The Writing Coach

Daily Creative Writing Exercises: 4

An exercise in narrative voice:

I always believe that 'finding the voice' is one of the most essential parts of writing fiction.  I can spend months trying to get the voice right, but once it is there, the novel really begins to take off.  It's so important to have a voice which is consistent.  Even if you use more than one narrative voice, each voice must have its own internal cohesion.  Sometimes we can spend a lot of time writing, only to decide that we need to rewrite, changing from 1st to third person, or from past to present tense.  It's a part of the process of course.  But when beginning a work, the more we experiment with voice, the less likely we are to need to make such changes later - when the work involved is likely to be so much greater. 

Daily Creative Writing Exercises: 3

A Short Exercise in Developing Plot

Students who have worked with me before will be familiar with this one.  But it's one of my favourites, so I simply must share it here..

Here's your scenario: 

A woman is packing a suitcase in the middle of the night.  This is where your story begins - your hook.  Now, where will it go?  Who is she?  What has happened?  Why is she packing?  What is her desire?  This desire forms the arc of the story. 

Daily Creative Writing Exercises: 2

Character Development:  "Man is his desire"

When I begin writing a novel, I often don't have a clear sense of where, exactly, that novel is going.  But I do spend a lot of time thinking about my characters and, most importantly, what drives them.  What do they want?  What makes them get out of bed in the morning?  What would they kill for?  What would they suffer for?  If we can understand a character's motivation, we are closer to understanding the character as a whole.  We also have the beginnings of a plot...

Exercise:

‘Man is his desire’.  Consider a character that you are currently developing.  What is his or her greatest desire?  This desire  is his/her driving force.  Now, envisage a scene in which the character is attempting to fulfill some early part of this desire, but make it difficult, even morally difficult to achieve.  (eg.  a story about a woman who wants to get a job promotion - write the scene where she learns a respected senior colleague is about to be sacked; a story about a man who wants to marry a particular woman, write the scene where he meets his friend's wife for the first time (the woman).

Daily Creative Writing Exercises: 1

A Sense of Place

As I've often said, I'm more inspired by new locations than by any other type of stimulus.  Here's one of the Norfolk beaches that inspired my novel 'Bluethroat Morning'. In writing class, I would often ask students to reflect on how location influences their work.  Today's exercise asks you to reflect on places that have affected you and to mine them, discovering rich material for writing fiction. 

Exercise:

Spend a few minutes thinking about a place that has moved you immensely.  It must be a place that once made a strong impact on you:  whether that be a negative or positive impact is your choice.  Perhaps you are thinking about a childhood memory, a holiday or an everyday place that strikes a particular chord with you.

Point of View - This Week's Crit

The first person to respond to last week’s exercise here on 'The Writing Coach' was Helen Belgian who wrote this for the point of view exercise:

I am going to throw up & my legs are slowly dissolving. I try to laugh it off - “side-effect of the Waltzer, I am never going on that bloody thing again!” - and I hope my sharp bitter giggle convinces Karen & Joss that tears are spiking my eyes from hilarity and not impending hysteria. 

Shit, it’s not even like she’s prettier than me; the pumping bass and kaleidoscopic lights impart a sexy glowy fuzz to everyone here. Even the grimy tattooed guy on the Waltzer who kept thrusting his money-belted groin at me, his leering tongue wrapping as much innuendo as possible around his hackneyed invitation to  “scream if you wanna go faster.”  There is screaming, now, in my head, and I am sure the others could hear it seeping out of me.

“You’re looking really green, hon, and you’ve sort of glazed over. You’d better sit down, we’ll get you a donut or something sugary. Or will that make you chuck, do you think?”

They looked happy, but that doesn’t mean anything, really. Everyone’s happy here. That why they call it the bloody fun-fair. It was clearly all an act, as fake as the stuffed synthetic Disney toys they give away here for pinging a tin can or hooking a duck. He’s showing off for her, a big brave bear of a man, whilst she simpers like a bloody Victorian virgin.  She’ll never get him on the big wheel. He’s scared of heights. I know this about him. This, and much, much more than she ever will.      

Just as they merge into the effervescent crowd, he slips an arm around her shoulder. She tips her radiant moon face up to his and I know they are going to kiss.

Karen strokes my back as I double over and vomit violently into the diesel-soaked grass.    

I like the passion in this piece of writing, the real intensity of emotion.  Belgian gets that sickening jealousy across very well with some strong verbs (‘spiking’, ‘thrusting’ ‘screaming’) and a powerful, colloquial voice that allows the character’s furious jealousy to burst through without stating it plainly (so taking in the ‘show don’t tell’ of last week’s exercise).  The sense of place adds intensity, the grime, the tattoos, the synthetic toys, so she’s using the scene to build feeling too and that works particularly well.  Interesting I think that this is an exercise in a new point of view, so clearly Belgian is more familiar with one of the happy couple than the jealous ex.  I’d be interested to know what she learnt about the new narrator from this and indeed her rival.

If I were to edit this piece, I’d probably remove a few of the adjectives (‘kaleidoscopic’ is great; but ‘sexy glowy’ less strong for example and we probably assume the ‘tattooed’ guy is grimy so ‘tattooed’ alone would do it for me)  A lot of the adjectives are strong, but there are probably just a handful too many and I’d like to see a more precise metaphor perhaps in place of some of these or simply more action.  I like the ‘Victorian virgin’ but not the ‘big brave bear’ which I feel is too obvious.  I’d also cut the reference to ‘chucking’ in the middle to make the vomiting at the end more powerful.

All this, remember, is very personal.  Any crit. is .  And the trick, when one’s work is put through this process is to see what you agree with and what you don’t agree with and go with your gut.  I do this all the time when I’m edited.  I reject at least half! What I like most of all about this writing is the spirit of it, the real spitting fury that comes through, I admire that.  I like the visually intense quality too, so though I’d tone it down a little, I applaud the essence of the voice.  And I’d like to know more…

For me, it’s interesting when a work has more than one narrative voice, so long as there is a structure within which those voices work.  In the end ‘Temple of Hymen’ had two narrators, Vermilion and Emilia, whose stories often contradicted one another; having two narrators allowed me to explore the story in a much fuller way than would have been possible with a single narrator and I found it a fascinating device to use.  Consistency is always key when using multiple voices.  Not a consistent voice, if several are used, but a pattern within which those voices are revealed to us the reader.  In ‘Small Island’ for example, Andrea Levy uses three narrative voices to brilliant effect.  The story is so much broader for this and it’s a much more involving way of telling a story than an omniscient narrator could achieve.  In modern novels, a fully omniscient narrator is becoming a much rarer thing.  I’m going to write about McEwan’s novel ‘Saturday’ on my other blog ‘Stubborn World’ shortly, but for now, suffice to say that if you take a look at that narrator, it’s third person but ‘close third person’; in other words, we can’t see beyond the character Perowne (unless it’s to imagine McEwan sitting there creating him which given the level of research we can’t help but do).  Certainly we don’t see into any other character’s head.  It’s third person but it’s intimate.  Intimacy is one thing we seem to demand as readers these days.  Anybody want to challenge me on this one?

Creative Writing Exercise - 2 - Point of View

More on this subject shortly, but as time is short, here’s the exercise. As usual, first to post me their completed exercise will get a response on this site next week.

This is a chance to bring you fresh perspective on work in progress. Think of a character that you have written about before or are in the process of writing about (character A). I want you to take a new view on your protagonist (A) by writing about him/her from the point of view of another character (character B).

The scene is to be set in a fairground and to be written either in first person or in a close third-person narrative voice. Your new central character (B) sees your usual protagonist (A) by chance at the fairground and this provokes a strong reaction. Don’t spend too long scene-setting, jump into the drama here and see what happens when another character observes/encounters your usual protagonist. The results might surprise you.

The reason I love this exercise is that a new point of view can often bring additional depth to our work, whether this means a deeper understanding of our characters or possibly, if we’re still at the conceptual phase, a decision to write the work differently. When I was writing ‘Temple of Hymen’ I began with Emilia’s voice only and soon tired of her innocence. A walk around campus (I was on the UEA Creative Writing Programme at the time) gave me the insight that a fresh perspective was needed. I’ll write more on this in the next posting.

Show don't Tell - This week's crit.

David Bedsole who writes Punk Israel was the first person to e-mail me his response to last week’s writing exercise.  For this week’s exercise, please come back tomorrow.  Here’s what Bedsole wrote :

Two boys, we stood in the archery field of the camp in rural Alabama, sunburned. He outweighed me by fifty pounds, a hulking kid, matter-of-fact, patronizing, almost friendly.  Listen to him:

"I can kick your ass.  That's all there is to it.  It's just how God made us.  God gave you a weak, scrawny body, and God gave me a big, strong body to kick your ass with."

We sweated, and there were gnats that year, gnats in droves, a plague.  We both wore khaki Duckhead shorts and white t-shirts.  We had seen each other in the showers--me barely into puberty at thirteen, he seemingly on his way out.   He was chubby, but solid.  I was thin and short, and still hairless all over, hairless everywhere, with a voice that hadn't yet began to squeak. 

He had a girlfriend with real breasts and a big imagination.  He had adventures with her.  Not like me, who had sat in the back of the flatbed truck next to a beautiful redheaded girl, hearing the shocks creak as the truck took the curvy road, enjoying the way we leaned into each other, until her face screwed up in pretty disgust and screamed me away.

Now we stood here, sweating, in this green field, and he waited for my reaction.  I waited for my reaction.  In my mind I saw him thirty years later, in a business suit, same expression on his face, wry, waiting.

Bedsole takes this exercise and runs with it.  He really takes on board what I wrote about precise, physical detail being a way of showing.  Yes, we are told ‘facts’ but we aren’t patronized and nothing is given away easily.  We are shown this particular relationship, the smaller boy’s feelings of inadequacy, but there’s something open-ended here too which I like.  Where there’s room for interpretation, generally the writer is showing. 

I like the specifics of the location, in particular the gnats.  The dialogue shows a lot about the other boy’s superiority complex.  The fact that the smaller boy dwells on the other boy’s physical maturity shows his feeling, without making it obvious.  Character in fiction is revealed, often, through what a character notices, their point of view.  Bedsole has a winning turn of phrase (“pretty disgust” I like particularly); hey, if you read his blog, you know that, right?  There are a lot of adjectives here, not something that Elmore Leonard would like, but though I agree with most of Leonard’s points in this essay on hooptedoodle, I disagree with the stuff about description.  My view on description is – scatter it, with precision; don’t go for the obvious; have an odd slant; a new perspective. It’s interesting how Bedsole acts as a narrator here, that “Listen to him”, a rare device these days, but one I like, it gives the narrator an edge. 

My only slight point of confusion is in the final sentence.  Is he, as a child, imagining the future?  Or rather, is he telling this from adulthood, is the last sentence in present tense effectively?

This week’s exercise will be on Point of View.  Come back and find it shortly… 
Do remember that if you want to be informed when I post, you can fill in the box on the right and you'll receive an e-mail, so you won't miss a thing and are more likely to be the first to get your exercise to me for a crit.

This week's Creative Writing Exercise

In class at Richmond College last night, it occurred to me that it might be useful for readers of this blog to participate in the regular writing exercises I set my students, so my intention is to post the weekly exercises here.  I'd love to hear how you get on.

The class was based on that old chestnut 'Show, don't Tell'.  If you're a regular writer, you'll have heard a lot about this concept, but for those who are newer to writing, I'll simply say that it's a general rule of thumb that one should aim to 'show' in fiction rather than 'tell'.  What this means is, don't tell us that a character is nervous, terrified, happy, in love or ashamed.  Instead, reveal that to us through gesture, action and dialogue.  Or indeed, reveal it to us with close description.  Many people think that 'telling' means describing.  It doesn't.  Brilliant description can often be a form of 'showing'.  I used the example of chapter two of Khaled Hosseini's novel 'The Kite Runner'.  It begins:

"When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father's house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror.  We would sit across from each other on a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried mulberries and walnuts.  We took turns with the mirror as we ate mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing."

My point is - this could be described as telling - the author is 'telling' us what happened.  But in fact it is showing.  The author is showing us something about the relationship by this precise detail.  He is saying 'Hassan was my friend; we had a special relationship' but instead of saying that, he is being particular, showing it, allowing us, the reader, to inhabit the text.  When the reader can inhabit the text and analyse the meaning, generally the author has been successful at 'showing'.

This week's exercise is:

Write a passage in the first person past tense, a memory, in which your central character reveals that another character was an enemy, or at the very least, provoked a strong negative reaction.  Do not, however, tell us that this is what the character thinks.  Reveal the antagonism through action, dialogue or precise description.  Leave room for the reader to interpret what the narrator thinks about this character.  Don't tell us.  Show us.

Do let me know how you get on.  The first person to e-mail me their exercise will be posted here with a free constructive critique!