Keeping The Reader Within The Story World

I was reading a charming story for children about some little mice when - wham!  suddenly I was jerked out of the fantasy.  The mice were walking paw in paw.  Now, up until that point, I was enjoying the story and not really thinking about the level of anthropomorphism.  I accepted that the mice were living a human lifestyle, with mousy additions.  But that one phrase took me into reality - if the mice were walking paw in paw they had to be up on their hind legs, and that created a visual picture that jarred with my vague imaginings.  Worse, once I'd been taken out of the story, the rest of the fantasy was undermined.

We can accept all sorts of things as being real within a story, from the wizarding world of Harry Potter to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  But the second something challenges the reality of the story world, the whole thing falls apart.

All fiction is a fantasy.  If a character behaves in a way nobody would in real life, the fantasy is exposed.  How many single women, on returning to their flat, start to take off their clothes without turning on any lights?  According to a certain type of film, this happens all the time, but when I see it any tension dissipates as I stop suspending disbelief.  In a romance, I'm quite happy for the central couple to bicker their way through the first three quarters of the book before realising they're in love, but the change has to be gradual.  If it's bicker, bicker, bicker, oh look we're in love! you've lost me.

Implausibility takes the reader out of the story world more than anything else, but any hiccup in the reader experience is to be avoided.  That's why, if someone says they didn't get something your reaction shouldn't be to defend your work but find out exactly what it was that made them leave the story world.   Because if they leave, you've lost them.

Why Faking It Is Better Than The Real Thing

Recently the True Love series ran on television, but I didn't watch it despite the impressive cast of actors.  The advance publicity was flagging up that the actors had improvised the scripts as if it was a plus point, but I've been an actor and I've performed in improvised plays and what it's taught me is that 'actor' and 'writer' are different words.

Improvised dialogue feels right.  It feels natural.  It comes from a emotion that feels real to the actor.  There appears to be an authenticity, which is the Holy Grail in acting.

But do we really want to watch (or read) real life?  No - because we're living it ourselves.  I suppose there must have been some Big Brother afficionados who watched every second of footage from the house, but they must have been thin on the ground.  We watch and read fiction instead.

Fiction isn't real.  It has structure - which real life often doesn't.  It has purpose - which real life often doesn't.  It has meaning - which real life often doesn't. It has an ending - which real life doesn't (even if you die, life carries on).

The trick is to make fiction appear like real life.  It's real life but with purpose, structure, meaning and an ending.  That's what the writer adds.  So don't tell me it's improvised - I can do that in the comfort of my own home.

When we write fiction it isn't about us and how we feel, it's about how we make the reader feel. And that takes craft.

That's my blog post.  And now:

A Boring Anecdote To Prove The Point from when I was an actor...

I was playing Ruth in The Silver Sword, a play about a group of Jewish children fleeing Poland and trying to get to Switzerland where they hoped they might be reunited with their parents.  Ruth is the oldest, and leader of the children.  In rehearsals, the reunion scene always made me cry (shades of Jenny Agutter crying 'my daddy!' in The Railway Children) and several of the other actors congratulated me for feeling the emotions, for living the part.

Come to the performances, and my group of children has gone from the two other professional actors to a troupe from the local stage school.  In the big reunion scene they were all fidgeting and whispering on stage behind me.  I couldn't get into my emotions!  I didn't cry!  My whole performance was ruined.  For three nights this was a problem.  The children fidgeted and whispered, I didn't cry, it was a disaster.  (For me as an actor.  The play was fine.)

Then I got over it.  I would have to act, instead of 'being there in the moment'.  That night, the children fidgeted and whispered, and I acted my Jenny Agutter moment instead of living it.  To my surprise, there seemed to be a lot of white things waving in the audience.  As I'm hugging my father and mother on stage, I'm also squinting at the audience trying to see what was going on.

It was handkerchiefs.  People in the audience - and quite a lot of them - were crying. I was AMAZED.

And that's how it went on. night after night.  When I genuinely got caught up in the moment and cried, the audience didn't.  When I acted, the audience did.

So as a writer, I ask myself - who do I want to get emotionally involved?  Me?  Or the reader?  Both is best, but if I have to use craft and not my own feelings to get the reader going, then that's what happens.  The reader comes first.  Always.

6 Ways Of Using 'Find and Replace' You Might Not Have Thought Of

Like most people I use Word as my word processing software. You'll find the Find/Replace button if you go to Edit on the top bar, then you're offered Find - which will just find a word - or Replace, which will find a word and then replace it. I use Find and Replace a lot when I'm writing and editing.

1. When writing and I get stuck and want to jump I put XXX and then make the leap. Later on I can Find all those XXXs and then stick in whatever's needed to make the link.

2. When writing I might get an idea for a previous scene. Instead of scrolling back I put XXX and then make a note. Later, I use Find and look at all those notes.

3. When writing I know I've got certain...shall we say, quirks? If I'm stuck for a gesture on the first draft, I often have characters running their hands through their hair. This is fine once, twice maybe, but too many times and all my characters would look like cockatoos. Finding the phrase "running his hand" or "he ran his hand" means I can think of something better.

4. Which do you prefer? She felt as if a sledgehammer had whacked her...or...Bam! A sledgehammer whacked her...or...his words hit her like a sledgehammer. I could go on with different versions of sledgehammering, but the least effective uses "She felt". It's a distancing phrase, it puts the reader at arms length by telling us how she feels rather than showing. Bam! let's us feel the sledgehammer at the same time as she does. As a general rule, all "she felt"s can go, and Find is a useful tool for hunting them down. I also do it with "seemed" and "that" and have done it for adverbs too - type in ly and see how many come up.

5. Names. My characters change names a lot when I'm writing, especially minor ones. And then at the end I go back and check I haven't used similar names - I speak as one whose first draft of her first novel featured Patrick, Pat, George, Gerry and Jenny. It's easy to change names using Find and Replace BUT be careful before you press the OK button. I have changed names like Gus to Nick, and ended up with words like AuNickt and disNickting. Get round it by adding spaces before and after the names, or press the Next button rather than All so you can check each one before you change.

6. If I cut bits out from a draft I stick them at the end of the document so I have them to hand if I either want them back, or think there might be a nifty phrase or bit of dialogue lurking that I can use later. I put *THE END* at the end of the book (which is good for morale) and then cut and paste them after it.  (Putting the * * means I don't get mixed up with phrases like 'she thought it was the end of everything'.)  That way I can easily find where I am so far, and how much of the whole document is discard.

How do you change a duvet cover?  I always feed one corner of the duvet into the new cover, then hold it securely while I do the other corner, then shake the cover down.  A friend does something clever with starting with the cover inside out and then flipping it over, which they insist is a far better way than mine. I think it is too, except I can't seem to work out the mechanics and spend longer trying to work out what I'm supposed to be doing than I do on changing the cover.

The 'flip it over' method doesn't come naturally to me.  Neither does planning a novel.  I've tried it, and enjoyed setting it all out on cards, and doing little charts and all sorts of colour co-ordinated bits, but when it came to actually writing the thing, I couldn't.  The story I wanted to write was something quite different, and whenever I tried to wrestle it back into the plan, I couldn't.

Stephen King sets out without a plan at all.  Ken Follett does 300 page plans (and yes, that is about half the length of the novel, and I'd think at this point I'd start calling it a draft, but it's a plan to him).  Ruth Rendall plans her novels, writes them, then changes who the murderer is, re-writes the novel. I've heard of other novelists collecting snippets of writing in a file and gradually seeing how they work themselves into a story.

Some people plan, some people don't.  Some people lay down the law that the only way to write a novel is to do this, or that, or follow this formula, or let your muse roam free. Some people are very convincing and persuasive about their writing method, so convincing you think that if only you could use that way of writing, you'd be as good as them.

The only way to write is to try every method out and see what happens.  Hopefully you'll have fun along the way, even if you do go down a few dead ends and blind alleys. The only right method is the one that works for you. And in the end, so long as the bed gets made, does it really matter how you got there?

Being A Writer Shouldn't Be Depressing, Honest

Someone recently got in touch about my blog saying nice things, but adding that they found it 'also a bit depressing sometimes when you highlight the plight of the debut writer and how difficult it is to get published.'

Oh dear.  Nothing could be further from my intention because I don't think the road to getting published is depressing at all.  As far as I can see, getting published is open to anyone, of any age, background, colour, creed, nationality, shape, size, whatever.  Anyone, absolutely anyone, can get published.

Personally, I think that's cheering.  What I accept might be depressing is quite how competitive it is, but that's true for most endeavours that  are worth doing.

For instance, I didn't realise until I started working at the University of Bath, where many of our elite athletes train, exactly what those young people put themselves through.  Hours and hours of training, day in, day out, for year after year.  Diet constantly monitored, no fun and games, sponsorship only for the lucky few, and real success only for one or two out of the hundreds who are training - and that's just at Bath.

It's hard doing almost anything and most things require years of training and practice - it takes about the same time to learn how to blow glass properly as it does to become a doctor.  Why not writing as well?

So you learn, you practice, you get better.  It takes time.  Yes, a few lucky people get there more quickly than others, but so long as you constantly keep on learning, keep on improving, keep on pushing at the door I believe it will eventually open.

The key to opening the door is writing something good, and that's possible for all of us.  Keep trying, keep on improving, keep writing, keep learning, keep pushing the door.  The only way to fail is to stop trying.

Describing Places

The holidays are looming and lots of writers are heading off for places with notebooks hoping to capture some local colour that they can use in their writing.  But what to capture, and how to use it?

When I go to a location I'm going to use I take a camera  but my notebook is much more useful.  In it I record any thing about a location that I couldn't get from a guide book, such as smells, sounds and tiny details that you'd only know if you'd actually been there.   I write details about specific places at the front, and more general observations in the middle.

These are some general details about Rome, as written in my notebook:

Tiny cars - have some that look like Cousin It in the Adams family
Down every street lines of parked scooters - Lambrettas & Vespas
Constantly changing road surface - tarmac, cobbles, flagstones
Lots and lots of specialist shops.  Row after row of different knives, for cooking, for doing anything.  Clippers for nails and nasal hair - who would have thought that the world needed so many varieties of nasal hair clippers? Pen knives, chisels for wood carving, Canadian dental cream with retro pictures of Canadian Mountie, at the back an advertising poster with Mountie plus blonde haired girl in red chequered shirt, drawn into impossibly tiny waist and v 50s pointy breasts.
More is definitely not less here.
Pope shop - red, purple, scarlet, orange. Flat shoes for nuns - 69 pairs.

(I can remember counting the shoes.)

This ended up in A Single to Rome as:

    Another cobbled narrow street, then another, punctuated by random shops.  One was selling nothing but clerical items, everything from wimples and dog collars to shining gold-embroidered capes fit for a pope, and sixty-nine pairs of sensible shoes and sandals in shades of grey, beige and black.  Another had nothing but rows and rows of different types of knives.  Knives for cooking, for cutting, for hacking down jungle undergrowth, penknives and chisels for wood carving, and an extraordinary selection of nasal-hair clippers.  It had never occurred to Natalie before that there could be so much choice for a nasal-hair clipper, but here they were, offering different sizes, different grips, different mechanisms.
    Street surfaces constantly changed from tarmac to cobbles to flagstones, and down every street were lines of motorcycles, mostly Lambretta and Vespas but also other bigger machines.  Dotted between them were minute cars, some that looked as if they belonged to Cousin Itt in the Addams Family.

(The Mountie and his girl never made it - not specifically Italian enough.)

The most important point is that if anyone wanted to use your novel or short story as a guide book they would have gone out and got a guide book in the first place.  Your descriptions need to create the world your characters live in, rather than be a list of facts.  

This section has quite a lot of description in one go, but Natalie is exploring the city for the first time, and this is what she sees...what I saw...what I hope the reader sees along with Natalie.  Obviously writers are able to recreate places without having been there - in A Single to Rome, I also wrote in detail about an entirely imaginary museum - but the more real stuff there can be, and the smaller the detail, the better.  Real rings true.

3 Time Sucks That Can Be Dumped For Writing

Which would you rather have on your tombstone: 'watched the complete boxed set of Mad Men' or 'wrote a novel'?

Writers watch television, of course they do (lunchtime wouldn't be lunch without Bargain Hunt IMO) but only after they've done the writing, not before.  If you've had a heavy day at work then coming home and vegging out on the sofa is attractive, but first try sitting down to write for just 10 minutes.  You will feel much much better for it.  Promise. (You can always make watching the boxed set of Mad Men your writing reward.)

Which would you rather have on your tombstone: 'her children's socks were always ironed' or 'wrote a novel'?

A certain amount of time has to be spent on domesticity unless you want to live in a slum but surprising amounts can be ditched.  Ironing can go - buy stuff that doesn't need it.  It's not child abuse to train your children to tidy up after themselves, and they can learn to use the washing machine and hoover and load the dish washer.

Which would you rather have on your tombstone: 'went to parties' or 'wrote a novel'?

Speaking from experience, life goes on once you ditch dinner parties and the like.  You have fewer acquaintances, but that seems a fair trade off to me.  Things like Twitter and Facebook can give the illusion of a social life, but they're also time sucks.  Use a kitchen timer.

So, television, domesticity and socialising are my top 3 time sucks.  What about yours?