshot. Don't edit or revise what you're writing while you are writing. No exceptions! If writing longhand, put your palm or a piece of paper over the lines as you scribble them. If writing onscreen, set the font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. So what if you make typos or spelling mistakes? It doesn't matter! Once your ten minutes are up, walk away. Don't read what you've written straight away. Leave it. Leave it long enough that you might remember it with a little start of surprise and pleasure later on, and go back to it in a spirit of happy interest. You don't need to judge it, evaluate it for it's worth and try to 'fix' it. It was just for fun. If no one ever reads your ten minute scribbles, it doesn't matter one tiny single bit.

Ready, steady... PROMPT.

IMAGE

MUSIC

WORDS

"Something he saw in my face seemed to give him courage."

Good writing. I wish you joy.

The Plot Diamond, Part Two: Turning Ideas into Plots

In last week’s post I introduced the concept of the Plot Diamond – a rejigged plotting pro-forma which partakes of many different ways of looking at a fairly classical, Hero’s Journey type of narrative. This has its limitations, which I listed and explained in that post, but despite them I do think that for many writers and many stories, this is a useful device. It’s often been useful for me.

When we talk about having ‘an idea for a book/novel/story’, the chances are that what we really mean is that we have a cupped handful of fragments of a story, glinting and bright enough to inspire us to seek to piece them together. One strong character, perhaps, and a vague sense of how it all starts and ends. A theme you’re compelled to explore and a couple of really strong, hit-you-in-the-head scenes that would perfectly embody it. Maybe a perfectly detailed climactic scene and almost nothing at all leading up to it. You’ve now got to try and figure out how to fit these events together into a plot. How to close the gaps between them in a way that makes sense, that is entertaining to read, that is worth writing. In other words, you have to figure out how to make all the fragments into a whole, without any idea what the finished form of the thing should really be. At this stage, some writers make character or story collages, either in hard copy using images cut from magazines or photos, or else online using an app like Pinterest. Others utilise index cards or Post Its to list discretely everything that they know about characters, setting, story, mood. Some just dive straight into the writing and hope to anchor their ideas that way. This is all answering the same instinct, which is to get every single tiny fragment, even the ones no larger than a grain of sand, laid out neatly in front of you so that they cannot do the mental equivalent of slipping down the back of the sofa or tumbling into the pile of the rug, never to be seen again.

The very act of writing down or concretising your ideas (in whatever form) makes them feel more real and get-at-able. Often as you begin to list them they will expand right before your eyes, drawing other ideas from your subconscious and attracting them into one mass the way that a proto-planet attracts space debris. Your snippet of dialogue suddenly has three compelling characters attached. Your image of a setting has a tragic situation and two more settings nested within.

This is a part which feels intensely magical and by the end of it you have expanded your handful of fragments to the point where it overflows your cupped palms – or rather, your mental capacity to keep everything straight.

It’s a very good job that you wrote it all safely down or made this lovely collage. Well done.

Now for the bad news: you still don’t have a story, or the plot for a story. A narrative is more than a series of events that happen one after another. There needs to be some kind of underlying structure (whatever that is): rising tension, rising stakes, opportunities for characters to change and evolve, or fail to. The story needs to move your imaginary people through events of physical and emotional and mental significance in a way that reveals them to the reader. Sometimes when you've pinned all your ideas down you still won't feel you have enough volume to make a convincing novel or story. Other times it will look as if you have far too much. Well, this is where the Plot Diamond comes in (cue: the malevolent cackle of a magpie, wind wailing against the windows, the flicker of the lights).

Obviously before we can really get started on how to use this tool, there needs to be an in-depth explanation for the different terms it utilises. And I’m afraid that in order to offer the greatest clarity here, I’m going to rely on descriptions of the events of films, because I can be sure that at least some of you will have seen at least some of the ones I chose. So:

FIRST PLOT EVENT: This is the event that kicks off the story proper and is sometimes also referred to as ‘the inciting event’. It might not, however, be the first scene of the story. Sometimes a narrative begins by showing the character or characters’ world, illustrating the most important people or factors in their life or establishing their ambitions or deepest wishes. Leading up to a dramatic or significant event – as in The Fellowship of the Ring, where we're introduced to the idyllic Shire and Frodo's well-hidden longing for adventure – allows us to understand what is at stake for the protagonist when the first plot event occurs and something changes.

Some writing books will tell you that you must cut straight to the action. And for some genres or some kinds of stories, that’s perfectly OK to do. But it’s not vital, and there are many books which do no such thing. What is vital is that you begin with something relevant to the wider story; scenes which will signpost to the reader what kind of journey they’re about to go on, events which will reveal their significance as the narrative develops.  CHARACTER TAKES ACTION TO CHANGE COURSE OF PLOT: Sometimes known as ‘the character accepts the call to action’. Perhaps your protagonist or protagonists rocket straight from their first plot event to acceptance of their situation without stopping for breath (like an 80s action hero). In which case, this event and that one may very well blend together. But generally after the big disruption of the first plot event, characters seek to return to the status quo. Perhaps they refuse to accept what's happened, struggle to rationalise or deny it, try to find safety by mindlessly embracing the comfort of their old routine, or protest that this is just a big misunderstanding and really nothing to do with them. However at some point most characters (though not all!) will seek to regain their agency and take control of their situation. They decide to do something. Sometimes this action backfires, sometimes it works. In either case, this is the trigger for further events. The moment when the character first begins to truly effect the plot is usually an important one. It tells the reader a lot about who the character is and whom they have the potential to become. Using The Fellowship of the Ring as an example again, this is when Frodo, having reached the safety of the Rivendell, and having been given a viable chance to step out of this life-or-death adventure and head home without any stain on his character, instead steps forward and volunteers to take the Ring to Mordor.  MAJOR DISASTER OR SETBACK: I have also seen this referred to as ‘the mirror moment’, ie, it’s when the protagonist or protagonists are brought face to face with themselves. The events triggered by the interaction of the main character's choices and the plot now reach a critical point. Things might have seemed to be going really well up to this point, or it could have been a hard fought battle all the way. In either case, at the moment when success seemed assured, or the characters thought they’d found temporary sanctuary or at least could stop to rest… disaster strikes. This changes the course of the story again. Often the reader will have seen this setback coming all along. Sometimes even the characters can see it. But they're powerless to prevent it, either because of an essential flaw in their own character or strategy (established prior to this, of course) or because the forces aligned against them are overwhelming.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, this is the whole section where the Fellowship are forced to seek shelter in the mines of Moria and end up trapped there as a series of escalating disasters imperil them, causing them to lose Gandalf. In Disney's The Little Mermaid, this is where Ursula the Sea Witch sees that Ariel and the Prince are falling in love, realises her dastardly plan isn’t going to work, and casts a spell to enchant the Prince and make her his own. Ariel wakes up full of joy, convinced of Prince Eric’s regard for her – only to find him suddenly engaged to another woman.   THE PLATEAU OF AWFULNESS: This is the beginning of the end of the novel or story. In the midst of the fallout from the great disaster that brought the main character or characters face to face with themselves… something even worse, often contrasting with that earlier disaster, happens. It's the part of the story where things literally cannot get any worse. There's no way back now; it's do or die.

Following an unsuccessful attempt by Boromir to take the ring, Frodo realises that without Gandalf he cannot stay with the Fellowship anymore, because the ring will twist and destroy them all, one by one. At exactly this moment, orcs attack the party. Ursula the Sea Witch is exposed by Ariel and her animal sidekicks as an imposter before she can marry Eric – but it’s already too late and now Ariel’s soul belongs to her.

One of the best (and best known) examples of this is in The Matrix. Near the end of the film, most of the crew of the ship have been slaughtered by a traitor and Neo is stuck in the Matrix fighting against Agent Smith – then the alarm on the ship goes off, signalling that a killer 'squid' is approaching. The only way the crew can save themselves is to set off the EMP. But if they do that, Neo will die. The attack of the killer machine contrasts beautifully with the main disaster – Neo's battle against the Agent – because while Neo is a blur of action, running and fighting for his life, the crew are forced into stillness, silence and inaction, desperately willing Neo to win but unable to fight for their own lives.

This is often the moment of peak emotional suffering for the main character or characters. It's when you knock their supports away (other characters they have come to care for and rely on, a last desperate hope, their own illusions about themselves, their world, or the opposition) and force them to fall. In despair, fury, new determination or sudden revelation, they are now propelled forward to the final events of the story.  LAST PLOT EVENT: "Um, hang on a minute, there are only FOUR points on that diamond," says the astute reader. "How can there be five points on your list?" Well, that’s the thing about a hero’s journey story-type: in the end, everything comes full circle (in some sense at least). This final plot event is where you must fulfil the promises that you made to the reader at the beginning, bringing the story to a natural and satisfying close. Just as with the first plot event, despite its name this might not be the actual last scene in the story – but it's the last point in the story where events are still in flux. Further chapters may tie up loose ends, but shouldn't significantly alter what has occurred in the last plot event.

Frodo and Sam escape in their boat – now the last hope of Middle Earth – and Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas decide to let them go and attempt to rescue Merry and Pippin instead. Ariel’s father relents and transforms his daughter into a human so she can be with Eric. Trinity kisses an unconscious Neo and tells him that she loves him, and he responds by proving he is The One and destroying Agent Smith at the same moment that Morpheus presses the EMP button and kills the squid-robot that is tearing the ship apart. I hope you can see now how this works. The simple structure makes it very easy to parse how events you might already have in mind should be placed within the narrative in order to pace the story dynamically, and again, the act of doing so can often draw other ideas out of your subconscious as you realise that this scene you imagined could be a Plateau of Awfulness, and then surely the best event to follow it would be this, followed by that... Even if the events you have in your head don’t fit the definitions of the ‘main’ events listed above, could they perhaps be the lead-ins or sequels to such events? If you can fill in three or four of the points on the diagram, even if it turns out you have three Major Setbacks and two PoAs, you're well on your way to having a complete story.

This post is quite long enough for one week, so next Monday I’ll go into the real nuts and bolts of using this tool and demonstrate how to map your work onto the Plot Diamond structure. Good writing in the meantime.

Thursday Pick & Mix (#3)

Hello, Dear Readers - welcome back to Thursday Pick & Mix. I hope you're all doing well this week, and ready to seek out your writing joy.

But if not? Remember that sometimes when you feel the most crabby, cranky, creatively cramped up and frustrated, is exactly when it could be the most helpful and rewarding to just let go and write. Write something silly, something knotty and weird, something that makes you smile or snarl, something no one but you will ever see. Just write, entirely for the Hell of it.

Come on, give it a try. Go wild. No one can stop you...

First, a quick rundown of the very few rules of the exercise:

Write for ten minutes. Ten. No more and no less. But please don't make this a source of stress. If you're an anxious watch-checker like me, then take off your watch, set a timer and put the timer out of sight (but in earshot). Don't edit or revise what you're writing while you are writing. This one takes a bit of getting used to, but try it and you'll find it helps. If writing longhand, put your palm or a piece of paper over the lines as you scribble them. If writing onscreen, set the font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. So what if you make typos or spelling mistakes? It doesn't matter! Laugh at them, tell them to get stuffed, and keep going. Once your ten minutes are up, please, please give yourself the precious gift of walking away. Don't read what you've written. I mean it. Just leave it. Leave it as long as you can - long enough that you might remember it later on with a little blink of surprise and pleasure. Go back to it, when you do, in a spirit of curiosity and interest, but without the expectation that you must judge it, evaluate it for it's worth and try to 'fix' it. Give yourself permission never to re-read this if you don't feel the urge. If no one ever reads your ten minute scribbles, it doesn't matter one tiny single bit.

Now, onto this week's prompts.

IMAGE

MUSIC

WORD

"Neutrinos and neurons..."

Good writing, everyone. I wish you joy.