Being a Flexible Friend to Your Writing

I whiled away a few minutes the other day looking at an old piece of writing and counting the number of structural errors in it.  It had begun from a writing exercise I'd been set in the writing class I used to go to.  We were given the beginning half of an opening sentence and had to take it from there.  I had done, and made a nice little story from it.  

The trouble was my starting sentence came pretty close to the end of the chronological story, so much of it had to be done in flashback, and worse, flashbacks within flashback.  (Shock horror!  Yes, the woman on a mission to eradicate flashback from prose was once an offender.) It made it hard to follow what exactly was going on on the first couple of pages.  I vaguely remember being aware of that, and trying to signpost exactly where the reader was in the story.

It never occurred to me to change where I'd started.  And yet, why was I so wedded to that opening sentence?  The first words of it weren't even mine.  It was because my writing mind lacked flexibility.  The story started there because that was where it had started in the writing class exercise and that was that.  

First draft writing is about getting those initial ideas down.  Re-writing is about being flexible.  Why shouldn't this bit go there, rather than stay where it is?  Does John have to be an engineer?  Could John be Joanna?  What if Rover the dog was a cat called Pushkin? What if we set this scene in a fish market instead of a tea shop? Does the story need John/Joanna at all?  

We get hooked on the initial ideas and images that inspire us to write and become rigid when change is mentioned.  But writers need to be flexible when it comes to looking at our work a second time.  I like the opening line of my old short story.  It's a good one.  But it screws up the rest of the story telling and then I lacked the flexibility to change.  

Now I try to write with as much flexibility as possible.  Everything is up for change, depending on the demands of the story.  I try to keep the writing as fluid as possible until the last moment, which means I have moments of despair as I survey the utter mess that is my novel. But I remember the fable about the sapling, that can bend with the storm, growing next to the mighty but rigid oak, that topples in the wind.  Flexibility is good.

What If Failure Is All You Get?

Someone on Twitter asked "What if failure is all you get?" in response to my post on Three Cheers for Failure.

Our lives are not like the lives of characters in a book. We get born, stuff happens along the way, we die. We only put "The End" when it literally is "The End" - ie you're dead. You may have "failed" at 20, 30, 40, 50...but who's to know what's going to happen when you're 60 or 70?

I know several people who have first got published in their 60s and 70s - are they failures because it happened late to them? Or terrific success stories because they persisted?

I'm struggling to finish my current novel. Deadlines have come and gone and I still can't get the b****r done, which is probably suicidal in the current climate. Is that failure? Will, a couple of years down the line, I be laughing over the champagne as I read my amazing sales figures? Or will I be watching the clock to get to the end of my shift at the check out in Sainsbury's?

Who knows? It's likely to be somewhere in between - a recent programme on chaos theory said that it was impossible to predict what you'd be doing 5 years ahead, even if your life looked ultra stable and solid now. You may be "failing" at the moment, but if an acceptance letter or phone call arrived in the next 5 minutes, you'd consider yourself a success.

Stop focussing on the end, because it won't be the end. Getting an acceptance will lead to more problems to be solved, more failure, more success. It's a bit like being pregnant and only preparing for the delivery. Wake up! You've got the baby around for at least the next 20 years, more if you're unlucky (or house prices continue to rise).

Enjoy the journey, even when it's tough and hard going. Failure and success are only words, they're not states of being and the ending is only the ending when it really is The End. There's plenty of time for living until then.

Quantity v Quality

I've spent lots of time this summer with friends and family; them visiting me, me visiting them. It's been fun, even the two nights I spent on a slowly expiring single lilo with the bedding rigged up from a double sheet and a scratchy, winter-weight sleeping bag. But some of my friends and family didn't go in for uncomfortable nights. They instead booked hotels and B&Bs and joined the hosts at pre-arranged times. They had quality time, not quantity time.

They may have had a good nights sleep, but I feel that they missed out on the full experience. They missed out on hanging around waiting for everyone else to decide what to do (difficult when you're talking about organising 4 multi-generational families). I had some good chats then. They also miss out on the opportunities for surprising revelations - someone confessed to relationship difficulties over the fruit and veg counter in Morrisons, and there was a late night heart to heart with a friend of a friend I'd never really noticed much before.

So lots of hanging around not doing much, but with the occasional flash of pure gold, versus bursts of rather controlled quality time where things were done on the grown-ups terms.

I can't say which is preferable for family and friends, but in terms of writing I know where I stand. Quantity beats quality every time. If you write, and write, and write you risk some of it being utter tripe, but you also gain the unexpected thread of gold running through the dross. If your writing time is controlled, you risk getting hardly any done - good or bad.

I appreciate that not everyone has unlimited time at their disposal and, for some, their writing time is perforce limited by circumstances. But you usually have lots of thinking time available (waiting for trains, walking the dog, cleaning, doing the washing up, knitting...) so when your writing time comes, splurge it all out on the page. Don't worry about the quality of what you're writing, just get it written. You can always sort it out later.

Buyers and Readers

Waterstones recently announced that they were doing away with their 3 for 2 promotion, which has generally had a good reaction in the publishing world. I looked at my To Be Read pile - which is actually more like a couple of shelves-worth - and realised that many of the books on it had been bought as part of the 3 for 2 promotion. I hadn't really wanted that third book, but got it any way as it was free. Having got it, however, I haven't spent my time reading it.

It's the same with my Kindle. I've downloaded lots of books - mainly the entire works by classic authors such as Henry James and Charles Dickens - but I haven't actually read any of them. The books I have read on my Kindle are the ones I paid for. And more than that, paid a reasonable sum for. (Your definition of what's 'reasonable' will probably be different from mine, but I don't think paying 99p is reasonable for a book that has taken an author maybe a year to write.)

People sometimes tell me that they've bought my books but haven't actually read them, and my standard response has always been, "so long as you've bought them, I don't mind". The flip side is that when someone tells me that they've read all my books from the library, it's hard to be thrilled. I've never been a writer who has said "I just want to be read" - I want to earn a living from writing!

But I wonder if I'm going to have to change my attitude. Someone buying a book for 99p doesn't seem much of an achievement if they don't actually read it. If they don't read it they can't tell other people that they're worth reading, and they won't bother to go and read the rest. Why should they, when they've already got a copy of one of my books waiting to be read?

It's not just about money. As a reader I'm handing over great wodges of my time to read a book. Whether I paid 99p or £7.99 for the product, it's taking up a lot of my leisure time. I want the book to be good because my leisure time is worth a lot to me.

I think anyone who says that they know where publishing is going is a fool. Things are changing too fast and what is true this week may not be true next year, next month, even next week. But a lot of the discussion around publishing - especially epublishing - is based around price. This year, when we've got new reading devices to fill, perhaps price is the key topic. I think however, that selling lots of books at rock bottom prices is a red herring.

What did I do last week? Bought two full priced books, because I wanted them. I've now read them both, along with another book that was lent to me by a friend with a good recommendation. That's anecdotal evidence. But many of the ebooks by best selling authors sell at prices comparable to their paperback price, and are doing well too.

I wonder if 2012 will see quality of reading experience coming to the top of the list, when we choose to be readers rather than just buyers. I hope so.

Countdown to Consistency

I have a Countdown Teapot.  For those who don't know it (you fools! or sensible people for having proper jobs and not wasting time watching daytime TV) Countdown is a words and numbers game on Channel 4 at 3.10pm.  A few years ago I auditioned for it, along with my friend Caroline.  

The audition process roughly followed the game, but with 10 people playing each time.  We were given 9 letters and had to find a word containing the most letters in the next 30 seconds.  Ready? The first set of letters were: TICPAETOT. Tick tick tick...

30 seconds later we went round the table each saying our highest scoring word.  My heart was pounding as I declared a 9 letter word.  I was so excited I felt sick, especially as no one else declared a 9.  There was so much adrenaline flowing in my system that I genuinely thought I might have heart failure as I said "petticoat".  

And that was my high point.  My brain was completely scrambled by my initial success and I couldn't focus on anything.  I failed the audition, as did Caroline.  But you were allowed 3 goes at auditioning.  We went again and the same thing happened.  One high score, then nothing.  This time Caroline got through.  She went on the programme, and won her teapot.  I wasn't going to bother to try again (and really, was my heart going to take the strain?) but in the end I did apply.  

By the  time my third and final audition came up a lot had changed in my life and I wasn't watching Countdown as much so I wasn't as worked up about it.  Also Caroline had worked out the secret to passing the audition.  She told me that they were looking for someone who was consistent and therefore wouldn't be embarrassing on the programme.   It was better to always score a 7 or a 6 than get a wide range of 9s and 5s even though the average might be the same.

Reader, I won it. I succeeded in the audition by aiming for 7 letter words not 9 letter ones, went on the programme and won a teapot.  

And the point of all this rambling is that consistency is important also in writing.  It's no good having flashes of brilliance if there are also chunks of lumpen prose.  In fact, if anything it's worse because the flashes of brilliance highlight just how chunky and lumpen the rest is.  All the writing needs to be of the same standard, which obviously should be as high as you can make it.  

So, if you know that dialogue is your weak point, then you have to try to improve it. If feedback tells you your problem is in too much description then you have to learn to wield the axe. Page 1 should be as good as page 5, or page 55.  Or, to extend the metaphor to another TV gameshow, your writing is only as good as The Weakest Link.  

Three Cheers for Failure

A friend of mine is trying to move from journalism into fiction.  He's a very talented writer: I love what I've read of his work.  He's aiming high and wants to be a Booker prize contender, which is a fine ambition.  The trouble is, his ambition is preventing him from moving forward.  

He has problems finishing work, endlessly re-writing and editing.  When a short story is finished he won't send it anywhere - he says doesn't want to send it to competitions because there might be issues over copyright should he want to publish a short story collection later on. He also worries that he hasn't yet found his voice.  He tries different styles, different genres.  He destroys a lot of what he writes.  He researches agents and publishers, but somehow never finds one that is suitable for his work - he tells me that it's very important to start as you mean to go on and the wrong agent or publisher can kill your career before it starts.  Well, yes, but... 

What it amounts to is some beautiful writing which only gets read by a select few (I am now off his reading list after I ventured some criticism).  I think it's great when writers write just for themselves - but this writer is ambitious.  He wants to be launched in a blaze of glory. He doesn't want to follow the ordinary path, or so he says.  

I suspect he doesn't send out because at heart he is frightened of failure.  He has set his sights so high that he will be very lucky indeed to succeed.  Ambition is a good thing, but it can also cripple you.  Easier to say 'I'm not ready' than risk being turned down.  

But failure is part of any creative endeavour.  Without failure we can't judge our strengths and weaknesses.  Without failure we won't grow.  Without failure we stay in the same place and stagnate.  Failure means development.  If a writer gets 99 rejections but an acceptance on the 100th, is that writer a success or a failure?  A success even though if they'd given up at 98 they would have been a failure.

I believe that we are all on the same road.  Sometimes we move faster or slower than others.  Sometimes we get a lucky break and jump a section, sometimes we go through bad times and slip backwards.  Luck plays a big part, as does hard work.  If you fail - that is, get a rejection - then you slip back a bit, but you only come off the road if you stop writing and stop trying to move forward.  

Using Beats in Prose

I first came across the word 'beat' a million years ago when I was training to be an actor.  It's used to describe a pause - literally the time taken to say the word beat - in dialogue.  What it does is allow thinking time.  

If a character's dialogue is: 

'I love porridge. Aunt Alice sent us a postcard - did you see it?' 

then there has to be a pause or beat between the two sentences:  

'I love porridge.' (BEAT) 'Aunt Alice sent us a postcard - did you see it?'

because there is a change of direction in the character's thinking from the first sentence to the second, from porridge to the postcard.

On stage the actor would pause or perform some action between the two sentences.  When you got your script for the first time you'd go through marking the beats, working out what the thinking was behind the words. (I acted in a Pinter play once and we spent some time working out how many beats there were to stage directions such as pause (2 beats), long pause (4 beats), brief silence (6 beats) etc.)

That's in acting.  The word beat is used in film scripts, but it's used in the same way - to indicate a pause in dialogue.  And from film the word beat has come into prose to describe the spaces between dialogue.  But in prose we can't hear the characters pause, so we have to write something...

'I love porridge.' She wiped the table down. 'Aunt Alice sent us a postcard - did you see it?'

'I love porridge.' She looked up as the letterbox rattled. 'Aunt Alice sent us a postcard - did you see it?'

'I love porridge.' A mouse ran along the edge of the skirting board. 'Aunt Alice sent us a postcard - did you see it?'

Every time your character changes direction in their thoughts there should be a beat, unless you want to indicate a character whose thoughts just rattle through their head - for example, Miss Bates' long speeches in Jane Austen's Emma.