The Bus Stop Test

Recently I've been doing a bit of travelling by public transport. It's been great - a chance to settle down with a book. However, there is always the niggling residual fear that I'll be so sucked into the fictional world that I miss the stop in the real one. It hasn't yet happened, partly because my book at the moment has been the magisterial Last Night in Twisted River by John Irvine.

Weighing at nearly 700 pages it was always going to be a long read, but I'm a reasonably fast reader - a book a week is standard, so I didn't expect Last Night in Twisted River to go beyond a couple of weeks. It's been over a month, and I've only just finished. Phew.

There are two main reasons why it has taken so long. Firstly, I kept dropping off to sleep. Secondly, even when reading I was easily distracted by what was going on around me. I was trying to pin-point why, exactly, I was making such heavy work of reading the book - it's undoubtedly well written, the sentences flow, the images are arresting, the characters distinct people, yes, there's flashback and I was often confused as to when exactly we were which meant going over some pages a second time but that wouldn't entirely explain my distraction - and then it struck me: it was the omniscient authorial voice.

At the end of the book John Irvine talks about the writing process (the novel is about a writer who uses autobiography for his writing) and says that the omniscient authorial voice is out of fashion, but he likes the style and is going to carry on using it. Fair enough.

But to me, that voice distanced me from the characters. I never truly engaged with them and could have put the book down without reading to the end almost every moment. There were only about 20 pages when I was in danger of missing the bus stop and, in a book of nearly 700 pages, that seems a poor ratio. I persisted with reading because I usually do read to the end regardless, because a friend had rated the novel and because John Irvine is a great author.

It may be that intimacy with characters is fashionable and fashions can, and do, change. You can choose to write in whatever style you wish, and if that's with the magisterial voice common in the C19th then fine. There are readers who love that style. But, you should also be aware that it's a distancing voice and the current fashion is for something more intimate. That way, hopefully, you'll pass my bus stop test.

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/

Bath 3rd July Details are on my website

Should You Ask Rhetorical Questions?

When I first started writing I was part of a critique group which featured a couple of super academic, professionally high achieving and all-round scary ladies who were writing Literature (the capital L was obvious). I have never forgotten one of them holding the corner of my offering and commenting that she automatically dismissed any work that featured rhetorical questions.

So that was me told.

Older, and wiser (and published) I now recognise that it's one of those areas of English, like split infinitives, that some people have a thing about. At the time I slunk off into a corner, never to ask a rhetorical question again. Or did I? Well, in truth, I have sinned, but never without that particular grande dame's voice reverberating around my skull.

Does it matter? Should one not be free to write as you wish? Shouldn't we liberate ourselves from out-moded rules about style? Or do we readers become fed up with one damn question after another? Who knows?

So much about writing is a question of taste. Personally, I quite like a rhetorical question every now and then but, like exclamation marks, usage should be limited or the writing appears cluttered. And it's well to be aware that for some people it leads to automatic dismissal. But then, I was never interested in writing Literature with a capital L. I have only ever wanted to write stuff people want to read.

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/Bath 3rd July

Details are on my website 

And Another Rude Poem that Goes Too Far

We can go too far with showing not telling. This is the poem I was originally going to recite at the Get Writing Conference last Saturday:

Mary had a little lamb.

She also had a duck.

She put them on the mantlepiece

To see if they'd...fall off.

It's just not as funny. Yet we're still relying on the audience identifying and then supplying the missing word, exactly as in yesterday's poem. I think it's not as funny for two reasons: the missing word is generally considered ruder and cruder, and the substitution weakens the joke.

When you're writing, you're creating a world. You want to lure the reader into your world and keep them there. They're usually keen to stay, but can be jolted out. By being crude, the reader is startled out of their comfort zone. I was interested to learn that several friends preferred my later novels because there was less 'bad language'. Now, I don't think there's much in any of my novels, but I took their comments on board. The 'bad language' had jolted them out of their comfort zones and away from my story world.

And then there's the substitution. I think this weakens the joke by pointing out that it IS a joke, a contrivance. The reader doesn't feel as clever as they did in yesterday's poem when they did the work and substituted the word. Instead, it's a trick, and they're the ones being tricked. The subtext runs: You're expecting this rude word, but - ha ha - it's something else quite innocuous.

So there has to be a balance. If we use showing not telling, but make what we're showing too obscure and difficult, it becomes too much like hard work and the reader will give up. If we mislead the reader, the reader will turn away. Sometimes telling is the right thing to do. Part of the writer's job is learning about the balance and getting it right.

When I told my partner of my poetry plans for the talk at the Get Writing Conference he said I must have balls of steel (!) to contemplate reading out such material in front of a group of strangers. Yesterday's poem got a laugh, today's wouldn't. On Saturday I got the balance of smut:crudity right. Tomorrow maybe I won't. Who knows? It's all a matter of trial and error and, balls of steel or not, isn't it fun to be playing and experimenting?

A Rude Poem that Proves a Point

I recited this poem during my talk at the Get Writing Conference on Saturday:

Mary had a little bike,

She rode it on the grass.

And every time the wheels went round

A spoke went up her -

At which point I stopped, and the audience laughed (luckily - I'd have been scuppered if there had been silence). Why did they laugh? I asked them. The answer was because they knew what word was coming next - and in fact one lady helpfully mouthed it at me just in case I hadn't known. But the missing word isn't intrinsically funny, so why the laughter?

I'm sure there are lots of complicated psychological reasons why the omission of a mildly rude word can get such a reaction with a group of adults, but what I was using it for was to demonstrate that the audience was both willing to do some work - ie supply the missing word - and enjoyed the process. In fact, they enjoyed supplying the missing word far more than they would have done if I had said it.

When we're writing we can forget that the reader wants to work, and will enjoy their reading far more if they have to make an effort. That's the basis for show, not tell. We show the reader a situation, the reader does some work and deduces for themselves what's going on. It's much more effective than telling them exactly what's going on. Tell us that Evangeline was nervous, and we're bored. Show us Evangeline's sweaty palms or bitten fingernails and we're delighted to deduce that she's nervous.

Make the readers do some of the work, by showing and not telling, and you've got them hooked on your story.

Never be Snotty to the Assistant

At the RNA party to announce the shortlist for the Novel of the Year 2011 (which Kissing Mr Wrong just happens to be on) I was chatting to a commissioning editor from Headline. It turned out she had originally started as an assistant to my own editor at Headline and had risen through a series of promotions to the position she now held.

Think about it. How does a commissioning editor get to be a commissioning editor? It's usually not because they've been, say, middle management at Marks and Spencer. No, they've come through the ranks. Many have had stints as booksellers or been agents (or their assistants) en route but essentially, at some point they'll have been the one making the tea and going out to get the sandwiches.

Those people are usually the ones who new authors first make contact with at a publishing house or agency. So a new author would be advised to be polite and considerate at the very least. You may be thinking you always are, and I expect that's true, but there are some people who phone up demanding this or that, or respond badly to rejection and take it out on the assistant. Not a good idea because, remember:

The Tea Makers of Today are the Commissioning Editors of Tomorrow.

Yehudi Menuhin v. Nigel Kennedy or Why Perfection Doesn't Matter

A few months ago I was listening to a radio programme about violinists. I'm not musical - Chopsticks on the piano is about it - but it was fascinating hearing various musicians talk with such passion about the soloists.

Nigel Kennedy, it was universally agreed, was a perfect violinist, literally note perfect. Yehudi Menuhin, on the other hand, made errors. 'But I'd rather have the Menuhin recordings,' one of the musicians piped up. The others agreed. They enjoyed Menuhin's passion, his heart-felt commitment to his music, and that over rode any considerations of perfection. Put simply, it was the mistakes that made Menuhin the violinist he was.

And it got me thinking: why do we writers tie ourselves up in knots about some nebulous ideas about perfection? We edit and edit and edit until our shoulders seize up and our hands ache. We don't send our work out because it's 'not quite there yet', even though we finished that draft a year ago. We tinker and fiddle and primp our words, searching for perfection.

It's not there! And even if it was, would we want it? Wouldn't we as readers rather choose the heart-felt, the committed, the passion for story telling over mere perfection? Go for it, let your words soar like Menuhin's playing and stuff the imperfections.

Why Readers are like Goslings

Reading is a strange business. We start out with high expectations and long for them to be fulfilled - no one reads hoping that they're going to waste their time, surely. So we latch onto whatever we get given in the first paragraph. Aha, we think, that's what this story is going to be about.

And then it isn't.

It's such a disappointment. As a reader, you sort of commit to the first person you see in a story, just like a gosling hatching from the egg. And as you read further, and the story gets further away from the character you started with, half your brain is wondering when we're going to get our real main character back, the one we started out with, the one we bonded with.

I see it in class time and time again. We begin with character X, then mourn X's absence if X doesn't turn out to be the main character. Feedback invariably starts with 'What happened to X?'

In novels this may not be so important - though in published novels, if the story is going to start with a different character, you often see that chapter being called a prologue, or some such, just to alert the reader that they shouldn't commit fully.

But in short stories starting with the character you mean to go on with is vital. Consider this: I see misleading story beginnings in class fairly often, but I can't remember seeing a story that didn't start with the main character when I've been the final judge for short story comps. That implies that the misleading beginnings get weeded out in the initial judging stages.

So, I'd strongly advise anyone to make sure their opening paragraph concentrates on the main character and call me a goose if I'm wrong.