Toby Litt's Blog, page 12

Writing and Shit – Part 6 – What does a story need? continued

We’re moving straight on.

A story – any story – needs a thing, something.

But things don’t exist in the void. And if you want an event to happen, then the thing needs to move around from one location to another.

So a story also also needs a place for its thing.

Mr But: Again, it’s possible to imagine a story that was about an isolated object floating in a void lacking gravity and any possible indication of up and down, not even a single star.

And again, I would love to read this placeless story, Mr But, if you can write it and send it to me – but I will be most interested to see what is happening a while after the opening paragraph, especially on pages three and four. How are you making anything happen?

Exercise: Write a description (as you did before in the third person, past tense) of a place you once knew very well but to which you can now (for whatever reason) never return.

Warning:

Because this involves your memory, you may be tempted to include the word I in your description. Please don’t, as that will stop it being the third person.

Describe the place in terms of what can be seen there, not what someone who knew the place might know about it – for example, The wallpaper was light green and covered in fleur-de-lys rather than The light green wallpaper had been put up by Gareth Wilson in November 1998.

You have five minutes. Start the clock.

Now move on.

Writing and Shit – Part 5 – What does a story need? continued

Right, the first thing that a story needs is a thing – a material object of some sort that can be picked up or otherwise moved around.

Mr But (we’re going to hear a bit from him – unless I cut him entirely as being too annoying) says: It is quite easy to imagine an exception to this – what about if, Mr But says, there aren’t any objects in the story because it’s about a person alone in an entirely empty, featureless room.  This may seem an exception, but you will need to add that they are a person who has suffered complete amnesia, not only of the events of their life up until finding themselves in the empty room, but also of what things are.

It sounds like a very interesting premise for a story, Mr But. Please go ahead and write it.

Literary aside: Samuel Beckett wrote a number of stories situated in a blank nowhere – they’re referred to as the cylinder or closed space stories. Examples would be All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping, The Lost Ones.

Exercise:  Write a one page description, in the third person past tense, of a pickupable object you passionately desire but do not think you will ever own.

Reassurance:

Don’t freak out if third person, past tense flashes you back to school grammar lessons. Here’s an example: The stuffed giraffe head was moth-eaten is the third person, past tense, rather than The stuffed giraffe head is moth-eaten, which is present tense, or The stuffed giraffe head will be moth-eaten, which is future tense.

Third person just means you don’t put yourself in the sentence and say I remember the stuffed giraffe head my Aunt Maisie had in her upstairs toilet…

With all of these Exercises, I would ask you to be excessive. We’re alone. No-one need ever see a single word you write, unless you choose to show it to them. So, have fun – write about something that is as far from being boring to you as possible.

Take five minutes to do this.

Go to next.

 

Writing and Shit – Part 4 – What does a story need? continued

Okay. Often what you will have written for the first sentence is something like:

‘A story is… a personal journey of growth and discovery involving struggle and eventual triumph or defeat’

or:

‘..is about a character who faces a dilemma that forces them to define more clearly who they are through their choices.’

All these and similar definitions (perhaps picked up from other manuals or creative writing tutors) may, at a less primitive stage, hold true for the kind of stories you want to write.

But, frankly, I think they’re no use for getting you out of the shit.

For the moment, I want to find a way of describing a story that holds just as true for a multi-volume fantasy epic like George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones as for a two sentence short story by Lydia Davis, and as much for a cutscene in a video game as for a three panel cartoon strip.

So, we are going to put aside the first sentence, and concentrate for a while on the second. What does a story need? What can’t a story do without?

Writing and Shit – Part 3 – What does a story need?

 

We’re going to put together three basic things without which a story can’t exist (without, that is, great and sometimes gloriously perverse efforts by the writer).

These things will, when I first describe them, almost certainly seem to you very oversimplified. (And perhaps familiar, if you have looked at the Starting to Write course. But the approach here is slightly different. We’re fixing stories, not starting them.) I am not, here, writing in the language of sophisticated literary criticism.

Exercise: I would like you to write two sentences, the first beginning:

A story is… 

And the second beginning:

A story can’t do without…

As I said, the can’t do without involves three things – plus one more that we’ll think about a lot more later on.

You have five minutes in total. Don’t overthink it. In fact, try to underthink it. Don’t be sophisticated. Think in the most basic way you can. Building blocks, not paint colours or lighting effects.

And don’t, whatever you do, use the word ‘journey’.

Continue here when you’re ready.

 

Writing and Shit – Part 2 – 1st Exercise

Writing and Shit – Part 1 – What Type of Writer Are You?

Either/Or/Or

I am guessing you are one of three sorts of writer.

Does this sound like you?

You have hundreds of ideas. You have dozens of opening sentences. You have lots and lots of half-stories. You have a few stories that have even reached what you once hoped was the end, but which turned out merely to have finished without having ever been completed.

What you need, you say, is discipline.

I’ll call you the Starter.

Or is this you?

You have a project – it is the thing that made you want to write in the first place. It is your story (not necessarily your life story, although it might be). You need to tell this story, and so you began quite a few years ago; and ever since – with brief holidays, or on brief courses – you have been engaged upon trying to write this damn thing whilst also trying to learn how to write this damn thing whilst also (you now admit) trying to learn how to write.

What you need, you say, is an editor.

I’ll call you the Middler.

Or is this you?

You have novels that are completed, several of them. You have written them sincerely, start to finish, with moments of enthusiasm and breakthrough and weeks of doggedness and calculation, but they haven’t done anything for you. Their readers, these novels, have been polite, have praised this bit or that bit, but no-one has ever taken you and lifted you out of your unwanted, unpublished life and into the glory of authorship.

What you need, you say, is a publisher.

I’ll call you the Ender.

Virtues

In themselves Starting, Middling and Ending are all good and necessary things to do.

Without the ideas and enthusiasm of the Starter, there aren’t any stories.

If there’s no deeper commitment, such as that of the Middler to their book, then there are only empty deadlines and novels that are really journalism.

And the Ender has the greatest of all a novelist’s possible virtues, stubbornness.

The truth is, you have probably, at one time, been both a Starter and a Middler. Enders are rarer, because not everyone is able to free themselves enough time to complete a novel. The father is pushing a buggy toward the sandpit. The cab driver is picking up her fares. Life constantly happens and art is constantly deferred.

If I were to choose any of these types as the one most likely to develop into a short story writer, I would choose the Starter.

If I were to choose one as a future writer of non-fiction, it would be the Middler.

And for a future writer of novels, it would be the Ender.

It is almost certain that what they lack (or you, if you are one of them) is a clear understanding of what makes a story, and an even clearer understanding of what doesn’t make a story.

Which is where we’re going next week.

Writing and Shit – Part 0 – You’re in the shit, admit it.

No, the Title Wasn’t Just

for the Sake of the Rhyme

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Shit.

The shit.

You’re in the shit – admit it.

Lots of writing manuals (yes, this is a writing manual) begin by addressing a virgin subject – a person who has always wanted to write and now has found the time to commit to buying a manual that will give them some idea how to begin and (if they get their money’s  worth) how to continue for a while, until they give up.

This is not you – you are not this.

No, you are someone who has come to this blog out of exhaustion or desperation or self-hate or a moment of genuine humility.

It’s possible you have read numerous blogs about writing, and yet you’ve still recently found yourself back in the shit.

In fact you’ve become, as the sixties’ song has it, King Midas in Reverse. Not only are you in the shit but everything you touch, in the hope of dragging yourself out of the shit and onto some solid, unbrown, unstinky ground, itself turns instantly to shit.

I could be polite, and call it something else that really means what the s-word means – mire, midden, crap. But I am aiming, in this blog, to be honest and direct.

To say someone is in the mire is to pretend to turn them into a medieval peasant. The moment for being medieval is long gone (there may still be a moment for pretending to be medieval, but not within the time scheme of this blog).

If I am speaking to another writer who has been generous enough to ask me where I am with my latest project, and I answer by saying, ‘Well, I’m really in it,’ they will know I mean the shit and they will know what the shit means.

In the shit means –

total, universal, molecular doubt –

doubt that appears to undermine any hope of progress or even of indicating that time is passing.

Writers can easily appear self-pitying to non-writers. This is where we live, this shitty doubt; we live on intermittent islands of fertility reached by noxiously epic journeys through wastes of the slubby brown stuff.

Writing is a product of your body and, like any product of your body, it is a thing that – when you come back to it after a gap of time – is likely to disgust and distress you. (The teenage jar of nail-clippings, rediscovered in your twenties. Eugh!)

So I am not talking to anyone who is just beginning and whose only problem is what kind of nice paper to buy and what kind of nice pen or paper to use or, more likely, what helpful software within which to open up a blank document upon which flatteringly stickered laptop within which coffee shop.

You already have a history, my writing friend, and it’s not a pretty one.

But what kind of writer are you? Think about that, ahead of next week.

Write a one page sketch of how you tend to write, and in what kind of shit you usually get stuck.

Writing and Shit – Intro

I’ve written a writing manual, and I’m going to serialise it here.

It’s called Writing and Shit by Toby Litt.

It’ll be weekly. It’ll be free. It’ll include exercises. And you can help me a lot – if you think you can learn something from it – by commenting on what you found useful and what you thought skippable.

I am going to cover roughly what I cover in the first term of the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck College. And I’m going to draw on all that I’ve learned from the students, and from what they most frequently ask of me, secretly want from me, and unwittingly need from me.

Thank you to my students.

 

9 Ways to Guarantee Your Novel Will Be Published

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If you can’t do Step 9 immediately, go back to Step 8. If you can’t do that, go back to Step 7, and so on.

9. Get a Publisher

Your typescript is ready to go. It’s just great. You can do nothing more to improve it. Your Agent (see 8) agrees. Send it out in full confidence. Await contract.

8. Get an Agent

Your typescript is ready to go. You by yourself can do nothing more to improve it, not that you can see. Send it off to a carefully selected Agent or five, and hope. (Or, if you’ve already tried all the Agents you can think of, try small presses directly.)

7. Tell a Great Story

By great story, I don’t necessarily mean twisty thrillery post-apocalyptic S/M love triangle with car chases and nukes. I mean something that will bear re-reading as well as reading. Something that changed you as you wrote it, and will change readers as they read it (not in a schmaltzy way). Something that can fascinate someone who has read a lot of stories. Something with grain as well as heft.

6. Learn to Tell a Great Story

You can only do this by writing not-great stories, thinking they’re great, going back to them, realising they’re not, starting again. Many times. Getting past number 6 may take you years, or decades. Or you may never make it past. Or you may skip from 4 to 8. Some lucky/unlucky writers do. But there is no wasted effort. Just as there are no short cuts. Frequent returns to 0 are necessary.

5. Learn What a Great Story Is

Read the books that trouble other writers. Read Ulysses. Read Emma. Read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Read My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Be troubled. Read the stories that it’s hard to recover from. Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’, John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’, Lorrie Moore’s ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’. Then recover from them, somewhat.

4. Learn to Tell a Story Quite Well

This might involve taking a Creative Writing MA or MFA, or joining a local writing group, but it might also be you, at home, or in any warm place you can find, figuring out the basics of taking the reader by the hand, not squeezing too tight, not letting go, not dissolving it in acid and cackling with manic laughter, but leading them to where they didn’t expect to go.

3. Learn What a Good Story Is

Read. Read anything. Then read some more. Then re-read. Then read what has been written about the thing you just read. Then fall completely under the influence of a writer you’ve discovered for three months or more. Then hate them. Then sneakily look at them again, years later, and realise they do have some virtues. Every good writer is a great reader.

2. Learn to Tell a Story Badly

This can be difficult. Try to revel in being incompetent. Look around and figure out what most annoys you in the work of writers you don’t like. Have a go at doing what they do, but with glee and manic energy. Then read this out to a couple of friends. Then leave it behind forever. Time for 3.

1. Learn to Punctuate and to Present Your Work Attractively

If you don’t do both these things, you stand a very small chance of being published. You will get better at both if you pay attention whilst doing 3. (If you are dyslexic, or have other issues with punctuation and presentation, use grammar- and spellcheck. Get someone to proofread your work. Don’t think it’s not important, or that someone will do this for you later, because they’re so impressed by your storytelling.)

0. Have patience.

 

 

 

Impatience – A short story

Today, some good news – a short story of mine, ‘Impatience,’ has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. It’s the impatient version of my novel, Patience, which will come out in August 2019.

The story is very similar, in both, but also – I hope – radically different. Readers who are curious about it can choose to be patient or impatient.

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I feel differently about this story to others I’ve written. It seems, to me, in either short story or novel form, just about the best thing I’ve done.

Not just written, done.

This is largely because I was visited by Elliott, a once-in-a-lifetime narrator who is nicer, wiser and generally better than I am. He is also a lot more patient – as he needs to be, given his circumstances.

If you would like to meet Elliott, he’s waiting here. (This is an extract from the novel, not the short story. So, you’re being patient.)