Toby Litt's Blog, page 6

Starting to Write 5 – Repairing your stories (Lockdown version)

Welcome back.

I have already given you my definition of a story –

A story is about someone

dealing with something

that isn’t where it should be.

And you have begun writing the nothing draft of a story. You have two characters who have found something. You have another character (the one in disguise) who is going to reappear next Lesson. Now you need to make something happen.

Here we come to what needs to happen in a story for it to pick up energy. Here’s my suggestion:

A story needs to have one thing go wrong,

then another thing to go more wrong.

Very often, stories which don’t last very long, or don’t feel very complete, run something like this –

A character is having a normal day. She encounters a problem. Somehow, she works out a way to solve the problem. The story ends.

Chaos is allowed out of the box, briefly, then put back in the box.

Now think about this.

A character is having a normal day. She encounters a problem. Using her qualities as a person, she tries to work out a way to solve the problem. But in doing so she creates two new problems. Both the new problems are more serious than the original problem, and both need to to be dealt with immediately. The story continues.

Watch Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Mickey Mouse.

 

If Mickey was successful the first time he tried to chop the mop up, there would be no story.

Now think about what happens in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Cell One’, the story that was last Lesson’s reading. Think about how things go wrong, and then more wrong, and then even more wrong for the brother. If he didn’t go to jail, it wouldn’t be such a good story. If he didn’t do as he does once in jail, it wouldn’t be a great story.

You must allow your stories to expand, by having things in them go wrong and then more wrong.

The next bit is a very important piece of advice:

Don’t panic if the story seems to be running out of your control. That’s exactly what you want it to do.

Unless a story excites you, it’s unlikely to excite the reader. Very often, the moment in writing the story when you think ‘Oh, crap, that just can’t happen’ is the moment at which the reader will think ‘Oh great, now something’s really happening!’

EXERCISE 11

Write a scene in which your two characters, the child and the grown-up, get in a car. Describe the car in one sentence. Then say how they set off with the something on the back seat. Have them talk about where they are going. Who are they going to meet? What are they going to do with the something?

Then have the car break down. This is the first thing going wrong.

The child and the grown-up disagree about what to do next. They are only a short distance from where they were heading. Do they walk or don’t they?

Have the child and the grown-up start walking along the road. They need to stay on the road. Then you need to invent the second thing that goes wrong –  the thing that goes more wrong.

Say what that thing is. Show it vividly to the reader.

When you’ve finished, write the word ‘Driving’ at the top of this page. That’s what we’re calling this scene.

Take as long as you need. Remember to include lots of dialogue. Read back over what you’ve written.

Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why this day?

The story you are writing is not meant to be a great story, or even a good story. It’s meant to be a useful story.

Perhaps you’ve started to care about the child and the grown-up, but the purpose of you writing about them in this way is to get you writing in a more supple, energetic way.

When you come to write a story of your own, it may be more downbeat. However I suggest that even in stories that apparently have very little action in them, you will find that things go wrong, and wrong again. At the very least, they go beyond the routine.

When you’re writing a story, you always need to be able to answer the question –

Why this day?

Usually the answer is one of two things –

This is the day on which someone’s life changed.

Or –

This is the day on which someone’s life might have changed but didn’t.

Stories are about change or the chance of change.

There are exceptions to this but they are usually to do with the writing itself being where the change takes place, or that the change takes place within the reader as they are reading.

 

READING 5

Read Flannery O’Connor’s short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find‘.

Think about the voice the story is being told in. How does that voice treat the characters it is describing? Could any of the characters within the story tell the story as well as the third person narrator?

 

You can go straight to Lesson 6.

(Not yet Lockdown version from this point on. Soon will be.)

 

 

 

 

 

Starting to Write 4 – Writing better dialogue (Lockdown version)

Dialogue. Does it give you the fear?

It gives a lot of writers the fear.

It’s something many writers – even fairly experienced ones – either avoid or rush.

For one thing, it can be hard to see how to rewrite dialogue. If a character has something to say, don’t they just blurt it out? And if you – the writer – mess around with how they say it, isn’t that cheating?

The Exercises you’re going to do today are designed to help you write more dialogue, and to write better dialogue.

You’re going to need the pages you’ve already written in front of you.

Last time, using your pseudonym, you wrote about a child and a grown-up finding something. I asked you to make sure they disagreed about what to do next.

Obviously, if you have two characters who agree about everything they may as well be one character.

But two characters who disagree can open up your stories in a way that gives them much more energy –  and so makes them easier to write.

However, it’s very very easy to write bad dialogue.

In fact, why don’t you do that now?

EXERCISE 7

On a new piece of paper, write the worst dialogue you can imagine. Remember, you’re not doing this as yourself, you’re doing it under your pseudonym – you’re doing it as the  writer you invented in the first Lesson.

Take as long as you need.

Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is bad dialogue?

Usually when I ask people to do this exercise, they write one of a few kinds of dialogue. They write deliberately boring dialogue (often in a realist novel style).

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine. How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

Or, they write deliberately overwritten dialogue (often in a parody romantic fiction style).

‘My darling, your eyes look like the most brilliantined diamonds ever dug from the mines of Africa.’

‘Oh, my dear, your muscles are throbbing with the desire you clearly feel for me deep in the foetid caves of your passionate soul.’

Or, they write deliberately overinformative dialogue (often in a thriller style).

‘Have we traced the B-X425 nuclear missile to its hidden lair in deepest Slaka?’

‘Yes, our agent Kayleigh Williams-Grace achieved this for us at oh four hundred hours precisely.’

‘Good, then we can proceed with our plan to overwhelm our enemies by a surprise attack at oh nine hundred hours precisely.’

Often, when people read these deliberately bad dialogues out in class, they get lots of laughs.

In fact, they get a reaction that suggests the dialogue isn’t bad because it’s good for making people laugh.

The Opposite

Let’s pause for a moment.

In this Exercise, I asked you to write the worst dialogue you could come up with, and to do it as a writer who isn’t you. I hope that made it easy.

At the very least, it made it easier than if you I had asked you the opposite – to write the best dialogue you could come up with, and to do it publicly, as yourself.

Often the best way to write well is to take the pressure off yourself by thinking, ‘Of course this isn’t me doing my absolute best, it’s just me trying something out – for the sake of it.’

I have found that using a pseudonym can often free writers up amazingly.

If it’s useful to you, keep using your pseudonym throughout these Lessons. If not, you can now put it to one side and pick it up again when you feel like it.

Just don’t obsess in your nothing drafts about being yourself. Sometimes it’s a lot easier not to be.

Don’t think ‘How do I want this story to go? What would be the best I can do?’ Think ‘How could this story go? What would be exciting?’

The Good Stuff

You’re now going to do three exercises each of which has a different idea of what’s behind good dialogue.

EXERCISE 8

Write a dialogue in which those two characters of yours (child and adult) are arguing over what to do with the something they have found.

Make sure that with each new line they say, the conflict between them escalates.

They must never say anything to agree with or placate the other person. Each line raises the stakes.

When you’ve finished, write the word ‘Arguing’ at the top of this page. That’s what we’re calling this scene.

Take as long as you need. Don’t write more than a page.

Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WINNING DIALOGUE

The idea behind Winning dialogue is Power.

What’s important is that all the people speaking are trying to come out top dog.

Watch this famous climactic scene from A Few Good Men for an example of Power dialogue.

Both of the characters here (Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a military lawyer, played by Tom Cruise and Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson) are trying to win the scene. Kaffee wants to force Jessep to admit something he’s been concealing. Jessep wants to get through the trial but also to be true to his values. Their exchanges become more and more challenging and intense. They shout louder and louder. They get closer to the real issues between them. ‘I think you’re a monster.’ ‘I think you’re not fit to be a soldier.’ And when it comes, the rhetoric of Jessep’s long speech seems crushing. But the final win, which is Kaffee’s, is wordless. Jessep has betrayed himself, and will shortly be arrested.

EXERCISE 9

Write a dialogue in which your two characters are both trying to disguise what they really want from the other one. This doesn’t have to be directly related to the something they’ve found. It can be about practical or emotional needs.

Make sure that this is revealed to the reader by the characters’ evasions and inconsistencies.

Each character suspects the truth of the other one, and tries to probe them to reveal it.

Again, take as long as you need.

Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HIDING DIALOGUE

The idea behind Hiding dialogue is Fear.

What’s important is that all the people speaking are trying to keep something secret.

Watch this scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral for an example of Hiding dialogue.

Both Charles, played by Hugh Grant, and Carrie, played by Andie MacDowell, are trying to hide how much they feel for one another, because they are afraid the other doesn’t feel it too. They hide their feelings, paradoxically, by speaking an exaggerated, parody version of what they feel. Carrie would like a sign of commitment from Charles, so she says she expects a marriage announcement. Charles, who is just waking up, is afraid that he might just get what he secretly wants (to have a serious relationship with Carrie). But he’s not up to speed, so he plays along until he realises it’s a joke. They both have moments when they come close to speaking the truth (Charles: ‘That is a tragedy.’ Carrie: ‘But I think we both missed a great opportunity here.’)

Interlude

Before we come to the next exercise, take a break. And while you’re doing that, try to think about what the third kind of dialogue might be?

If Winning dialogue is about power and Hiding dialogue is about fear, what could be the thing that is behind a different kind of dialogue.

EXERCISE 10

Write a dialogue in which one of your two characters isn’t really listening to the other.

Make sure that this is revealed to the reader by that character’s replies not really meeting up with what has just been said.

Each character is following their own line of thoughts.

They are talking at cross-purposes.

Again, take as long as you need.

Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IGNORING DIALOGUE

The idea behind Ignoring dialogue is Ego.

What’s important is that all the people speaking are only giving the others a small percentage of their attention. The rest is spent on thinking their own thoughts.

Watch this scene from Some Like It Hot.

 

For much of the scene Jerry, being Daphne, played by Jack Lemmon, isn’t listening to Joe, played by Tony Curtis. She’s following her own thoughts of marriage to Osgood Fielding III. The comedy comes from how her answers follow her line of thought, rather than engaging with what Joe is insisting is the reality of the situation. Finally, Joe manages to break through and Daphne becomes Jerry. But the end of the film reveals that Joe’s assumptions are pretty much all wrong, and Daphne’s ‘deluded’ version of reality was closer to the truth. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

The Opposite Again

Bad dialogue, to me, comes when no winning no hiding no ignoring is going on. If the characters are in complete agreement or close to it, they are being entirely honest or close to it and they are listening as hard as they possibly can or close to it – if all this is the case, what can they possibly say?

‘Yes.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Amazing.’

People do have conversations like this. But if you overheard one on the bus, you’re not likely to tune in for long. But if two people are tearing chunks out of one another, you might just say on the bus an extra stop.

Chekhov

Last time, I asked you to read ‘Lady with a Dog’ by Anton Chekhov. This is a great short story. There are multiple somethings that are somewhere they shouldn’t be. One of the main examples of this is when the two characters, Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna are first alone together in a private room.

“It’s wrong,” she said. “You will be the first to despise me now.”

There was a water-melon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of silence.

Anna Sergeyevna was touching; there was about her the purity of a good, simple woman who had seen little of life. The solitary candle burning on the table threw a faint light on her face, yet it was clear that she was very unhappy.

 

READING 4

I would like you to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s story ‘Cell One‘.

Think about how the character of the brother is deepened.

What tiny significant details do we get about him?

What are his big significant actions?

 

You can go straight to Lesson 5.

(Not yet Lockdown version from this point on. Soon will be.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starting to Write 3 – How to make sure your stories keep going (Lockdown Version)

Very often, people start writing stories but stop after a page or two. There’s nothing wrong with that if what’s been told is a complete story.

There are types of short story that are very short. You can find them online as ‘flash fiction’. The Amy Hempel story, ‘Housewife‘, is just one sentence long.

But many stories a couple of pages long feel incomplete. Not enough has changed for the characters or the reader. Or both have lost energy.

From now on, I would like you to make sure that this doesn’t happen to your stories.

So, I am going to give you some Rules. When writing a story, during the time you’re doing the Writing Course, you must stick to the Rules.

Rule 1

Your story must contain at least two people.

Rule 2

Your two people must be very different from each other.

Rule 3

Your two people must make decisions by talking.

 

You’re now going to begin a story, using Exercises 3, 4 and 5 from the last Lesson. You already have someone, somewhere and something. Get them where you can see them.

EXERCISE 6

There’s only one Exercise in this Lesson, but it has several stages. When you’ve finished, you should have another page of your story.

I want you to put the someone to one side. They will come in later. For now, I want you to look again at the something and the somewhere. This is the basis of your story – but what you’ve written are just notes. A nothing draft.

For this exercise, you are going to have two new people, two new someones. I want you to make one of them a child and the other a grown-up.

You’re not writing the whole story now. You’re not even thinking of writing a whole story. You’re just making a beginning that needs to go on.

You will begin by describing what the child and the grown-up look like as they walk or wheel along together through the somewhere.

You are using the third person past tense, so you say ‘They were’ and ‘He saw’ and ‘She thought’. You don’t use ‘I’. Have some fun. Write for a few sentences.

Have the child and the grown-up walk through the somewhere, then have the child find the something. No need to describe the something. You’ve already done that. Instead you describe the different reactions to the something of the child and the grown-up.

Make sure they speak throughout this. Don’t worry if the dialogue is a bit clunky, just keep them talking.

Then, and this is the most important part, you have them talk about what they’re going to do with the something – and they must disagree. One wants to do one thing. One wants to do another.

That’s all. That’s as far as you need to go today. Re-read these instructions, then start.

Take as long as you need. Don’t write more than an A4 page, though.

When you’ve finished, write the word ‘Finding’ at the top of the page. That’s what we’re calling this scene.

Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Opposite

Why have I been restrictive? Why have I given you these three rules?

Well, because I have written and read so many stories that didn’t go very far, or weren’t very interesting, because they were about the opposite.

A story with a single main character, on their own, with no-one to speak to, and no-one to disagree with, is much harder to keep going than a story with two characters who speak and disagree.

I hope that, on finishing this exercise, you felt a bit of a desire to keep going. There’s more to be shown, more to be said. This is a good feeling to have.

Lydia Davis

Last time, you read Lydia Davis’ short story ‘In a Hotel Room in Ithaca‘. Have another look at it.

In this story there are two someones, or three if you count Socrates. There’s the narrator and there’s April, the housekeeper. The somewhere is a flat surface next to a coffee-maker in Ithaca. The something is the piece of paper. The some time is just the implied time of picking up and reading the note.

What’s where it shouldn’t be? On first reading, I would say it’s the smiley face. The detail of the smiley face next to a quote from Socrates makes the note remarkable – and comic.

On a second reading, it’s April who is where she shouldn’t be. If she’s quoting Socrates, why is she working as a housekeeper?

But then, ultimately, perhaps it’s the narrator staying in a Greek hotel room who is where she shouldn’t be. She doesn’t expect housekeepers to quote Socrates. It surprises her. Perhaps it shouldn’t. Perhaps her view of the world needs to expand.

Your interpretation of the story may be different to mine. I hope you’ll see how it depends on the four needed things – someone, somewhere, something and some time.

George Saunders

You also read George Saunders story ‘Sticks‘. Even though it’s very short, it includes lots of different elements. It manages to get a man’s life and a whole load of American culture. Like the first story, the more you think about it the deeper it gets.

The story obeys Rule 1 and Rule 2 very clearly. Rule 3, it dodges. Dialogue is absent. Words seem not to be important. But then they suddenly appear, and the change between ‘LOVE’ and ‘FORGIVE?’ is huge. The silent man, who speaks through his metal pole, has finally resorted to language.

If you were driving past this house, you would probably slow down. That’s a good test of a story – would it draw your attention, in real life?

There is a big difference between the father and the children, referred to as ‘we’, and between the father and the young couple. That final difference ends the story.

Note how every sentence moves the story forwards. Nothing here is just a description.

READING 3

I would like you to read the story Lady with Lapdog by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov.

Please think about how it relates to my definition of a story –

A story is about someone who is somewhere they shouldn’t be.

Thanks for following the course.

If you feel like it, please tell other people about it.

 

You can go straight to Lesson 4.

 

 

 

 

 

Starting to Write 2 – What does a story need? (Lockdown Version)

Exceptions

I’m going to be making some strong statements about how stories work and what they they need.

There are exceptions. There are always exceptions. I know this. And you can spend your time trying to think of exceptions. ‘But what about…?’

Or, you can take my statements on trust. You can try them in your own stories. And then you can come back to them later, and pick and choose what you need from them.

But for the moment I’m keeping things as direct as I can, and so I won’t always be saying ‘but…’

Four Things

This time, you’re going to be doing three exercises – gathering together three of the things a story can’t do without.

But I’m going to start you off by giving you one of the four things for free:

The fourth thing a story needs is time.

If no time is passing, it’s very hard for anything to happen. But, in fact, time passes in every sentence you write – because it has a beginning, middle and end. Even a long paragraph just describing a statue or a painting moves in time. So, time is inevitable. You get time for free, too.

Not You

One of the main things you’ll be doing, throughout these Lessons, is getting yourself out of the way of your writing. And so although you’re going to be drawing on your ideas and memories, you’re not going to be writing about them as you.

So, before you start, write the pseudonym you came up with in the last Lesson at the bottom of the page. That’s the name of your invented writer who isn’t you. These three Exercises belong to them, not you.

Third Person Past Tense

For each of these three Exercises you’re going to be using the third person past tense.

The reason you are writing all three exercises in the third person past tense is so they fit together easily when they’re done.

If you’re not certain about what third person past tense means, read the next bit. If you know exactly, skip down to where it says EXERCISE 3.

The third person means you don’t begin sentences ‘I’ or ‘We’, you begin them ‘He’ or ‘She’ or ‘They’ or ‘It’.

You’re writing in the past tense.

The past tense talks about things that have already happened. For example, ‘She went…’ or ‘He saw…’

EXERCISE 3

Write a description of an object that is extremely desirable. The object must be one that you could pick up and carry. Write five or six sentences, double spaced.

Careful: Before you start, make sure you stop yourself from writing ‘I’. This isn’t an exercise where you say, ‘I saw this diamond ring’. It needs to describe the diamond ring as if it were already in a story.

So, for example, ‘The diamond in the ring was as big as a little toe.’ But don’t give a situation. Just describe the object itself, as if there was nothing else around it.

Take as long as you need to do this Exercise.

Write each Exercise on a separate side of A4 paper.

When you’re finished, scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EXERCISE 4

Write a description of a place you knew well in the past but to which you can’t return. Write five or six sentences.

Again, be careful: You yourself are not in this Exercise. The place is described like a place in a story. Not, ‘I remember you could get into the garden through a hole in the wall.’ But ‘There was a hole in the wall halfway down the garden.’

Double spaced.

When you’re finished, scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EXERCISE 5

Write a description of a person who is wearing a disguise. Make them up from your imagination. Write four or five sentences.

Good. You’ve finished with the exercises for a while. Relax. You’ve now got all four elements of a short story in place.

Now scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What does a story need?

You did those Exercises without knowing where they were leading. Well done if you didn’t peek ahead.

Here is my simple definition of what a story needs –

A story needs someone, somewhere, something and some time.

Did you get any of these when you listed the four things a story needs? Did you say character or setting? If so, well done. You were on track.

I have tried to reduce the four elements to their simplest form. So, ‘someone’ rather than ‘a character’. Someone can include robot or dog.

If you take away any of these elements, a story becomes incredibly difficult to tell. You either have someone floating in a void, or somewhere without a character there to do anything.

When you have all four of the elements, you can write stories of finding, losing, leaving behind, hiding. Lots of good story stuff.

Now, here is my definition of a story –

A story is about someone who is somewhere they shouldn’t be.

This can also run:

A story is about something that is somewhere it shouldn’t be.

 To understand this better, you can flip it around –

If everything is in its routine place, there isn’t a story.

When I said ‘shouldn’t be’, I don’t mean morally. (Though stories are often about people doing bad things.) And I’m not implying disapproval. What I mean is more like, they would normally be somewhere else. If you prefer you could think of it like this, A story is about something that is out of place.

Stories (usually) are the opposite of routines. Stories aren’t about the day on which nothing happened. They’re about that day – the day on which something different happened. Very often, they’re about the day on which something changed forever.

Your Story

Your first story, which you’ve started without even knowing it, goes like this –

One day, there was a person. Here’s what they were like.

Read aloud your Exercise 1 – the someone.

They were wandering around. What they saw was this.

Read aloud your Exercise 2 – the somewhere.

They looked down and saw something. What could it be?

Read aloud you Exercise 3 – the something.

Now think about this –

If, instead of doing today’s Exercises, I had asked you just to start writing a story, you might have begun by describing a person going through their usual routine. Getting up in the morning. Going to their usual place. You would be giving a reader a sense of who they were and what they did.

Would that person doing that stuff be more or less intriguing than the story you’ve come up with, without thinking about it? 

Hemingway

Before we finish, let’s go back to the story you read last time. Where are the four elements in that?

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Well, the something is obvious. It’s the baby shoes.

The somewhere is harder to find. We don’t have a description of a place. But several places are implied. There’s the newspaper in which the advert appears. That counts as a place. There’s also the place the baby shoes are being kept – a box in an apartment, perhaps. There are other places, but two will do for the moment.

Finally, there is someone. Perhaps more than one someone. These people are implied, but they are easy enough to imagine. There is the person who placed the advert – the mother or father or other person related to the baby who did not live long enough to use the shoes. There is also the imagined reader of the advert.

What makes this six words a story?

I would say, very simply, it’s the someone who is somewhere they shouldn’t be.

The baby should be alive, in the world, and it’s not.

The shoes should be on its feet, and they’re not.

The more you think about it, the sadder it becomes – and all from six words.

READING 2

Read ‘In a Hotel Room in Ithaca‘ by Lydia Davis. It’s a very short story.

Read ‘Sticks‘ by George Saunders. It’s a slightly longer story.

In both stories, think about the someone, the somewhere and the something – are they where they should be? What is out of place?

Think about how time moves forward.

Think about what is and isn’t routine.

 

If you like, you can go straight to Lesson 3.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starting to Write 1 – Preparing to Write (Lockdown version)

I have to things to say to you:

There are no short cuts.

and

There are no wasted hours. 

So, let’s begin.

What do you need to start writing?

Well, you’re looking at these words on a phone or computer – and you could use that. But for lots of reasons, I believe it’s better to write with pen or pencil on A4/US Letter paper. At least for nothing drafts.

I’m calling them ‘nothing drafts’ rather than ‘first drafts’ because they’re not as scary as first drafts. They are just something you write, when you begin writing, and they are meant to be a mess. You really must not worry about crossings out, second thoughts and what you might be in danger of thinking of as ‘mistakes’.

There are no mistakes. There’s just getting stuff down on paper.

Everything you write in your nothing draft is for you. You’re the only one who ever has to read it or understand it. As long as you can read back the words you’ve written, everything’s fine.

The first advice I’m going to give you is this: Double-space your writing.

Right from the beginning, only write on every other line.

Why?

Well, doing this gives you more room to put in changes and new sentences than if you write on every single line. It also gives you a feeling of making faster progress. This is a page from one of my stories –

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I hope you can see where I’ve written new sentences in between the first lot of sentences. They appear in the double-space gap, because that’s what the gap is for. The page is welcoming to new stuff. It doesn’t make you feel bad for making changes. You’ll probably need to make lots of changes. Not always, but most of the time.

Next Lesson, you’ll start on a story.

For now, I’d like you to do a couple of writing exercises.

EXERCISE 1

Invent a pseudonym.

On your first blank page, write down some random made-up names. Have fun with them. Make them a bit over the top. Just let your brain come up with anything. First names and surnames.

Now, from among these put together the name of a writer (not a real writer who actually exists) – make up the name of an invented writer you can write as.

For example, I once wrote something under the name ‘Alex Warden’. That was my pseudonym.

Don’t worry if you don’t like the first name you come up with. Come up with a few, then choose the one that you like.

Take as long as you need.

That’s all.

Before the next Lesson, I’d like you to read and re-read the story below. It probably wasn’t written by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, but is often spoken of as if it was. (Details here.)

Warning: It is very sad.

READING 1

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

That’s a short story. A famous short story.

Before next time, think about these questions:

Why is *that* a short story?

What does a story need?

What can’t a story do without?

EXERCISE 2

Write down four things a story needs.

Think simple.

 

If you like, you can go straight to Lesson 2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starting to Write – A Free 10-Part Course (Lockdown Version)

Do you want to learn about writing?

You’re in the right place.

This is a free writing course for complete beginners, or those who have written a bit but want to go back to the start – because they know they need to get better.

Now is exactly the right time for you to give writing a go. Your usual excuses – mostly likely – no longer apply. You’re indoors. You have a bit more time than you normally do. Perhaps a lot more time. In this course, I will try and help you put that time to the best use.

In 10 Lessons, I will take you through the basics of writing short stories – just as if you were sitting among the other beginning writers in the Creative Writing workshop I run at Birkbeck College, London.

I’ve been teaching at Birkbeck over 10 years. Over that time, many of the Creative Writing MA students I’ve taught have gone on to get agents, to get published, and to win competitions.

All that’s great. But much more importantly each and every one of them, whatever their level to start with, has improved as a writer – and as a reader.

You won’t need to buy any books. Hopefully, you won’t even need to buy any stationery.  Lesson 1 will deal with Preparing to Write. (It will also involve a bit of writing.)

All the reading materials are available online. And, when possible, I link to videos as well as to stories.

There will be writing Exercises, and there will be some Reading. Each Lesson should take you around an hour to complete – but this may vary, depending on how fast a writer you are.

If you want to get the most out of the course, it’s best to go through it one lesson per day – and, even if you miss a couple of days, to pick up where you left off.

The Lessons are all online right now. There’s no need to sign up.

I look forward to helping you learn to write better stories.

Toby

Go straight to Lesson 1.

Lilian’s Spell Book – free on Kindle for the next five days

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I wrote Lilian’s Spell Book to be a really gripping supernatural adventure story, a Chinese box of a haunted house mystery, and a study of a normal family in a very weird place.

Here’s a plot summary:

Lilian’s Spell Book is a paranormal adventure novel about an ordinary English family – mother, father, pre-teen son, baby daughter – who inherit an extraordinary house. They move to this vast Elizabethan mansion in rural Sussex from their small South London maisonette. Very soon, they all find out their new home is haunted. But it is the mother of the family, the unnamed narrator, who begins to suspect that the secret to the house lies in the Elizabethan portrait that hangs in a room just off the vast entrance hall – a glittering, gorgeous oil painting showing the proud, red-haired Lilian holding in her hand a small leather-bound book. But the real wonders start when the narrator discovers the book itself, in the secret library of the mansion. Lilian’s father was an alchemist…

And here’s the opening couple of chapters:

In the very heart of the fire – I could see it clearly – there stood a figure. I thought for one mad moment that it must be my husband, and that he must be burning to death. But the figure stood there, quite calm, quite still, completely unaffected by the furnace-like blaze surrounding them. I could see them through the open doorway that, for some reason, wasn’t burning. The fire did not come that far.

Perhaps I should be clearer. This was not a figure made of flames. This was the outline of a figure where the bright flames left a darker gap. And the gap went all the way to the bricks of the far wall. It was almost as if there were a person-shaped tunnel running through the whole infernal room, from front to back. And there was nothing there to burn, I was sure. This room of our house was totally empty. It was the air itself that seemed to be on fire.

The light from the burning room scorched into the backs of my eyes. How long before the fire spread? How long before our beautiful old wooden dreamhouse was razed to the ground? But still I didn’t turn and run. Still I stared into the light.

I knew this figure. With every passing second, I was surer of that.

I knew her, and I knew she had a message for me.

As I watched, she put her left hand out and beckoned me towards her. Of course she was left-handed! – I’d known that all along.

It was madness but I felt certain that she wouldn’t let me come to harm. It was a while since I had started to trust her. But did I trust her enough to trust her with my life?

Of course I hesitated. Nobody wants want to die like this. Nobody wants to be burnt alive. What I was about to do was against all reason.

Reason, though, was something I had given up on or which had given up on me quite some time before.

I nodded to her.

The figure beckoned me again.

I moved forwards, to the edge of the flames.

I could see her better now. My eyes seemed to be getting used to the bright light. Was that a smile I could make out among the flames?

With a final thought for my husband, my children, I stepped over the threshold – into the heart of the burning room.

1.

It’s the sort of thing that only happens in books – a relative you haven’t thought about for years dies, their solicitors track you down, you’re called to a small, incredibly old-fashioned office and told you own a house you never even knew existed.

If it hadn’t happened to us, I really wouldn’t have believed it. But the solicitors were called Gibbons & Jump, and their old-fashioned office was at 17 Winchester Road, Worthing, and Peter and I went there for ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in May – taking baby Mary with us and leaving my parents to entertain six year-old Jack.

I breastfed Mary in the car before we went upstairs. She slept in my arms for most of the meeting, which lasted just under an hour. That was how long it took to change our lives completely.

The dead relative, Michael Francis Jonson, was a great uncle of Peter’s on his father’s side. That part of Peter’s family seemed to enjoy falling out over things, especially religious things. Michael Francis had been Catholic, and had taken it all extremely seriously. So much so that he refused to leave his house to anyone who wasn’t of the old faith. But most of his family was either wishy-washy Protestants or nothing much at all. (Michael Francis never got round to having children himself.) Even though Peter hadn’t been a practicing Catholic for years, he had gone through the rigmarole of conversion while at university. He said it was because he found the whole thing very glamorous, silly idiot. So, when Michael Francis Jonson decided he needed an heir, he had ordered his solicitors to search out one who was a proper Catholic, and Peter, I suppose, was the best they could come up with.

‘You don’t have a photograph?’ asked Peter, after Mr. Gibbon broke the news. Mr. Gibbon didn’t look like a gibbon. He looked like a grizzled chimpanzee.

‘I think you should go and see it for yourself,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘Then you can make up your mind about taking on the responsibilities, etcetera. It’s about half an hour from here. You could be back by teatime.’

I could tell this was the kind of office where teatime was still held sacred. Four o’clock, and not a minute after.

There was a silence.

‘Who gets it if we don’t take it?’ I asked.

‘The taxman,’ replied Mr. Gibbon, as if Peter and not me had asked the question. ‘Mr. Jonson would die intestate.’

If we took the house, he said, we would have to sign some papers, and agree to bring up any children of our own as Catholics – otherwise they’d be disinherited and lose the house, or any money from the sale of it. Also, we couldn’t just auction off the whole kit and caboodle.

The solicitor explained, very carefully, that this last bit was binding. ‘You will not be able take anything out of the house for the purpose of selling it – the furniture, paintings, even the crockery. It is all part of the estate, and must be maintained by you. Paintings can be loaned for exhibition, if they are properly insured. The building itself, of course, cannot be sold. Nor the land it is build upon. Nor any of the surrounding acreage. Either you own it, as the heirs of Mr. Jonson, or it passes to the state. The same conditions will apply to your children. However, there are outbuildings, some garages, a garden shed, and the same strictures do not apply to these properties and their contents as to the main house.’

‘Oh good,’ said Peter, ‘so we can sell the lawnmower.’

‘I am merely relating the terms of the will,’ said Mr. Gibbon.

‘I am merely saying that we can sell the lawnmower,’ said Peter. He was never able to take official people all that seriously. That was one of the reasons I loved him like I did.

‘I believe there is a lawnmower,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘And it would of course be yours to sell – though that might leave the gardener in some difficulties.’

‘Could we rent the house out, and live somewhere else?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘That is explicitly forbidden.’

Then he handed Peter the keys and a piece of paper with the address.

‘You’ll find an inventory of the contents in the middle drawer of the desk in Mr. Jonson’s study, rear room, left hand side.’

‘There’s no alarm?’ Peter asked.

‘No,’ said Mr. Gibbon. ‘It’s all rather old-fashioned.’ Which was rich, coming from him.

As soon as we were out on the street, Peter said, ‘I don’t like the bit about Mary and Jack having to be Catholic.’ It was a sunny morning. People whose lives were still the same walked past us with shopping bags in their hands.

The key was nothing special – just a dull brass Yale attached by a steel ring to a fob of new leather.

Peter held it up next to his ear and shook it like a bell.

‘I’m trying to hear money,’ he said.

I looked at him properly for the first time in a while. Blue eyes. Stubble. He was a bit of a scamp – could never get his dark hair to sit down properly. When we’d started going out I’d thought he was very attractive, but that I was the only person to see it. It wasn’t that Peter was the greatest looker; it was the energy he had inside him. Turns out, I wasn’t the only person to see it. At least one other did.

‘This is fun,’ I said, trying to clear those sad thoughts out of my head.

 

2.

My name is Jeane Jonson.

I’m an ordinary woman and I have an ordinary family, at least that’s what I thought. We lived ordinary, happy, suburban lives – in Tulse Hill, South London. Peter had his own business, creating and maintaining financial software for small companies. As for me, before I had the children, I’d been a schoolteacher at a primary school. I intended to go back part-time as soon as Mary was in nursery. We couldn’t afford for me not to work. We weren’t rich. We were as normal as normal gets. This inherited house was the first extraordinary thing that had even happened to us. Even Peter’s affair had been perfectly normal.

With the traffic, the drive took more than twice the half hour Mr. Gibbon had promised. Almost as soon as we started, Peter had to pull over so I could get in the back. Mary had woken up, and wouldn’t stop crying. She calmed down when she felt me beside her, and we set off again. Luckily, Peter had recently put Sat Nav in our car, so finding the village was easy. We had the postcode, and the solicitor had told us to follow the road down past the church. This went on for about a mile, only wide enough for one car, and with tall beech trees on either side. Here was where Mary decided to fall asleep again. She’s a very good baby – typical second child. Or at least the kind of second child everyone hopes for.

The road ended at a pair of tall black metal gates, beyond which was a gravel track curving round to the left. The gates were open.

Peter stopped the car and turned off the engine.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.

‘I need a moment or two,’ he said.

‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’

‘I’m just preparing myself for the full horror. It probably doesn’t even have a roof.’

‘Then we’ll get a roof put on. Anyway, Mr. Gibbon said there were paintings – and they wouldn’t just leave paintings open to the rain.’

Peter was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t want to force the children into anything that’s not good for them, Jeane. Not just for the sake of money.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘If we don’t like it, we don’t take it. Now, drive.’

He started the engine.

The track curved round to the left, then to the right, then left again. A thick wood surrounded us. Trees high over our heads made the inside of the car quite dark.

And then, without warning, the house was on top of us. Peter had to do an emergency stop, and the tyres skidded on the gravel. He pulled up a few inches short of a green garage door.

In front of the house there were only a couple of parking spaces, nothing more. No grand drive down an arcade of trees. The trees were growing very close, all around the tall two-storey building.

The jolt had woken Mary, who started to do her worst kind of cry. I picked her out of her backwards-facing car seat and cuddled her. She was three months old but chubbing up nicely. I was pleased about that. Jack had been just the same. They took after me, that was for certain.

‘Oh my God,’ I said.

‘Wow,’ said Peter.

‘Look at it,’ I said. ‘It’s a stately home.’

‘It is a bit over-the-top,’ said Peter. He was looking up at the black beams and white plaster of the building, and the diamond patterning in the glass of all the tall, narrow windows. This house definitely had a roof – with bells on. Three bells.

‘No decisions yet,’ I said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

To the sound of Mary’s screams, Peter put the key in the lock and turned it.

Even with a hard shove, the door wouldn’t open.

‘There’s another lock,’ said Peter.

He pushed the door at top and bottom.

‘Down there,’ he said, pointing. ‘I can’t see anything on the outside.’ Peter stepped back. ‘There isn’t even a deadlock.’

‘Perhaps there’s another door,’ I said.

‘But this is the front door, and Mr. Gibbon said the front door. And this key was the right one.’

‘Well, maybe someone’s in there.’

‘Who?’ asked Peter.

‘Let’s find out,’ I said.

If the house key wasn’t impressive, the doorknocker certainly was. It was shaped like the beak of a brass griffin, and when I let it slam home Mary – who had just quieted down a little – started screaming again.

‘Let me,’ said Peter, and banged on the door for a deafening minute.

Then we spent another minute stepping back from the house and squinting towards the upper windows. They were all of them closed, and it was only in my imagination that I saw anything moving behind them.

‘I’ll have a look round,’ said Peter. ‘See if there is another way in.’

He took the key from the door and started off round the right-hand side of the house.

I cradled Mary gently on my shoulder, stroking her back and telling her everything was all right. If she kept on crying, it meant I couldn’t try knocking on the door again – which I was going to, even though Peter wasn’t with me anymore.

It had been sunny on the road but the air around the house was very cold. The tall trees put it in a deep wind-shadow. The place had the still, secluded atmosphere of a pond waiting for its surface to be broken. Nowhere in London ever felt like this, and nothing in my life did, either.

I turned to go back to the car, and just then the front door cracked open.

‘That was quick,’ I said. But when I turned round, I didn’t see Peter.

The door was ajar by only an inch or so, a long line of darkness down its right-hand side.

‘Yes,’ said a female voice.

‘We’ve come to see the house,’ I said.

‘Well, you can’t see the house,’ said the voice.

‘Yes, we can,’ I said. ‘We’re the new owners.’

The door slammed shut. I heard a chain rattle and tap against the wood. The door opened wide.

‘Hello,’ said a woman of around fifty-five, stepping out into the dim light. ‘I’m Mrs. Forster. I do the housekeeping. I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘We’ve come straight from the solicitors,’ I said.

Mrs. Forster stepped closer. ‘And who is this little darling?’

‘Mary,’ I said.

‘And how old?’

‘Thirteen weeks,’ I said. ‘And a half.’

‘Oh, so young. What a sweetie.’

It’s hard not to be disarmed when people are nice about your children. Mrs. Forster had short, wavy brown hair that managed to shine even without sunlight to strike it. She was wearing what I’d call country clothes – a green cardigan over a cream shirt, tweedy skirt, green stockings and slippers.

‘I heard you knock the first time – I have very good hearing. But I was quite a long way away. Are you on your own?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘My husband is looking for another way in.’

‘Oh, he won’t find one,’ said Mrs. Forster. ‘The house is quite secure.’

‘There’s no back door, then?’

‘There are several other doors but none of them are used.’

Mrs. Forster was trying to intimidate me, by speaking very properly.

‘He’ll come back,’ I said. ‘Once he’s gone the whole way round.’

‘Oh, no. He can’t do that. There’s a path one way but the woods come right up to the wall on the other side.’

Mrs. Forster pointed towards the trees behind the garages. They were certainly dense.

‘We’ll go through the house,’ she said, ‘and try to catch him in the garden.’

I was reluctant to cross the threshold without Peter beside me. Not that I’m particularly superstitious. I’m not funny about ladders or broken mirrors or black cats. But, if this was going to be our new home, I wanted to enter it together. I was slightly annoyed that Jack wasn’t there, too. We did almost everything as a whole family.

‘Follow me,’ said Mrs. Forster, and went into the dark hallway.

After a moment more of hesitation, I obeyed – entering that strangest of places for the very first time.

My first impressions weren’t unpleasant. The hall was vast, with a double staircase zigzagging up at the far end. It smelt powerfully of wood and wood polish. The walls were done in tight, oblong panels, right up to the high ceiling where there hung, yes, a real chandelier. Not a crystal one. It, too, was made of wood.

Mrs. Forster switched on the lights and I was dazzled. Everything shone back at me. Jack would love this, sliding around in socks on the parquet. And I would spend my life expecting to fall over and crack a hip. Mrs. Forster certainly knew how to polish.

‘I don’t waste the electricity when I’m just by myself,’ she said. ‘This way.’

There were two wooden doors directly in front of us. They went underneath the stairways, which zagged out and then back in again to meet in the middle. Mrs. Forster turned the gleaming brass handle on the left-hand door and passed through. Over her shoulders, I could see daylight. It took us a little while to reach it, though. First there was a longish hallway, also wood-paneled, and with paintings in the dark on either side. Then there was a small cloakroom. Beyond that was a huge sitting room. I only had time to take in a very large and ornate fireplace to my right and, to my left, a grand piano. Heavy tapestry curtains hid the far wall – a bit moth-eaten, perhaps. There were some holes where beams of light shone through. Mrs. Forster was about to pull them back when a furious rattling started behind them.

‘That must be him,’ said Mrs. Forster, completely unfazed. I couldn’t say the same for myself.

She pushed aside the left-hand curtain. As it started to catch the light, I saw that it was a tapestry inlaid with golden thread. I recognized from the crab, the scorpion and the pair of little boys that it must be the signs of the zodiac.

Peter’s face moved back from the window, but not before I’d seen his mouth give a little gasp of surprise, or perhaps fear.

Mrs. Forster had now moved this curtain as far as it could go, and was walking across to push the other.

I carried Mary towards the brighter light. Beyond the glass was a beautiful walled garden with an ornamental fountain in the middle and rosebushes around the far edges. This was the moment I decided we should definitely move in.

‘Look,’ I said to Mary, and turned her round to see. ‘Daddy.’

He came up close to the glass and made a funny face at Mary, then caught sight of Mrs. Forster beside me.

‘Hello,’ he shouted.

‘Come in the front way,’ I shouted, pointing with my finger.

As Peter walked away from the window, I saw that the elbows of his best suit were bright green and the soles of his best shoes were spattered with mud.

We went back through the house to meet him. It took him longer than I expected for him to arrive – but, finally, there he was.

‘This is Mrs. Forster,’ I said, as he came into view. ‘The housekeeper.’

‘Not really,’ she started to say. ‘I live in the village – ’

But Peter had stepped into the house and, without meaning to, had made two muddy footprints on the spotless floor.

Mrs. Forster looked down in dismay.

‘Never mind,’ she said.

Peter apologized, and took off his shoes. The two footprints he left behind were very clear – like footprints in a cartoon.

‘Would you like me to show you around?’

‘Yes,’ said Peter, at the same moment as I said, ‘No.’ It wasn’t that I disliked Mrs. Forster, or found her creepy, it was just that I thought it would be fun exploring the house, rather than being given a guided tour.

Peter looked at me, then said, ‘I think we’ll find our own way round.’

‘It is quite big,’ said Mrs. Forster. ‘And there’s lots of nooks and crannies you’d never find without someone pointing them out.’

‘Next time,’ said Peter. ‘Do you come every week?’

‘I come every day of the week. You wouldn’t believe the amount of work there is.’

‘Well, it looks spotless,’ said Peter.

Mrs. Forster couldn’t help but glance at the muddy footprints.

‘When are you thinking of moving in?’ said Mrs. Forster.

‘We’re not sure that we will,’ I said.

‘What?’ Mrs. Forster said. ‘And leave this place empty? You can’t do that. It’s such a beautiful house. And such a good home for a family. There’s the countryside…’ She seemed baffled we were even considering living elsewhere.

‘We probably will,’ said Peter, not wanting to upset her.

‘Let’s have a look around first,’ I said. ‘Come on – I’ll show you the living room.’

Peter smiled at Mrs. Forster then followed me through the left-hand door beneath the stairs. Once we were out of earshot, he said, ‘Why didn’t you want the old dear to show us around? She can probably tell us a load of the history.’

I explained about wanting us to explore, together, and Peter seemed to understand. The more nice things we did together, the better.

He stood in the middle of the room, which was about as big as a tennis court. ‘Can you imagine us living here?’ he asked.

I looked around. ‘We’ll have to get some Irish wolfhounds,’ I said. ‘And, when we’ve finished feasting on mutton, we can throw them the bones over our shoulders.’

‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ said Peter. ‘No, really. I have.’

‘It’s such a big fireplace,’ I said.

We went over to look at it. Mary was dozing on my shoulder. There was a large coat of arms front and centre. It contained lions, gryffins, dragons and stars, all intricately carved in bright stone.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t imagine us living here. I think it would change us. Not straight away. To begin with, we’d probably camp out like intruders. But, if we ever got used to it, we’d be very different people.’

Peter took a last look around. ‘That we would.’

A whooshing sound suddenly came from directly above our heads. It took me a moment to realize that it was Mrs. Forster doing the hoovering.

Off to the left of the sitting room was a study with a big desk, a Windsor chair and several filing cabinets that I guessed were full of Michael Francis Jonson’s papers. One wall was covered with trophy heads of animals: deers, wild boar, even a zebra; the other was dominated by a large map of the house and grounds.

‘We’re going to take it, though,’ said Peter. ‘Aren’t we?’

I didn’t reply, but walked back across the living room and through the opposite doorway. This was the library. It didn’t contain any paperbacks, that’s for certain.

‘These must be worth something,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll have to have everything valued.’

‘But the solicitors said we can’t sell anything from inside the house.’

‘If we’re going to afford to do anything to the place, we’ll have to find a way round that. Where else is the money going to come from?’

It was true. Since buying our house, we’d been able to keep up the mortgage payments but hadn’t been able to take anything off the balance. If we sold it, we’d be left with only a few thousand pounds cash.

Back in the hallway, we found another couple of doors opposite one another. The first (on the left as you came through the front door) led to a kitchen and a small dining room. The other went directly into a more formal dining room, with another large fireplace and plenty of painted portraits.

‘You must be related to some of these,’ I said.

‘All of them, probably.’

Most of those upon the walls were men. But there was a very striking woman with red-golden hair above the mantelpiece. I was drawn to go and look at her more closely. In the bottom corner of the canvas was a date, 1585. Her pose was rather stiff, and her clothes looked very ceremonial, but her face was full of life, full of passion. Her long slender fingers held a small leather-covered book – a red silk ribbon dangling down from between the pages.

‘I wonder who she is,’ I said.

‘A Jonson,’ said Peter. ‘She has the Jonson nose.’

I looked, and it was true. Peter has what most people would call a Roman nose. It’s not something you can miss. I always found it attractive, and thought it showed strength of character.

Looking up at the young woman, in all her spangly glory, I felt terribly frumpy. Not that I thought she’d looked like that in real life. I didn’t have a portrait painter to flatter me, and iron out all the little imperfections. Jack would have told you that I was perfect, but then your children have to, don’t they? I felt like I was starting to get back to my old self, physically, after having Mary. I’m quite petite, and I prefer to have my dark hair short and out of the way. My eyes are probably my best feature – chestnut brown. Not that I’m vain about them. I wish my legs were slightly longer, and my upper arms a little firmer. Overall, though, I haven’t done too badly in the genetic lottery.

‘Upstairs?’ I said.

We could leave all this for later.

‘Upstairs,’ said Peter.

And already I was starting to think about how soon that later might be.

*

If you’d like to read on a little, the whole book is here, for free, until April 4th 2020.

Writing and Shit – part 37 – Writing, fast and slow

Cast your mind back to the recent and the twenty year-old books I asked you to pick out and read – it’s very likely that within the first five or ten pages of the recent one more takes place, and what does happens is faster.

Scenes in movies have become shorter, scenes in stories have followed.

Often all the viewer needs to understand is that Ah, it’s this scene – it’s shaky cigarette – seen it before. Cool – what’s next?

It’s a generalisation, but I think it holds true.

Quicker scenes are particularly in Netflix series. If you would like examples, check out Maniac or Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

SOLID GOLD ACTION

One of the ways stories and novels have changed most in the last hundred and fifty years is their approach to action.

In a Victorian novel, even swift actions could take dozens or even hundreds of words to describe. They were not only described in terms of physical choreograph, they were moralised, explained. The reader’s reaction was built in. The soundtrack was audible.

As the carriage rounded the corner onto the bottom of Regent Street, the merciless leader of the anarchist movement stuck his blunderbuss out of the window, took deadly aim at his unwitting and innocent target, then let fly the barrel’s contents with a sharp report that immediately drew the attention of the many ladies and gentlemen then present in the vicinity.

This is a Victorianized version of a sentence I have used often when I’m teaching genre writing. It’s quoted in a brilliant book by Geoffrey O’Brien called Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of the Noir.

 

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I learned a vast amount about the pace of writing from O’Brien.

Here’s what he has to say:

With stripped-down syntax and a vocabulary reduced to basics, [Dashiell] Hammett found original ways to convey a sense of physical and temporal immediacy. This prose mirrors the reality of duration, and consequently Hammett rarely dilates an instant of consciousness. His characters, caught up in the pace of the book, literally do not have time to think; they can only act.

By contrast, a Victorian writer like H. Rider Haggard, in all his forty-odd novels of physical adventure, was incapable of suggesting the feel of an action scene simply because his prose could not move fast enough. By unburdening himself of syntactical luggage, Hammett approximated actual tempo, as in this passage from Red Harvest: “Another car came around the limousine and charged us. Out of it, gunfire.” Haggard would have needed at least half a page to say that, by which time (in Hammett’s terms) the car would have been and gone.

The sentence deserves to be picked out –

Out of it, gunfire.

Sentences as elegant as this come along very rarely. It is astonishing for what it gets done and all it leaves out.

I’ve been talking about different kinds of story-time. The story-time of Dashiell Hammett is a vast acceleration from that of my invented Victorian novelist. It is also a non-moralised and non-explained time. Actions are shown, morals are never told.

YEAH, YEAH – YADDA YADDA

(I wrote this before self-isolating slowed everyone down. Books are being read in houses with closed doors – almost certainly with more attention than they were two months before this started.)

Society is becoming more impatient. We have less time to take things in. We want labour-saving devices, or apps, to do things for us. If shorthand versions are available, we will choose them over version that laboriously take us through every nuance.

This, at least, is one way of looking at the way story-time has developed. That everything is done faster to avoid annoying readers who are increasingly unwilling to stick around.

(All this from someone who wrote a novel called Patience. Which co-incidentally is now available as an ebook for £2.50.)

I would say two things to this tendency.

First, I think that while there is a general acceleration in how stories are told, there is also a reaction to this. Some recent books, for example Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or George R.R.Martin’s Game of Thrones Series or Richard House’s The Kills, make a virtue out of stretching time, the readerly experience of time, to an extreme distension. This isn’t something new, although I think it’s something modern. One of the points of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – a book about aging – is that it takes so long to read that, looking back after finishing it, the reader feels that they have moved on from one time of life to another.

The second thing I’d say is that impatience with slowness isn’t new. Even Henry James’s contemporary readers (1870s to 1910s), those alive to buy his books the day they came out, often complained about how dense and slow they were.

Henry James is one of my very favourite writers, but I am very conscious that for lots of open-minded, enthusiastic readers he has become unreadable. His sentences, going back to what I said about syntax, are long, contain more than one sub-clause, digress, leave out words you might expect to find, and are generally – for lots of readers – a struggle that drives them near demented, and is certainly no great pleasure. Because Henry James faced this criticism himself, and answered it, I think it’s fair to assume he wrote exactly as he did for a good reason – or for several good reasons.

What reading Henry James does is force you into an extremely slow and intricate story-time. Yes, James says, you can look at things quickly and glibly, but if you want to see what’s really going on, you have to live with stuff for a long time, go away from it and forget it, and then return to it, to investigate it as closely and tenderly and yes, slowly, as the thing requires.

To which the majority of people will answer, I don’t have time for that. In other words, Your story-time is one I can’t slow down enough to enter. Give me car plus gunfire, I’ll do the rest, thank you very much.

This I completely understand. But I think Henry James, to give him one final word (there was, for James, always another last and final word) would say something like this –

The car and the gunfire are thoughtless action, and life – I hope – is not all thoughtless action. Things happen because people make them happen, and they do that for reasons which are far longer standing and far deeper than the abruptness in which they may terminate. Where people end up, and what they end up doing there, is very much due to where they come from and what, there, was done to them.

Exercise: Write about an action that takes less than a second, and write about it in one sentence that is below ten words long. Then rewrite that action in a paragraph of one hundred words that moralises the action. Now do the reverse, write a brief action in a medium-sized paragraph. Then reduce it to the smallest number of words you can. At which end of this spectrum do you feel comfortable? What’s your preferred story time, within the sentence?

Stay safe.

Republic of Consciousness Prize Readings

Instead of a reading event, the Republic of Consciousness Prize asked all the authors/translators to do a reading from their shortlisted books.

Here we are:

 

 

 

 

 

The books are Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne and published by Fitzcarraldo; Minoli Salgado’s Broken Jaw, published by The 87 Press; Hanne Ørstavik’s Love, translated by Martin Aitken and published by And Other Stories, and Isabel Waidner’s We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff, published by Dostoevsky Wannabe.

Patience is available direct from Galley Beggar Press.

The announcement of the winner is next week.

Writing and Shit – part 36 – The Haunted Scene, or Better than Movies

We’re going back to scenes. But by now you should be ahead of me. You should be thinking things like –

Mr But: A scene creates a gap.

Very good.

Mr But: But not all scenes create gaps. Surely some scenes fill them in.

Yes, they do. Concluding scenes fill gaps in, and also scenes which, by closing down this one gap open up two or three gaps elsewhere or later on.

I am wary of even calling them ‘scenes’, because to approach them too distinctly – as if you were writing scenes in a play or in a screenplay – may cause you to write them in a way that doesn’t fit with the flow of a story or a novel.

Between scenes in a play, it may be necessary for furniture to be removed or for a whole new set to drop down out of the ceiling on wires. Between scenes in a film, the entire cast may need to relocate from London to Iceland.

There is no equivalent to this in writing. No heavy lifting need ever be done. An expensive or epic background costs no more, in time and ink, than an impoverished or claustrophobic one.

Between scenes in a novel, there may be a comma.

THE HAUNTED MIND

Writing also has the advantage that it is far simpler to have a character in two places at once – one physical, one mental.

Here is a simple sentence, one you would hardly notice in a novel.

He walked down the street thinking of his sister.

Or:

He walked along, thinking of his sister.

Or:

As he walked down Hill Crescent, he thought about his sister.

Now, think about how much work a play or screenplay would have to do – how much preparation – in order to achieve the doubleness of this scene: action and memory, in the same stride.

At the very least, a film would need two scenes to set up this moment. And it would be impossible, without expositional dialogue between characters of a voiceover, to convey specifically that he was thinking of his sister without creating a visual tag that, within the language of the film, the viewer knows means the sister.

For example, in an earlier scene in the film, he and his sister – as children – joyously jump through the spray of a lawn sprinkler, watering the front garden of their parents’ house.

Other scenes intervene, the sister dies, and we join him walking down Hill Crescent where – because he has to, because this is the only way to signal to us what’s inside his head – he sees…

What does he see? If it’s just a house with a front garden that isn’t enough. There’s room for doubt. If he merely looks at a lawn, it’s not absolutely clear. There may have been grass elsewhere in the film. How about if he looks at a sprinkler but one that’s not spraying water? To me, that suggests he’s thinking about death just as much as he’s thinking specifically about happy times with his sister, when they were kids. No, to achieve the double moment of those eleven words, ‘As he walked down…’ the screenplay, and then the film, needs the set-up scene and then the pay-off in which he sees a sprinkler spraying a lawn. Without doubt, the audience knows he is remembering his sister at that moment – but what a fucking slog.

I can get it down to seven words.

He walked along, thinking of his sister.

Five.

He strolled, remembering his sister.

Four.

He strolled, remembering Shaniqua.

Or:

Remembering Shaniqua, he strolled.

Fiction can easily have scenes which interpenetrate, which haunt, one another. Scenes which don’t do one thing at once. In some ways, it’s harder to avoid doing this than to do it – because scenes occur because other scenes have occurred before them.

They are in the pub, arguing about money, because they’ve been to the funeral, because Uncle Terry died because Uncle Terry climbed the ladder onto the roof because the storm had blown off the slates and therefore there was something in the wrong place (slates) which cause someone (Terry) to be in the wrong place which meant something went wrong (Terry slipped) and something went more wrong (Terry died without leaving a will).

Written stories, rather than stories on screens, can create a present moment that is much less limited, that is much more haunted by past and future, than film or TV can.

 

THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS

Two important things that can happen in any scene are 1. that a person has a realisation or makes a decision, and 2. that someone acts on a decision – or just acts spontaneously without thinking (if you believe that’s possible).

We’ve already seen the different ways in which films and stories cope with showing what’s going on inside someone’s head. And I’ve just, I hope, given an example (sister-sprinkler). And I hope I’ve given a good example of how stories can be more efficient (because they only need one sentence, not two scenes).

The second most common piece of advice given to writers, after Write what you know is Show, don’t tell.

One of the changes you may notice between the new book and the twentieth anniversary book you just looked at is that the new one is less tell-y and more show-y.

Just because stories can do the insides of people’s heads more efficiently doesn’t mean that storytelling, as a whole, doesn’t change under the wider influence of film and TV, YouTube and vines.

Viewers of film and TV stories have become very good at translating what a person does (what is shown) into what they are feeling or thinking (what we would need to be told about them, or what they would need to tell another person or speak in a voiceover for us to know for certain).

THE BUSINESS WITH THE CIGARETTE

For example, a person who lights a cigarette with shaking hands is understood immediately – in the language of cinema – to starting to deal with the shock of something that has just happened, but to be out of immediate danger. A person letting the door of their apartment close behind them and then doing a fist-pump or a little dance, even if the viewer saw nothing of them before this, would be understood as celebrating a triumph they achieved through maintaining a proper, grown-up demeanour.

If you were able to time-travel back to 1950, and show just these scenes to a cinema audience, I think they would understand the shaky cigarette – although some might suppose the person lighting the cigarette was cold rather than shocked, but they would almost certainly not understand the fist-pump. Like the high-five and brushing imaginary dust off one’s shoulders, this is a piece of showing that has only become common in the past half century. The private dance, however, seen in isolation might be extremely confusing. It might signal that the person was insane, or that they were shivering because of something running down their back, or that they were about to start tapdancing because this was a scene from a musical.

These are examples of the Show, don’t tell (because it’s clunky) language of movies. But because the viewers of films are the readers of books, story writers are able to use visual shorthand in order to convey what the people in their stories are feeling.

THE BUSINESS WITH THE DOORS

So –

She hurried out through the exit doors and tried to light a cigarette. It was difficult – her hands were shaking so much.

This, we would understand emotionally even if we hadn’t had the scene in which she received the shock.

How much more effective this is, as storytelling, than –

She hurried out through the exit doors and stood there for a moment, trying to process her feelings over the shock she had just received.

Okay, perhaps that’s deliberately bad, and the ‘stood there for a moment’ is also shorthand, though more ambiguous shorthand for someone taking a moment to think about something that’s just happened to them.

She hurried out the exit doors, feeling extremely shaken up by what she’d just seen.

It’s more distanced, less physicalised than the shaky cigarette. In terms of story-time, it’s slower, vaguer.

Let’s try the next one the other way round –

After she was sure the door had shut behind her, she allowed herself to feel immensely joyful, and not a little giddy, about the professional triumph she had just achieved.

Again, I may have exaggerated the wordiness a little. But you will read equivalent sentences in dozens of stories.

After she was sure the door had shut behind her, she relaxed and felt joyful – everything had gone so well for her.

And the movie-influenced, Show, don’t tell version –

After she was sure the door had shut behind her, she did a little dance – woop woop.

I am not saying that everyone has to write this way. If possible, I avoid ever advising writers Show, don’t tell. I certainly don’t say, Rely on cinematic tropes to do the work of conveying the inner life of someone you’re writing about. The best writers will find new language every time, to bring people alive for us in a fresh, distinctive, uncliched way.

(This is why writing is hard. Just to show someone feeling joyful for a moment, in a non-familiar way, is extremely difficult. Why not just say, ‘She smiled broadly’? Well, over to you – why not?) We will recognise the action, and translate it into the thought or emotion, because it has been so accurately observed. And we will feel it more because we will recognise it as something within ourselves that’s been put into words, rather than something we’ve seen on a screen that’s now happening in a book.

A CHANGE OF SCENE

Let’s have a go –

She hurried through the exit doors and went straight up to two women smoking and chatting.

‘Put those out,’ she said. ‘Put them out now.’

Then she walked away.

The character is a lot less generalised now. It’s a reaction that wouldn’t be everyone’s reaction. It also takes more words.

After she was sure the door had shut behind her, she headed straight for the fridge, grabbed the orange juice and drank it down in one.

Or:

After she was sure the door had shut behind her, she headed straight for the fridge, grabbed the milk, unscrewed the cap and inhaled deeply.

Something important needs to be added here, and it’s the kind of thing that used to get writers labelled as post-modern. The people you are writing about, if you are writing about now, live in a world saturated by cinematic shorthand. This is nearly unavoidable. Some people will resist expressing themselves in a way they’ve learned from watching movies. They may try not to express themselves, on the outside, at all. But many others will adopt and perhaps adapt a shorthand of behaviours, particularly private behaviours, from movies. Most of us haven’t been in the room with a man receiving news of the death of his child. Most of us have seen this scene probably dozens of times, on screen. (See Laura Palmer’s father on the phone in the first series of Twin Peaks. Almost impossible to bear.) We have also seen the scenes that follow – the different behaviours of the grieving father. Some real-life fathers, in the same terrible situation, will model themselves on what they’ve learned from movies.

Exercise: Write some sentences in which a character’s physical action conveys their thought process. Have them change their mind, but only describe them doing this from the outside. No ‘she felts’ or ‘he thoughts’.

Stay safe.