The Practical Navigation of Hardship

I can make a total of seven different dishes based on these.
None of them are nice, but that's not the point.

There's quite a bit of advice out there on how to 'make it' as a writer, but a lot of it seems to exist in a fantasy world of aphorism and affirmation. This strikes me as profoundly unhelpful. Sure, a few encouraging words can serve the purpose of making one feel briefly better about things, but once that's taken care of, what does one actually do?

I've been plugging away at this writing nonsense for a while now, and years of effort are beginning to manifest themselves in incremental gains. This being the case, I thought I might just jot down a few of the (sometimes very hard) lessons learned in this time, for the general betterment of humankind. And also because the vague hippie crap I've encountered along the way really annoys me.

DOLLAR DOLLAR BILLS

This looks bad, sure, but I can't actually afford a wallet.

If you're going to drop everything and 'chase your dreams', you're going to need a plan. And your head examined. Of the two, though, the plan's probably the most important, and by 'plan' I mean one that exists in the real world. The kind of aspirational maths used by small time drug dealers and Amway Ambassadors isn't going to work here. The inescapable consequence of exchanging security for creative endeavour is going to be financial hardship. Any plan needs to account for this and it's a far, far better thing to choose what you give up than to have it wrenched unexpectedly from you.

In my case I dropped eating out, buying clothing, buying technology of any kind, any and every kind of monthly subscription, drinking in any kind of bar with appealing decor or patrons, and practically any and every occasion involving going outside with other people and frittering away money (otherwise known as socialising). What I kept was food, tobacco and some of the cheaper ways of getting drunk, seeing these as bare minimum for the maintenance of physical and mental health. Of course, these lists are going to be different for each person, but I think their relative proportions are about right for this kind of thing. If you think this all looks a bit bleak, you're right, but it's really just a question of attitude. It's worse than useless to give way to anger or frustration, and the benefit of adapting to a lifestyle like this is the discovery of untapped reserves of discipline, which is always handy.

Apart from sacrifice and various other hair shirts, there's also a positive side to extreme penury if you're able to stay open to it. It's important to inculcate a willingness to do just about anything for work, and with the right attitude this can be a treasure trove of experience and material. I've worked construction sites as a labourer, done highly uncovenanted shifts in various kitchens, taught English and music (just like my Victorian spiritual ancestors), private investigated and written godawful hack pieces for everything from technical manuals to genre mags to international tabloids. If writing's about exploring new worlds, it's not possible to ask for better than this, and it's mainly accessible through developing a tendency to say 'yes' a lot, and some skill at pretending to know what you're doing.

But most importantly, it's time to brace. There's a reason there's a picture of Mi Goreng at the top of this piece. In a country as rich as ours, poverty can easily be bearable but it's rarely ever fun.

ALONE, ALONE, ALL ALL ALONE

Awwww... Nobody cares.

Nobody is going to understand what the hell it is you're doing. 

Okay, that's not a hundred percent true - it's pretty likely that other creatives will, but it's best to assume you're not going to meet any. While the world is full of people who claim to be writers, very few actually are. I've been unreasonably fortunate in this regard, having met a bunch, but fortune isn't something to be relied upon overly much.

So, back to nobody understanding. There's a few key disadvantages to writing as a profession. A big one is that nobody can tell the difference between a person who is writing and a person who is sitting around doing nothing. This can cause serious problems. I remember a long series of friends and relatives who more or less immediately lost faith in the idea that I was doing anything at all. The result of this is resentment and gratuitous advice. The solution is to strike out alone. I'm not, of course, talking about some libertarian bootstrap mission, but rather a willingness to be morally and spiritually lonely. Of all the things that have got me through, the support of friends and family have been important, certainly, but the primary thing has been mental independence. 

Like everything else worth doing, writing requires a lot of time alone and in silence, working very hard indeed without the slightest prospect of reward. This is difficult at the best of times, and it's next to impossible if you care about what other people think of you. 

THE GENERAL CUSSEDNESS OF LIFE

Insert Affirmation Here

When Anthony Burgess was incorrectly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, he was given twelve months to live. Being married and penniless at the time, he set to work on publishing enough material to provide a financial basis for his widow. It's difficult to imagine a greater sense of urgency, but even he found the occasional roadblock he couldn't immediately surmount.

He set himself a target of two thousand words of 'fair copy' per day, and then went on to attack this target in an admirably realistic way. By his own account some of the things which got in his way were rather petty. Hangovers. Arguments with his wife. Brief periods of despair. What this shows is that regardless of how driven and single-minded a person is, there are still going to be occasions where they fail and that this just isn't important. What is important is to just keep going.

I realise as I write this that it's very similar to the kind of nonsense you get on writing websites, usually broken down into a faux-aphorism and set against a nature photograph. This doesn't stop it from being true. It's vitally important to just keep going. Bloody-minded doggedness has achieved a great deal more than sensitive inspiration in just about every possible field of endeavour.

What's worked for me is to make a clinical assessment, at the end of each day, of what I've actually achieved and how I'm currently feeling (yes, gasp in shock). Then I plan the next day according to these factors. Do I need to push some stuff back? Recalibrate my short term goals? Spend a day in the gym or at the bottom of a bottle? Fine. Disappointing, sure, but fine. Just so long as I maintain an absolute faith that I'll stand back up tomorrow or the next day, it's absolutely fine to burn the day just gone. A lot of people will tell you not to beat yourself up, but I disagree. A minor, and above all brief, assault is both necessary and beneficial. And then you just carry on.

I've had a lot of advice from a lot of people over the years, ranging from, "Be willing to set your enemies on fire in a public square,"  to, "The only way to peace is to place a flower on their head in your mind." It all boils down to the same thing, though, as far as I can tell. Our greatest weakness is also our greatest strength - the appalling loneliness of our inner selves can be turned from a wasteland into a fortress, so long as we're willing to pursue a purpose we set for ourselves. I know this because I once wrote something like it for a fortune cookie.

Writing Out the False Value of Self

One thing I'm very sick of hearing is how 'personal' and 'unique' the writing experience is. Apparently, the whole art of writing is a simple matter of aligning your chakras, embracing the woo, and communing with the universe until literary brilliance pours out onto the page as a direct result of personal inspiration and divine intervention. I would humbly suggest that this is utter bullshit.

In Donna Tartt's excellent book, The Secret History, one of her characters says something along the lines of, "The greater the amiability, the greater the coldness." The contention here is that being amiable is a process which involves manipulating and managing the feelings of others, and that those who are best at it are necessarily those who possess the objectivity of indifference.What is writing, if it is not the manipulation and management of the reader's feelings and experience? It follows, then, that writing must, on some level at least, be a somewhat cold-blooded experience.

Due to some very poor early life decisions, I often find myself reading the works of new authors and being asked to provide comments and advice. In the real world, this translates to telling them what's wrong with their stuff. In almost every case these works share a common flaw, and I strongly suspect it arises from the neo-Romantic hippie bullshit that gets circulated in schools, creative writing courses and smoke-filled coffee houses. Almost every single one of these works falls down badly in the area of "getting over oneself". One of the biggest tells which reveals the rookie author is a kind of adolescent insistence on their own 'unique' and 'personal' vision. Narrative, description and atmosphere get shoved aside so that the author can stand on a soapbox and descant on their pure and individual perceptions, their deeply held convictions or, in extreme cases, their delusional belief that they have some kind of unique facility with language.

No writing, from airport garbage to towering works of literary greatness, is about the author. Whether we're asking fundamental questions about the nature of truth, or assembling cracking tales of mystery and suspense, the prime and most important thing is to get out of our own damn way. One of my favourite (apocryphal) stories about Alexander the Great concerns his study of the Iliad under Aristotle. "Of all the characters in the Iliad," Aristotle is said to have asked the young Alexander and his companions, "who would you most like to be?" The cleverest answered, "Homer, because he's the only survivor." But Alexander disagreed. "If you were in the Olympic games," he said, "would you want to be the Pan-Hellenic athletics champion, or the little fat kid who calls out the scores?" As authors, whether we like it or not, we're the little fat kids calling out the scores. Just as the Iliad isn't about Homer, but Achilles, so too our writing has to be about something we're interested in which isn't ourselves.

There is a wealth of writing advice kicking around in the ether written by masters from various points of the literary spectrum, from the decidedly commercial but technically brilliant James Patterson, all the way through to the rarefied intellectual uplands of W Somerset Maugham. Form, construction, aesthetics and other vital aspects are patiently explained, but all of this advice boils down to one simple statement: remove, as far as is possible, any trace of yourself. Do I have a unique way of using adverbs? Delete. Do I write long passages tenderly painting the special unique specialness of the sights and sounds of my childhood? Delete. Am I relying on my own idiosyncratic manipulation of language to generate sympathetic resonances within the audience? Delete! Delete! Delete!

Like all arts, there is a strong requirement for competent craft. Until the basic technical skills are in place, nothing of any worth can be adequately depicted. The implication, then, is that a great deal of cold, mathematical exercise needs to be undertaken. It's a supreme irony of writing that prose which sounds natural and easy is necessarily the product of careful calculation and painstaking labour. I think most authors will agree with me when I say that building that nebulous thing we call 'voice' is always, in the beginning, an exercise in stripping and burning away every single thing we think of, initially, as unique to ourselves. Once this is done, we can then trust to the idea that our individuality - our uniqueness, if you like - will take care of itself. If it actually exists it will necessarily do so, leaving us free to focus on how to dissect, translate and then reassemble an experience which feels real and true to the reader.

This might sound a bit extreme, but it isn't. The fact is that we're always going to present in anything we write. Whether it's a short story, a novel, or a sales report, we can't help but leave our psychic fingerprints all over it. But as a story-teller or explorer of the human condition, it's our sacred duty to deliver the content, and this has to involve putting ourselves aside. As a writer, one has to work under the assumption that, for a while at least, we will be writing for people who don't know us. And a universal truth about strangers is that they do not give a crap whether we live or die. This means that in order to capture their attention and convince them to keep giving it, whatever we write really does have to be about something that isn't ourselves.

I don't care what anyone says - writing does not primarily exist as a form of therapy for the author. Writing exists to be read by people who are not the author. This means that no writer can ever really produce anything worth reading until they can climb over the detritus of individual identity and access that part of their existence which is universal.

Von Clausewitz, Friction and Abandoning a Manuscript

How can someone that smart wear epaulettes that stupid?

Von Clausewitz, in his seminal work On War, outlines a concept called 'friction'. Friction can be viewed simply as an aggregation of every crappy little thing we chalk up to Murphy's Law. The new contractor shipping rounds that don't fit the guns. The dysentery that cripples every battalion passing through a certain market town. The subaltern who doesn't know that data gathered about a Russian road in summer is worse than useless in winter. All the small and large things that go wrong - all the 'fires' that managers spend most of their time putting out.

Anyone who's managed a project (and who hasn't, these days) knows what friction feels like. It could be said that project management is just warfare by other means. Actually, it really can't, but I couldn't resist making a Clausewitz joke. Anyway, friction is that feeling that forces outside your control are throwing themselves in the way of your progress. That grinding, maddeningly frustrating sensation of progressing only one step for every three frantic attempts to surge forward. And there are times when the friction is so great, so unbeatable, that projects are abandoned altogether. The cost of combating friction becomes higher than the potential gains of project completion, and it's time to hit the classifieds and start looking for another job.

I think we can apply this principle to the writing of a novel - more specifically, to the question of when it's time to tear the whole thing up and start again. Let's take the novel I'm currently writing as an example. I had an idea, and a bunch of subsidiary, or connected ideas, a major theme, plot, subplot, peripeteia, anagnorisis- pretty much all the good gear needed to cobble together a story that takes tens of thousands of words to develop. Sure, I was missing some key stuff as well. Like the middle third of the plot and any firm idea of how to get to the climax, but I had enough to get started. In treading that fine line between proper planning and neurotically paralytic perfectionism, I felt justified and not a little bit virtuous about my decision to just start writing.

The first few thousand words progressed well. In the way that only fully realised literary prose or unadulterated stinking garbage can, the sentences tripped over each other in their race to appear on the page. And it was then that the friction started. What I had hoped for was a gradual clarification of the way ahead as each of the stepping stones of the rising action fell into place. The idea was that momentum would carry me through to the completion of the plan as I progressed along it. What happened instead was more like trying to drive water uphill with a broom.

Connective or process passages ballooned monstrously as my characters and chain of events frantically resisted any efforts to send them along the track of my thoughts. Every scene designed to move the plot had to be first violently wrestled into contact with it and, even then, came out as stubbornly static and lifeless set pieces. Every word, line and paragraph which came out served only to obscure rather than serve my narrative, but I pushed on, clutching at the straws of minor achievements in order to justify carrying on. It'll all come out in the wash. It'll be all right on the night. It takes a while for my genius to reveal itself. These and other scraps of delusional idiocy sustained me on a path that was necessarily doomed to failure.

One of the things which was confusing me was that I had all the component parts needed to construct the first act of my novel. Looked at from a certain point of view, there was no discernible reason for the dysfunction of all these component parts. Looked at from the point of view of the very intelligent and invaluably honest person who I often inflict my early-stage works on, it was pretty obvious. It was shite. What I had done was to take all the parts needed to begin a story and, thanks to my own head-up-the-arse syndrome, put them together upside down and backwards. To give you an idea of just how badly I'd muffed it, I point to the fact that my 'first problem' or catalytic action was scheduled to occur about twelve thousand words in.

Now, in this instance, what I did to discover this was to waste the time of another person in order to discover the blindingly obvious. What I should have done was remember Von Clausewitz, his stupid neck stock, his even stupider epaulettes, and his brilliant idea of friction. The sheer magnitude of friction being encountered in the creation of a work that was practically already written should have alerted me to its deep structural flaws long before I hit the ten thousand word mark.

They say the wise learn from the mistakes of others. In that spirit, I tender this idea for the benefit of any wise people who may be out there. Pay attention to friction. If writing a story feels like pulling out our own teeth with other people's fingers, it might be time to stop, take a step back, and ask ourselves why. Because while writing isn't meant to be easy, the kind of difficult represented by friction should be seen as an enormous, alarmingly red flag warning us to think again.

Truth in Fiction - Understanding 'Write What You Know'

Chancellorsville

Of all writing advice, I think the most frequently misunderstood is 'write what you know'. So many people I speak to, including students, seem to have the unshakeable belief that this means we cannot write about anything if we do not have direct experience of it.

This just isn't true. 'Write what you know' strikes me as being nothing more than the perennial idea that we should be expressing various kinds of truth, boiled down into a vague and less than helpful aphorism. I'm pretty sure what we're mainly talking about here is psychological truth. That for detail, visualisation and procedure Professor Google will do, so long as we are able to match our inner truth to these externals.

So while we may not have direct experience of selling dimebags of cocaine on the streets of New York, if we understand the corrosive effects of despair and crippling anxiety, it might be possible to produce something like Clockers. If we understand how it feels to be utterly overwhelmed by fear, then we can probably, after quite a lot of research, write a war story.

A scene from the Spike Lee adaptation of Richard Price's 'Clockers'.

This is exactly what Stephen Crane did in order to produce The Red Badge of Courage. In this story, we follow the fortunes of a private at a battle which may or may not be Chancellorsville, watching as he first fights, succumbs to battlefield panic and cowardice, then is redeemed by turning off his finer feelings and giving in to the animalistic nature of violence. The theme is the fallacy of Romantic conceptions of heroism, but the effect is one of total realism. On its publication, the novel received rave reviews, with many Civil War veterans utterly convinced that Crane must have been writing as a veteran of that battle himself. This despite the fact that Crane was twenty four, had never seen a battlefield, and was born several years after the end of the war.

So how did he do it? Crane himself, when called upon to explain it said, "Of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field, or else fighting is a hereditary instinct, and I wrote intuitively; for the Cranes were a family of fighters in the old days." Which sounds like two parts bullshit to me, but we can hone in on the bit about the football field, as many of the emotions experienced in group violence of any kind can be directly and realistically transposed into any other.

Team sports can provide insight into many kinds of organised group violence.

It's pretty obvious, though, that this alone will not be enough. We need to think outside the square a little, like Crane did, and find feelings and reactions within our experiential grab-bags which might apply. Take this passage, for example, where his narrator is appalled to discover that the line from which he fled actually held, thus making his desertion an even more criminal act of cowardice.

"Thoughts of his comrades came to him. The brittle blue line had withstood the blows and won. He grew bitter over it. It seemed that the blind ignorance and stupidity of those little pieces had betrayed him. He had been overturned and crushed by their lack of sense in holding the position, when intelligent deliberation would have convinced them that it was impossible. He, the enlightened man who looks afar in the dark, had fled because of his superior perceptions and knowledge. He felt a great anger against his comrades. He knew it could be proved that they had been fools." 

Who isn't familiar with this kind of angry self-justification in the face of moral failure? We feel it and use it almost every day, and its inclusion in this narrative context lends the story a surprising weight of authority.

But the mainstay of the novel is in its study of fear.

"He yelled then with fright and swung about. For a moment, in the great clamor, he was like a proverbial chicken. He lost the direction of safety. Destruction threatened him from all points." 

"He began to exaggerate the endurance, the skill, and the valor of those who were coming. [...] he was astonished beyond measure at such persistency. They must be machines of steel. It was very gloomy struggling against such affairs, wound up perhaps to fight until sundown." 

"The lieutenant sprang forward bawling. The youth saw his features wrathfully red, and saw him make a dab with his sword. His one thought of the incident was that the lieutenant was a peculiar creature to feel interested in such matters upon this occasion."

We are repeatedly confronted with startling moments of psychological truth. In the face of many moments like these, we find ourselves willing to accept the vagueness of Crane's battlefield details, the obviously fictional sequence of happenings and encounters, the characters who appear with such serendipity in order to illustrate some aspect of the developing theme - none of this really matters in the face of the fact that the narrator is reacting truthfully and realistically to his circumstances. 

It takes some intelligence, and a lot of research and fact-finding, but yes - it is eminently possible to write convincingly about unfamiliar setting and situations. It's not so much about knowing something before we write it, but rather a process of discovering within any situation that which we already knew, and then writing to that knowledge.

The Tyranny of 'Narrative Drive'

He who would pun would pick a pocket.

Most writing advice columns will start by telling you that it doesn't matter what you write, what your 'style' is, and that there are no rules. This is bullshit.

Okay, so it's not a complete lie, but it is an over-simplification. It's the sort of polite thing people say when they don't want to discourage you. Like, "You write quite well for someone your age," or, "Yes, it really suits you, but I like the other one better."

There are rules. They're broad and flexible and can be applied in a huge variety of ways, but rules they are and exist they do. One of these rules has to do with the requirement for 'narrative drive'. This is a vague one to define, but it basically boils down to the feeling that stuff is actually happening and that the story is actually going somewhere.

I hate to say it, but anyone who tells you this isn't important is flat out lying to your face, albeit with (usually) benign motives.

Probably the most important aspect of narrative drive is a sense of momentum. I believe it's actually true that things like pace and frequency of incident don't really matter - a lot of readers prefer slow, contemplative works. What kills momentum, however, is the lack of a unifying idea or set of ideas, lack of consistency in pacing, and the lack of coherence in incident.

Here's three broad principles which, when kept in mind, should help to preserve narrative drive.


WEAPONISE YOUR NARRATIVE

Treat the narrative as your primary delivery system.

This is about having something to say. Before the first word of a story is written, careful consideration needs to be given to the ideas or feelings which the author is trying to get across. Basically, if your plot is not designed as a delivery system for a devastating assault of ideas and emotions, then it's just possible that your story might not be worth reading.

Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating, but it is important to be clear about what you're writing about if you want to avoid producing a story that feels vague, aimless or pointless. It doesn't have to earth-shattering. There's no rule to say that every author must always and only write about the horrors of war, or the insane hubris inherent in human existence. Sometimes, a story which perfectly captures something small - like the desolation of a grey and rainy day, or the heartbreak of life's minor defeats - can be more poignant than any towering epic of literary greatness. But deliver something you must, as people who read writing purely for the sake of beautiful words are called 'poetry readers'.

It could be argued that what I'm saying here is genre specific, but I don't think it is. Remember, I said delivering an idea or a feeling. It really doesn't matter what you're writing, from advertising copy to screenplay to literary doorstopper, it is guaranteed that you will be trying to deliver one or the other. Thrillers deliver excitement, horror promotes dread, sci-fi often shoots for wonder - the list goes on.

By focussing on the idea or feeling you wish to convey, it is far more likely that you will hit upon the best possible vehicle for delivering it, as well as avoiding a story which leaps peripatetically between a dizzying over-abundance of concepts.

The process is a simple one. Some people start with ideas, others with stories, others still with disconnected scenes. Whichever starting point works for you, it's important to pause and determine what you want to make the reader think and/or feel, and then design the rest of your story accordingly. Not to do so is to radically increase your likelihood of producing either an incomplete or a failed manuscript.



DON'T FAFF ABOUT

If your book is this thick, restart and try again.

When you have an idea of where you want your story to go, it's important that you get there as efficiently as possible. Now, don't get the idea that I'm saying every story needs to tear along at the pace of a Lee Child thriller, but it's still not okay to waste scenes and actions. Just as we apply Chekhov's Gun to story elements, so too should it apply to everything else.

On a very basic level, let's say you start a chapter of a novel knowing that you must achieve the following before you can move on:

1. A meeting between two characters
2. A key piece of foreshadowing dialogue
3. An overall impression of a locale
4. The introduction of an important object

The immediate tendency is to think of each of these plot and story elements and create a scene perfectly designed to show each of them. When you're one or two chapters in, this approach may very well work best, but if you continue in this way throughout your book, what you're going to end up with is a smoking hot mess. Characters will have to be used, re-used and invented, and your people and events will start moving in repetitive loops. Also, there's a good chance you'll end up with about 700 chapters.

It's a good idea to apply, at the very beginning, the principle of economy. If all the things on the list above need accomplishing, what is the minimum number of scenes and character actions required to do that? Can the characters meet in a venue which is emblematic of the chosen locale, have a conversation in which they foreshadow the plot and then proceed to notice or mention an important object? If you consistently craft in this fashion, even stories not exactly crowded with incident will gain a sense of momentum and purpose. 

It's easy to forget, but what I try to do is imagine that I have to painstakingly hand draw each scene I'm going to create, and then let my constitutional laziness take over. This is generally effective because, as a writer, painstakingly hand drawing every scene is exactly what you have to do.

PANTSER OR POSEUR?

This is a hipster reading paper anime because it's cool. Don't be that guy.

You may have noticed that much of the foregoing assumes a degree of planning. This leads me to believe that many authors are going to skim through this thinking, "Well, I'm a pantser. None of this applies to me."

A word about pantsers. Nobody who writes anything worth reading does so with zero preparation or planning. 

Nobody. 

I like to use public speaking as an analogy. There are speakers who are brilliant at extempore speaking, and those who require careful planning, notes, and so on. Extempore speakers tend to have a few things in common. Firstly and most fundamentally, they have expertise in both speaking and at least one subject. People who can speak extempore can usually do so because they have practiced speaking to the point where they are glibly articulate, and because they know what they're talking about inside out and upside down. On top of this, when observing an extempore speaker, one notices that they do not, in fact, speak entirely off the cuff. When called upon to speak, they will pause, see the broad outline of their argument in their minds, and then set off. 

From this we can see that they don't eschew planning - their whole lives have been a process of planning and preparation for the moment of speaking. This means that all that's left to do on the day can usually be shortened to a second or two of thought. This is emphatically not the same as failing to prepare or plan at all.

Now, you may think that the divine and plentiful flow of your unique genius is sufficient to keep a reader locked in the compelling spell of your literary greatness, and if you do, I won't argue with you. There wouldn't be much point anyway. But if you're a pantser because you've assessed your spontaneous writing to be better than your contrived, then I'd just point out one thing. However good it is, you still need a rudimentary scaffold or path to your destination. And you still need a destination, because the greatest single killer of narrative drive is aimlessness, and the quickest way to kill a reader's interest is to lack narrative drive.

Chekhov's Gun and Delusional Writing

Chekhov's gun is one of my favourite literary principles. For those who don't know, it's basically the rule that any significant element of a story should be directly relevant to that story. So, if there's an interesting salad fork on the table, that fork had better end up protruding from someone's eye, or being valued at a million dollars on Antiques Roadshow, thus saving the protagonist from want. What it shouldn't do is sit there as a kind of cul de sac of description and attention, and then never appear again. Or even worse, appear repeatedly for no reason at all.

On first reading, this idea might seem a bit extreme. What about all my beautiful sunsets, my complex political realities, or my character creations 'too good' to leave out? Well, to put it simply: nobody cares. If your sole object in describing a sunset is to perfectly capture its crimson glory as it bleeds across the flat plain of the horizon, what you should do is go away and write a poem about it. If your grand vision of a dystopian society is so compelling you can't help but describe it in mind-numbing detail for no reason at all, this is why essays were invented. You get the idea.

This is not to say that there is no place in any story for world-building or beautifully descriptive writing - far from it - but discipline must be maintained in all things. If the primary goal is to tell a story, then that story must be told. If the beauty of the sunset affects the mind-state of your characters, inspiring them to change the way they act or view the world, then by all means pick up a thesaurus and go nuts. If the way your world works directly impacts on the actions or options of your characters, then yes, explain away.

A picture speaks a thousand words, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

If you've written something which does not serve the story, then it's got to be cut. It does not matter in the slightest just how hauntingly beautiful, or incisively intelligent the passage is - it must be excised. By all means put it in your 'spare parts' box for later use, but that's about all it's going to be good for.

It might seem that I'm being a little insistent on this point, but there's a good reason for this. By far the easiest thing to lose sight of, when writing a story, is that the theme or message we're trying to convey, while important, is not the story itself. And while technical skill may be important, it is emphatically not in and of itself the reason why people read us. Look at Dan Brown, for instance. The man can barely put a sentence together, and that just doesn't matter next to the fact that he can cobble together a compelling tale. We're story tellers, with an absolute requirement to effectively and entertainingly tell stories.

There's a practical aspect as well. As an editor, when I see this kind of foolishness in a manuscript I know, deep in my bones, exactly what kind of author I have to deal with. A rank amateur, precious, resistant to advice, and an overall nightmare. If that's the way an editor reacts, you can be certain that publishers and agents will see it the same way. It's not too hard, I think, to extrapolate the likely effect on their decision making when it comes to considering your work for publication.

Any time we find ourselves looking at a piece of writing and wondering whether or not to cut it, we should ask the following. Are we thinking of keeping it because of its quality rather than its relevance? Are we thinking of keeping it because it iterates the stunning depth of our personal vision of the world? Or are we perhaps thinking of keeping it because it's good writing and we think readers will appreciate that for its own sake? None of these are good reasons to keep a piece of writing in a story. They are all aspects of the delusion that the primary goal of storytelling is expression and realisation of the self. It's not - that's what group therapy, poetry and Facebook are for. Pick up Chekhov's gun and obliterate, with extreme prejudice, any such notions and the story elements that go with them. I guarantee you that the end product will be well worth the sacrifice.

Dialogue - Transliteration, Didactism and Dialect

People often ask me for advice on how to write better dialogue, and I usually fob them off with vague platitudes about listening to people and reading Elmore Leonard. This is because I'd prefer them to chalk up a hit on this blog.

There's no getting around it - writing good dialogue is difficult and complicated. The way I see most people go about it, while making perfect sense on a logical level, is unlikely to be effective. This is because some of the fundamental aspects of writing dialogue are a bit counter-intuitive. Today I intend to tackle three of the basic ones: preserving the feel of the spoken word, didactic function and the minefield which is dialect.

"JUST WRITE LIKE THEY TALK" DOESN'T WORK

The Watergate transcripts are practically unreadable.

In one of my many previous jobs, I had to sit in a small room with headphones in and type up the transcript of a court proceeding. As I was listening to the defendant droning on about safety ropes and danger signs, I realised that I was actually editing his speech as I went. Don't get me wrong - I wasn't coming over all Grammar Nazi on the poor bloke - it was simply that his perfectly sound speech patterns, translated directly into prose, were pretty well unintelligible.

Of course, I can't show you what I mean by publishing the transcript I was working on, but Steven Pinker, in his excellent book: The Language Instinct, gives us a really good example using the transcripts of the Watergate recordings.

NIXON: The grand jury thing has its, uh uh uh - view of this they might, uh. Suppose we have a grand jury proceeding. Would that, would that, what would that do to the Ervin thing? Would it go right ahead anyway?

Herein lies the problem - so much of face to face dialogue is non-verbal that a strict rendition of the words actually used will generally become a collection of nonsensical sentence fragments. The writer's job, then, is to convert the spoken word into clear prose which is still suggestive of natural speech.

I think that this mainly comes down to cadence. If we look at Shakespeare or Eminem or any other great poet of human speech, we find that one of the most important factors is meter. This suggests that the rhythm of a passage of dialogue is at least as important as the content. Paying closer attention to cadence can go a long way to making dialogue sound natural without compromising meaning. The excerpt above, for example, could be rendered this way:

"This Grand Jury thing - suppose we have a Grand Jury? What do you think that would that do to the Ervin thing? Do you think it'd go right ahead anyway?"

As we can see, cleaning up the section where Nixon is floundering for a phrase makes it more comprehensible, and the use of a dash indicates his hesitation without confusing the reader with fragmentary verbiage. Additionally, we indicate the hesitant cadence of his questioning by adding words to slow down the rhythm of the questions. Adding "What do you think" and "Do you think" preserves the tentative feel of "would that, would that, what would that do", without bombarding the reader with weirdness.

To sum this point up - it's a kind of transliteration: a way of encoding rhythm, sense and feel without compromising meaning.

SHUT UP AND TELL THE STORY, BUT NOT TOO MUCH

"Let me explain to you, at great length, a bunch of stuff you should already know."

Unless you're Elmore Leonard, it's pretty safe to say that all dialogue performs a didactic function of some kind. It either has to move the plot forward, reveal relevant information or, at the very least, reveal character. If it doesn't do any of these things, the obvious question is, "Why would anyone read it?" You may very well be in love with the interplay of your two characters, but if the conversation doesn't tell the reader anything new, it will represent an annoying flat spot in your narrative. There are exceptions, of course. I mentioned Elmore Leonard, for example, whose novels tend to consist of fascinating, aimless dialogue punctuated by annoying breaks into narrative. Thing is, though - very few people are Elmore Leonard. At present, I count one.

Having said that, there are few things which feel clumsier than obviously didactic dialogue. Take any prime time television drama, for example, and you will find it littered with passages where characters are carefully explaining plot elements to other characters who should already know. NCIS is a major culprit for this, as is almost every sci-fi show ever made.

This is where careful structuring comes in. Doctor Who uses a brilliant device in the form of the Doctor's companion. The fact that there is always a clueless newbie by his side gives him practically limitless scope to explain any and every occurrence, object and character they come across. This, of course, is not appropriate to every situation, so authors need to be careful not to write themselves into a corner, so to speak.

The explanatory use of dialogue should be judicious, limited and, above all, realistic. If you encounter a passage of dialogue which sounds stilted and crap no matter what you do, it may be worth looking at what comes before and after. It could very well be that a structural failing elsewhere has forced you to insert un-saveable dialogue. Fixing this and just deleting any 'Macgyver explanations' may be the best solution.

DIALECT, INNIT?

Put simply, dialect is a nightmare. Do I use phonetic spelling? Do I do this for every word, or just indicatively for key words? And how do I choose those key words? Is it a cop-out to just mention the character has an accent and then write their speech normally? How the hell do you spell the way South Africans grunt?

I have no firm opinions on any of the above, but I do know two things. Faithfully rendering accents phonetically almost always makes for unreadable prose, and clumsiness with dialect is a guaranteed deal-breaker for readers and publishers alike. Happily, as writers we stand on the shoulders of giants. Or, to put it more bluntly, there's plenty of people we can steal from.

One of the funniest scenes in literature.

Charles Dickens, when he isn't unrealistically putting formal English into the mouths of his working class heroes, serves as a good case in point. One of his most triumphant creations is Sam Weller, the cockney manservant of the indomitable Mr Pickwick. It helped that Dickens was a Londoner, and therefore steeped to the gills in the Cockney of Victorian times. This is an important point - dialect and accent need to be approached in the same way as learning another language. Immersion is vitally important - if you haven't internalised the rhythm and feel of an accent, don't use it. It'll just be crap.

Dickens noted that the main features of the Victorian Cockney were the frequent transposition of 'V' and 'W', the dropping of 'h' and the use of different long vowel sounds. In the excerpt from The Pickwick Papers provided below, we can see how minimally, but effectively, Dickens represents this.

Here a voice in the gallery exclaimed aloud, "Quite right too, Samivel, quite right. Put it down a 'we', Lord, put it down a 'we'."
"Who is that, who dares address the court?"said the little judge, looking up.
...
"Do you know who that was, sir?"
"I rayther suspect it was my father, my lord," replied Sam.

Another example is provided by the master hand of Patrick O'Brian. The famously grumpy Preserved Killick, steward to Captain Aubrey, speaks with a thick rustic accent derived from a tiny village now swallowed up by present day London. Well before I'd watched David Threlfall's excellent realisation of Killick, I was able to hear the dialect in the character's voice. This is surprising, considering how little O'Brian does in the way of transliteration. A typical line for Killick would read thusly:

"Which it will be ready when it is ready."

It can be seen that absolutely nothing has been done to the spelling - O'Brian has merely found a telling grammatical variation (which it will) and used it to indicate a whole wealth of sound. A similar technique can be used for some Irish accents. The grammatical quirk contained in "I'll be after seeing where he is" can do great service, where phonetic rendering would serve only to confuse and annoy.

It can be seen from this that the main qualification for being able to write various accents is to know them with sufficient intimacy to be able to isolate and use their key components. Not exactly a short cut, I know, but so little with writing actually is.

THAT'S ALL FOLKS

Well, I hope you found this helpful. If you think I've missed anything, violently disagree with me on any point, or wish to inform me of a lucrative way to work from home, that's what comments sections are made for. Happy writing!

Collaborative Writing, Silence and Samurai Thinking

Reading about writing these days, one might be forgiven for thinking that we're living in some kind of Romantic revival period. The creative process is almost always cast as a kind of individual communion, with the writer alone on a mountaintop or in some flea-ridden garret, feverishly searching for the sanctum sanctorum of creativity supposedly buried deep within.

This is a bit deceptive, however - thanks to film, television and the blockbuster novel, we're living in something of a golden age for collaborative writing. This means that for writers with commercial ambitions, the ability to write collaboratively is a must-have skill. Which is all well and good, but how, when you get right down to it, do you actually do it?

Well, here's some hints and tips, garnered first hand from my time collaborating on two multiple award-winning works of fiction.

OBVIOUSLY, YOU NEED A PROCESS

Have you ever been on a committee? Then you know the feeling of wanting to stab yourself in the eye with a fork as a tactic for escaping the endless, circular discussions that are the potential bane of any group dialogue. The strategies for avoiding this in your own writing group are simple. Nominate a leader, set times and deadlines for discussion, and institute a clear, fair and definitive decision making process. This way, your discussions can be directed, have a definite end time and a way to drag people off their hobby horses so everyone can get on with their lives.

Collaborative writing requires organisation. Gigantic whiteboards are optional.

But you don't need to just take my word for it. You'll see that my friends Tony McFadden, Kristen Prescott and Zena Shapter, all agree. You should check out their tips on collaborative writing as well - a quick cross reference will show that we all say pretty well the same stuff. Process, process, process. It's boring, I know, but when a bunch of individually prolific authors and collaborative artistes extraodinaire say so, it must be true.

SHUT UP AND LISTEN

Most collaborative writing efforts are going to start with a brainstorming session. If you're fortunate enough to be surrounded by some real talent, each and every member of your writing team is going to have something to say.

Remember to take time to shut the hell up.

The thing is, though, that this is iceberg time - what they say is really just the tip of an elaborate vision for the work as a whole. It is vitally important, when listening to what your fellow authors say, that you are alive to the fact of this vision. It's down to you to decode and extrapolate from the tiny fraction of their idea they are able to vocalise, and then decide whether you can accept and build on it, or if you need to pitch a different way of seeing the final product. It is impossible to attain this level of understanding if you talk incessantly, or if you are the sort of listener who's mainly thinking of what to say next. Listen actively, ask questions and, most importantly, give your whole attention to understanding both what your fellow authors are saying, and what they're leaving unsaid.

WRITE LIKE A SAMURAI

“Although this may be a most difficult thing, if one will do it, it can be done. There is nothing that one should suppose cannot be done.” 

Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Purpose, courage and unusual footwear are all samurai traits we should emulate.

It's very important that when you do finally settle down to write, all other considerations are simply ignored. Do not be paralysed by doubt, pay absolutely no attention to what you think of your own skills as a writer and especially do not worry about what you think of the skills of your other writers. Be unafraid of looking foolish, of writing terrible prose, of making mistakes - in short, be like the samurai: take decisive action and complete it no matter what.

If we sit around trying to think of elaborate or complicated ways to get things done, there is a very good chance that nothing will get done at all. The best way to get something finished is to just start it. It's easier said than done, I know, but also remember that being in a group represents a kind of safety net. If you're having an off day, or you're just not confident you can do what needs to be done, do it anyway - your fellow writers will catch you if you fall. Almost anything can be tweaked, prodded and edited into shape, but there is zero possibility of fixing a piece of writing which does not exist.

AND FINALLY

You'll notice that most of what I've had to say above has been about mentality. This is no accident - if you don't approach collaborative writing with the right mentality, it simply won't happen. No amount of organisation in the world can overcome an author who's in their own little world, or who tries to bring an unconquerable ego into the group. It's vital that each individual author sink, to some extent, their own individual visions and aspirations in order to favour the corporate goal.

If you'd like to have a look at the books we've produced by this method, here's some links.

Scribbles in the Dark

A Dolphin for Naia

Rider and The Hummingbird

How to be Productive as a Writer

When we decide to be writers, I'm sure we all have some imagined idea of what that's going to look like. For me, I have visions of myself seated in front of a computer, alternating between the agony of composition and the triumph of completion, all pasted together into a work montage, with Eye of the Tiger playing in the background.

Reality, however, is never so kind, and I've found that without careful management, 'being a writer' can easily devolve into 'wasting time on the internet' and 'lying about your accomplishments to yourself and others'. The work montage is replaced by the failure montage, and despair, angst and self-loathing stalk the darknesses of the mind. 

This fate worse than death is actually quite easy to avoid. Here's five of the strategies which have worked best for me.

1. BE A GOOD BOSS

Nobody likes an arsehole, so why be one?

Writing is a self directed activity. This means that, for the period during which you're writing, you're your own boss. It's important, therefore, to be a good one. Think back to all the best bosses you've had and you'll realise that they weren't the ones who let you slack off all the time, and nor were they psychotic martinets. A good boss assesses and monitors their workers' capabilities, their capacity to absorb workload, and manages accordingly. Avoid both the setting of impossible standards, and failing to set any standards at all. Create a set of achievable goals which you know you have a good probability of achieving, and remember to praise, reward and otherwise manage yourself for better results. 

2. SCHEDULE EVERYTHING (ESPECIALLY DOWNTIME)

It's best not to go 'Full Rimmer'.

A to-do list is nothing more than an aspirational wishlist which you are guaranteed not to complete. Tasks need to be linked to time. I block out all my time on an electronic calendar. This way, Google becomes my personal assistant, gently reminding me that now is the time to do this, that or the other. It's important, however, to take some time over this. I'm not saying you should go the full Arnold J Rimmer on your schedule, but basic things should be taken into account. When are you most creative? Block out this time for creation. When are other people awake and receptive? This is the time to do your calls and emails. And so on. But most importantly (and this is the thing which most people forget) you must also rationalise the time you intend to 'waste'. Everyone needs a break - time to poke around on social media, to eat, watch television and so on. Set and allocate times for this as well, otherwise your breaks will end up swallowing your whole day.

3. BE HEALTHY

It's health, Jim, but not as we know it...

This is neither the time nor the place for health advice, but that's not really the point. What I mean by this is that you should do whatever it is you think constitutes leading a 'healthy lifestyle'. It doesn't matter if you've fallen for some detox fad or think that your addiction to aerobic activity constitutes a healthy attitude to exercise. For the purposes of being more productive, it is vitally important that you consistently make and stick to decisions about your diet and exercise which make you feel virtuous. It's very, very hard to be productive if you're not happy with who you are or the way you live. 

4. ESTABLISH A ROUTINE

The less stuff you need to carry in your head, the more space you have for creative endeavour. If your goal is to artfully construct a towering edifice of existential thought and deep human pathos, the last thing you need is the additional burden of remembering every trivial detail of the travails of what we call daily life. Routine is the great saviour in this case. As much as possible, the business of daily life should be 'routinised', to borrow an ugly military term, so that minor but important things which must be done can be done on autopilot. There is simply no need to re-invent the wheel every day. If there's stuff that needs to be done at regular intervals, make those intervals as regular as possible and they will eventually require no management, and therefore no mental energy, whatsoever.

5. MAKE YOUR WORKSPACE YOUR OWN

Einstein's desk.

I am emphatically not one of the 'tidy desk, tidy mind' brigade. While I like to have a neat workspace, I'm well aware that many do not. But whether your ideal desk is uber-achiever minimalist or mad scientist chaotic, it's important that it be optimal for you. If you want things messy, have them messy. Just make sure you don't waste any time on self-recrimination and that you can put your hand on whatever you need, whenever you need it. I guess what I'm saying here is that it's foolish to try and force yourself to conform to some external standard for what your workspace should be like. My advice is to aggressively ignore everyone else and construct a space that works perfectly for you.

This list isn't comprehensive, of course, but I chose these five things because they were the base changes which needed to be made before any other strategies could be employed - the fundamentals, if you like. It's worth remembering, too, that everyone has their own strategies for optimal productivity. It's very useful to talk to other people about their process - you never know what you'll pick up. As Montaigne, or some other Frenchman, says: "We polish our minds through contact with the minds of others".

How wrong did I get that quote and attribution? Very wrong, but you get the idea...

"Make Your Characters Live" And Other Writing Platitudes

I spend a lot of time hanging out with writers. Not in a smoke-filled coffee house, absinthe-sipping kind of way, but in a spotty nerd online in his mother's basement way.

What 'hanging out with writers' really looks like most of the time.

Now that's cleared up, it's probably time to get to the point - which is that I come across quite a lot of writing advice, much of it to do with how to write good characters. Most of this advice is along the lines of "make your characters live" or "when your characters do stuff you didn't plan, then you know you're on the right track."

This is annoying on several levels. As advice, it's utterly useless. The first example doesn't actually mean anything and the second is both unhelpful and not necessarily true. And all of it together is a bit like being a boxer's corner man and offering something like, "Hit him quite a lot and really hard." It's basically answering a question about how to do something with vague instructions as to what should be done.

So let's talk about the how.

When writing fiction, what we're mainly trying to do is create an experience for the reader. I'm aware that many people who write fiction are doing so because they feel compelled to elucidate their grand and unique vision of the universe, or because they think it's a cheap replacement for therapy, but I'm mainly concerned with people who want to write good stories. And those people are as much or more about the story and the reader as they are about their own special inner specialness.

In creating an experience for the reader, what we ordinarily do is provide a proxy consciousness in the form of the narrator. This means that the narrator, regardless of the 'person' being used, needs to perceive and conceive in a way that is familiar, or at least understandable, to the reader. Let's take the example of walking into a room. When we enter a room, most of us do not make a detailed accounting of every single object within, and nor do we completely ignore these objects until we wish to interact with them. The eye falls naturally and in a predictable way. We obtain an impression of size, note key pieces of furniture and decoration and any people who might be inside. Sometimes, we take note of what can be seen out the window. Given this, it should be a relatively simple matter to describe a room. All that need be done is to consciously emulate the normal pattern of the moderately observant eye, and then remember to add in anything which might be crucial to the plot.

A prose description is not a detailed catalogue. Unless, of course, you're writing a catalogue.
Or if your name is Andy McNab.

The same principle applies for characters. One should ask the question, "Of what, in fact, does another person's existence consist?" Examined clearly, the answer tots up to a surprisingly short list. When we 'know' a person, this knowing consists of little more than a jumble of impressions and images held within our minds. Generally speaking, our experience of the 'other' is limited to just a few telling aspects. A signature context or environment, one or two physical mannerisms, a habit of speech, some dominant characteristics - stupidity and a quick temper, for instance. Layered on top of this we might have a vague idea of their beliefs, profession, some likes and dislikes and one or two signature ways of moving or walking, though usually only if we know them quite well.

Given that our narrator is a sort of proxy consciousness, and that this consciousness should be recognisable to a reader, then creating a believable, life-like character is actually pretty simple. All we need do is re-create those aspects of another person which make up the existence of others as it is experienced within our own minds. Some writers put these elements in a spreadsheet of some sort and tick them off as they are revealed through action and dialogue, whereas others use a less accountancy-based approach. Either way, it doesn't really matter. The essential thing is that no amount of laboriously telling the reader who someone is, no potted biography, no matter how detailed, is ever going to measure up to a method which echoes the memories and experience of your own consciousness and, by extension, the reader's.

Collaborative Writing: How Hard Can It Be?

Over the years, you may or may not have noticed that something called the Northern Beaches Writers' Group regularly makes the ill-advised decision to include me in the creation of a collaboratively written children's book.

This is part of the Write a Book in a Day challenge, where writers and illustrators write, illustrate and bind a book within twelve hours, all to raise money for the fight against childhood cancers. Well, last Saturday we assembled at our secret fantasy factory and did just that, emerging at the end of the twelve hours with a book about a magical spider amulet, sinister secret societies and a time-travelling convict.

The work begins...

Of course, the process of writing a book in such a short time, and collaboratively at that, can only be described as fraught. To steal a line from one of my favourite Dark Age chroniclers: "A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some bad."  

When we all rocked up at stupid o'clock, the general mood was upbeat. Much food and many excellent baked goods had been brought, confidence was high and nobody was hungover or at all worried about spending twelve hours on a non-smoking site. Nobody.

As a group of seasoned, multiple award-winning WABIAD veterans, there wasn't quite as much naked terror in the room as one might have expected. When the email dropped in, we were relaxed, confident, and ready to roll. We were to write about a spider, an escaped convict, a beautician and rubbish tip. This author kept his mouth resolutely shut for the first minutes of the brainstorming session, being utterly determined to keep anything resembling a robot or a military vehicle out of it.

No robots were created in the making of this book.

What we ended up with was a tale which spanned two centuries, several cultures and, because I was there, included firearms and humorously stereotypical Chinese secret societies. We cracked into writing, I cracked into feverishly deleting passages containing profanity, death and sex (I kid you not) and then we all settled back for our first read through.

This is where it gets interesting. As we read through each chapter, it became apparent that not a single one of us had come away with a common understanding of the (admittedly quantum physics complex) plot line. Devastation! Disaster! Something else beginning with 'D'!

With a lesser, merely mortal group of authors, we would have expected something like this to happen:

But no - this is the legendary NBWG. Everyone took a breath. I consumed half a pound of nicotine gum, and a discussion took place in which everyone's politeness instantly attained an elaborate, Jane Austen level of intensity. Plot holes were identified, compromises made, faults eagerly admitted and gnawing, soul-destroying anxiety and rage carefully hidden. In short, we smiled, communicated and then formed like Voltron to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

We all settled down to work again except, of course, for me. My chapter containing nothing but a firefight and some people shouting at each other, I filled the time by adding another firefight and doing a last minute check for profanity, etc. Rather dishearteningly, I found some. Then, after a mere three and half hours, we had converted eight more or less disconnected chapters from wildly different books into a seamless and compelling tale.

A brilliant bunch of professionals. And some bloke with a ponytail.

And this is really what this post is about. I've been collaborating with these people for so long that I now take the process for granted. This is very, very wrong. Some very special qualities are required for successful collaborative writing, and all of our team has these in spades. Faced with a potential disaster, every single one of them sunk their egos, pride and irritation, negotiated from positions of extreme generosity and never once lost their tempers, even consenting to accept advice from a seething Chinese person mumbling through a huge mouthful of Nicabate.

I know that the usual practice is to simply panegyrise everyone involved, over-use exclamation points and thank everyone and everything it is possible to think of, up to and including the weather, the traffic and people who weren't involved in any way. But that would be to miss an opportunity to showcase just how profoundly impressive the NBWG team actually is.

If you want a more detailed breakdown of the collaborative process, with special emphasis on recovery, watch this space - one will be coming out very soon, using our book "The Time of the Jade Spider" as a case study.

If you want to sponsor us (and I know you do), you can still do so until the end of August.

The link is: https://www.writeabookinaday.com/findschools.php?state=NSW

The team is: Northern Beaches Writers' Group

And the cause is a fantastically good one.