Emma Darwin's Blog, page 5

What a writer can learn from the HWA Debut Crown Shortlist

I've just had the very great pleasure of chairing the judges for the Historical Writers' Association Debut Crown Prize. Along with former winner Ben Fergusson, book bloggers Ayo Onatade and Susan Heads, and novelist and journalist Sunny Singh, we had the task of reading something like 36 debut historical novels. And as we wrangled our way from a longlist to a shortlist, I was reminded of how historical fiction presents any writer with some of the biggest writerly challenges of all. So it's genuinely remarkable how the best of what we'd read - all debuts, after all - met those challenges. 

So why might a writer, specifically, want to read each of the shortlisted books. It's not that they're all perfect in every possible way - there's no such thing of any novel, still less anyone's first novel, after all. But each does show something that, if you're learning to write any kind of fiction, is well worth learning. I do suggest, too, that when you read you close-read: don't go whizzing on but get detailed with yourself about what words, exactly, are creating the effect I describe. And if you disagree with me, why? What might I be liking that you don't, or vice versa? Learning to read like a writer is essential to your craft, but learning to read like other readers is a useful next stage.

Emily Bitto ��� The Strays A radical artist and his family challenge conservative 1930s Australia, but in this limpidly written story the repercussions travel down the generations.

Why a writer should read it: The prose is that quiet, pitch-perfect sort which I think of as "supple". Without ever being over-rich or aggressively plain, it just always has the right words, rhythm, stress and slack for the story that Bitto is trying to tell, and for the eyes of the narrator through which she is trying to tell it. 

Sarah Day ��� Mussolini���s Island A beautifully-told story of love, betrayal and survival in a strange and moving episode in Italian history.

Why a writer should read it It's based on a fascinating unknown corner of real history, but I mean it as a compliment when I say that it never reads like that: both settings and characters feel fully imagined and inhabited and their story becomes vivid and painful. And the writing is evocative and considered, without ever becoming over-egged or over-explain-y. 

Martin Holm��n ��� Clinch Chandler in reverse, with the protagonist the alleged criminal in a compelling 1930s Scandinavian-noir whodunnit.

Why a writer should read it: An terrific example of how to take an established sub-genre - the hardboiled noir crime story - and reinvent it with a new setting (at least to non-Scandi readers) and a new angle on classic tropes. Everything is very confidently handled, not least the considerable violence, without ever slipping into over-explaining the historical setting or social dynamics. 

Abir Mukherjee ��� A Rising Man Delightful and splendidly-written whodunnit set in and beyond the Raj in the historical pivot-point of 1920s Calcutta.

Why a writer should read it: A very different re-inventing of a classic sub-genre, this time shedding a very precise historical light which challenges many received ideas of the Raj. It sets up the characters and tropes without which no classical whodunnit is complete, but does it in a contemporary voice and with comedy, verve, feeling and real narrative tension.

James Terry ��� The Solitary Woman of Shakespeare Gold rush Indian Territory becomes the Forest of Arden in this very funny but also subtle story of one woman���s determination to shape her life.

Why a writer should read it: Even to American readers the premise must be delightfully fresh, but the perfectly-pitched comic narrative voice is never at the expense of feeling, nor of good writing: the setting is beautifully evoked and the characters' story, though made confidently ridiculous at times, is genuinely touching.

Beth Underdown ��� The Witchfinder���s Sister An enormously compelling and deftly-told story set at the heart of the great Essex witchhunts.

Why a writer should read it: This brilliantly pulls off the difficult feat of centring a story on a protagonist who, as a woman of her time, can have very little agency. There's real narrative tension despite this, and the voice is spot on too: unobtrusively historical so it evokes the time without ever seeming effortful or self-conscious.

One final, general thought. A word which kept coming up as I was writing this post was "confident", and I've been trying to work out what is that makes all these novels feel so confident, when they're very different in so many ways.

Trusting the reader: not nervously putting in explanations - explicit or implicit - of unfamiliar historical situations, settings, manners or mores. Also trusting the reader to stay with you for more lyrical and evocative passages which aren't obviously pushing the plot onwards.
Being willing to go for it: not pulling any punches, whether they're physical (plenty of punches in Clinch) or emotional (betrayals in Mussolini's Island), or in storytelling terms (holding to genre-rules in A Rising Man).
Finding a voice: one which is consistent in its relationship to the real written and spoken voices of history, as well as right for the novel in a general way, and then sticking to it.
Not trying to be too many things at once: being wholehearted about what the novel wants to be, and not trying to cover more bases. It's wholeheartedness that raises a genre convention to become a satisfying trope, and refuses to tidy up a complex emotional dynamic into pop-psychology, but lets it stay complex and partly inexplicable.

Mentoring for Writers: the Authors for Grenfell post

At the Authors for Grenfell auction, I offered to write a bespoke blog post for the bidder of the largest amount. The auction has closed now, having raised over ��180,000, but the Red Cross's London Fire Appeal is very much open, and the needs of the victims don't vanish as the headlines do, so do please click through to donate. And for a lovely story of the power of social media in these things, . My idea, in offering the blog post, was that the bidder would get from some personalised advice. But the winning bidder turned out to be Glenn, whom I've been mentoring for some time, and who therefore has the benefit (at least, I hope that's how he sees it) of my advice anyway.  So Glenn suggested that I should blog about something which would appeal to Itch readers in general. 

I've blogged about whether creative writing can be taught at all, and about writing courses in general, and MAs and Creative Writing PhDs in particular, but never about mentoring, so here goes.

What is mentoring? The general idea is a one-to-one, ongoing, relationship with an experienced writer or mentor, which supports you and helps you to develop your writing. If that sounds a bit vague, that's because only the one-to-one bit is certain: everything else will vary according to the needs of the writer, and how the mentor works.

Many mentors would base each session on a chunk of writing, probably read ahead of time. This is partly about feedback on the chunk - what's working, what isn't, and how to make it better. But where mentoring is different from tutoring is that the writing is also as a jumping-off-point for thinking about what's happening in the writer's writing life: How is the project going? What's getting stuck? Is your process the right one? Is this a moment to plan more, or to let go and fly blind? Have things changed? Are you having a wobble? Why? What's next?

Some mentors work to a clear "once a month" or "every six weeks" programme; others are happy to wait for the writer to ask for a new meeting: some pairs will mix-and-match those approaches. Also, some mentors work to a set number of meetings, at least initially, while others just see how it goes. 

Some mentors are writing coaches. That's not about discussing tactics for winning the writing race - though writing more quickly might come into it - but "writing coach" as in "life coach". This kind of mentor may not read text at all, but be solely working with the writer on motivation, process, productivity, confidence, blocks, even promotion and professional marketing. A writing coach might not even be a writer themselves: good life coaches work with people in all sorts of professions, as their skill is in asking the right questions and setting conversations in motion which mean the writer finds their own answers. This website, which is a long-established service, explains the possibilities well.

Some mentors are quite light-touch. I know of writers who don't really want detailed, teacher-like help with their writing, nor a full-dress coaching structure, but the equal and reciprocal relationship with writing buddy isn't quite right either. I know someonewho refers to their "writing aunt", which nails it nicely: a sounding-board, a supportive but much more experienced and senior friend, and a reliable trusted reader for their writing. As ever, the key is to make sure that both sides understand what to expect.

Why might I want a mentor, not a course, or feedback on a whole novel? Courses, classes and how-to books abound for beginners and less experienced writers, because most of them tend to make the same mistakes, and need the same kind of advice. But the more experienced and/or talented you are, the more the basic skills are all in place, and your ambitions for your writing will be very specific, and individual to you. What you need is individually-tuned feedback which can understand exactly what you aspire to write, and work with what you can already do, to go further. A good course with a good tutor may well be able to offer you some of that - and the power of a good workshop group isn't something that a mentor can altogether replace. Of course, a mentor might agree to read a whole novel at some stage - perhaps at the beginning, perhaps as a last stage - but it's not integral to the relationship. Mind you, another reason for a mentor is simply that you can't commit to the regularity of a course or writers' circle meetings.

Does the writer pay the mentor? Yes, if you want a professional. That said, I have heard some wonderful stories of mentors who are willing to help in a light-touch way, for no more than a gift or a donation to charity: some feel that they had help on the way up, and want to pass it on. I know of one or two whose only request was that the writer "pay it forward", by helping someone else in their turn. But do bear in mind that, for the sake of your writing, even gift horses need their mouths looked into. Free mentoring isn't free if it costs you time without improving your writing and your confidence. 

Do you have to be writing a novel? No, though obviously the long-haul of a novel is a prime candidate for mentoring help. Anyone writing a memoir or other creative non-fiction, might find mentoring helpful, whether the challenge is the emotional investment and risk, or simply the research and writing. Short fictioneers and poets can also benefit from the overview and longer perspective a mentor can offer, as they try to develop their voice throughout a coherent body of work. A mentor can also help with the confidence to send work out, or perform it, and establish a plan for developing a presence on the scene.

What you work on together can change. Glenn first came to me with a novel he had written a substantial amount of, but we have since shifted onto a new project which I've helped with from early on in its life. And there's nothing to say that you couldn't start with some short fiction, and then get help to start a novel - or vice versa. You might even agree that it's time take a break from a long project which has go stuck, and write some short things for a while to rediscover the fun of it all.

How do you find a good mentor? If you're interested in the end of mentoring which is like writing-tutoring, it's much like finding someone for that work. Ask for individual recommendations on writers' circles and forums; notice if anyone teaching courses locally looks promising; there is Gold Dust which is pitched as an alternative to an MA, so it's expensive and quite structured, but has some truly brilliant writer-mentors on the books; editorial agencies such as Writers' Workshop, The Literary Consultancy and the website Reedsy all have writer-editors who may willing to work this way.

I would myself be a little cautious of using a non-writing editor in this way, as their feedback on the writing as it stands - what it lacks - may not take your process and writerly self into account as much a mentor should. As my post The Fiction Editor's Pharmacopoeia suggests, it's one thing to experience a not-working bit of writing, but quite another to work out why it isn't working, and what you might do about it. On the other hand an editor of that sort might be just the job to get your nearly-there manuscript shoved over the last hurdle into publishability.

At the more process- and coaching-oriented end of the spectrum, any of the above might produce someone suitable. The Writing Coach has been offering this kind of work for many years, and magazines such as Mslexia and Writing may well carry advertisements for others who work similarly. Then there's always the option of thinking of writers you admire or know from a workshop or event, and digging on their websites to see if they offer this kind of help. You could even email someone on spec, if you're feeling really brave. Make it clear that you are expecting to pay - you'd be amazed how much help some get asked to give for free - and ask if it's something they would consider. They can only say No. If they don't do a lot of this kind of work, you may need to be particularly clear about what you are looking for, so that you don't end up in a muddle.

How do you arrange things? There are so many different inflections to the overall idea of mentoring that things can very easily go wrong because expectations aren't clear. The author Sara Maitland is a hugely experienced mentor, and her book The Write Guide: Mentoring, discusses the relationship from bothsides; she also has draft agreements to help both sides feel sure of what each is expecting. Maitland has quite a structured approach, but it's a good starting place for deciding and agreeing what you need, and you can always adapt things. The mentor will almost certainly have experience and usual ways of working, but the most successful relationships are those where you are both happy with the approach that you jointly adopt.

Many mentors will ask to see the work first, and will decide if they feel they can help you; some will also suggest a phone chat or an initial meeting, to find out if you get on and the collaboration will work. Others will simply suggest having a first session, and seeing how that goes before you commit to each other for the longer term.

How do you meet? The assumption is that the meeting is face-to-face in a caf�� or at someone's house, or on Skype or Facetime. The phone can also work fine, although it does seem to work better if the first meeting was visual as well: it's just easier to feel that you know each other that way, and particularly for the longer-term, more holistic aspects of mentoring that can make a big difference. Some mentors work only by email, and that might be fine if what you want is more at the tutoring-editing end of things. But good mentoring is very collaborative: it's not just about you receiving the mentor's wisdom, but about an ongoing, evolving conversation, and that's not so easy in an asynchronous form such as email.

A meeting is probably an hour or ninety minutes, and an experienced mentor should know how to make sure everything's covered, and you go away with a plan of what to do next. Of course things might run on a little on occasions - and I've sometimes had sessions where we agreed a bit early that we'd covered everything necessary - but ideally the mentor will wind things up reliably and fairly on time. You would usually finish the session by arranging the next meeting, and agreeing how long before that the mentor needs to receive any work.

Mentoring can feel like friendship, but it isn't - even if you are friends in other areas of your lives, or really like each other at the ordinary human level. If you do agree a mentoring relationship with an existing friend or acquaintance, it's even more important to be clear about what the mentoring will consist of. If some kind of romantic spark started between you, then I feel very strongly that the mentor, as the one in the position of seniority and power in the relationship, should take a leaf out of the book of their psychotherapeutic and educational cousins, and refuse, point-blank, to have both a mentoring and a romantic relationship at the same time.

Clear expectations and boundaries are crucial, as they are with mentoring's psychotherapeutic cousins. With anything as vulnerable as the writer's creative self, and their hopes for it, the space that you create between you must feel safe: reliable, confidential and respectful. Only then can the writer be open and honest enough for real progress to be made. And, just as the writer needs to experience the mentor as safe, the mentor needs to have their boundaries of time and commitment respected. Don't assume, just because this is an individual, one-to-one arrangement, that the mentor will be on call to you whenever you like; but, equally, as long as you have both been clear about what they've agreed to do for you, then if it doesn't seem to be happening you need to initiate a conversation about it. Things go wrong when each side is assuming something about the other side's actions and expectations, but no one is actually saying so, just stewing resentfully or feeling indignant and short-changed.

No mentor will be right for everyone. The best mentor for you may not write your kind of thing, and many of the skills of mentoring are unrelated to genre or style or literary level. But don't be afraid to call it a day after that initial chat, or after the first paid-for session, or even later, if you consistently feel that it's not working. Big writing names and near-invisible ones may be equally miraculous mentors: writing is all about getting into other people's heads, after all. But either kind may not have the right repertoire of processes and ideas for you - or may only have ways that serve their own purposes, and little idea of alternatives. Plus, things change, in you and your writing, and in what you need and what the mentor can provide. Having said that:

Be prepared to find it difficult sometimes. If a mentor never suggests something that surprises you and nudges you out of your comfort zone, then you probably didn't need them. It would be very normal, at times, to find what you are tackling uncomfortable or difficult, and that in itself is not a reason to end the relationship. But if a mentor, month after month, is subtracting from not adding to your confidence that you may be having an ugly duckling phase but the far side of it you can see a sparkle of swan-hood, then it's time to move on. It's time to move on, too, if you feel that your writing is being steadily pushed - or lured - away from something that feels solid and authentic to you, towards something that, however potentially lucrative, has no taproot into your writerly self.

Be prepared not to be given what you thought you wanted. Early writers may be used to feedback on prose, but be dismayed when a mentor suggests that it's the macro stuff of structure and story that needs work, and there's no point in talking about prose till that's fixed. You may think that you're writing literary fiction only to be told that it's a mainstream women's fiction. Of course, it's your right to disagree - but you have chosen this mentor, so at least consider hard the possibility that they're right, before you give up on them.

Be prepared to work hard. It is not unknown for a writer to ask for mentoring with the expressed hope of improving their work and achieving their goals, but at some, probably unconscious, level,to  consistently do things which make change very unlikely: not tackling the suggested work with an open mind; consistently "not having time" to do the work; constantly reverting to processes which they've ostensibly agreed don't serve them well. That kind of self-undermining or self-sabotaging may be a sign that this isn't the right mentor for you. In my experience it's usually a sign that your relationship with your writing is not, at the moment, likely to benefit from having a mentor: but why not have that conversation with them, before you thrown in the towel?

Don't expect your mentor to be a magician, nor yet a publisher or prize judge-awarder. Mentors may be facilitators, guides, aunts and bloody good writers themselves, but they cannot write your work for you. You have to do that, and how it comes out will always be more about you than about them. And that's a good thing. The last thing a good mentor wants is for you to end up writing like us: what makes us happy is to help you find a much more vivid, exciting and authentic version of your writing.

And finally, Glenn was generous enough not only to bid in the Authors for Grenfell auction, but to suggest that whatever I wrote for him should be useful to all the readers of the Itch, not just him. So, if you've found this post useful, I am shamelessly suggesting that you should consider dropping a pound or two towards the Red Cross's London Fire Appeal. The need for help for the victims is not going to end any time soon.

Bid for a Bespoke Itch of Writing Blogpost at Authors for Grenfell Tower

As part of an initiative to raise money for the Red Cross London Fire Relief Fund, on behalf of victims of the dreadful fire in North London, Authors for Grenfell Tower have got together to auction signed books, characters, events, critiques and many more writerly treats, in aid of the fund.

I am offering you the chance to have your own, bespoke Itch of Writing blogpost, addressing a personal writing problem of your own. I'm happy to include your name and internet links, or for it to be anonymous, as you prefer. 

If you'd like to bid, the page is here:

https://authorsforgrenfelltower.wordpress.com/2017/06/20/bespoke-blog-post-from-writing-mentor-emma-darwin/ 

and there's more about the initiative here, and hundreds more things to bid for here:

https://authorsforgrenfelltower.wordpress.com/

Happy bidding!

 

Mastering the tyranno-thesaurus

Among teachers of English at school-level, using a thesaurus is a Good Thing, being a means of enlarging children's vocabulary. But a ticked box for the maximum number of different words on the page is a poor substitute for teaching genuinely good writing, so among serious writers, and teachers of writing, using a thesaurus is often spoken of as a Very Bad Thing. And when you consider the thesaursed version of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", which floats round the internet attributed to John Raymond Carson, you can see why:

Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific,
Fain would I fathom thy nature specific.
Loftily poised on the ether capacious,
Strongly resembling a gen carbonaceious,

In the mix of this argument is also the human tendency to equate long and obscure words with greater intelligence, superior education, higher status and more serious purpose. Since most human writers have a contrary streak, and others simply wear their snobberies upside-down, we tend to resist that common tendency by instead equating short and familiar words with greater authenticity, wider appeal, more serious meaning - and often greater intelligence, because when you're trying to express a complex idea in simple, non-specialist language, there's nowhere to hide your own lack of understanding.

And yet ... There isn't a writer in the world, I'm sure, who hasn't hit that moment of knowing there's a better word for what we want to say, but not being able to bring it to mind. That word, twinkling or gurning away just out of sight, is a more accurate, apposite, familiar or strange word; a word with a better bouncy rhythm, rounder vowel-sounds, or clinkier consonants; a word from deeper in the gutter or higher in the heavens, from the Bible or the Beats, from Preston, Periclean Athens, Pangaea or Pluto. And if you could use a thesaurus, you might be able to remember it.

First rule of using a thesaurus: there is no such thing as an exact synonym. Of course, that fact is central to what we do: use the exactness of our words to control our readers' understanding and response. I've been known to say that I can teach anyone to write better if they have some sort of feeling that cross/angry/irate/annoyed/irritated/furious/outraged don't all mean the same thing.

The thing is, another human tendency, given similar words, is to use them to make finer distinctions among what they denote. This evolutionary process is fundamental and inevitable: if Anglo-Saxon c�� and Norman-French beof meant exactly the same thing on 14th October 1066, they didn't do so for long. And evolution doesn't happen just in the denotation that kept c�� wandering around eating grass, while beof began to turn up on a platter with Yorkshire pudding. It also happens in the connotations, as the fact that your cow of a football teacher is beefy enough to be frightening proves.

Connotations form the halo of further meaning that every word carries: the nuances and implications, the echoes and references from liturgy and literature, myth and the Daily Mirror. Because of them, every word "says" something about its user: not just who they are in age, gender, ethnicity, class, personality and emotional state, but their purpose in using it. Is the word you've found not just the right word for this story, but for its user? What's more, over the centuries and even decades both denotations and connotations can shift radically, so if you're writing something not set in your own time, you have two sets of denotations and connotations to integrate: those of Then, and those of Now. 

So I suggest that, when you look in a thesaurus, the one thing you're not trying to do is to find a word that means the same as the one you've already thought of. It's much wiser to think of your starting-word as a mere placeholder, a stand-in, a thing in square brackets, for the right word that you've wanted all along if only you could have brought it up from the vault. 

And don't forget that the right word isn't necessarily something longer, fancier or more obscure: it might be simpler. This is particularly true if you - like many aspiring writers - have trouble shedding the office-speak when you leave the office: so often "aspirations" would be better as "dreams", and  "a disastrous eventuality" as "a car-crash", and a thesaurus is a good way to remind you of it.

On the other hand, teachers of writing know all too well the story which has clearly been written by auto-thesaurus: I expect there's even an app out there. So, how do you make sure your story doesn't become one of those?

I think the test is to keep alert to what you intuitively feel - even before you consciously think - when you see the words that the thesaurus offers. I'd divide the possible reactions thus:

"Duh! Of course!" Use the word. You knew it all along, and it almost certainly has all the right sounds and meanings for what you're trying to say. Although checking these things is never a bad idea.

 "Ooh, tasty, hadn't thought of that!" Be careful. It might please you as a word in itself, but unless you're confident that not only the denotation, but the connotations, are what you want, things could go very wrong. I have some students, often good writers in other ways, whose manuscripts' margins are full of me saying "Infer means 'assume' or 'deduce', which which I don't think you mean here. Imply?". They picked the word that sounded more interesting and roughly right, without understanding its meaning fully.

"Interesting. I don't know that one!" Almost certainly don't use it. Even if you check its meaning in a dictionary, chances are you won't use it with the right nuances and rhythms. It won't sit naturally in voice of character or narrative. 

If you do go for a word the thesaurus offered, I suggest you move on from there to look it up very stringently in something really comprehensive, such as the full online Oxford English Dictionary. That's not just because you might be wrong - it's also because chewing on this new or recovered word is an excellent way to start integrating it into your fully-understood word-hoard.

And finally, a couple of thoughts about thesauri (which The Oxford Dictionary for Writer and Editors says is the correct plural, though some sites suggest that thesauruses is also just fine):

The free online ones can be good for a quick check, but aren't nearly as comprehensive as a good print or paid-for-online one: don't forget that your public library should give you access - very possibly remotely - to the major sites.
A thesaurus built on Roget's principle , with words collected together by concept, rather than dictionary-style, is far, far more useful: the next-door headers are words which are conceptual cousins to the one you're starting with, so browsing is far more fruitful than the random neighbours the alphabet creates.
For what it's worth, I have the big Bloomsbury Thesaurus, in the new edition which was published in 1997. It's Roget-style, and for my money is the best; it can still be found second-hand, and I bless the day I bought it. It also had lots of very useful boxes of vocabulary for specific things - shipbuilding terms, musical terms, breeds of horse, or astronomical bodies - which is subtly different aspect of the word-you-can't-quite-remember problem.
And don't forget with all sites and all words to apply your "Is this British English or American English or something different again?" scanner. Even when the denotation is exactly the same, the connotations are almost certainly not.

World Building: How much does it take to bring characters and places alive?

The next Words Away Salon is less than a week away, on Monday, 5th June, and I'm delighted that Kellie and I will be joined by Claire Scobie, who's a novelist and mentor, to talk about World Building: Bringing Characters and Places Alive.

If you're within reach of the Tea House Theatre, Vauxhall, do come along: we start at 7.30 - though the Tea House is open all day - and over wine, beer, tea and cake, we kick the evening's topic around, between the guest, Kellie and me, and you the audience. It's all very informal and great fun, and can also be a very welcome break from staring at your screen, trying to make Chapter Eight behave. 

And as part of my thinking about World Building, I looked back at an earlier post on the blog about it, and this is an updated and lightly tweaked version of that post from a few years back.

***

Have you noticed how often fantasy and science fiction - speculative fiction - comes in fat trilogies? And how historical fiction is a bit that way inclined as well? That's partly because of the need for what spec fickers (rightly) call "world-building" and hist fickers (less wisely) call "the researched stuff". That's not just about the politics or logistics of two kingdoms being at war, or their technology, food or writing systems; it's also about the manners and mores of the inhabitants, the traditions, the religions, what the radicals are trying to make happen, gender relationships, psychotropic substances, and so on.

Were your novel set within living memory, in Britain, or the US, or somewhere else your potential readers know at first or at least second-hand, then in theory you could write phrases like "Trafalgar Square Tube" or "Bridezilla" or "TV Evangelist", and they'll conjure up a full set of denotations and connotation, which then become part of your readers' experience of the novel. Even you do need to think about it: I've blogged about what's going on when your storytelling relies on readers to get cultural references.

And, of course, for readers to feel the same density and complexity in life in 5th Century Athens or on the planet Zog, you can't rely on that existing knowledge: you're going to have to supply more of the cultural/physical hinterland, the stuff of what drives people to act, what they fear and what the dream of. What's more, if, say, your story springs from the big political and historical circumstances of your world - which is so often exactly what you want to be exploring - then you may need quite a bit of that hinterland. But how much is too much? 

And, of course, readers who enjoy the Otherness of historical and speculative fiction by definition want to buy into a full, substantial world: to sense that for each street the story takes them down, there's a whole village fanning out beyond it, for each moment in the chapel there's a whole history and geography of faith and heresy underpinning and overlying it that single prayer. Readers want to sense that every wardrobe or weapons store that's opened has twenty garments or guns in it; that's true even if the only ones that actually matter are the right one the character fails to pick out because it belonged to their hated, abusive grandmother, and the wrong one they do pick out, which will lead to disaster in thirty pages' time. But the reader doesn't know what those other eighteen will look like so, rather than do as cheap TV dramas do with their obviously empty suitcases, you're going to have to fill those cupboards.

Or are you? I'm reading Fahrenheit 451 at the moment, and it's startling what Ray Bradbury doesn't put in: what doesn't get explained, what doesn't get described, what actually isn't there at all. And yet I'm experiencing a vivid, wholly Other world; it's self-sufficient and convincing in how the characters struggle to operate in the only reality they know, even though that reality is conjured by the most minimal of means. What Bradbury's done, of course, is leave the spaces for my mind to fill in. If you asked me to free-write my experience of that world, it would be full of things Bradbury didn't put in it. (Which is probably why "the film of the book" - any book - always leaves fans of that book disappointed.)

In The Desirable Difficulty of Sleeve and Paint I thought more about how and why the writer might try to get the reader's imagination working harder, but of course, it's not coincidental that it's Bradbury who says, in Zen in the Art of Writing, "The artist learns what to leave out." Just because readers want to sense the presence of all those other streets and lives and faiths and garments and guns, doesn't mean that you should put them all in.

But notice that Bradbury hasn't said, "The artist learns to leave everything out"; what we must learn is to know what the reader can and can't do without, in order to create the world for themselves, hear the voices you want them to hear, and feel the emotions you want them to feel. The art is in picking which glimpses you offer the reader of those other streets, strange words, sayings and folk-tales , religions, garments and guns.

That almost certainly means you imagining or researching an awful lot more than ends up on the page, and only then picking which bits of your material will have the best and strongest effect, while taking up the least space on the page. In Yours To Remember, I thought about more on how to let those bits of data compost down into your work, and for more on how to pick the details that are evocative, without slowing up the story, click here. And finding the right kind of feedback and beta-readers is the way to grow your own judgement of what to leave out, and the confidence to do it.

The other reason that all the imagining/researching too often ends up on the page, is that we too easily feel that any map smaller, and with fewer dimensions, than the world itself, is imperfect. (Of course in strict logic it is "imperfect": some things are left out, as they must be in any map which isn't the same size and number of dimensions as the original.) When you've done all that imagining, there always seems to be another bit that could and "should" go in: another alleyway or heresy to write, another, subtly different garment which these people really did have ... That's perfectionism in the negative sense: the idea that if you don't create the perfect version, you've failed.

So, although it's important to learn what to leave out, it's just as important to learn to forgive your (nearly) finished novel for all the things it's never going to include: for all the things it could have been, for all the roads you could have taken this project down and didn't, because you chose to go another way. Unless you're utterly incompetent and have no capacity at all to change how you write something, there will always be other ways you could have written it. There is no such thing as a perfect novel in the absolute sense: there will always be avenues/heresies/weapons-stores you could write, which might be just as good, in a different way - but you've decided not to. So be it.

***

Maybe see you at the next Words Away Salon? Monday, 5th June, with Claire Scobie joining Kellie and me at the Tea House Theatre Vauxhall, to talk about World Building: Bringing Characters and Places Alive.

Lady Macbeth and rubber duckies; how much do you need to explain?

A couple of weeks ago I went to see the new film Lady Macbeth. The performances are marvellous, the direction remarkable - especially for a first feature - and costumes and settings are beautiful in a terrifyingly austere way. But I also noticed an aspect of the script which is extremely relevant to writing fiction and creative non-fiction, or anything else story-shaped. In neither script nor image does Lady Macbeth give you almost any backstory or side-story (my term, but you know what I mean), for any character or situation. We learn almost nothing beyond the edges of what we can see and hear in the moment.

So you discover only the barest of reasons why Catherine is in the situation she's in - and that only well into the story - and are neither shown, nor told directly, anything at all about why the other characters act as they do. They just act, and we know who they are by how they act. And that's not because the characters are too busy talking about other things, or the film was too long and got cut: it's just under 90 minutes, and the barest script I've seen since Meek's Cutoff.

The film is, at heart, the story of Catherine growing from child to woman: coming to understand herself and the world she lives in, and taking control of both. (It is, if you like, the dark inversion of Bridget Jones's Diary.) What matters is who she is at the beginning, what happens, and how that makes her into who she is at the end. So, I'd suggest, any careful explaining of how the beginning came about is superflous. Indeed, where the original Leskov novella has a whole extra act where the consequences of who she has become play out, the filmscript stops at the moment when Catherine recognises her full adulthood, and the movie's all the better for it. Beginning, middle and end is all we need.

I'm not say that it's the only way to tell all stories but certainly this very, very close focus is very appropriate to the source story, and to Catherine's situation. It's also true that they had very small budget, but while there's nothing inherently virtuous or ennobling about being force to cut your coat according to too short a cloth, the sparseness of the storytelling is in this case a happy consequence of poverty. After all, all creators have a budget - of time and energy, at least - and one crucial creative decision is always to pick a coat which can be cut without compromise from the cloth you have.

But, more generally, it's worth asking yourself in any project: do I really need to explain? Of course you, as the writer, may need to work out for yourself why Ann is so angry about everything, or Bob so beatific, just as an actor may make up stories about their character to find the keys to the personality they must embody. But that doesn't mean the reader needs it spelled out, or even mentioned at all. So if your first reaction to "Do I need to explain?" is "Yes, of course,", then ask yourself, Why do I think I need to explain? If you've understood for yourself why Ann and Bob are as they are, then as characters-in-action and -interaction they will be consistent, and the consequent change and development will convince: explanations of the psychological mechanics underlying that convincingness will be superfluous.

At the very least, being ruthless with this stuff helps you to avoid the pop-psychology of a glossy magazine article, or the over-neat cause-and-effect of a self-help book anecdote. And with luck it'll steer you away from what film director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Chayefsky unkindly but accurately called the Rubber Ducky Moment. As John Yorke describes in Into the Woods, this is the scene when the character (or the movie) explains that they've been formed by the moment that big brother took away their beloved rubber ducky, and the audience is invited to understand that the whole story is the consequence of that, um, shall we say, emasculation? Not that it's always an individual, small-scale personal event: in historical fiction in particular, the Rubby Ducky Moment may well be socio-political: the dissolution of the Abbey, the ravaging enemy army, the social exclusion after the bitter divorce. 

The Rubber Ducky Moment, says Yorke, is usually laid out in Act Four (of Five, as the train announcements put it) and I'd never say that having such a moment is automatically a crime: it may make sense for us as readers to realise just how deep-rooted this character's damage (aka "flaw") is, just as you push them the ultimate, change-or-die climax in Act Five. But it's still not a given that it needs spelling out to us. Can you not trust us to sense and believe in the length of the roots, without hoiking them out and brandishing them in our faces?

What's more, amazingly often these days, you'll find the Rubber Ducky Moment displaced to be the Prologue. I'd argue that this is an even bigger sign of a lack of confidence in the writer, even if it's masked as lack of confidence in the reader. Do you really not trust yourself to hold onto our attention, without showing us the crucial moment right at the beginning? It reminds me of those "next episode" trailers which basically summarise the entire story, from terror that we might not tune in.

But refusing to rely on the Rubber Ducky Moment in all its soap-bubble, bouncy, bright-yellow glory, is also very good for you as a writer. The reason Lumet and Chayefsky were being sniffy about the Moment is that so often it isn't a revelation of what's in a character's psychological depths, it's a substitute for those depths. We all know the kind of novel where we're told that a character has a Porsche or a Beretta, wears Prada or listens to Springsteen, as a feeble substitute for evoking those things for the reader. As a teacher looking at that kind of manuscript, I'll be saying: "What about the reader who's never heard of Prada? What have you given them, so that they know what it's like to be dressed in it, and what that means for the story? It's that which is important." 

In sum, storytelling is an act of human communication, and one of the things that humans learn (or should learn) as they grow up, is also relevant to more formal, substantial acts of communication, such as a book. In the words of comedian Craig Ferguson, when you feel you should explain something - either directly or indirectly - about the context of your characters' actions and reactions, stop, and ask yourself: 

Does this need to be said? (At all?)
Does this need to be said by me? (Explicitly to the reader?)
Does this need to be said by me now? (At this point in the story?)

What is a non-linear narrative, and should my story be one?

Once upon a time, there were only stories which were about a single person, and they started at the beginning, proceeded by way of a middle stretch of causally linked events, through to the end. Then someone invented the word "meanwhile", and it became possible to tell a story in which that chain of events was partly formed or changed by what was happening or had happened to someone else and in a different place; the story began to step sideways, so as to draw this new set of causal relationships into the main chain of cause-and-effect.

As readers and writers got more experienced, the possible weaves of different strands became ever more interesting and complicated - think Dickens - and began to involve slipping forwards and backwards, as well as sideways, away from the single series of events about one person, told in the order in which they happened. Finally, the 21st century threw into a writer's calculations the need, in the age of "Look Inside the Book", to make sure that the first page gives the reader an instant hit of excitement: a strong "promise" that this story will be worth your while, as Andrew Stanton puts it. And the result is that more and more books that tell their stories not in the order in which the events actually happened.

The simplest (though not always successful) result of this trend is the ubiquity of prologues, of which more here, but they don't really change the order of the narrative, just give a bit of separate info at the start. And, of course, almost any story will have "achronological" elements: flashbacks, memories, and the occasional "meanwhile moment". But I'm talking about something more fundamental: stories where the main story is not narrated in the order in which it would have happened in the "real" life you're conjuring. A

In what follows, I'm using "story" to mean the events of the overall story in the order they actually happened, and "narrative" to mean the text in the order that the events are told on your pages. To help your thinking, I'm suggesting a few examples, but if, as you read, another example occurs to you, do put it in the comments.

So, some ways in which a narrative would count as non-linear include:

The narrative starts from the end of the story and moves backwards: Martin Amis' Time's Arrow.
The main narrative proceeds in alternating sections taken from different parts of the story: Joseph O'Connor's Ghost Light.
The main narrative has a "frame story" of before, or after, the events - perhaps in a different voice or from a different point-of-view - and sections of it are interspersed among sections of the main narrative: William Boyd's Restless is of this type, though the "frame" is quite substantial.
A series of separate and maybe conflicting narratives, read together, build an overall story: Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Sarah Water's Fingersmith can almost be read as one of these.
There are two main narratives, each whole in itself and with no significant plot interconnections as they go - or at least not till the very end.  This is often called a dual narrative: an example would be Charles' Frazier's Cold Mountain, or Restless again.
There is one narrative, and another very substantial story assembled by the reader or some of the characters, from evidence such as letters, poems and diaries: most commentary and reviews of A S Byatt's Possession talk as if the Victorian "love story" is a parallel narrative, but it is never actually narrated.
There are two main narratives, with different casts of characters so the stories connect, but their plots don't. This subset of the dual narrative is usually called a parallel narrative: as well as my own The Mathematics of Love, Tobias Hill's The Love of Stones is a super example. 
There are several narratives, nested inside each other: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is the classic example.

In addition, with those last three examples where you have more than one main narrative, each narrative might tell its own in the natural chronology, or break its story up and tell it out of order. Mind you, I think it's a very tricky to do that, and not lose your readers ... or possibly your mind. On the other hand, as one of the commenters below points out, The Time-traveller's Wife does exactly that.

So, if you're contemplating doing it this way, what should you be asking yourself? 

It's worth remembering that we are time-bound creatures wired for understanding things as a matter of beginning-middle-end: a "causally related chain of events", as the dictionary definition of narrative puts it. If you're breaking that chain up, then effects won't follow causes in your telling, and nor will an effect lead onwards to the next cause. Instead, the reader must intuit or work out consciously the true causal relationships which form the actual story; you're asking more cognitive heavy lifting - conscious or unconscious - as they "assemble" it.

And if you're working with more than one main narrative you're asking for even more heavy lifting: the reader must press the pause button on one story, moving on from it so as to immerse in the other, and then pause that to immerse in the first ... and still make sense of each in its own right.

But, at the same time as you're asking the reader to "assemble" the actual story by separating it out from the narrative form you're using to deliver it, you're asking them to read the separate sections together, to get whatever "more" the story trying to offer the reader by being told this way. 

The thing is, because we are time-bound creatures, the only good reason for asking this extra work of the reader is that their experience of the story will be richer than if you did things the normal way. In other words, the juxtapositions, echoes, thematic links and overlaps, must all help to explain, illuminate, deepen and enrich the story and the ideas it embodies.

So, what matters is that you are sure that the reader's profit-and-loss will end in profit: the cost of the extra work must not outweigh the riches they'll gain. And extra work is not the only possible cost. Cutting away from strand A and dumping us in strand B breaks the chain of cause-and-effect and leaves the broken links loose, in the expectation that the reader will pick them up; but there's a very real risk that setting out the stories in this way sacrifices both clarity and energy in the storytelling.

In principle, you could compensate for at least some of loss of energy by the fact that you can "create tension", by cutting away from a strand just when we want more. But if you cut away solely to deprive the reader of information that we would have if the narrative were chronological, we'll intuit what you're up to, and feel cheated and manipulated. Overtly witholding information from the reader doesn't create mystery, it just makes us baffled and therefore bored and restless - or even resentful.

What's more, the more invested you've managed to make us in one strand, the more we will resent the switch; indeed, The Mathematics of Love was rejected by an agent on the grounds that readers always resent one or other strand, and I've known other agents agree that this can be a problem: the book overall has to offer many extra riches, to compensate for the risk of readers being annoyed by its split focus and the demands that places on the reader. 

So, if you're switching from Strand A to Strand B:

Instead of chopping a strand off just to avoid having to tell us something, you need to find a natural place to end it - a satisfying, chapter-end sort of pause - so that we don't mind leaving it. You must then re-start the other strand in a way that doesn't confuse or frustrate us, but means we can relax and let ourselves immerse all over again, even though we know we haven't got long. 
Give us enough help, fast, to anchor us in time and place B without us ever having to figure it out. By all means label the sections with the date, or the name, or whatever, but that's not enough: many readers don't read them - or only as a last resort, when they realise they're lost.
I suggest that the opening sentence of the new B section should have at least two things which couldn't possibly belong to the A strand: specific places, names, events, whatever. Then make sure the following sentence or two gives more help, so we're really securely anchored by the end of the first paragraph.
Give us enough little scraps and reminders to recall the last time we were in B: not just who and what, but what mattered and matters now, what was urgent and important. Be as light-touch as you can, though: just enough to bring it back up to the top of our memory after the intervening A-section. And remember that you may have written the last bit of B weeks ago, but the reader only read it an hour ago. We only need a little reminder, not slabs of repeated information.
Pay attention to the end of the A section we're just leaving. The more A-ish it was, the better the contrast - and so the cleaner and more intuitive the switch - to the world of B.
Make the voices of the different strands as different as you possibly can; either because you have different narrators for A and B, or by using psychic distance and free indirect style to colour the narrative as strongly (and differently) as possible. 
Be very wary of opening the new section of strand B with a line of dialogue. Starting any story or new section with dialogue has the enormous disadvantage that, unlike a line of narrative, it can't directly anchor us in time or space. It's like a voice coming out of a loudspeaker in no-man's-land. We don't even know who's speaking until we reach the speech tag, and we know nothing more until after it finishes and the narrative can fill us in. Of course it doesn't take much working out ... but it does take some.
Don't be afraid to Tell . There are many times when it's much better to say "In May, in Berlin, John found it difficult to believe Jane wasn't coming back", than do anything subtle and Show-y about how the view from an apartment (which apartment?) showed the linden trees in leaf (hang on, are lindens like limes? And when do they leaf?), but it wasn't much comfort him (to whom?).

What's a non-linear narrative, and should my story be one?

Once upon a time, there were only stories which were about a single person, and they started at the beginning, proceeded by way of a middle stretch of causally linked events, through to the end. Then someone invented the word "meanwhile", and it became possible to tell a story in which that chain of events was partly formed or changed by what was happening or had happened to someone else and in a different place; the story began to step sideways, so as to draw this new set of causal relationships into the main chain of cause-and-effect.

As readers and writers got more experienced, the possible weaves of different strands became ever more interesting and complicated - think Dickens - and began to involve slipping forwards and backwards, as well as sideways, away from the single series of events about one person, told in the order in which they happened. Finally, throw into a writer's calculations the need, in the age of "Look Inside the Book", to make sure that the first page gives the reader an instant hit of excitement - a strong "promise" that this story will be worth your while, as Andrew Stanton puts it - and the result is that more and more books that tell their stories not in the order in which the events actually happened.

The simplest (though not always successful) result of this trend is the ubiquity of prologues, of which more here, but they don't really change the order of the narrative, just give a bit of separate info at the start. And of course, almost any story will have flashbacks, and the occasional "meanwhile" moment. 

I'm talking about stories where the main story is not narrated in the order in which it would have happened in the "real" life you're conjuring. In what follows, I'm using "story" to mean the events of the overall story in the order they actually happened, and "narrative" to mean the text in the order that the events are told on your pages. And I'm suggesting a few examples, but if as you read another example occurs to you, do put it in the comments. For example:

The narrative starts from the end of the story and moves backwards: Martin Amis' Time's Arrow.
The main narrative proceeds in alternating sections taken from different parts of the story: Joseph O'Connor's Ghost Light.
The main narrative has a "frame story" of before, or after, the events - perhaps in a different voice or from a different point-of-view - and sections of it are interspersed among sections of the main narrative: William Boyd's Restless is of this type, though the "frame" is quite substantial.
A series of separate and maybe conflicting narratives, read together, build an overall story: Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Sarah Water's Fingersmith can almost be read as one of these.
There are two main narratives, each whole in itself and with no significant plot interconnections as they go - or at least not till the very end.  This is often called a dual narrative: an example would be Charles' Frazier's Cold Mountain. Another example is A S Byatt's Possession although, interestingly, the Victorian "narrative" is almost never actually narrated, but assembled by the reader from the letters, poems and diaries.
There are two main narratives, with different casts of characters; the stories are connected, but their plots don't. This subset of the dual narrative is usually called a parallel narrative: as well as my own The Mathematics of Love, Tobias Hill's The Love of Stones is a super example. 
There are several narratives, nested inside each other: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is the classic example.

In addition, with those last three examples where you have more than one main narrative, each narrative might tell its own in the natural chronology, or break its story up and tell it out of order. Mind you, I think it's a very tricky to do that, and not lose your readers ... or possibly your mind.

So, if you're contemplating doing it this way, what should you be asking yourself? 

It's worth remembering that we are time-bound creatures wired for understanding things as a matter of beginning-middle-end: a "causally related chain of events", as the dictionary definition of narrative puts it. If you're breaking that chain up, then effects don't follow causes in your telling, and nor does an effect lead onwards to the next cause. Instead, the reader must intuit or work out consciously the true causal relationships which form the actual story; you're asking more cognitive heavy lifting - conscious or unconscious - as they "assemble" it.

And if you're working with more than one main narrative you're asking for even more heavy lifting: the reader must press the pause button on one story, moving on from it so as to immerse in the other, and then pause that to immerse in the first ... and still make sense of each in its own right.

But, at the same time as you're asking the reader to "assemble" the actual story by separating it out from the narrative form you're using to deliver it, you're asking them to read the separate sections together, to get whatever more the story is offering by being told this way. The thing is, because we are time-bound creatures, the only good reason for asking this extra work of the reader is that their experience of the story will be richer than if you did things the normal way. In other words, the juxtapositions, echoes, thematic links and overlaps, must all help to explain, illuminate, deepen and enrich the story and the ideas it embodies.

So, what matters is that you are sure that the reader's profit-and-loss will end in profit: the cost of the extra work must not outweigh the riches they'll gain. And extra work is not the only possible cost. There's a very real risk that cutting away from strand A and dumping us in strand B - breaking the chain of cause-and-effect and leaving the broken links loose for the reader to pick up - sacrifices both clarity and energy in the storytelling.

In principle, you could compensate for at least some of loss of energy by the fact that you can "create tension", by cutting away from a strand just when we want more. But if you do it solely to deprive the reader of information that we would have if the narrative were chronological, we'll intuit what you're up to, and feel cheated and manipulated. The thing is, overtly witholding information from the reader doesn't create mystery, it just makes us baffled and therefore bored.

What's more, the more invested you've managed to make us in one strand, the more we will resent the switch; indeed, The Mathematics of Love was rejected by an agent on the grounds that readers always resent one or other strand, and I've had other agents agree that it can be a proble: the book overall has to offer many extra riches, to compensate for the risk of readers being annoyed by its structure.  Instead of chopping a strand off just to avoid having to tell us something, you need to find a natural place to end it - a satisfying, chapter-end sort of pause - so that we don't mind leaving it. You must then re-start the other strand in a way that doesn't confuse or frustrate us, but means we can relax and let ourselves immerse all over again, even though we know we haven't got long. 

So, if you're switching from Strand A to Strand B:

Give us enough help, fast, to anchor us in time and place B without us ever having to figure it out. By all means label the sections with the date, or the name, or whatever, but that's not enough: many readers don't read them - or only as a last resort, when they realise they're lost.
I suggest that the opening sentence of the new section should have at least two things which couldn't possibly belong to section we've just finished: places, names, events, whatever. Then make sure the following sentence or two gives more help.
Give us enough to recall the last time we were in B: not just who and what, but what mattered and matters now, what was urgent and important. Be as light-touch as you can, though: just enough to bring it back up to the top of our memory after the intervening A-section. And remember that you may have written the last bit of B weeks ago, but the reader only read it an hour ago. We only need a little reminder, not slabs of repeated information.
Pay attention to the end of the A section we're just leaving. The more A-ish it was, the better the contrast - and so the cleaner and more intuitve the switch - to the world of B.
Make the voices of the different strands as different as you possibly can; either because you have different narrators for A and B, or by using psychic distance and free indirect style to colour the narrative as strongly (and differently) as possible with viewpoint character B. 
Be very wary of opening the new section of strand B with a line of dialogue. Starting any story or new section with dialogue has the enormous disadvantage that it can't directly anchor us in time or space as a line of narrative can. We don't even know who's speaking until we reach the speech tag, and we know nothing more until after it finishes and the narrative can fill us in. Of course it doesn't take much working out ... but it does take some.
Don't be afraid to Tell . There are many times when it's much better to say "In May, in Berlin, John found it difficult to believe Jane wasn't coming back", than do anything subtle and Show-y about how the view from an apartment (which apartment?) showed the linden trees in leaf, but it wasn't much comfort him (to whom?).

How To Tame Your Novel

A writer recently got in touch because he's overwhelmed by the novel he's writing. He has a story, and about two-thirds of a first draft, but it's feeling more and more impossible. There are loose ends, continuity clashes, scenes whose outcome is unconvincing and others which don't go anywhere; when he tries to write a scene it always grows in a direction which the plot won't allow, while if he tries to write the scenes that the plot needs, they're stiff and dead. What's more, each time he solves a problem - changes the time-scheme of a chapter, or a character's personality - it causes a problem somewhere else.

And this writer is so not alone. But how you tame a novel-in-progress is always going to depend both on what the novel is, and what kind of a writer you are. So I can't offer an infallible recipe, just some ideas. As ever, try each one on your project and your temperament, and use the ones which seem to fit you. On the other hand, when you're looking at my suggestions, do also keep an ear out for your strongest, most appalled resistance. Every way of working has its particular advantages, but also its particular pitfalls, and so the muddle you're in is, by definition, partly a consequence of your writing process. Which means that processes which are the very opposite of your normal way of working might be just what you need to un-scramble things. 

I would also say that, particularly if you suffer from the must-write demon, it's terribly easy to feel as if any writing-time that isn't putting more words on the page is wasted. Believe me, it isn't - and that's quite separate from the need to accept that creativity is inherently "wasteful". The more you can do to tame your materials, and work on them in other ways than drafting, the more swiftly and easily the draft will come when you do start. 

One more thought: with all of what follows, bear in mind my one-and-only rule of writing, which is DON'T FIDDLE. If you keep dropping in on the file at random and tweaking here and there, all that happens is you make more muddles, start hares you fail to follow through, and lose your sense of the larger structure. Now, if never before, you need to be absolutely ruthless: don't open the file without a clear and particular task in mind (even if it's just reading a scene to see if it's needed), and seeing that task through. If other ideas/jobs/worries occur to you (which they will) then don't let yourself be sidetracked: just make a note and keep going. Trust me: you won't forget what the idea really was (if you find you have, then it's probably your later discoveries which killed it, which is a Good Thing), and you will be able to deal with it when you reach it in the to-do list. 

Stage One: FINDING OUT WHAT YOU'VE GOT

The first stage of taming anything is to understand what you've actually got: is this tiger a cub or fully-grown, male or female? Is this herd of elephants African or Indian? Or are they actually woolly mammoths? Here are some ways to find out. I've suggested a useful order but, as ever, it's up to you:

Corral everything. If you have several different files, assemble them all in a single folder, glance at each, type a line or two at the top of the file to explain what part and stage of the novel it is, and re-name the file itself with something that explains what it is. Honestly, it's a very long time since file names could only be 8 characters, so make your life easy. If you have lots of paper versions of things, then it's even easier. It's what capital letters, red pens and the top-right-hand-corner of the page were made for. Then do the same for your research notes, printouts, postcards and leaflets, books and all the other necessary gumph: folders and marker pens are your friend. Not only will you feel as you, rather than the animals, are now running the zoo, you'll have gained a useful overview of what you've actually done so far and what material you've forgotten you have.

Assemble the text. Print it out if you haven't (and with decent margins), because the last thing you want to be doing is have your fingers stray into messing with the words. Take a pen, read it through, and find, but don't try to solve, the problems. Try to make your finding-notes in a way which will help you when you want to flip through collating all the instances of a particular issue: "LETTER PLOT: she's nosy and would open it"; "BEN'S CHARA.: he's usually braver than this".

Write a synopsis. I can't say often enough how incredibly useful writing a synopsis purely for yourself can be. Think of it as telling a story about your story: it forces you to work out the "causally related chain of events" which is the fundamental nature of narrative. Yes, as your imagination kicks in other ideas/jobs/worries will float up, but don't let them into the main narrative, just keep a separate page for what I think of as "sidecar notes".

Stage Two: GAINING CONTROL

Any of these can be used earlier, as part of clarifying what you've already got. And writing a synopsis can also be used not to find out what you've got, but later, when you want to develop it.

Imagine-on-paper anything else which isn't solid enough in your mind, or has given you continuity problems. Try some of:

sketch-maps
building plans
spreadsheets of relative ages of characters during but also before the story
timelines of the whole novel, or individual parts of the plot
timelines of the different strands of a dual narrative
theme mind-maps: anything from single words which encapsulate your project to myths or quoatations that you draw on 
relationship mind-maps: what rivalries, sexual loves, familial loves, jealousies, fears, hopes and dreams run between your characters? Are they reciprocated, or different?
event mind-maps: what leads to what in cause-and-effect terms (separate from the order it's told in the novel)
a dramatis personae of every named character, and a list of others ("shopkeeper who sells the gun") who matter to the plot
character-in-action questions , including the characters' inter-action grid
off-stage events which affect the plot
ask your novel my Seventeen Questions to clarify what you're actually trying to do with this project, and how it's trying to work 

To help nail voice, character or theme, try first-drafting a short story of an event which isn't part of the story, so you're free to follow your writerly nose, separate from the structural needs of the novel. It's worth doing at least a rough second-draft, to clarify the essence of what you've discovered, but you don't have to polish it unless you want to. And if you feel this isn't a good use of your writing time, I should point out that a story I wrote purely to explore voice and point of view for what wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy went on to be published as part of a Fish Competition anthology, All the King's Horses.

Write a chapter plan, with a maximum of three sentences for each chapter: where it starts, what happens, and what the outcome is. This is a bit like a synopsis, but pushes you into working out the structural function of the units of your story. It's one of the first things that Debi Alper and I make writers do on our course on Self-Editing Your Novel, and it works like a charm for virtually all our 250+ graduates. If you'd like to join our 24th course, it starts in June.

Read a book on story structure, preferably not one based on filmscripts, since it's like reading a book about how to tame a single wolf-pup when you actually have a whole pack of all ages to cope with. My favourite is John Yorke's Into The Woods. 

Buy some index cards: this is particularly useful if you write out-of-order, or your novel has more than one separate story-strand. Make one card for each chapter or main scene of the story - perhaps colour-coded if you have a dual timeline - and use pen for those you've written and pencil for those you haven't, or some such distinction. Blue-tack them to the wall or a white-board, or string a washing line across the room, and start sorting them into the right order.

Try a planning grid: a grid is another way of sorting out the structure, and has the advantage that you can use separate "on stage" columns if you have a dual narrative, but still see how they plait together: a little number in the corner of their respective boxes can show the order of the chunks in any given chapter, or the point-of-view. The rest of the columns can track everything else that you've got in a muddle with: external events, to-and-fro of letters, psychological stages of change, weather... 

Try fitting your story into five-act structure (or whatever the book you read suggests). Then remember that act-structure is fractal, and try shaping each act into five mini-acts, to make units of story. If you have a dual time-line, then make sure each has its own five-act structure, and think about how they play out when plaited together.

Take your projected word-count, and divide by 25: if you're working, as I do, with five-act structures, and intend your novel to be around 100,000 words - which is a pretty safe bet for any genre - then each unit of story, very roughly, wants to be somewhere around 4,000 words. There, that's not so horrifying, is it? And of course you don't have to stick to that anyway.

Stage Three: START THE RE-DRAFT

How you tackle the re-write will always depend on how wildly your existing text has got out of hand. The basic options are

a) revise what you've got: with your new sense of the characters and their overall story, and your new grids and structures to help you.
b) start a "new" project: plan and structure it in your normal way, and let that "new" project dictate what it wants of the old one.

But, above all, in deciding which to do, don't try to save yourself trouble. Revisising what you've got appears to mean less work, but is it really that your unconscious not wanting to risk the need to murder your darlings? What's more, if you're doing it really thoroughly it's unlikely actually to be much quicker than starting afresh. What's more, there's a very strong risk that you will end up with something which works OK, but lacks the fluency, the overarching coherence and drive, that you'd get from re-imagining the whole story from scratch. 

Still, if you find the muddle is genuinely more in your head than on the page, then a) is an option. Consolidate your files into a master-file of the main text, complete with your labels at the start of each section that remind you what it is and what it's doing there. Colour-coding different points of view or narrative strands might be useful, too. Then, if you didn't do it earlier, do the print-and-pen, problem-finding read, and from that make a clear to-do list of tasks, tattoo Don't Fiddle on your monitor, and get stuck in. Even if you normally write out-of-order, I do suggest that you start at the beginning and work forwards, because that gets you closer to how the reader will read it, and should help you to hold on to the overall arc of the story as you move chunks around, tweak, darn in, change, develop and cut stuff, and write the new bits you've discovered you need. 

If you decide to work as if it's a "new" project - and I urge you to consider it really seriously - then you could start however you start a new novel. Keep the old files to hand for when the new story asks for them, but be ruthless about how much surgery any old sections need before they truly belong in the new story. So often it would be better to write something from scratch, rather than patching everything together from existing bits and a bit of sewing. At the very least, to add in old text, don't let yourself copy-and-paste, but actually type the darn stuff in. As that post explores, then the words have to go through your brain, and your brain now knows what they need to be under the new dispensation. Above all don't let yourself paste in old stuff just to rack up the word-count. 

But however you normally start a new novel, remember that this time it has, shall we say, led to certain problems. So would it be worth thinking about a change? Either way, you then need to think about the best form in which to tackle everything.

Use Scrivener. In Scrivener you can simultaneously

a) write, label, synopsise, rearrange and keep track of separate chunks and their associated notes, references and images, and
b) keep the chunks connected up to read in series as an overall draft of chapter or a whole novel, and
c) collect together chunks which are separate in the text but part of the same strand, and read them in series

Scrivener is God's gift to anyone whose novel has got out of hand, even if you're not planning to start from scratch - and that post of mine has suggestions about how to get to know it. You can import the whole of your existing text, chop it up and label it with your new sense of how the whole thing works, and then use Scrivener to work with the start-to-finish text, or on separate strands, or whatever. If you are planning to start from scratch, then use Scrivener's famous cork board, or the outliner, to set out what you know of the overall structure, get writing, and when you need some existing text, copy-type it in. Or, if you're deaf to my excellent reasons for copy-typing everything, you can import it, or (shhh!) just copy-and-paste from your old files. You can also use the outliner to keep track of individual and collective word-counts, and see how the proportions of the structure are developing.

Use scissors-and-stapler. I rebuilt a couple of novels this way, and if some evil person took away my Scrivener, this is how I would again. Print it out, chop up the sections you want to keep, and staple them onto new pages, writing links and comments and notes about what's missing in between them. Typing the whole thing up is an excellent way to gain an overview, particularly if you don't try to work out the larger problems and new things, but just leave them as notes, until you have the whole thing in your head to help you set about tackling the details

If you must use Word or another word-processor, then do what you can to keep track.

add page-numbers before you print out, and then work in "page view" so you can see page numbers on screen; they'll jump about as you work, of course, but it's better than nothing.
make a different file for each chapter or section, and consider naming them something more helpful than "noveldraft2Ch2.docx". There may be a "publication" capability, which links separate files so you can do some global things to them
use Word's outlining capabilities, though they're very hierarchical, which fiction isn't. Personally, I've never been able to make head or tail of them anyway
give different sections a headline or summary at the beginning - maybe your three-sentence-chapter summaries.
print out a list of the chapters-and-summaries or some such, and use it to track word-counts, filenames and other notes.
colour-code the text of different strands, voices or points of view: don't forget you can do a search for a colour of text or other formatting, to find them all
print out and edit-on-paper regularly - get a little laser printer to make it cheaper, faster and clearer

With any of these - with everything in this post - I do suggest that you remember my motto "fast and forwards". I know that it's not the only way to write a novel, but when it comes to this kind of sorting-out it's almost always safer and more effective to work forwards. For most of us, too, it's better to work on a particular issue, throughout the novel, in a single sweep, making sidecar notes about connected problems when you need to, and then going back to sort out those, or the next item on the to-do list.

And, finally, when it comes to eating this very large elephant with - it probably feels like - a single, tiny and brittle plastic spoon this post should help. Good luck!

Networking & Publicity for Writers: how to get it, how to survive it

Seven years ago - good grief! - I wrote a post about networking for writers, Several Rabbits at Once. Twitter was by then more than an irritating twitch at the corner of its creator's eye, but it was nothing like as big as it is today. Still, it seems to me that not all that much has changed in the relationship of one's inner, writerly self, and the nasty, glorious, noisy, beloved (and hated) Outside World. But what has changed - thanks to social media but also to the tectonic shift in the book industry towards self-publishing as a route to the reader - is the degree to which writers can and are told they "must" grapple with publicity themselves. (Just to be clear: we're talking here about publicity, which is the business of finding ways which cost nothing (except time) to reach readers and persuade them to buy your book. The ways which do cost money - which have also changed, with self-publishing and social media - are called marketing, which is a whole other topic. So I'm making no apology for re-posting a tweaked version of that post, all of which is essentially still true: just remember that everything in it also applies to the virtual socialising of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and whatever is the Cool Kids' current place.

However, if you're in reach of London on 20th February, and want to explore in more detail how to get publicity, but also how to survive it, do come along to our latest Words Away Salon, at the Tea House Theatre in Vauxhall. Our guest will be Ruth Ware, who, before she hit the New York Times and other Bestsellers' lists with her debut novel for adults, In A Dark, Dark Wood, and again with The Woman in Cabin Ten, was a senior publicist with major publishers. Over wine, tea and cake, Ruth, fellow-writer Kellie Jackson, I and the audience will jointly explore how publicity works, how to get publicty, how to cope with getting it, how not to get the wrong sort (yes, probably, there is such a thing), and how to cope with not getting it. The Words Away Salons are relaxed, informative, inspiring and fun - and the food's good too! I do hope you can join us.

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Back in the Pleistocene era, fresh off my Drama degree, I worked for a couple of years in academic publishing. It was the late eighties: in the wake of AIDS, and the Equal Opportunities and Equal Pay Acts, career-building had, briefly, been brought in to replace sex as Cosmopolitan's chief preoccupation, and I knew that I was supposed to network in my industry. The book trade ought to be a pleasant place to do that: indeed, I'd decided to go into publishing because when I was writing my Finals dissertation on play publishing, everyone I approached was so nice and friendly, as well as interesting to interview. So every few months or so I trotted along to the Society of Young Publishers, bought my Groucho-Club-priced drink, and wondered what to do next. The talks were interesting, and some were the basis of things I still find myself explaining on the aspiring-writer forums today. But after the speaker had finished, everyone else seemed to leap back to their feet and start making connections. They were doing and receiving favours, recognising friends, and even, for all I knew, doing deals. And I didn't know how you did that. I used to leave, and walk through a Soho which was full of pubs overspilling with non-publishers doing the same, and get on a train home. For years after that, I was convinced that I was socially inept when it came to work. I'd got enough conversations going between ill-assorted tablefuls of wedding guests that I didn't think I was a total disaster, socially speaking. But about work, I knew, I was useless.

It helped a bit when I read an article which talked about how networking only works if you have something to offer: networks are built on reciprocity. So I forgave myself because of course I'd had nothing to offer: all I had was the desire to receive, and I wasn't even very sure what I was supposed to be receiving.

Still, when I found myself at the opposite end of the book trade - author not publisher, fiction not academic - I was disheartened to hear that, these days, Networking Is All, because publishers can't and won't spend money on promoting anything below the mega-names on their list. We authors, we're told, must blog, Tweet, Facebook, start cool and edgy festivals, butter up reading groups, hustle for commissions, bare all to the Daily Mail, schmooze magazine editors, sell stories as promotion, get Big Name authors to give puffs for our books, sign up to a dozen readerly websites, pitch articles to every newspaper every week, and no doubt sign up for a reality TV show as well.

But now I've realised that although you do need to do some of that, you can't do it all, so you might as well pick what you enjoy, and ignore the rest. I, for example, love blogging and teaching, and am completely useless at thinking up, let alone pitching, articles. So I don't feel guilty about not doing the latter. If you can't imagine ever having anything you want to say on a blog, then don't blog. And I've also realised all sorts of other things about networking:

1) The one thing you can always offer to other writers, to the book trade, to readers, and to the chief accountant of the engineering firm which is sponsoring the prize that your book's been shortlisted for, is your interest in them. It never fails.

2) Networks don't work in obvious ways. Just as it's hopeless trying to second-guess which of ten suitable agents will fall in love with your novel, it's hopeless trying to do too ruthless a profit-and-loss prediction on where it's worth spending your efforts. I've had a nice run of good, small writerly things happen lately. Of those, judging the Frome Short Story Competition 2011 (that's this year's you're linking to) came about via an editorial report I did. And a commission for a story for Radio 4 came about through a friend from the school gate, who was only just starting out on her writing career.

3) When you're introduced to someone - or introduce yourself - at a book-tradey thing, whether it's a trade dinner or a festival, because you're an author people know why you're there. To a degree, you don't have to explain yourself, and the only thing you need to offer is your you-ness. Even elsewhere, having written a book seems to be a passport to interestingness: in most circles the assumption is that you're worth listening to unless you prove otherwise. Just make sure you get your answer to 'What's it about?' nicely trimmed and finely polished.

5) You have to cast your bread on the waters. A thriller-writer friend does five things every week to promote herself and her writing: five ferrets down five holes. Four and a half yield nothing Mr McGregor could put in a pie. That doesn't mean she's a failure, or her books are, or that nobody loves her. That's just how it is. And the only sure way to make certain that the ration of effort to success is 1:1, is never to put in any effort at all. It needn't take long, either. Yes, we'd all rather be writing. And mostly we can. Accept the fact that some will fall through. Some may even fall through because you said you'd send some stuff, and life got in the way, and now you're too embarrassed to email and apologise. Shit happens. It's only a disaster if that was your only promotional effort that year.

6) Writing a press-release is not rocket science - and if you're a writer, it's not even a GCSE in Engineering. It's just a thing you can learn how to do. You can also learn how to research websites and magazines, find out what they're looking for, write that, and (most important of all), overcome your feeling that Showing Off is a bad thing, and that you're not worth the attention and the money you're asking people to pay you. You are. You are. You are. You may, of course, have the opposite problem, but you can equally well learn not to piss people off by being insensitive, shouty or always on Broadcast and never on Receive. Please do that if you need to.

7) Twitter works. If I hadn't been on Twitter, I wouldn't have due on the sofa at the wonderfully daft booky event which was the Firestation Bookswap. My main Facebook presence I keep for actual friends - though even then it's a handy way of making sure we all know what's going on with each other - but other writers use it more widely and with great success. And a Facebook "page" is the simplest kind of website you can have.

9) Teaching can be networking. I've not only had students buy my books (I never tell them to, honest!), I've had them suggest festivals I might like to pitch to, and to mention their name. And it was because Roger Morris sat in on my session about historical fiction, at the York Festival of Writing, that I thought of getting together a panel to talk about historical fiction at literary festivals, and that was a good example of what odd routes networking follows. I knew Roger through WriteWords, Maria McCann through the Glamorgan MPhil, and Rose Melikan through the agent she and I shared. We had a lot of fun.

10) And finally, blogging. I do it because I want to, and it pays off for me in all sorts of interconnected ways - teaching, researching, writing, making friends, and the pleasures of thinking aloud. Typical of unlooked-for ways it pays off is the request from a writer/teacher in the US, who's asked me to read her book about writing, and endorse it if I want to. Barbara Baig asked me because she thinks, from my blog, that we see learning to write in the same way, and she's right: I'm halfway through How To Be A Writer, and I'm already shaping what I want to say.

11) Even if you get all the publicity you could hope for, but find it incredibly difficult to cope with, there are things you can do to help yourself. More advice here, and more still for anyone who doesn't want to talk about their own life, but is afraid that journalists and social media will insist. And, yes, the publicist I quoted in that post is our very own Ruth Ware, who'll be joining us at the Tea House Theatre on Monday 20th February. Do come!

The point I'm trying to make is that none of these things are my core activity, but all of these are things I'm capable of enjoying, and none of them take longer than the sum of the enjoyment and their usefulness deserves. When there's yet another guilt-inducing mention of what we all 'ought' to be doing, I now ask myself,  'But do I want to do that?' as well as, 'How likely is it to be useful?' Yes, the writing must come first and yes, sometimes it's very hard to change direction between the inwardness of writing and the outwardness of promotion. But, let's face it, being in touch with interesting people who do what you do, and others who are thrilled that you're a writer and you're talking to them, is pretty good too.