Toby Litt's Blog, page 7

9 Things You Need to Write a Novel (COVID-19 Version)

When I’ve given this advice before, I’ve always felt a bit awkward.

You’ll soon see why –

The first thing you need to write a novel is…

Time

The second thing you need to write a novel is…

More Time

And the third thing you need to write a novel is…

Even More Time

Always, before, I’ve thought that most people nowadays are time-poor. And so expecting them to make time is expecting too much.

But right now a lot of people, and I’m guessing that includes you, are going to have a lot of spare time – or potentially spare time. You can use this positively. You can learn to do something you’ve always wanted to do. But I suspect that a lot of you are going to go back to the novel you’ve already dreamed about or half-started or abandoned midway.

Even so, you will still need time.

This perhaps seems a bit obvious. But let me explain.

Time, More Time and Even More Time are all necessary.

I’ve divided Time up into three because you need Time for different things.

The first lot of Time is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Time to write. Time to sit at the desk with words coming out of you.

The second lot of time, More Time, is… Time not to write. Time to do stuff which doesn’t seem to be writing but which, in the end, turns out to have been writing all along. To the uninitiated, this may appear to be people-watching or daydreaming, taking a nice long nap, or listening very closely to a piece of music – but, actually, it is when the writing bit of the brain does its hardest work. Believe me.

The third lot of time, Even More Time, is Time to rewrite, and rewrite and rewrite. But we’re not going to worry about that now. That’s for later drafts. For the moment, we’re thinking about the first draft.

As I’m sure you know, Time is never a neutral, abstract thing. Nor merely a clock-ticking-on-the-mantlepiece thing. Time for writing your novel is time not for other occupations, not for other people. It’s time stolen from your loved ones; time they will probably resent you not devoting to them. Time is closing the door behind you and not answering when people knock – not unless they knock very hard, and shout words like ‘Fire’ and ‘Bastard’ and ‘I’m leaving – I really am’.

In a way, writing is saying to your loved ones, ‘Go away, because I want to talk to you’. Meaning, I want to talk to you in a more articulate and truthful way than I ever could if you were there in front of me. ‘Go away, because I want to talk to you.’

All of which explains why you’ll need the fourth thing, which is…

Some Selfishness

I could try to make this sound nicer – I could call it self-belief or determination or following your dream – but that’s not how it’s likely to appear to your loved ones, the ones outside the door, knocking, pleading.

Self-belief without justification is always going to appear selfish, and until you write your novel there won’t be any justification. In lots of people’s eyes, until your novel is published by a publisher they have heard of, and appears in shops they frequent, and is reviewed in a newspaper they read, then it will continue to be unjustified.

And in the eyes of a large minority, a book still isn’t really justified until it has been made into a film starring an actor or actress they have heard of – thus saving them the trouble of having to read it.

However, writing rarely has a proper justification. Not in the strictest sense. Writing with justification is the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

There is a story about James Joyce, made up by Tom Stoppard and included in his play Travesties. Joyce is in the dock. The interrogator asks him, ‘What did you do during the Great War?’ To which Joyce replies, ‘I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?’

The only real justification for a piece of writing is that it is worth other people reading – or feeling guilty about not having read.

But Selfishness is, of course, not enough. You will also need…

Some Generosity

Because, without making it sound like running a coffee morning for Macmillan, writing is an act of generosity. A novel that isn’t essentially for other people to read isn’t worth writing.

This is the ‘..I want to talk to you’ part, the part that comes after ‘Go away.’

Many writers claim they write only to please themselves. And I believe them – but only so far as to say this is what they need to tell themselves in order to write.

A well-formed sentence has a direction: towards the reader. It arrows.

So far we have: Time, More Time, Even More Time, Some Selfishness and Some Generosity.

The next thing you need is a little more prosaic. It’s…

The Means

By The Means I mean the physical necessities of writing – a pen or pencil and some paper, or a computer.

What you use is entirely your choice. If what works for you is to write in crayon on old cornflake packets or in chalk on the corner shop wall, it doesn’t really matter.

There are some drawbacks to the corner shop wall (though with instagram poetry, who knows?). And I have a few cautionary things to say about word-processing.

The first is that it can make writing seem too easy. Although I am telling you the nine things you need to write a novel, the most important is probably contained in these five words: There are no short cuts.

The sheer physical labour of rewriting a novel, start to end, by hand, would certainly make one consider the necessity of every single word; copy/paste does not do this.

Of the Evils of Word-Processing, copy/paste is Number 2. (Number 1 comes a little later. Read on.)

By Means I also mean a workplace. Ideally this would be, as Virginia Woolf put it, A Room of One’s Own. But if this isn’t, a chair outside the back door, an unoccupied bedroom, a corner of the kitchen table can do. Quiet, too, is probably recommended. If that’s not possible, headphones or earbuds and music without words. I find if there are too many words, they start barging their way onto the page.

I realise for some people even a corner of the kitchen table is hard to attain. In which case, I’d suggest you write poems or flash fiction – for the moment. Until you can sneak away for longer.

The next thing you need – there are only three more – is something much more abstract. It is…

A Discipline

A Discipline. Not I repeat not a routine, though it might on the surface resemble one.

A routine is unhelpful because, when you miss it or mess it up, you are going to feel bad, and get disheartened, and stop writing.

I think the idea of a discipline is better than that of a routine, because it is more flexible.

A routine is ‘I need to be at my desk by nine o’clock and produce 400 words by lunchtime.’ A discipline is, ‘It would be good if I could do about a page or so every day.’

Here are a couple of famous writers’ disciplines. They are American writers. I’m not sure why but American writers seem to be more open about the craft of what they do. Perhaps because they feel awkward when anyone emphasises the art aspect.

The first discipline is Ernest Hemingway’s:

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

This comes from his book A Moveable Feast – a memoir of Paris in the 1920s. It is perhaps the single most useful clue I have ever come across as to how novels get written.

The second discipline is from David Mamet’s A Whore’s Profession. Mamet is a notable dramatist, and also wrote the screenplay to Wag the Dog.

As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to go one achievable step at a time: to say, for example, ‘Today, I don’t have to be particularly inventive, all I have to be is careful, and make up an outline of the actual physical things the character does in Act One.’ And then, the following day to say, ‘Today I don’t have to be careful. I already have this careful, literal outline, and all I have to do is be a little bit inventive,’ et cetera, et cetera.

American writers, particularly male American writers, can often go to extremes when they set their minds to a routine. Hemingway, later in his life, became very macho about things.

He wrote standing up, usually in his bedroom in his house in Cuba, using the top of a bookcase, on which room was cleared, to quote the Paris Review, “for a typewriter, a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east windows.” It gets better. Hemingway “stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a Lesser Kudu – the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.” He told his interviewer, George Plimpton, that he began in pencil, then shifted to his typewriter when his writing was going extremely well or when he wrote dialogue. Each day he kept count of the words he produced: “from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so be won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.” Hemingway was a strange old man, as he himself might have put it, but, when it came to writing, no stranger than most.

Not to be outdone, here is John Steinbeck:

He wrote eight hours a day, six days a week for forty years. He would sharpen twenty-four pencils each morning and write with them until each one was blunt. After many years of this regimen, he had to use his left hand to insert the pencil into the calluses on his writing hand because he was unable to pick up the writing utensil with his right hand. Every few months, he would sandpaper those calluses so he could continue to write.

British writers are different. Ian McEwan, I heard, rewards himself with a Choco Leibnitz biscuit if he’s had a good morning.

I’m not asking you to sandpaper your calluses. But I might be able to give you a few hints about finding a good, productive discipline:

To start with, don’t count the hours (a person can easily achieve nothing in eight hours), but do have a set amount you must do before you finish: one page, two, more, of hand- or typewritten words.

I said that I’d come back to the Number 1 evil of Word-Processing. It is wordcount. Especially Live Wordcount always in view.

Wordcount is an instrument of the Devil.

Don’t use it more than once a week.

Count pages, not words. A page of dialogue shouldn’t count for less than a page of description.

A few other suggestions:

If it’s a choice between writing badly and not writing at all, write badly. Your only responsibility is for the final draft.

Don’t try to make it perfect on the first draft. Roughness is a virtue at this stage, because roughness is easier to cut, to rewrite.

The penultimate thing you need is the one you’ll probably have thought of first…

A Yearning

I’ve chosen this, rather than Idea. There’s nothing more likely to close you down than someone saying, ‘You have to have an idea. Now.’

But you need to have a strong sense that there’s something not quite there that should be.

A nagging sensation. A question. Okay, I give up – an Idea.

What does an Idea look/feel/smell/taste/sound like?

Well, you tell me.

But if it’s a really good one, it’s quite possible that, even if you told it me, I wouldn’t recognise it as an Idea – and certainly not as a really good one.

I would, incidentally, recommend that you don’t ever tell people your ideas. Because unless they say, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. Let me sell my house to finance you as you complete this great work,’ you are likely to be disappointed with their reaction. And this may put you off seeing the idea through to its end.

The problem of The Idea is the biggest one for writers just starting out. They return again and again to the question: What do I write? And this is, of course, the question I am least able to answer for you.

But the one thing I won’t repeat is the Great Wisdom of creative writing classes, i.e., Write What You Know.

This is likely to make you think not of what you Know but what you’re Completely Bloody Sick to Death of.

Henry James, my favourite writer, had something neat to say about the relationship between writing and knowing, expression and experience, in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’:

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consist of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’

This is a much more difficult, and useful, thing to aim for. If you aspire to being one of those on whom nothing is lost, then ideas will come to you, I promise.

An idea can be an area of mess or confusion in your head, or a line of remembered real-life dialogue, or an enticing title, or an exquisite memory, or a feeling of dreadful foreboding. It’s something, in other words, that haunts you.

A Yearning.

The final thing you need is…

A Tone

For the first-time novelist, consistency of voice is one the hardest things to achieve. You probably won’t, to begin with, have anything approaching a style, but you will have to settle upon a tone. This can range from ‘Once upon a time…’ to ‘For a long time, my mother used to…’

Here, though, is the ultimate and very simple secret of writing a novel:

If you write 1,000 words a day for 75 days, at the end of those 75 days you will have a novel-length-thing. This novel-length-thing may not be a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a novel, but it’s a lot closer to being all three than the nothing you had before.

Or as Gertrude Stein said, ‘The way to do it is to do it.’

So, to conclude, let us go through the 9 things you need to write a novel:

1. Time

2. More Time

3. Even More Time

4. Some Selfishness

5. Some Generosity

6. The Means

7. A Discipline

8. A Yearning

9. A Tone

You have no more excuses. Right now, you have the time. Perhaps more time than ever before. More than you know what to do with. If it’s in you, it can come out.

Let it.

Good luck.

And if you’re after more tips on Starting to Write, you can find some here.

Writing and Shit – Problem Pages

In these changed circumstances, when lots of people have lots of novelist-type-time (inside, in yesterday’s T-shirt, in front of a screen with words on it, in doubt), I’m going to add something else to the usual Writing and Shit posts.

First, I’m going to do a Problem Pages/Agony Aunt type blog. I think I can probably give useful answers to three questions from three writers. If it goes well, or there’s a good response, I’ll do another.

Are you a writer who is in the shit with a particular story or novel? Send me your question, and I’ll try to give some helpful, practical advice. Be specific but try to keep it under 100 words.

Your question can be about technical matters, work routine, psychological attitude, anything. (Well, not about how does someone start to write? This series is about getting out of the shit once you’ve got into it.)

Please post your questions below, and I’ll make a selection and put up the three answers tomorrow (Friday 20th March).

And, perhaps, who knows, the answer to your question may already be up in one of the previous Writing and Shit posts.

Writing and Shit – part 35 – If you want to be published, you mustn’t write for the dead

If a reader doesn’t know a word, if they are forced to look it up in an online dictionary, it will stop them dead. It will break them out of the reading trance (I’ll write about this soon). And – almost certainly – it will them feel lacking in intelligence, stupid.

It’s not a good idea to make your reader feel stupid. Not if you want them to continue to be your reader.

Some writing – of course – is about making the reader feel stupid, feel lacking. Some writing wants to force the reader to improve themselves by going to the dictionary, hovering over the unfamiliar word, struggling with the syntax, learning to dwell in the oddities of convoluted time. (I love this kind of writing.)

APPS

Say I write apperception. As in the sentence, ‘Her apperception of things was brilliant.’ It has a particular meaning that I find hard to remember, but I know is fairly close to but a little chintzier. Sometimes I’ll look it up, for old time’s sake. Sometimes I’ll be content to allow it to stay vague. The chances are you have a clear-ish idea what apperception is. But it’s the kind of word choice that many writers would decide against – because of the making-the-reader-feel-lacking thing, and because they would judge apperception to be the kind of word the reader might not be comfortable saying aloud.

This is always good test of whether you should use a word or not.

What goes for apperception goes, in a less extreme way, for perception.

Some words, like perception, are easy to avoid.

It was her perception.

Such a sentence will, in most cases, be improved by being changed to the simpler, already known –

She saw clearly that…

Or just –

She saw…

In terms of story-time, perception is a dwelling word. It’s a word for readers who like to dawdle around in wordy worlds – and there are many of those readers (though perhaps not so many as there used to be). But if you want to help your reader in a vividly seen and rapidly passing story-time, you will choose –

She saw the cliff-edge, only moments away…

Rather than undermine all the work you’ve been doing, taking the reader into your word-world and keeping them there, by writing –

She perceived that ahead of her was a cliff edge, and that she would reach it in a matter of a few instants.

Already this reads like pastiche Sherlock Holmes, doesn’t it?

HANDY

At moments of high drama, go for the grabbable word – the one that you can shout without embarrassment when playing hide and seek with a child.

I saw you!

Yes.

You are clear in my apperception.

No.

Linguistic aside: At university, I learned that lots of these words I had to look up were mainly derived from Latin (i.e., perception from Latin percipire, to seize, obtain, collect) and the ones I already knew were from Anglo-Saxon (i.e., see, from Old English sēon). Some more abstract How to Write manuals might advise you to avoid Latinate language. I’d just say, Imagine playing hide and seek with a child. How do you say what you need to say, at the time you need to say it.

FINE WRITING

There are some writers who believe very passionately that fine writing comes down to, whenever there’s an opportunity, choosing high shelf words such as her apperception over grabbable, ready-to-hand words like she saw.

This is how lots of the books you’ll find in the Penguin Classics come across to these writers. And they’re not just being pretentious, these writers, they have a pure, often longstanding love of the story-time they enter into when reading George Eliot or Wilkie Collins or Louisa May Alcott or Trollope.

PASTICHE

Pastiche, as you probably know, means writing that pretends, for fun, to be from a different time. Some pastiche, like The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber, is of the past. In Faber’s case, Victorian time. Other pastiches, like A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, are of the future. In Burgess’s case, of a post-Russian invasion time.

The pleasure of pastiche is that, along with the pretence of olde or futuristic language, the reader also gets access to a contemporary version of olde or futuristic story-time.

There’s a lot of complex play, within pastiche, for the writer and the reader, and for the writer and the reader together.

Historical Pastiche Writer: Weren’t they just like this?

Historical Pastiche Reader: Oh, weren’t they indeed.

SF Pastiche Writer: Won’t it be just like this?

SF Pastiche Reader: Oh, it’ll be exactly like this.

Historical Pastiche Writer: Didn’t they say it just like this?

Historical Pastiche Reader: Oh, didn’t they indeed.

SF Pastiche Writer: Won’t they say it this way?

SF Pastiche Reader: Oh, I’m sure they will.

THE ACCIDENTAL

However, vast numbers of novels being written this minute are accidental pastiches. That is, they are being written passionately and wholeheartedly by writers whose idea of what writing should be dates from 1890 or 1940 or 1985 or 2015.

Most often, these writers (you may be one of them) think the world should be written up – it needs to be improved, by going into language. They don’t see it as a case of the world being gotten down – transcribed into language.

Almost always, these writers don’t read contemporary fiction. I don’t mean they don’t read fiction that is set in the present day and involves young people speaking the latest language. I mean, they don’t read historical fiction or science fiction or any fiction that was published this or last year.

To clarify things, let’s call this new fiction rather than contemporary fiction – through new fiction brings along misleading associations of youth, trendiness, whatever.

By avoiding new fiction, writers of inadvertent pastiche seal themselves off in a time-bubble. What they think should be written, what they feel they need to write, is – inevitably, and sadly – going to be out of date.

GRR, AND I MAY BE WRONG

Although you may hate lots of things about the present, and about what gets written today, you have to recognise that – as a writer – the present is where you exist because the only readers you will ever have are in the present alongside you.

Writing for future readers is something entirely different, as a general aim. But in terms of how it should be approached, I don’t think there is a great difference. Is a reader in the future, say, a hundred years from now more likely to be interested in writing from this year that is of this year or writing from this year that is of 1898?

I feel very sorry for writers who commit so many years to writing for readers who died before they themselves were even born.

I feel bad that they were able to continue in their time-bubbles, writing defensively in order to maintain their hermetic seals. What they are making, in the novels they carefully plan and execute, are nearly suicide notes – because they are saying to the reader, ‘Hello, from the past,’ or even ‘Hello, from the long dead.’

Many things about writing are paradoxical, this isn’t:

If you don’t read other people’s books, you can’t expect them to read yours. If you don’t love other people’s books, you can’t expect them to love yours. And if you don’t recognise the present day exists, you can’t expect the present day to recognise that you exist.

Perhaps you’re not convinced. Or you can think of examples of books published in 2020 that aren’t pastiche but read as if they were written in a previous year, and that this is to their benefit.

All I’d say back is that agents and publishers are among the most present day readers you’ll find, because they’re trying to second guess what the present day will be in twelve or eighteen months time. They are actively seeking out what couldn’t have written before. They may be wrong. They may not recognise your talent, or genius. But the one thing they definitely know is what most of what is being written now looks like. They know it and they’re not thrilled by it.

Story-time is not a single, unchanging thing. There are lots of different kinds of story-time that are closely related to different kinds of genre. To get a sense of this –

Exercise: Pick up a bestselling book from this year – let’s say, the bestselling political thriller. Then pick up the equivalent bestselling political thriller from twenty years ago. If you don’t have much free time, read the first ten pages of each. If you’re serious about getting a sense of how story-time changes and develops, read both books through – getting a sense of how dense each page is, how long it takes to read ten pages, how many hours it takes to read each book.

Exercise: Alternately, or additionally, have a battle of the books. Read the first five pages of the new book and the first five pages of the book from twenty years ago. Now decide which you’re going to finish. Ask which felt like the easier read? Which put more hooks in you? Which spoke to you more directly?

Onwards.

Writing and Shit – part 34 – Colons and semi-colons, and other things you should care about

As last week’s blog went down so well (over 800 reads), I’ve decided to divert into a little more about punctuation – hoping for a similar reaction. This is something I wrote a while ago about how I see the difference between colons and semi-colons. 

In other news, Patience, my novel, has been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020.

To celebrate this, my publisher Galley Beggar are offering a 15% discount on purchases of Patience – if you buy with the code YIPPPEEE!

MODERATION, IF NOT KINDNESS

I used to be very hardline about this; my stance being that a writer who doesn’t know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon is like a gardener who can’t tell the difference between a conservatory and a shed.

[image error]

 

[image error]

But when you’re hardline in any way, you risk getting caught out according to your own strictures.

So, before anyone does point the grammatical or green finger, I’d like to say that my approach has softened – and that I know there are ways of writing without using either colon or semi-colon; and so writers who avoid them entirely, because they think they’re crap, don’t need to know the difference.

I’ve seen twitter threads recently, in which young writers take turns expressing their contempt for semi-colons and all who use them. They are quite inventive in their invective.

My view is this: we don’t need fewer punctuation marks, we need more. I’m very fond of the dash, but would also (without being affected) like to have other options.

And what I tend to assume is that every single resource that writers of the past have come up with, including every single word in the Oxford English Dictionary, may – at some point in my writing – be useful to me. I don’t set general bans on anything.

I can imagine narrators who are best expressed by a semi-colon addiction. They’re not punctuation Moseses, not men like Hemingway or Kurt Vonnegut (very anti), but they organise their thoughts and forms of expressing them in a more shed-like way.

What is true is that semi-colons make lots of readers feel awkward and, perhaps, inadequate. They’re not quite sure that to do with them. So if you’re trying to write for as big an audience as possible, then you should probably find other ways of getting stuff into your sentences. Probably by writing shorter, separate, more direct sentences.

Ahem.

COME INTO THE GARDEN, MAUD

However, for those writers that would like to get a grasp, in non-grammatical language, here’s my best attempt:

If the sentence is a house with a garden, then the colon is a conservatory and the semi-colon is a shed.

This conservatory, I should add, is built on the back of the house and entered directly from the living room or the kitchen; it is being used as a greenhouse; the shed is at the bottom of the garden; not a huge garden, though.

Let me explain a little more ; or try to.

Both the colon and semi-colon are storage devices; each allows the writer to get more stuff into the sentence; just as I’m using them in this sentence. But they work in different ways.

COLON

The colon is lead up to by the whole of the preceding sentence, depends entirely upon it for support, and when you reach it you pass swiftly through it – like the door into a conservatory. Inside the conservatory, after the colon, everything is neatly arranged in rows, on shelves, for visibility and ease of use: flowers, cuttings, packets of seed, spraycans, etcetera. (Etcetera is probably the equivalent of the cat-flap.) (The cat is, of course, irony.)

SEMI-COLON

The semi-colon, like the shed, is an independent structure that can stand up by itself; it is separated from the house my a short walk; it too contains stuff that needs to be stored (tools of various sorts; flowerpots, both empty and full – for example, of wintering bulbs; gardening gloves and those old shoes that aren’t good for anything else; the lawnmower) but what that stuff is isn’t so easy to make out from outside; the arrangement is more higgledy-piggledy, but that’s how some people like to store things, isn’t it?

So, there you are. Easy to imagine, easy to remember – c, colon, conservatory – s, semi-colon, shed.

Exercise: Try to write a sentence (or two or three sentences) that can be punctuated three ways – with colon, semi-colon and without either.

Shall I do more?

Writing and Shit – part 33 – Commas, and other things you should care about

SYNTAX

How long the unbroken paragraphs look, or how margin-hugging the dialogue is, are things the reader flashes on every time they turn a page. They are things they clock and judge in an instant.

Assuming they’re not put off by either too great a density or too much white space, they will proceed into the sentences themselves.

Here, too, there are elements the reader takes in and judges. Abstractly, you can call it syntax. Concretely, it’s commas.

Most readers don’t count commas, but they do note them. They see where they are in the sentences, they see whether they hold up the flow of a sentence (like a dam) or help it accelerate (like a waterfall), and most of all they see how many of the little tadpoles there are.

If you’re any kind of writer, you can control your syntax.

Or, to put it another way –

Syntax is word order and word order, as a writer, is something over which you should have minute control.

 Or –

Writers, good writers, realise, and are in control of, the ways, down to the minutest level, that word order – more generally known as syntax – can be manipulated, so as to have this, or that, effect upon the reader.

Or –

Simple sentences read fast. And uncomplicated but indirect sentences, with subclauses that dam up the onward flow, read slightly more slowly. And virtuoso displays of verbal dexterity, if words can be said to be dextrous (can they?) – sentences containing what, for some people are ‘exotic’ punctuation marks such as the dash, the colon and (oh Lord preserve us from its devious ways) the semi-colon; sentences that double back upon themselves, augmenting what came earlier but extending it out into gorgeous, expansive rivers of meaning, poignancy, insight and wit – these kinds of sentences (of course you’ve noticed you’re reading an attempt at one right now), that start to seem almost like you started reading them at one stage of your life and are going to be a different and definitely older if not wiser person when you finish them, etcetera, etcetera: complex sentences read slow.

Exercise: How would you characterise the syntax of each of these four examples? Can you write a sentence that means the same that has the kind of density you’re comfortable with? 

Literary aside: One writer made me particularly aware of this. Patricia Cornwell is one of the biggest selling crime novelists in the world. Her first novel, Post-Mortem, is written in direct and propulsive and enjoyable prose. By and large, Cornwell avoids subclauses, arriving to interrupt sentences, that would slow the reader down. Therefore, not too many commas per page. By the time she reached the fourth or fifth Scarpetta novel, it was as if Cornwell had realised that this syntactical never-look-backness was the secret of her success, and made it a rule. This meant that sometimes her sentences became incredibly contorted because they seemed to be going to extreme lengths to avoid including a comma in them ever at all. It’s quite fun to spot this.

“,”

What does a comma do? It stops the flow of time, for just a little moment. Grammatically, it allows the meaning of a sentence to jink, pivot, divert or reverse.

Through controlling not just commas but all punctuation and all word order, you can write in such a way as to bring your reader totally into your kind of story-time, and keep them there, contentedly; or you can, I’m afraid, flub it, page after page, putting great efforts into getting descriptions accurate, dialogue energetic, but losing the reader because they’re in two times – their eyes want to be gazing at immense horizons, but it feels as if their toes keep stumbling, their ankles getting grazed, by obstructive, unpleasantly sharp objects , : ; –

Aside: I usually allow myself one exclamation mark per book. Only one? Yes, only one! But for this blog, there are more. Because I got too excited.

READER, I MARRIED YOU

If you don’t care about commas, you don’t care about your reader, and if you don’t care about your reader, they won’t care about you.

Because if you don’t care about the commas, you’re going to lose control of the time of the sentence, and if that happens, you’re going to be messing up the reader’s story-time.

The best way to learn about this is to re-read and re-re-read books that create the kind of story-time you most like to enter. If you were to re-read a whole novel, by your most-loved writer, just to become aware of exactly how they use commas within sentences, or avoid them, you would not be wasting your time.

THE SPECTRUM

There is a spectrum of density in prose. At the furthest, densest end of it comes philosophy, where the truth of each word in each sentence – because it’s an attempt to state something as absolutely as it can be stated – needs to be interrogated, discussed, annotated and mentally argued for and against. (An example being Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus.)

Then comes language that in some way is unfamiliar, either because it has passed out of common use (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) or because the writer has deliberately defamiliarised it (James Joyce’s Ulysses, and even more his Finnegans Wake, and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons).

Next, less dense, comes prose that is syntactically complex because it is creating a convoluted relationship to time (Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche de Temps Perdu).

Then comes prose that acknowledges James and Proust but wants to be slightly brisker and more accessible (Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, Zadie Smith, On Beauty).

There are many graduations of density between this, which is usually called ‘literary fiction’, and the directness and clarity of Agatha Christie or Philip Pullman.

Beyond this comes Elmore Leonard and Patricia Cornwell, where you never have to look back within a sentence – everything is understood first time, going forwards. Lee Child is very good at this. (And you can see him refining and refining his syntax in Reacher Said Nothing, a book by Andy Martin which follows Lee Child day by day as he writes his novel Make Me.) Hereabouts is where you’d find Harry Potter.

And then we start to get books for younger readers. ‘Young Adult’ novels can be very challenging subjectwise, but they will tend toward a flowing, unobtrusive syntax (Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games.)

Some Middle Grade novels will be written entirely in declarative sentences. (The Beast Quest books or Jacqueline Wilson’s novels.)

Almost as simple as you can get is The Cat Sat on the Mat-level writing for toddlers. (God help us, the Spot the Dog books.)

Finally, there are books with, on each page, one picture of a thing and the name of that thing beneath it.

 

[image error]

 

HORSE

Patience Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize

I am delighted that Patience is one of five books shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020.

To celebrate this, my publisher Galley Beggar are offering a 15% discount on purchases of Patience – if you buy with the code YIPPPEEE!

Current price is £5.99.

Please include the exclamation mark. (They got very excited.)

This prize is for works of fiction published by small presses (below 5 full-time employees.)

The other 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.

 

 

Writing and Shit – part 32 – When your writing is too dense, or not dense enough.

Density isn’t something that often gets talked about, but it is one of the first things a reader notices about a book and one of the last things – sometimes years later – they remember about it.

Writers dream of readers. They picture someone reading what they have written – if the writer is lucky, about lots of readers reading the whole of some book we’ve written.

But readers don’t just read. They’re not robotic text scanners, starting with the first letter top left and ploughing along each line, down down down, until the bottom of the page.

SCANNERS

Whenever a reader faces a new page of text, they scan it. They form an instantaneous visual impression of the whole of it. And what they will come away with – the headline – is an answer to the question: How dense is it?

The reader will guestimate how many words are on the page. Not as a cold number but as something to give them a sense of how long that chunk will take to read. It may be that they are enjoying the book a lot, and this is only a flicker of calculation, but they will still take in what faces them.

If nothing strikes them as unusual, they’ll just carry on, word by word, chunk by chunk, from the top left. But if, say, in the middle of an Elmore Leonard novel there were suddenly two consecutive facing pages with no paragraph breaks, no dialogue and (even more weird) no capital letters, the reader would be subconsciously, and perhaps even consciously, freaked out.

I would be prepared to bet this sudden two page lack of paragraphs, dialogue and character and place names never takes place in any of Elmore Leonard’s one hundred plus novels.

Why? Because as a writer he never writes that densely. To do so would take the reader out of Elmore Leonard’s swift, terse, dialogue-driven story-time and into something alien, slower, more expository, without speech.

Elmore Leonard is too good a writer ever to do this by mistake. But many writers, in their first novels, do the equivalent with great frequency. They unwittingly change the density of what they’re writing – they hit a descriptive passage, or a chase sequence, and they stick with it and stick with it, and three quarters of a page has gone by without a paragraph. Then they go into dialogue where people aren’t getting on, they’re snappy and speak in monosyllables – usually to say No. And suddenly, from being very dense, the words on the page start to look like a poem hugging the left margin. Here’s an example. Perhaps the huge paragraph doesn’t go on long enough, but I hope you‘ll get the idea.

The venetian blinds in the whole building hadn’t received a decent clean in at least a couple of decades. But, for some reason, the accretion of dust and dead flies was at its most extreme and most noticeable in the cafeteria. Perhaps because of the proximity of food, stuff that people were going to cram into their mouths, but perhaps also because after they’d done the cramming they would sit there for a minute or two, trying to encourage the stuff to get far enough inside them not to cause an afternoon’s agonising reflux – because they sat for a while and looked, the venetian blinds were something everyone in the department spent an unusual amount of time examining. No-one, and this was certain, wanted the blinds raised because that would mean two dreaded things, it would mean the sunlight would come inside and it would also mean that the officers sitting, cramming or digesting, would be visible from outside. Absolutely none of the officers wanted either of these things to happen. They spent too much of the day on sunblasted display. What they wanted as they ate the stodgy meals that were all the cafeteria provided, was a quiet dark space where they knew they were safe from the public and their unceasing demand for directions to the nearest toilet, pharmacy, massage parlour or police uniform sales outlet – because, sarcastically, they wanted to buy some trousers just like those. And so, it was always at some point explained to new officers, ones that had just joined the job or been transferred, that, yes, the blind were never cleaned and that, no, the blinds must never, ever be raised. What happened on this particular lunchtime, then, was something for which everyone who had come across W. P.C. Abrahams that morning needed to take partial responsibility. For as soon as he entered the room, she made a disgusted sound and closely approached the blinds.

‘Eugh,’ she said.

‘Hey,’ said P.C.Hughes.

‘Digusting,’ said P.C. Abrahams.

She reached for the cord.

‘No!’ said P.C. Smith.

‘We need some light,’ she said.

‘Christ,’ said P.C. Beeton.

‘Newbie,’ explained P.C. Ahmed.

W.P.C. Abrahams began to tug.

‘Stop her!’ shouted P.C. Hughes.

‘They’ll break,’ someone cried out.

‘I hate newbies,’ said P.C. Ahmed.

Finally, P.C. Abrahams took notice.

‘What?’ she asked.

Okay. I exaggerate, but not much.

As you’ll see, the writing here goes from extremely dense to extremely sparse without transition.

Descriptive passages are something you get trapped inside – they’re extensive, claustrophobic.

Dialogue, in complete contrast, is public, open, depthless.

The two kinds of writing look very different on the page, and they read very differently.

You probably got through the dialogue passage of fourteen lines faster than some of the three or four line sentences in the description.

YEAH BUT

Why does this matter?

It matters because an experienced reader – a professional one – an agent or editor – glancing ahead through your book will figure you in a couple of instants as someone who hasn’t figured out the way to tell a story.

Because in writing like this, you are – it’s on display – a writer who is failing to keep your reader within a certain consistent kind of story-time.

If a writer is inconsistent or has no inner logic in how they relate description to dialogue, it is almost certain that other things in their writing, to do with consistency of tone and of point of view, will also be lacking.

GOING INSIDE

I just said inner logic, to do with dialogue and description – what did I mean by that?

Most novels accelerate. Events come faster, one upon the other, towards their ends – their climaxes.

Also, readers tend to speed up as they are reading novels.

This is particularly true in the case of crime novels where the mystery is close to being solved or the serial killer caught. But it’s also true of literary novels written in extreme forms of English, such as Jame Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

As we get to know all forms of writing, they become easier to read. We are also, humanly, impatient to complete the experience before something interrupts us, or we die.

An experienced reader, aware of density and how it can be controlled, will use it to control pace – both the pace of the action and the pace at which the reader progresses through what, on a kindle, would be 70%, 80% and 90%.

Towards the end of a book, chapters, sections, paragraphs and sentences may all shorten – giving the reader a real rush. The layout of the page itself will make them remember, years later, That was a real page-turner.

Readers take paragraph breaks as rewards. They’re Scooby Snacks that re-energise them. They’re resting points on the climb up the mountain of black and white. Although they are white space, they are still read. They are gaps – important things happen in them.

Here’s one version of a scene:

‘Will you marry me?’ she asked.

‘No,’ she said.

And here’s another:

‘Will you marry me?’ she asked and she said, ‘No.’

Completely different scene, isn’t it? The first takes a beat, the second shows there was no real decision to make.

If the writer wants to pull against the usual acceleration, they may write in longer paragraphs to give the reader the feeling that the idyll reached towards the end of a novel, the happy place the characters have been striving for all along, is satisfyingly there, is somewhere they can comfortably dwell for a while.

This may be only a matter of a page or so, but it will slow the reader down enough – after the two or three-lined paragraph rush – for them to feel, Ah, yes, we’re somewhere solid now, the child is safe, the house is saved, the marriage will last, the vampires are defeated, the puzzle is solved, the abuser is revealed.

EXERCISE: Look back at your story-start. How many white spaces are there, on the page, where are they and what does this mean? Is there a disjunction between thick description and spaced out dialogue?

Every writer has to work out the relationship between their prosy-prose and their speechy-speech. Some almost integrate them; some keep them quite separate; some do their best to integrate them. The reader will pick up on this, with a scan, and may – on this basis – decide whether or not to read a single word.

Yup.

Writing and Shit – part 31 – Space-Time

We’ve dealt with our spaces and places, as they relate to story-time, now we need to deal with our time.

This should be a lot simpler.

Imagine a big invisible clock, hovering in the sky of our flat empty space.

It’s not an ordinary clock, showing the hours of the day. It’s a countdown, and the writer can set it to any time between one second and infinity.

For our horror story, how much time do you need to allow the dread of the story-time to be entered most effectively?

Think about it for a moment. Then scroll down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s possible you’ve thought of a time of 24 hours or 38 hours or 72 hours, but I doubt you have thought of one second or one year.

Dread can come upon one very rapidly but it needs more than one second to be really dreadful.

Dread distends time. Minutes lasting hours, hours lasting days. But if it starts to drag out, dread becomes hard to maintain. Dread becomes excruciation.

It also, probably, for the reader, becomes boring. Dread is horrific when distilled.

Most horror stories enter a time greater than half a day and less than half a year. Three days and nights would (in my guess) be typical.

Think about it. The very sentence ‘On the third night…’ builds dread. ‘On the sixteenth night…’ is unlikely to build much of anything, except a yawn.

PICKING EPIC

Similarly, and even more simply, for epic fantasy story-time we need longer. Three days and nights won’t do. A week won’t do. We need long distances in mountainous regions to be journeyed through. A year might be a good time, spring to spring.

Exercise: Take a particular sub-genre of fiction and think about what kind of story-time the reader enters when reading it. Write down the genre and an emotion word or two that define it as dread defines horror. Then think about the typical time-period such a generic story covers.

What I hope you’ll find, as I tried to show with horror story-time, is that generic kinds of story-time call into being – for very good reasons – generic kinds of props and locations, landscapes and atmospheres.

Mr But: Lots of stories take place because one or more of these elements has been changed. For example, not all ghost stories take place in old places. Some adventure stories happen in a single, small room.

Thank you. I could hardly have put it better myself. Genres are constantly trying to break out of themselves. Inventive writers swap the props around, and slightly relocate. But, usually, they stick to creating the generic kind of story time.

Go back to your two lists of five books – the Read and the Not-finished

We generally give up on books when we become impatient with them, when we get bored. We may say this is because Not enough happens or I got confused with what was going on or I didn’t care about anything that went on. All of these mean essentially the same thing – I entered a story-time and found I didn’t want to stay there or, when I’d left it for a while, I didn’t want to return there.

Exercise: I’d like you to write a list of your all-time favourite five stories or novels.

Explanation: These don’t have to be written stories. You can choose a film or a comic if you like. But, again, if it’s nothing but films or comics or biographies you’ve chosen, you may be an aspiring writer in those forms, and not in fiction.

Look at this new list. Now get up.

Exercise: Gather these beloved books together. Put them on the desk or table in front of you. Now think about how long it would take you to read the first ten pages of each of them. If there’s one that’s clearly the fastest read, please it to your left. Put the next fastest beside this, a little to the right, and the next and the next until you get to the book where ten pages take you the longest to read.

This is –

DENSITY

And we will be getting dense soon enough.

Writing and Shit – part 30 – The horror! The horror!

Let’s spend a moment examining what story-time means for one particular genre: horror.

(Some generalisations follow. Not all horror novels may conform, I realise.)

The story-time of a horror novel depends upon a specific form of suspense, namely dread.

Horror novels are dread-ful. But we can subdivide them in terms of microgenres, in terms of how that dread is managed by the reader.

Violence is a solvent to dread, because once violence has begun something definite is happening. Dread is fear of what might, in future, happen. What might happen if I stay in this house overnight? What if I go down this long, dark staircase into this cold, wet cellar? What if I investigate this sound, this high, child-like whimpering? What if I open this door?

(Much of horror is opening doors of one sort or another.)

Readers who wish to enter the story-time of horror have a tolerance of, and take pleasure in, shorter or longer periods of dread.

It’s possible to imagine a horror novel that is entirely about a gradual build of dread from the first page to the last.

Even so, if most horror novels depend upon an escalation of dread, from start to finish, it is still a gradual build that contains within it climaxes that terminate in scares or false scares. Each climax is likely to be at a higher level of dread than that which immediately came before it.

Different micro-genres of horror would include many climaxes or few. The rhythm of the climaxes and scares needs to be unpredictable enough to surprise the reader. They want to take their own fear seriously.

If it turns out (at the end of the novel) that the whimpering was a speaker playing a recording of whimpering and the person staying in the house is merely being pranked, there would be a huge let down. (Unless they are being pranked by a psychopath, as prelude to torturing and killing them, because there’s still a chapter to go.)

Horror depends on something genuinely horrifying.

This requires the person in the story to be surrounded by appropriate stuff in an appropriate space (acoustically as well – sound is very important).

THE EMPTY SPACE

Now, I would like to take away the stuff of the horror genre entirely. It may be that the reader loves these props – they love old haunted houses in and of themselves. But let’s try to recreate this particular genre’s story-time from scratch – by reinstalling the location, props, sightlines, etc.

We now have our main person and we have an entirely empty empty space around them.

 

 

 

[image error]

 

 

 

Picture it – completely blank. Like that bit in The Matrix, before the weapons zoom into place, and Neo and Trinity tool up.

[image error]

How do we populate this space with buildings, objects, stuff, so as to give the reader of that isolated person’s story the kind of story-time they want?

The person needs, first of all, to be isolated enough not to be able to end the dreadful situation by going into the next room or calling for help.

The essential horror situation, I’d suggest, requires broken sight-lines. If all walls were transparent, the person could see what they were dreading. Dread is usually of the unseen, the unknown.

So we need a place with walls that are opaque. We need our person to be able to move around within the space, and discover things they couldn’t see from where they were before. In other words, we need doors.

So far we have an isolated place with walls and doors.

Here are some more questions: Would our person feel more or less dread if the place was warm or cold, clean or dirty, full of soft surfaces or full of hard edges, new or old, without reputation or well known for being terrible, somewhere they are meant to be or somewhere they are not meant to be?

Where have we ended up in our pursuit of maximally dreadful story-time? I think it is somewhere cold, dirty, full of hard edges, old, well known for being terrible and somewhere they are not meant to be. Sound familiar?

This is not because all horror stories have to take place in creepy old houses or deserted warehouses. It’s because a certain kind of story-time calls into being certain kinds of props.

EPIC

Finally, for today, returning to the empty white space and the idea of sight-lines – and in contrast to the horror genre. What are the sight-lines of a fantasy epic?

Well, they vary. But I would say that the writer wishing his reader to enter the story-time of epic would need to create very good sight-lines – sight-lines from which distant locations to be reached could be spotted from far off, from which vast armies could be seen massing.

Would the epic fantasy reader be able to enter the story-time they desired if the people in the story were within a horror story location? If, to travel even a short distance, they had to open door after door? No, it wouldn’t be possible. Within a house, you cannot have the sentence The friends journeyed on for several days.

Literary aside: This is, in fact, the very effect of Mark Z. Danielewski’s great novel The House of Leaves. This includes epic fantasy space within a haunted house. But within the epic part, the doors are absent.

For epic fantasy story-time, we need a general absence of walls and doors. (Yes, our people and elves and dwarves will find shelter, but more often they’ll be exposed to wide open spaces.) We also need good sight-lines. They’ll need some high places to look out from.

[image error]

Try to imagine the Lord of the Rings taking place within a world that was entirely flat – on a vast empty plain.

Again, that space would mean there was no possibility of epic fantasy story-time being entered.

Exercise: Perform the same build, from an empty space, for a completely different genre.

See you soon.

Writers Rebel – a speech for Extinction Rebellion

Last night I introduced Clare Farrell, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion, at the second Writers Rebel event.

The first event took place last October, on Trafalgar Square, where 40 writers – including Ali Smith, Robert Macfarlane and Susie Orbach – read and gave speeches.

At the event, I read Blake’s ‘What is the price of Experience?’ as a mic check – getting the crowd to read along with me. It was extraordinary, to feel the power of Blake’s words.

Before I read, I said that I was sure that Blake, if he’d been alive, would have been there, would have been taking part in the protest.

For last night, I was asked to say a little bit about writing and protest. Here’s what I said –

 

I like to sit.

I’m a writer. I like to sit.

I’m a Buddhist. I like to sit.

But here I am. I’m here, standing. Standing up in front of you, talking. Directly. Politically.

Thank you for coming. Thank you for being here. You could be somewhere else.

I could be somewhere else. Sitting. Because, like you, I’m a writer – and, for me anyway, that means more than just about anything else, I like sitting at my desk and writing.

It takes something to get me out of the house. Also, I’ve tended to agree – in the past – with the advice that getting too involved, too politically doctrinaire, hurts the writing, and takes time from it.

And so I’ve voted Green in most elections, and after Trump was elected I joined the Green Party. As something to do.

But I haven’t committed to any kind of political action that was likely to get me arrested. I’ve been on marches about university tuition fees, against war, against Brexit. But I haven’t become involved in organizing civil disobedience.

Now, with the world as it is, with the climate crisis as extreme as it already is, I feel I have no choice but to become more involved, more committed – committed to Extinction Rebellion.

Why? Why Extinction Rebellion?

Well, I don’t know how old you are – I don’t know if you remember the 4-minute warning. 4 minutes until nuclear holocaust.

During the 1980s, I spent quite a lot of time thinking about what I’d do when the 4-minute warning sounded.

I was fairly sure it would sound.

Eventually, I settled on two courses of action – either I would run out onto the street, to try and find someone of my age to lose my virginity with, or, more likely, as the streets of Ampthill, Bedfordshire, probably wouldn’t have contained anyone capable of helping in that endeavour (they hadn’t so far, obviously) – or more likely I would put on ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon.

‘Imagine’ lasts a few seconds over 3 minutes, so I reckoned I could get it played start to finish by the time the nuclear blast hit.

At the time, looking at adults, looking at the madness of Mutually Assured Destruction, looking at Ronald Reagan, I wondered why everyone wasn’t already out in the streets – doing one thing or another.

I wondered why, things being so bad, so extreme, the whole human race wasn’t protesting.

Coming into the very recent past, I was still wondering why there weren’t mass protests everywhere about environmental degradation? Why wasn’t there resolute, global action?

Well, now there is – now, there are millions of people out on the streets. They are focussed, organised, and they have a sense of urgency.

It is Extinction Rebellion which has given the focus – at least in the UK.

If there is a single thing that has caused me to want to do more, to want to do whatever I can, then it’s just this: within my short lifetime, I’ve witnessed the English climate change.

You’re seen it, too.

We’ve seen bird and insect numbers collapse. We’ve seen winter becoming sometime muggy, rather than freezing. We’ve seen trees blossom in December that used to come out in March.

And that shouldn’t happen – that kind of change shouldn’t be perceptible within a single human lifetime.

It’s a planet we’re talking about, not a back garden.

I’ve seen this in a place, in a country, that is generally quite isolated from extremes of weather.

It’s true, I have benefited from many of the industries and systems that have caused environmental change. I’ve bought the plastic, eaten the meat. But I realise that just changing my own consumer habits is not enough. That’s continuing to sit.

I need to try to make more of a difference.

What we need now is individual commitment to collective, global action – political action; sometimes obstructive, sometimes annoying to people who just want business as usual, sometimes infuriating to them.

As a writer, like you, I have always tried to find my own words for things – not to take on slogans. But, at this point, I’m happy to copy an eleven year-old school striker carrying a placard that says NO PLANET B.

Because they’re right.

There is NO PLANET B.

We have caused the mess, with our dynamism and our laziness. We have put the energy into the ecosystem. Now we need to clean up our own mess. We need to take the energy out.

It can be done.

I’m a writer, so Writers Rebel is where I’m going to make my contribution, put my commitment, spend my time, make my stand.

And if the writing gets suffers, it suffers. And if the writing gets worse, the writing gets worse.

I don’t think it has to.

Maybe you’re where I am, maybe not.

This evening is a chance for you to think about what you want to do, or not do.

This evening is a chance for you to think about where you sit.

—

Here’s a link to Extinction Rebellion.

Follow Writers Rebel on twitter.

[image error]