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Writing Advice Where to start?

Where to start? The writer's notebook, or let's not really write To plot or not to plot Don't get it right the first time Beginners' four faults Margaret, Maggie, Marg and Meg: problems with names and how to avoid them Loving your characters too much What is conflict? Everyone is right: creating fundamental motivation Pacing anxiety, or How to stop padding and plot! Not stopping the reader: avoiding the stumbling blocks that break the spell of your story A, B and C characters Describing your characters through their actions Plot and narrative: the twin rails of the novel Explaining too much: why less is more Description: what's it for? Killing your story: 8 guaranteed ways to wreck your writing Point of view: how to drive a story from inside a character's head Art of the unspoken: saying more by describing less Dialogue: the best action Style, the life and death of a writer Historical fiction: who rules, researcher or story-teller? The doldrums: when the wind leaves your sails The strenuous marriage, Part One: careful observation The strenuous marriage, Part Two: careful imagination The strenuous marriage, Part Three: strict toiling with language The Three Abouts Details, details Microwave writing Rewriting Paper: the re-writer's power tool The synopsis: what it is, what it isn't Plagiarism I am your editor: submitting your novel Are you a writer? Take the quiz

Where to start?
The opening scene of your novel should really be the opening scene. A novel is a sudden window opened to let us watch an arc of action from its initial to its closing phase. If you open the window too early, your readers have to drum their mental fingers waiting for the action to start. Open the window

too late, and you'll find yourself desperately filling in with flashbacks and infodumps. How do you know what action is the initial action? What is your story about? A young girl, suffocated by small-town life, deciding to head for the big city? Or a businessman at the end of his tether learning that, on top of everything else, he has cancer? Where do you start telling that story? The temptation all too often is to begin by describing the people and setting for your readers, to soften us up so we'll understand the subsequent behaviour of your characters. Thus you have the young woman rant to a friend about the constrictions on her life, you show us the businessman's hectic treadmill existence for two dozen pages to make sure that we soak up its horror, in short, you spell everything out for us. You do this because you are anxious that we, the readers, won't understand, that we need to be conked over the head until we get it, that we are too narratively nave to grasp what's going on unless it's counted out for us in baby language. Don't be so scared! We will understand your young woman if we see her suddenly strip off her waitress's apron, announce, 'I ain't takin' another single minute of this,' grab her day's wages and head for the Greyhound terminal, where she phones her clinging mother, her no-hope boyfriend, and is heading for Manhattan within the hour. Here is a woman throwing off her shackles. Later, in Manhattan, as you show her tentatively spreading her wings, we will grasp what her earlier life must have been like with greater poignancy than any amount of introductory explication could have revealed. In the same way, you can show the businessman (in one short paragraph) typing desperately on his laptop in the doctor's waiting room, pleading on his mobile with his creditors, until he's called in and, on hearing the doctor's gentle life-sentence, suddenly and for the first time becoming absolutely still. His initial frenzy and his unaccustomed quiet will reveal more about how he got to that doctor's office than pages of pre-digested information. In addition, the narrative ball will already be rolling. We readers won't have to wait for the action to start: it's started! What is that decision, what is that sudden alteration of circumstance, that changes everything? What is that first domino? Tell yourself what your story is about: 'It's about a young woman trapped in a small town who escapes to become a famous actress.' Your first active verb is 'escapes'. That gives you your opening scene. She escapes. Or your story line could be: 'A businessman at the end of his tether learns he has cancer and becomes a seeker after spiritual truth.' The first active verb is 'learns'. That's where your story starts: in the doctor's office. Or 'A wild young man, rebelling against being tamed, lights out for adventure.' The active verb is 'lights out' and that what Huckleberry Finn does, to his own and literature's glory. Cut to the action, but don't be tempted to start the book with a showy bang unless that showy bang is the initial action from which all other action flows. If you open with an epic space battle and then have to spend pages telling us how everybody got there, your flashback will brake your narrative to a stop and your first scene will bounce off your vehicle like a fancy hubcap, revealed for the meretricious gewgaw it is. The key is: from which all other action flows. The first scene is the first domino. The second domino has to be right behind it. That inexorably tumbling line is your story, action begetting action until all are spent. Your job, on page one, is to open the narrative window at the exact moment of first tumble. This doesn't have to be in the very first line, but it does have to be the very first scene. If your first thousand words don't contain the initial action, rewrite until they do. That's where your story begins. That's where to start.

The writer's notebook, or Let's not really write


Standard advice to the beginner writer is to keep a notebook or journal. Jot down phrases that come into your mind, they say, paint word pictures, keep a diary of what happened to you every day, your thoughts and feelings, practise with writing exercises. This, you are assured, will get the writing juices going, will encourage a facility with words, and will hone your observational skills. I say baloney. I say that you will end up with a nice collection of notebooks, but you won't be a writer. Keeping a journal or notebook fosters the journal-writing skill, not the fiction-writing skill. Fiction requires skills that journals won't bring out, can't bring out. Journals are the eddies in the stream, the procrastinator's heaven. I repeat: if you want to write fiction, journals won't foster the skills you need. What are "notebook skills" and why don't they encourage the skills of fiction-writing? Let's look at a few. 1. Me, Myself, I Delve within yourself, say those who preach journal-keeping to beginner writers. Learn your motivations, what makes you tick, and then you will be able to write about deep and complex emotions. A few years of this kind of journal-writing will make you well acquainted with yourself, but at the end that's what you'll be able to write about yourself. It's easy to write about yourself. And there are plenty of thinly-veiled autobiographies masquerading as novels these days that show that editors accept them. But how many great books are simply portraits of the writer as a young man? Not Crime and Punishment. Real writers love characters. Writers catch fire at the thought of inventing a really interesting person. Most writers say that their stories began with a character who leapt up, whole and complete, in their mind's eye, a person with a story that had to be written. Writing about your own inner thoughts and feelings, your own daily life, won't get you a Huckleberry Finn or a Holden Caulfield. Actually writing fiction will. But, you protest, journal-writers are encouraged to create word-sketches of characters, to invent people. I say again, baloney. Characters-sketches are not characters. Characters live in a fully created world with a past and future, they inter-act with other characters, they go through time, they change and are changed by inner motivation and external circumstances. What part of writing a character sketch is the actually working on a real novel? Which brings me to: 2. A plate of spaghetti, all covered with cheese It's fun to write scenes, character sketches, mood pieces, quick word-pictures of rainy streets or of the ocean touched by sunrise. It feels so creative to do ten-minute free-flow, free-association writing exercises. And writing story ideas: all writers jot down story ideas and it's a wonderful intense burst of creative energy. The difference between the jotting down of short pieces and a novel is that journalkeepers do the short bursts and the real writers write the books. Journals full of short bursts are like plates of spaghetti: a big heap of stuff without structure. Then there is: 3. Death by a thousand bon mots Those who encourage the journal habit will tell you to keep a notebook constantly at hand. Write down phrases and sentences that come to mind, they say, for later use in stories. Picture the scene: you are writing your novel, you come to a point where you need a powerful descriptive scene, and you think "hey, I wrote one a couple of years ago. Now where the heck is that

notebook?" Or you have a brilliant sentence saved that you just have to put in a character's mouth. Hmmm, no character seems likely to say such a thing, so let's tweak the narrative so one of them can. It would be a pity to waste a good line. Sort of like dumpster diving: this looks like it might be useful one day. Let's keep it. Some writers are able to use these little treasures they have invented. They are usually writers of the pointillist, perhaps even brittle, "aphorist" school of fiction. Think Truman Capote. But rare is the good narrative writer who interrupts his flow of work to look up something he jotted down months or years ago. Who even remembers what they wrote years ago? When you are really writing, the words you need come to you. The words the story needs arise from writing it. Writing fiction is not in the snippet, the phrase, the sketch, the free-flow exercise. It is about really writing a whole piece of narrative with all the components of a story: plot, character development, conflict, mood, all worked out, all working together. The cartoonist Nicole Hollander has a "writing test" typical of those published by people who try to sell writing courses. The cartoon begins: "Complete the following sentence and then write 300 more pages..." A journal is "complete the sentence". A novel is "300 more pages". Novels need discipline, concentration, determination, the ability to see a project through though months or years, the ability to recognise good writing from bad, in order to edit and refine, the strategic, god-like view of the narrative as an entire, interwoven system of character, motivation, time and circumstance. What part of journalkeeping teaches these?

To plot or not to plot


Before your begin writing your novel, you have to have your plot outlined and fully developed. Or so we're told. Writing has no rules, save to make your story the best you can make it. Other than that, it is a case of 'whatever works for you.' It depends on the writer and it depends on the story. So why are we advised to outline our plot before we begin to write? Most failed stories fail because the writer had a great premise and had no idea, beyond this, of where to go. Not only did he have no idea where his story was going, he didn't even know where the scene he was writing was going. If you follow your own flashlight beam into the darkness, it's not surprising you get lost. 'Lost' looks like this: writers who keep re-writing the first 12 pages, who write 4000 pages of which only 5 are worth reading, who spend 10 years writing, writing, writing, always 'never quite ready' to send it to a publisher, who sit down every day with panic and fear in their hearts, doing anything, anything but writing. The standard cure is to write from a developed plot outline. So learn how to do it. But if you find that creating a plot outline kills your appetite for telling your story, if you find it not a help but a straitjacket, then you are either the sort of writer who has to approach your novel another way, or you have an attitude to your work that is usually answered by "Oh, grow up". Let's look at the two ways of writing a novel: by plot-plan and by no plot-plan at all.

Plotting
The overall purpose of a plot is not to kill the joy of creation, but to create a structure for your story that makes it a story and not a long, unwinding noodle of empty starchy calories. A story is a structured narrative, and 'structured' and 'narrative' have equal weight. At its core, every story has the same structure: Opening challenge This is the moment when your protagonist's world changes. Something happens that forces him or her (or them) to act. Understanding what your opening challenge is gives you the basic premise for the entire narrative, and therefore its structure. See my article on Pacing Anxiety about creating a meaty opening challenge. Chain of challenges The opening premise kicks off a chain of linked and ever-increasing challenges. The challenges have to be ever-increasing in tension and excitement. As with the higher levels of a computer game, the stakes have to keep rising, and they need to culminate in a gratifying pay-off. Resolution, or pay-off This is the final Big Scene: the argument, the feat of derring-do, the ultimate fight between good guy and bad guy, the scene where the detective reveals all and the killer is named, or the mutual confession of love. This is the answer to the question the opening challenge posed. Opening challenge: how will the hero 'X' solve/overcome/gain/defeat Y? Resolution: this is what X does, and Y is solved/overcome/gained/defeated (or, in a gloomier story, Y is unsolved, X does not overcome, does not gain, is defeated by. But let's move on). Envoi, or close-down A short final section that eases the reader from the high pitch of tension you've created at the climax to the world again. In thrillers, the author often explodes one final, unexpected plot device, something he planted earlier and, just when everyone is heaving a sigh of relief, BANG, the last unkilled bad guy comes through the skylight. In whatever form, the envoi has to make the reader close the novel with deep sense of satisfaction, be it with a smile, tears, or quiet thoughtfulness. Example Let's say your opening idea is to explore the world of the older rich woman and the younger trophy husband. How would this work? But 'young man marries rich older woman' isn't exactly a sizzler as an Opening Challenge, because there's no challenge. You get to work. Ryall's shallow greedy, idle, because no other type would enjoy being a gigolo. He marries knowing he'd be divorced in a few years, traded in for a younger model, butt he pre-nuptual agreement promises him a handsome settlement. He's enjoying life, counting down to the inevitabel moment she finds someone new and he gets his payoff. One evening he realises he's fallen in love with his wife. How to make her believe it, when she'll only think he's clinging to the gravy train? That will do nicely as an Opening Challenge. Because it had to be challenge, you moved from 'story of a man marrying older woman for money' to the first conflict. The chain of challenges follows easily: Ryall tells her he loves her; Monique scoffs: 'you're pretty but you always were a liar'; he starts taking her music career seriously, learning the ropes, seeking to be useful to her, she thinks he's trying to control her and pushes him away, he has a confrontation with the new man in her life and is ejected off the premises, she files for divorce, he refuses to give her one, it gets nasty because he is so desperate and so disbelieved. It ends up in court. In a high-octane Resolution scene, she says 'if you loved me, you'd let me go and not take a dime' and he says 'you got it'. As the judge announces the divorce, his eyes meet hers. In a romance, he sees she loves him, and the envoi will them being married again. In a comedy, he sees she loves him, and (envoi) they decide to

live together divorce is SO trying. In a tragedy, he sees that she does not love him, and never could. Envoi: he walks away, sadder and wiser. With your prepared plot in hand, and with whatever ending has appealed to you, the work can begin. You don't have to strain after events, you simply have to write what happens.

But ...
But, you protest, you want to write in the urgency of your imagination, forging the links of your story in hot metal on a burning anvil of creative drive, not to some formed plot, even your own plot. Deepsea divers plan their dive and dive their plan. You want to boldly go and discover everything on the way, writing it only as it occurs to you. OK, be my guest. Do it. I will bet money that, as you re-write and shape to make whatever it is you're writing a great, readable story, it acquires this basic structure despite yourself. Because that's what a story is. We have a fixed number of musical notes, yet new tunes are created every day. So too with the novel's basic structure. Without it, you have no story. With it, you can write any story you want. That's why you use a plot outline: to write a story, a successful story, a real, proper, finished, publishable story. It works.

Not Plotting
Some of you have disliked and have rejected everything I've said about developing a plot. Some of you prefer to approach things holistically, wandering through the seas of inspiration without a destination in mind, expectant, filled with hope that you will be delighted when you get to The End. How that's working for you? Finished a publishable manuscript yet? Having said that, you can write a story where swimming through that uncharted sea without route or known end actually succeeds, but the work happens at a different time. I'm not saying that you can float through a structureless universe. A story is bound by the laws of the opening scene, and it must follow that logically, as a flower does when it unfolds from the earth towards the sun. This is you telling your story by writing it, or rather by experiencing it in the moment of creation, rather than in the moment of plot planning. The un-plotted story always begins with a driving force. This is what inspires you to start writing. It is usually your opening scene. You start writing, you keep writing, but to make this 'swim in the open sea' end with a finished novel, you have to be thinking about it all the time. You start out with Ryall the shallow, greedy gigolo marrying a rich, older woman, signing the prenuptual after seeing that divorce will see him right, living Monique's high-profile life with her, and then realising one moment, watching her on stage fromt he wings, that he's fallen in love with her. You have him tell her, and she falls into his arms. Wait a minute, that's only 25 pages, and it's not really exciting. OK, wait a minute, she's a hugely successful rich woman who has settled for eye-candy because she's learned to trust sex, not love. So he has to try to convince her that he loves her. How? Let's see, he can do some stupid things but, as his love and her rebuffs sharpen his senstivity, he thinks of ways to serve and protect her. Or maybe he's a dope and keeps screwign things up. Or maybe... In short, you have to think hard all the time. By 'thinking about it', I mean you have to analyse and consider what you are writing. You might have a pad of paper beside your PC (or a pad of paper beside your pad of paper) where you write questions to yourself, argue with yourself: 'If Ryall fights the new dude here here, won't Monique chuck him out

of the house then and there?' 'If she's loved him all along, will she really push it to the breaking point in court?' You have to keep testing and challenging what you are writing with logic and sense while you are writing it. This might force you to rewrite huge chunks as you are going along, just as you would have to re-trace your route if you'd been following your own sweet way in the coral reef and found yourself above flat sand. Don't keep trying to write. Stop. Move back, analyse why it's flat sand, throw out everything that led you to this compass point, and start again down another direction. Maybe you'll come to the same flat sand again. Maybe you'll find yourself at a different flat sand, or maybe you'll have found the swftly flowing current that takes you to the beautiful bay. You might have started with Ryall as a male bimbo, messing up every opportunity. You find yourself dissatisfied, so you backtrack and make him simply callow, a man-boy who grows up when the fear that he might lose the love of his life makes him grow up. You might begin with Monique being tough as nails and twice as ambitious and then decide she'd be a rather nicer final partner for Ryall is she was a secret romantic whose heart had been bruised too often for her to listen to it any more. As you think, re-write, re-consider, throw out huge sections and try again, you keep hitting your inner tuning fork and listening for that sweet true tone that tells you that this sounds right, yes, this works. At The End, it's time to sit back and analyse again. What story have you been trying to tell yourself? What has emerged from the dark ocean you call your brain? What's in this stack of paper, screaming to be let out? Write down what you now believe your story is about, its 'log-line' (i.e. 'this is a story where X is faced by Y and does Z'; 'this is a story when shallow gigolo Ryan falls in love with his rich, disillisioned, distrustful wife and how he wins her heart' ) Then go through your first draft and write down every scene as a list e.g. '(1) Ryall marries Monique for money (2) Ryall realises he has fallen in love with her (3) she rejects his confession of love as a lie (4) he decides to take her music career seriously, learning the ropes, seeking to be useful to her (5) but she thinks he's trying to control her and pushes him away and so on. Now explain to yourself how each scene delivers at least one conflict, delivers at least one change, that gets X closer to Z. If you can't find this in any particular scene, drop the scene. Or re-write it until it delivers, but really, drop it. No matter how much you love it. With a swim-in-the-sea approach, your serious work doesn't come before the writing, but now, after the first, loose, sprawling mess is written and after you have tested each scene to see if it justifies its existence. The scenes that survive now have to be trimmed, shaped, honed, so that all that remains is what gets the characters in this scene one step closer to the resolution. This takes work. A lot of work. This takes a lot of time, but you're working towards an ending you have identified and each rewrite brings you closer and closer, the story increasingly focused, increasingly richer, until you finish what is now a novel. When you've finished, you'll find your story looks uncannily similar to one written to a plot outline, for it has an opening challenge, an interlocking chain of challenges that rise in intensity, a final and complete resolution of the opening challenge, and an envoi. Because real stories become themselves, a structured narrative, if they're given the right earth in which to grow. You might wonder if it was worth all the extra work to write without a plot if you get to the same end-point. If you have a successful, compelling story in your hands, then yes, it was. You just had to tell your story to yourself this way.

To plot or not to plot


It depends on you, the sort of writer you are. It depends on your appetite for hard work. It depends on your eye for an emerging shape. If you feel writing to a plot outline deadens the story for you, makes

writing merely a 'connect the dots' exercise, then try the non-plot way, knowing that you will work for longer, work harder, by writing foam that has to be condensed into diamond through analysis, thought, self-challenge and ruthlessness. If your every attempt to write that 'swim-in-the-sea' ends in failure, change strategy and try a plot outline again. You might find that it's actually a relief, but you'll also find that you are still analysing, challenging yourself, thinking hard, being ruthless. You are doing it before you write, not after. Because writing, really writing, is thinking about your story. A novel isn't a noodle a machine can extrude, it's an act of conscious creation. Writing to a plot, writing without a plot, both take work. Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks. In the end, they both come down to understanding that your story has a shape, that it has requirements to fulfill, that it has an essence. It's your job to make it emerge from your brain. You can do this by chiselling out out marble, or building up in clay. What you are left with, either way, is art.

Don't get it right the first time


How much of your novel have you written? Do you keep starting it and never finishing it? Do you have half a dozen projects in your filing cabinet or on your hard drive, all abandoned? Wonder if you'll ever join the sea of published writers? Well, quit hesitating on the edge of the diving board and dive in! Beginners tend to want, in fact they expect, to get it right the first time. They think a real writer is supposed to produce perfect prose from the word 'go'. They read their own pathetic first pages and either abandon them or frantically begin rewriting. The first, abandonment, is like throwing away the clay model because it doesn't look like Michelangelo's David; the second is like painting the walls of the house while they're still going up. You have to write the thing first before you're allowed to be discouraged or to panic. You have to write the whole thing first. So do it. Plunge in, write hell for leather, gallop from page one to 'The End' without a revision, pause, or reconsideration. Get gripped by your story. If you write with pen and paper, buy stitched notebooks so you can't tear out a page. If you write on screen, tape a note above it that says 'Looking back causes gangrene'. And write. Write hard, write fast. Take your idea, roughed out into a plotline (don't even dream of beginning a novel without some sort of storyline or plot map; you're not supposed to be that reckless!) and get as excited about the story as you want your readers to be. Don't feel pressured to pad it out. Don't worry about length. Just write all the absolutely necessary scenes. Don't fret about bridging them with connecting passages. Just put 'The following day...' or 'A year later...' or even 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch...' Sure they're clichs. That's what rewriting is for. Your first draft is to tell the story. Let your characters form themselves, let the story unfold itself. So what if your country boy starts out talking like a college graduate and you only find his true voice 30,000 words in? That's what rewriting is for! So what if you realise that you should have planted a massive foreshadowing about word 50,000? Guess what! That's what rewriting is for. Scribble a note to yourself in the margin and keep writing. What about all those writing manuals that tell you to read and amend what you wrote yesterday before beginning new words today? Well, that didn't work for you, did it? There are many ways to write a novel, and if one method doesn't get you to 'The End' you have to try another. The only thing you can't do is plunge in without some idea of where you're going. But don't allow yourself to be stalled because you don't have a detailed story-plan or plot outline. I know a wannabe

writer who spent so long crafting and revising his plot outline that he never actually wrote the novel. If you burn to write because you have a brilliant opening scene, ask yourself 'What happens after this scene?' and then 'Where do these characters all end up?' Jot down the logical actions that will take you from your first to your second question and you'll have enough of a plot outline to begin writing to. Pin it up where you can see it and start writing. When you write through from beginning to end without pause, you'll discover several things. First, you'll find you have the pace and discipline that always arrives when you apply the seat of the trousers to the chair over weeks and months. It's in the long haul that real writers are formed, and you aren't a real writer until you've gone through that baptism of sustained work. Second, your brain will start making amazing connections. You'll see where to fit in sub-plots, you'll find imagery and motifs rising into the structure as if by magic, and your characters will begin to take on real, surprising, personalities. Third, you'll find yourself growing more sure of how to say what you want to say, and the right words will come to you more fluently. Lastly, you'll find (if you're the real thing) that you love it. You really love writing. All that fussing and procrastination and worry that you were not producing perfect prose first time will fade away. You'll know at last what you always suspected: that writing is what you were born for.

Beginners' four faults


As an editor, I know when I am reading someone's first novel. I have nicknames for the four give-away faults beginners make: (1) Walk and Chew Gum (2) Furry Dice (3) Tea, Vicar? (4) Styrofoam. I see at least one of these in every manuscript where the author has not mastered the craft of writing before submitting in his or her work. What are these four faults and, more importantly, how can you cure them? (1) Walk and Chew Gum The writer has not integrated action and dialogue, internal monologue and action, or internal monologue with dialogue. It is as if the characters can do only one thing at a time. An example: "If you think you're going to town you'd better thing again," said Ralph. He put down his can of beer. "I'm not having any daughter of mine going to a Cantrell boy's party, and that's final!" "Oh, Pa! How could you be so cruel!" JoBeth cried. Then, hunting in her pockets for a tissue, she dried her eyes and stared at him defiantly. "If I want to go, how can you stop me?" she demanded. Ralph knew this would happen. She had always been independent, like her mother. He half-lurched to his feet. "You little hussy!" he bellowed. Running up the stairs, JoBeth turned at the landing. "I am going, do you hear? I am." Not integrating action and dialogue makes for jerky, lifeless prose. Combine, combine, toujours combine: "If you think you're going to town you'd better think again," Ralph snapped, putting down his can of beer. She was too damn much like her mother. "I'm not having any

daughter of mine going to a Cantrell boy's party, and that's final!" "Oh, Pa! How could you be so cruel!" JoBeth hunted her pockets for a tissue, dried her eyes and stared at him defiantly. "If I want to go, how can you stop me?" Ralph half-lurched to his feet, bellowing, "You little hussy!" But JoBeth was already upstairs. "I am going, do you hear? I am." This might not be award-winning prose, but it reflects the reality of the action and feelings better by having action, thought and dialogue knitted together. (2) Furry Dice Adjectives, adverbs and prepositions are furry dice hanging from a car's mirror. They don't do anything for the car's performance, they simply clutter the place. I once stripped a fifth of a novel by removing words and phrases such as 'very' 'up' 'down' 'over' 'about' 'some' 'a little' 'a bit' 'somewhat' 'whole' 'just' and other modifiers. For instance: She picked up the gun and aimed it straight at him. His smile disappeared as he lifted up his hands into the air. She waved him over to the wall, saying, "Spread 'em out, and no funny business, you hear?" She checked all of his pockets for the money, then stepped back. "Okay, I'm convinced. You haven't got it." This would be better without the modifiers, and with the tighter language you'll have to write to replace them: She snatched the gun and aimed. His smile disappeared as his hands climbed. She waved him to the wall, saying, "Spread 'em, and no funny business, you hear?" She checked his pockets for the money, then retreated. "Okay, I'm convinced. You don't have it." 59 words have become 44, and even then the passage could be trimmed. But the first, necessary action, before you seriously begin to rewrite, is to grab that swimming pool net and remove clogging, unnecessary modifiers that muddy the water. Hemingway didn't need them; you don't need them. (3) Tea, Vicar? "More tea, Vicar?" Angela asked, taking his cup and placing it on the tray beside her. "Don't mind if I do," said the Rev. Phelps. "That was two sugars, wasn't it?" she asked, pouring the fragrant liquid from the heirloom pot into his cup and stirring in the milk. When he nodded, she dropped in two sugar lumps, stirred again, and handed him back the cup. "Thank you, my dear," he said, accepting it with a smile. How often have I read loving descriptions of cups of tea being poured, pots of coffee being made, even whole meals cooked and eaten? Or rooms cleaned or decorated, or journeys made? Too darn often. Writers get a high out of conjuring a tableau from thin air, and in the white heat of creation forget that tableaux of mundane details are not exciting. The reader will not share that euphoria. Reading about a cup of tea being poured is about as exciting as watching paint dry. How does this scene help further the plot or character development? It doesn't. The writer simply got carried away with describing everything. Fiction is supposed to be like life, but with the dull bits removed, not spelled out in excruciating detail. Examine your work. Test every scene. Is there anything that you think of as 'setting the scene' or 'capturing the atmosphere'? If there is, cut it. Every scene needs conflict and movement to give it life, and tea for the Vicar has neither. (4) Styrofoam

This is related to Tea, Vicar?, but it arises not from self-indulgence, but panic. Styrofoam is the padding novice writers stuff into their novels because they haven't enough story to tell (or think they don't) and need to create word count. Padding is distinguishable because suddenly the forward movement of the story stops dead. Nothing happens for a few pages. I read, I read, and at the end I've learned nothing about the characters I needed to know, nor have the characters done anything essential to the story. Every scene has to propel the plot to the crisis that will resolve the story. Styrofoam does neither. If you fear you haven't enough narrative, add more conflict. Don't give me tours of the countryside, long rambling chats, the characters making travel arrangements, or any other lifeless block of prose. I want action. I want inexorable movement towards the crisis. I want to be gripped. So cut the padding. If that makes your novel too short, re-think your premise, your plot, your primary and secondary characters, and rewrite. If you want to be published, you'll have to cure these faults yourself, because your editor won't do it for you. She'll just send it back.

argaret, Maggie, Marge and Meg: problems with names and how to avoid them
Names are identifiers. We're called John and Jane to tell us apart. Still, we're still reduced to saying, Jim, the guy who fixes our car, not Jim who's in Sales or having to say John the guy I golf with, not Jon my brother. If it's confusing in real life, how much more confusing is it going to be in your novel if you don't identify your characters clearly? You'd think authors would naturally be aware that similar names might confuse their readers. Not so: I read a novel where the author gave me a Jenny, a Janey and a Janine. I kept breaking away to remind myself who was who. And a reader who pulls away from a story is bad news for the author, who ought to want to keep the reader gripped. That's why you should take care to have the names you choose look and sound different from each other. Jenny, Janey and Janine look too much alike. So do Fred, Ted, and Jed. Think about how every name will look on the page. What will it look like if Johnny and Ronny and Tommy and Bonnie are sitting around the dinner table? It will look like the author needs to read this article. Names that look too much alike also tend sound too much alike, so those readers who 'hear' words will be doubly irritated. For instance, Anne and Patty and Janet all share a vowel. This makes them flat and repetitive, too much like sheep baaing through the novel. To create texture, contrast your sounds. For instance, if you have a few names with 'a' sounds, like Anne and Patty, create contrast with some closed 'i' and 'oo' sounds: Lucy or Kim or Tootsie. Look at all your names to see if you've left out any vowels you could usefully add to the spectrum. If you have a Patty, an Ellen, a Kim, even an Eunice, but no name that contains a broad 'o', why not name your next character Toby, Jobe, or Lorna? By doing so, you'll be giving this and the other characters a strong identity. No reader is going to confuse Kim and Lorna. It's not just the look and sound of the names you have to consider, but also their rhythms. You could name your characters Ted, John, Frank, Jane, and Ann, but we would start feeling like we were being hit over the head with a hammer. "Where?" asked Ted. "That way," said John. "Why?" asked Frank. "Because," said Jane.

"Really?" asked Ann. "Yes," said Ted. By choosing instead Ted, Francis, Jonathan, Jane and Anna, you will instantly be able to construct more fluid, musical prose: "Where?" asked Ted. "That way," said Jonathan. "Why?" asked Francis. "Because," said Jane. "Really?" asked Anna. "Yes," said Ted. Since your readers are going to see these names over and over through your book, make sure it's a pleasant experience. Names come with psychological baggage. We react differently to Hepzibah and Kate, as do we to Jake and Armand. We can't help having opinions about names. We probably have an instant mental image of a Shari-Lynne, not to mention a Chudleigh. If you name a character across the grain of what we expect, you 'd better have a good reason for doing so. We all know that a boy named Sue is going to have a rough life, so if you have a character with a name that should give them grief and it doesn't, like Hepzibah, we'll wonder where your understanding of human nature has gone. A girl called Hepzibah might well hate her parents. A girl called Kate probably won't. Again, if Hepzibah is a cheerleader and Kate is a gypsy, we'll wonder where your common sense has gone: these names just aren't "right" for the people they are attached to. We often assume, rightly or wrongly, that names tell us something about their bearers. If you want to portray a charming, sunny, ordinary girl, you won't call her Protasia. If you want to convey that your male protagonist is 'all man', you won't call him Algernon. If a character is plain-spoken, give her a plain name: Pam, Joan. If your male character is sweet and shy, we'll be more comfortable with Timothy than with Steve, and so will he. Bertha tells us something about an older woman's background and social class. When she calls her daughter Lavender, we know a lot more about her at once. Unfamiliar names should only be used when there's something different about the character and/or her background. Ordinary people tend not to give their children eccentric names like Moon Unit. The man who replaces your hot water tank might be called Jerry or Daniel, but you'd be surprised if he were called Blenkinshop or Gwilim. You'd want to know why; there must a story behind it. In your novel, there'd better be, or why did you give him that name in the first place? If you don't actually want to create that complexity, don't give him an unusual name. There's no point. Only beginners think that characters become more complex and interesting if they're given interesting names. Unusual names have to have compelling reasons for existing. If you want your characters to be extraordinary, don't give them extraordinary names, make them do extraordinary things. Call your girl scout leader Sandy, not Alexandrina. If she decides to call herself Alexandrina, we will know something (interesting) about her. If you decide to call her Alexandrina for no apparent reason, we'll know something (unflattering) about you. If you're writing historical fiction, your names should be historically accurate. You won't find a Cindy in any 16th century document, but you might find a woman called Giles or a man called Ann (e.g. the famous French soldier). Names have their fashions. If you're setting a story before the present day, you should make it your business to know what was in vogue and what was not. When were Betty and Gertrude popular and when did they fall from favour? When did Arthur and Herbert leave the Top 40,

when did Jake and Daniel enter it? If you have a character in the 1880s with a 1990s name, it will look as if you don't know what you're doingand you don't. In the same way, communities and groups have special names that you must be aware of if you are not part of those communities (and certainly if you are). African Americans, for instance, favour both traditional names, such as Washington, William and Alice, and also newly-created ones, such as DeeVine and African ones, such as Keshala. They are fully aware of the significance of these names, and so should you be, especially if you are not a member of that community. Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans sometimes seek translations or similar versions of their Chinese or Hebrew names. An Italian-American, baptised Giovanni, calling himself Giovanni means one thing, calling himself Johnny means quite another. Names themselves have intrinsic meanings. Margaret means 'pearl', Stephen means 'crown'. The reader doesn't have to know the meaning, nor do you, but if you learn those meanings, you can subtly enrich your story by choosing names that are a commentary or secret clue to the action. For instance, in my first novel I have a woman called Pascale, the feminised French word for Easter. In the novel she redeems several other characters. Nobody needs to know this to understand the story, but it's a satisfying bit of under-story that will please those readers who know what "pascal" means. It underlines the theme. Once you are alive to the rich complexity and subtlety of names, you can use them to add layers of meaning. My example of 'Pascale' is one way. There are other ways, such contrasting names, echoing names, and changing names. Contrasting is just that, using names with different looks, sounds, and 'feels', such as Bertha and Lavender, or Jake and Fontleroy, to engender certain emotions in the reader. We'll dislike one and like the other, feel comfortable with one and uncomfortable with the other. Let the names you choose do some of the work for you. You're already at first base if you give your straightforward guy 'Jake' and your stuck-up snob 'Fontleroy.'' You can contrast characters not only against each other (we'll like Lavender, we won't like Bertha) but against us: if Selwyn and Mike are both under suspicion in a murder mystery, who are we going to suspect? We can believe that a Selwyn is creepy, but it will take us longer to distrust a Mike. Echoing names is to use two similar names, Meg and Maggie for instance, or Janey and Jenny, or Tim and Tom, to suggest that these two characters have a connection of some sort. Perhaps Meg is the daughter Maggie gave up for adoption, perhaps Janey is a creepy psychopath who wants to absorb Jenny's identity, perhaps Tim and Tom are boyhood friends who love the fact that they almost share a name. Changing names can indicate changes inside a character. A plain-spoken woman called Pamela would prefer the nickname Pam. Or a Jimmy, wanting to be taken seriously, starts using Jim or James. That creepy psychopath starts out as Joan, then, after she meets Jenny, she changes it first to Jane, then Janey. Tim and Tom might have been boyhood friends, but as they grow up Tim wants his own identity, wants to break free of old patterns and habits. He insists on being called Timothy. Tom is hurt, and the story begins. Names are powerful tools. Use them correctly, and they'll invisibly support your story, enhancing and underlining your narrative. Of course, if you want your readers to laugh, get Johnny, Ronny, Tommy and Bonnie around that dinner table...

Loving your characters too much


Writers are usually inspired to write because they have a character in their heads who won't go away. The plot arises from the initial problem or desire that impels that character to act, and the narrative follows the consequences of that action to a satisfying end. It's natural to make your main characters, especially your protagonist, likeable. After all, you're probably likeable yourself. The public's appetite for anti-heroes has never been strong, for the good reason that reading about creeps and louses isn't a particularly satisfying reading experience. Readers enjoy stories about acclaim, success, or romance, because they share these with the protagonist. You, the author, also live a fantasy through your protagonist. You want to see what would happen if you were faced with certain choices. How would you act when challenged by the Sheriff of Nottingham? Wouldn't you like to win the gold, the girl, and the glory? Who wouldn't? But to give him the gold, the girl and the glory is to fall in love with your protagonist. Of course you like your protagonist: you are writing about him or her, after all. They dominate your thoughts, you can't bear to have anything bad happen to them, and it's satisfying to give them every single witty remark you ever wish you'd ever made, all the physical or moral courage you wished you possessed, every good thing that ought to be the reward of virtue. Is this bad? Aren't there many books selling right now with protagonists like that? Yes. But they are not great books, or books that will live past their print run. While there is a place for fantasy fulfilment novels, they are seldom considered 'well written' because they lack the grittiness of reality. There are no James Bonds in real life. Readers enjoy a fantasy now and then, but their hunger for story is satisfied only by lifelike protagonists dealing realistically with the fabric of life. An inflatable doll, however curvaceous, is not a human being. If you are worried that your book has drifted into fantasy, when you had planned to write about reality, here is a checklist for you who might love your protagonists too much: 1. Does your protagonist lack character flaws? Or, if he or she has a few weaknesses, are these flaws (such as modesty) also loveable? 2. Do all the other good characters unhesitatingly like, love, or support your protagonist? Do they put the protagonist's needs before their own? 3. Are the bad guys merely foils for the protagonists, e.g. as selfish and catty as she is generous and thoughtful, as cowardly and cunning as he is brave and straight-talking? 4. Are the impediments and problems challenging your protagonist too easily overcome? Are they straw targets, existing only to demonstrate the protagonist's virtues? Conversely, are they so great (saving civilisation) that no real person could solve them? 5. Are the rewards gained by your protagonist, having triumphed over adversity, disproportionate? Do beautiful men surrender themselves to her? Does he become owner of the whole international conglomerate? 6. Does your protagonist never err? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, and you don't like having to answer yes, then you want to write realistic fiction rather than fantasy. You must now solve the problem of the protagonist who is loved too much. 1. If you have prepared a biography for your character, look at it critically. (If you haven't written one, now is the time.) You might have listed her favorite colours, her birthday, and who was her best friend in primary school, but have you listed the nastiest thing she ever did as a child, or the act of which she is most ashamed? Sit back and laugh at your protagonist. What are his pompous or unlovable quirks?

Does he pick his ears in public? Has he a prurient but ridiculous secret? Consider your family and friends, how they are each made up of appealing and tiresome habits, then round out your protagonist in a similar way. 2. Now look at your other good characters. The major characters need to be fleshed out with their own weaknesses and flaws. Think about why the good Duke of Mallaprin would swear loyalty to your prince-driven-from-his-throne. Or why the canny police officer would throw in her luck with your crusading attorney. Minor characters need less work, but you should know why each person in your story is acting the way that they are. A good person might be helping the protagonist from less than noble motives, or their support might be conditional, or it might falter when things get tough. 3. Why are your bad guys bad? What made them that way? Do they have any redeeming qualities? Even a Mafioso can love his children. Are they evil per se, or is it simply that their goals and your protagonist's are incompatible? A pleasant man can seem a monster if he plans to build his factory on a local woodland. See the world through the eyes of your antagonist for a few minutes, and return to your story with this insight. 4. Every impediment facing your protagonist should have the potential of being too great to be conquered. One of the frustrations with early television detective series is that the crime was always solved. Any police detective will tell you that life isn't like that. When your protagonist tackles something, there has to be a good chance that he or she will fail. If he is to succeed in the end, perhaps he loses some battle along the way, or suffers a lasting reverse. The prince regains his throne, but the good Duke dies. A dancer finds true love, but gives up her chance of greatness on the stage. In real life we lose sometimes more than we win. The fate of your protagonist should reflect this. 5. In the same way, your protagonist's final victory should be examined. Would your plucky young attorney really be made partner, marry the gorgeous police officer, and live happily ever after? Are you giving your protagonist not just the cake, but the whipped cream and the cherry too? How many of the people in your life achieve everything they want? Make your protagonist's reward convincing by its restraint. 6. Let your protagonist mess things up through his or her own character flaws. If his pride makes him blow his proposal of marriage, that gives the plot impetus, as Austen well knew. If he learns from this, as Darcy did, it is a most satisfying read. Sometimes your protagonist will err fatally and will have to live with it forever. Let his or her response drive the narrative. Good fiction is life with all the boring bits taken out, not with all the hardship taken out. If you want to create characters who are dynamic and real, keep your distance from them. Be objective about your most lovable character, be cynical about the best person's motivation. Once you have accepted that they have flaws and failings, you can create living characters who will create a natural, satisfying plot for you. Such characters linger in the minds of their readers and are, yes, loved.

What is conflict?
Beginners are always told to have conflict in every scene. Keep that story moving! But what is conflict? Too often it is taken to mean an "Odd Couple's" squabbling. That's an easy and obvious conflict. For instance, she's an urban animal, into cappuccino and corporate power games, he works a small ranch and loves the land; they are thrown together when her company decides to develop land next to his; they meet as enemies, but sparks fly.... Many an amusing and sexy novel has been written on the

premise of opposites attracting as much as they repel, but this is not the only form conflict can or should take. Conflict can be more subtle, more complex, more interesting than "she says tomayto, he says tomahto." Conflict is opposing desires, mismatches, uncertainty, deadlines, pressures, incompatible goals, uneasiness, tension. We are all caught up in some of these conflicts every day. And so should your characters. A convincing story has many conflicts built into it, layered and connected. The first layer is inside your characters. Once you know what these are, you can use them to make the conflicts between the characters more convincing and interesting. A character's inner conflict is not just being in two minds about something, not just being torn between obvious incompatibles ("I want to be a priest, and yet I love her") but is about being in a new situation where old attitudes and habits war with and hinder the need for change. For instance, a man who drives himself to succeed because he doesn't want to be like his happy-go-lucky father is suddenly confronted with a situation where he isn't winning. Or an executive discovers that her ambition to be vice president of her company is being thwarted by her own self-doubt. This war inside each of your characters makes them act and react in complex ways. You show these internal conflicts not by means of internal dialogue (which is a cop-out and is dull), but by showing your characters responding to their own inner compulsions. She, for instance, decides to confront her own self-doubts by taking on a no-win project where the local people are opposing a development. She is determined to be hard-nosed, prove she's vice-president material. He is always confrontational, fearing that one minute of negotiation would be the first step to becoming a wimp like his father. You have a grade-A opposites-attract situation here, yet it is believable because we understand why each of them is acting the way they do, why they are foolishly stubborn, why it's important for each of them to win. A character's inner conflict can be between what he thinks he wants and what he really wants. The rancher thinks he wants to be free of sissy emotion, but if he checked inside himself he'd find he was starving for love. The executive thinks she wants to work at head office, but actually she would be happier managing a regional branch. Each acts on this misunderstanding of his or her real desires or needs. The interest and tension in the story come as your characters realise (slowly or as a lightningbolt) that, despite what they think they want, their actions always seemed aimed at some other goal. She keeps modifying the project to meet his environmental demands, despite knowing that head office won't like it, doing it because it feels like the right thing to do. He keeps engineering confrontations with that "stuck up yuppie" and he doesn't know why -- but we do. A good story has more than two people in it. Give the rancher a foreman, a friend of the rancher's father. They disagree about what the company is doing: the rancher thinks it's wrong, the foreman sees its good points. Incompatible goals are a good source of conflict. Here are two men who have worked together for years, suddenly on opposite sides of the fence. One works for the other, yet is the older man, so we have tensions between different sorts of authority and respect. Secondary characters, like the foreman, also need their own inner conflicts, though the reader will only see these through the eyes of the main characters. The foreman could secretly want to bring peace between the rancher and his friend, the rancher's father, yet be reluctant to give up his role as proxy dad. What does he do? His inner conflicts make him a real person with his own motivation, and therefore as compelling in his own smaller role as the rancher and the executive are in their larger roles. A good story is when everyone comes alive. Your layers of conflict can be used to delay realisations (will that stubborn rancher never understand his compulsion to keep squabbling with the executive?) or to create dramatic reversals (just as she's about to win, the executive's self-doubt rears up its ugly head. Is it the same old fear of failure, or is she

reluctant to triumph over the rancher? What will she choose?) By combining and interweaving conflicts on many levels, both internal and external, you instantly make your story rich, messy, vibrant, real. Conflict must always be resolved, and every layer you create needs its closure. A satisfying and economical way of achieving this is to use one big knot to close two or more conflicts together in the same action or in a double whammy, where one leads ineluctably to the next. You resolve your central conflict by choosing a winner. Victory for one character is obviously defeat for another, and both must resolve more than the central conflict alone. The point of victory, if it's to be more than simply a moment of self-congratulation, has to give the winning character a final insight or a sudden moment of truth. The executive wins, but in the moment of victory she accepts what she has long suspected: that she deliberately modified the project to ensure that she would be kept in the regional office. She realises ruefully that she's no longer a driven big-city yuppie, but a woman who wants to live among friends. That final, culminating realisation or sudden bolt of truth doesn't have to be a wonderful moment, but it does have to be a convincing one. It has to resolve the tension you've created. We should finish your book convinced it could have happened no other way. The executive has won the battle and, despite the fact that she changed the project because of him, the rancher thinks he's a loser like his father. He feels beaten, worthless, and vulnerable. For the first time he asks for help. His foreman, faced with the need to be a true friend, meets his moment of testing and resolves it by advising: talk to your father. So the rancher does, and has his own revelation: he has been equating love with failure. His defeat (resolution one) makes the foreman live up to his own sense of duty (resolution two) and that leads to the rancher shaking hands with his father (resolution three) and discovering his true inner self (resolution four, the big one). How do you show, in action, that the rancher's revelation is also a life-changing one? He's a man who acts on his principles: let him do it here. The executive tentatively suggests they work together as business partners. He challenges her, saying he demands a life-long deal: husband and wife. And the rancher wins. Each layer of conflict has been resolved in a daisy chain of inter-connectedness, one closure bringing the closure of another. The executive achieves a goal she truly wants. The rancher achieves the goal he didn't know he wanted. They both have achieved their goals through the resolution of all the layers of conflict you established at the beginning. So go on, give your story that traditional resolution: the kiss. And the foreman? He's achieved his goal being a good friend to both the son and the father. His reward? The two old men go fishing, and he catches the big one.

Everyone is right: creating fundamental motivation


The 19th century German playwright Friedrich Hebbel wrote: "In a good play, everyone is right." This is as true of novels as it is of plays. But what does he mean by 'right' and why is this a good thing for a narrative? Let's explore this by way of an example. You have an idea for a novel: a conductor has discovered that his best friend, a cellist, is about to go on a world-wide series of concerts and will be playing the music of a notorious Nazi who personally served Hitler. The conductor is outraged and is determined to stop this even if it ends the friendship between them. The cellist is equally determined not to be stopped. The conductor's wife is apparently as appalled as he over their friend's decision, but at the last minute she frustrates her husband's plans to prevent the tour, at the cost of her marriage.

A meaty subject with lots of conflict arising from different motives: just what you want in a story. But let's apply Hebbel's statement to see if we can create not just a story, but a good novel, one with depth and resonance. Of the three characters, you know we'll like the conductor: his motivation is clear, and we'll share his contempt for anyone who is willing to excuse Nazism. He is fighting the good fight. An ordinary novel is content merely to make you like one or more of the characters. So you could stop right there. The conductor is the hero. But a superior novel wants to make us, the readers, understand them, to be caught up in their struggles, because our sympathies are deeply engaged with them. That means looking not just at the hero, but at everyone. Everyone is right in a good novel. But the cellist: how can you make us, your readers, passionately on his side? How can we care about someone who seems happy to play a notorious Nazi's music? Everyone is right in a good novel. How can we agree with the wife, who betrays her husband's trust in support of a man who is promoting the work of a Nazi? It's your job to do just that. As the writer, you are the one who must first agree with your characters, you are the one who must convince us they are right. After all, you have chosen to tell this story to us. Why? One of the obvious reasons to write such a novel is to explore the relationship of art and life. Can a villain create great art? Does it need a sublime soul to make a masterpiece, or can a lying, sneaking, racist scoundrel also achieve sublimity? What, indeed, is creativity? Does it spring from the totality of our personalities, or is it some mysterious, almost outside, force that can grow in the murkiest soil? That's a premise worthy of this novel, a serious question to explore, and superior novels are superior because they address the serious things in life. Superior novels live within you forever, because they address deep issues that shape our behaviour and our fundamental purpose in life. There are two ways to explore the questions you set yourself: by setting up cardboard characters who are mouthpieces to speak each side of the debate, or by creating real human beings who really believe in what they are saying and doing. Which would you rather read? Yes, so let's see how to write it. The cellist. Think of him playing Bach and Mozart and Bartok each day, feel how he compares himself to these geniuses and knows how far short he falls. He feels unworthy to play this great music. You see his innate humility, his despair that life is failure. That doesn't mean that he doesn't also feel ambition and the lust for fame. Humans are complex creatures. But at the core, he is right. Great art seems to spring from any source it chooses, and the source is immaterial. He himself is a mere human being, unworthy, just Mozart was a mere human, just as the Nazi composer was a mere human. Can any one of us explain where genius comes from or what it is? Can we do anything else but accept it as a miracle in our bleak existences, whatever its origin, and rejoice? By imagining the wellspring of the cellist's motivation as humility and despair, you have created a character who seemed to be the bad guy, but who in fact is right. How can he then allow himself to be stopped by the conductor? He can't. Their conflict has tragedy and depth because your reader will feel deeply that both are right, yet one must lose. Their conflict also has drama, and that makes a good novel. What about the conductor's wife? She agrees with her husband, but frustrates his plans. What motivates her to do this? You think about her, go into her head. You 'learn' about her as you create her. She believes that great art excuses, is even the forgiveness for, evil. Gauguin abandoned his wife and children to paint, but we balance his bad behaviour against his paintings and decide we can live with the bad behaviour, because we don't want to give up the paintings. The wife believes in the

transcendental, forgiving power of art. How could you not agree? Here is a second character who is right, yet who is opposed both to her husband and to the cellist: to one because he puts art second to the artist and the other because he appears, in her eyes, to be acting on his lust for fame by playing the music of a notorious Nazi. Misunderstanding, misinterpretation, create conflict and yield more drama. Throw in a twist: the cellist is in love with the wife, and the wife loves her husband. Here is a serious premise entangled with high emotion, and the reader will want to see how love makes the wife and the cellist do what they do, perhaps in spite of what they think. As for the conductor, you think into his mind, too. He's right, but isn't he also jealous of the cellist for being the one to see and rediscover a lost genius? Isn't he miffed when the cellist ignores him, because he's a conductor and subconsciously he expects musicians to do what he tells them even when he's off the podium? And can't he help but recognise that his attempts to stop the cellist's concerts are earning his friend excellent publicity? And he wonders if his wife's passionate attempts to stop him hindering the cellist's tour are based on principle alone or because she is in love with the cellist. Is the conductor, in part, defending his marriage? Looking into the conductor's mind, you find at bottom that he truly believes that you can't separate the source from the end product. A beautiful house's beauty is lessened by the fact that it was built by slave labour. Origins matter. The Nazi's music may be wonderful, but we listen to it with the same brain that holds images of concentration camps. How can we, the readers, not agree with him and want him to succeed? Conflict and complexity arise when several motives, or rather when several sets of belief, are incompatible. That is why the friendship ends and the marriage breaks: because all three characters are idealists, and all of them are right. But being right doesn't mean winning. It doesn't mean being happy. A novel that explores great principles and emotions doesn't have to be a tragedy, but it does have to explore the complexity of humanity, the conflict of souls, by means of compelling action. And what better way to create compelling conflict than by realising that every major character is right, and then having this sense of rightness provoke their actions?

Pacing anxiety, or How to stop padding and plot!


One of the great fears of novice writers is that they don't have enough to say. They worry that their chapters are too short and need padding and that their whole novel is going to end up a measly fortyseven pages long. This is pacing anxiety. You are afraid that you don't have enough to write about, and you are almost certainly right. Most novice writers don't have enough plot, because they confuse their premise with plot. For instance, you have an idea for a story: a timid woman called Jenny, feeling her life is smothered by commitments and duties, decides on a whim to go into the bed and breakfast business in Alaska. A good premise. But it's not a plot. So you think of several scenes: Jenny encounters a bear, she learns to cook a moose, faces her first Alaskan winter, meets the local Indian guide and his family, meets a hunky biologist (cue romance!), has hard times, gets a lucky booking, and ends up with a successful business, a new lover, and a sense of achievement. Great material! So you start to write. No, no no! You still don't have a plot! That's why you have pacing anxiety! You don't know how you're

going to turn these scenes into a novel, yet you start writing and hope that somehow the story will grow like Jack's beanstalk under your fingertips. Do you really expect to get cohesion and structure and density by simply writing what pops into your head every day? A good novel is planned. That means a structure where things happen for a reason. Your premise implies that Jenny, feeling stifled, heads to Alaska to improve her life. Your plot, therefore, is about a woman who creates a better life for herself by accepting challenge, and everything you write has to develop to this resolution. Challenge implies battling something, overcoming opposition, and this is the heart of novel writing. Fiction is about challenges that the protagonist either triumphs over or is defeated by (Emma or Madame Bovary, for example). A novel must have conflict, not just in its overarching idea, but in every single scene. Your premise is merely the novel's opening action. In the example used here, Jenny's first challenge is to change a life she has recognised as unfulfilling. You have to show the reader just enough about her life (overbearing father, boring boyfriend, emotionally-dependent mother, selfish friends) to make them as thrilled as Jenny is to see the 'For sale: large house, Grizzly Bay, Alaska' advertisement, and to approve when she faces the storm of protest and spends her life savings on it. Since a chapter should not have more than three separate pieces of action, getting all this into Chapter One means that there's no need in fact, no room for padding. See how easy it is to remove anxiety? Now you have the rest of the novel to write. You already have those few scenes in mind, but have you put them to the 'conflict' test? Where in them will Jenny be in conflict, and how will each conflict get us closer to the resolution? First, of course, the conflict will be within herself. She arrives with prejudices, fears, and ignorance. If she is a good person (and she is), she will fight to remove her prejudices. If she is brave, she will face her fears. If she opens herself to change, her ignorance will be dispelled. Fine! Now let's make all that concrete. Plot an arc of encounters: that face-to-face moment with the bear, for instance, can be where she learns that she is tougher than she thought. During a cold winter night she could realise that the song of the wolves and the vastness of the starry sky are not terrifying, but beautiful. As you consider Jenny as a person, you will think of more challenges for her. Learning to butcher a moose? Fixing the snowmobile herself? Your novel's premise has assumed a resolution, so you know Jenny will have to have a revelatory moment when she realises that, because of her initial action (moving to Alaska), she is a better, happier, person. All those scenes of internal conflict will lead inexorably to that revelation. And that provides your structure. But this novel, because of its premise (Jenny is running a bed and breakfast inn after all, not becoming a hermit), will require Jenny to meet many new people. You've already thought of a few. Now introduce conflict. Jenny will be having paying guests; a positive wellspring of conflict. She's learning the business while doing it and some of her guests won't like that. She might make mistakes that give her business a bad reputation, and she'll have to fight it by a publicity drive, sweet-talking travel agents in Anchorage, and so on. All this is conflict, and it's all action. She'll be meeting more people than simply her guests. Think about those other characters. The local guide might resent yet another white person moving in, and the hunky biologist will naturally fear the impact of tourism on the fragile ecosystem. Give Jenny an unwelcome neighbour, say, an unmarried teenage mother who's been living in the shack on the property, and you have more than enough opportunities for conflict. Draw out a sequence of conflicts for each of these characters. Tanu, the local guide, can meet Jenny and warn her that she isn't tough enough to live in his world. Later she helps his wife skin a moose. Tanu's

son gets lost and she helps in the search. Now place these 'Tanu events' alongside your sequence of Jenny's inner struggles. Start weaving them together. Right after Tanu's warning, Jenny can have her encounter with the bear and realise that she is tougher than she thought. Helping Tanu's wife butcher the moose teaches her the need for co-operation, the wisdom of Native American ways, and banishes her squeamishness forever. It will be while searching for Tanu's lost child that Jenny has to fix her snowmobile herself, and does. All this means that her final revelation of can be, in part, because Tanu and his family have accepted her. In the same way, the teenage mother, Karyn, who initially tries to drive Jenny away because she fears that Jenny plans to make her homeless, is at first a source of conflict for Jenny. This is resolved when Jenny hires her work at the bed and breakfast. Perhaps it is Karyn, watching the Northern Lights with her on that cold winter's night, who opens Jenny's eyes to the haunting beauty of Alaska, thus weaving two conflict lines together. Jenny's kindness to Karyn impresses Tanu, Mike, and the other townspeople, and shows that accepting the challenge of a new life has made her a better person. Lastly, Mike, the biologist, will at first be hostile, but as Jenny listens to him and begins to promote eco-friendly trips to her guests, he thaws. Having learned much about Native attitudes and needs from Tanu's family, Jenny defends Tanu's hunting in the face of Mike's opposition, earning her both his and the community's respect. During the search for Tanu's son, Mike and Jenny could meet and join forces, and he will see in action the courage she has learned over the past months. The climax could come when Jenny, just ahead of Mike, finds Tanu's son and brings him back to the town, enduring frostbite because she has wrapped the boy in her own parka. It is then, having made a real difference to other people's lives and having lived up to her highest ideals, that Jenny has her revelation. As you lay each conflict sequence down beside the others, you will see what to blend where, what to re-position, and what can be combined and combine them you must, because you'll have so much story to tell that every scene will have to do double work! You will find the action easily dividable into fairly equal chunks, and these will be your chapters (notice that chapters come at the end, not at the beginning, of the process). You have lost your anxiety and replaced it with the solid presence of a completed novel.

Not stopping the reader: avoiding the stumbling blocks that break the spell of your story
A stumbling block is the 'huh?' factor, the 'no way!' factor. It's something that stops your readers in their tracks, something that makes them pull out of your story for a moment, or something that makes them uneasy, irritated, not willing to surrender themselves to the story you are weaving. It makes them do what you don't want them to do: stop reading. The first of many possible stumbling blocks is the stumbling block of odd names. You call your heroine Veshurpiamalee Brown. The first time your reader sees that they'll go 'Huh?' They'll start expecting a very good explanation indeed for such an odd name. If you don't give them one you'll lose their willingness to trust you. In the same way, if you call your aristocratic love interest Lord Elmer Sheepshead, they'll go 'No way!' You haven't a hope of convincing them that the lovely Natasha is going to fall for a guy called Elmer Sheepshead, nobleman or not. Another stumbling block is a weird fact. Weird facts are true things that are unfamiliar to the reader. For instance, we assume that American naval vessels are called the 'USS Something-or-other', e.g. the 'USS Constitution'. In WWII, troop carrying vessels were known as 'USAT', not 'USS', so a soldier would go aboard the 'USAT George Washington', not the 'USS George Washington'. It's true, but when

your readers hit 'USAT' they'll go 'Huh?' 'USAT' is factual, it's correct, but it's not what they expect. They'll stop reading to puzzle over what this could mean and you've lost them, if only for a moment. So call your troop carrier the 'USS George Washington' and stop worrying so much about accuracy. A third stumbling block is wacky imagery. All writers strive for vivid, fresh descriptions, but saying 'Natasha was as pure as a peeled rutabaga' is going to have your readers saying, 'Huh?' Inept descriptions do the same: 'The little waves foamed up and down the beach like tumbling bricks.' Your readers think 'no way do waves look like bricks'. Or: 'He slipped into the darkened room, feeling as if a giraffe were on his shoulders. The gloom was oppressive, smothering him like a cornflake. His hand, a groping anteater, sought the switch.' Your readers have now concluded, not that you are an amazingly innovative writer, but that you are a ding-a-ling. If you want to write an outrageous, perhaps startlingly fresh and apposite metaphor, do it, and then read aloud what you've written. Does 'The rain clouds bunched over the mountain range like whales' sound stupid? Or apt? Does 'She laughed like a car backfiring' sound quite right for the heroine of a romance? Don't try to be clever with your imagery, try to be exact. And exercise restraint. Boring writing is an all too common stumbling block. Writers can get too close to their story and put down every last thing their characters do: 'Jake chose five medium-sized potatoes from the paper bag. He washed them under the sink in cool water, the traces of mud swirling down the drain. Patting them dry with paper towels, he lined them up while he found the vegetable peeler. He rested the first one in the palm of his left hand and peeled it with firm strokes, the peelings tumbling into the sink. After the first one had gone from a brown lump to a shining white ovoid, he picked up the second potato...' Your reader says: 'No way am I reading another word of this!' Sometimes writers create long boring passages of dull, dull prose because they are afraid they won't make their word count. Sometimes they do it because they have no sense of the dramatic and don't understand that peeling potatoes is simply not interesting. Sometimes they themselves are fascinated by something, maybe even potatoes, and let their enthusiasm carry them away. Whatever the reason, a good writer will realise at the rewriting stage, if not before, that this boring passage has to die. Either it goes or your reader goes. Another stumbling block is implausibility. 'As well as being a self-made millionaire, Lord Elmer Sheepshead was a black-belt in karate, an Olympic-level fencer, a crack shot, and an all-star wrestler who piloted his own plane, ran his own law firm, and spent his weekends both entertaining beautiful movie stars and working in an orphanage.' What are your readers saying at this point? 'No way!' Readers simply won't swallow such an implausible hero. No, not even in a comic book, not any more. In the same way, outrageous circumstances insufficiently supported will have your readers snorting 'No way!' For instance: your heroine hits Hollywood on Saturday, gets picked up by a gorgeous up-andcoming movie star that evening at a club, finds herself at the beach house of a major producer for Sunday brunch, has the latest Oscar winner asking her to star with him in the producer's next movie, and by Tuesday she's on the cover of 'Hello!' magazine. Come on. I don't care how beautiful and talented she is, your heroine will never be this lucky. It just doesn't happen. Your readers won't buy it. Outrageous coincidences also fall into the 'I don't buy it' category, e.g.: 'Lord Elmer realised that the beautiful movie star who had come for a photo shoot at his orphanage was none other than his longlost bride. "Gosh," said Natasha, gazing at the crack-shot millionaire who was her long-lost husband, "and I only got to Hollywood on Saturday."' Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary explanations. If a miserly millionaire suddenly starts giving money away, you have to convince the reader of his motive. That's why Dickens has Scrooge visited by not one but three ghosts: it takes that many to shift Scrooge from his misanthropic ways and

to convince us why and how fast he changes. Why does Lord Elmer not recognise his long-lost bride? How did he lose her in the first place? You can't simply tell the reader: 'Lord Elmer didn't recognise her because she'd bleached her hair." You have to be more convincing: 'Having lost his memory after an unfortunate karate kick to the head, Lord Elmer had started a new life for himself in America. One day, during a steep dive in his personal jet, Lord Elmer's memory came back. He began to search for the bride he had forgotten. Meanwhile, plucky Natasha, thinking that her husband no longer loved her, found work in Hollywood, eventually becoming a star. She read of Lord Elmer's successes in the papers, but it was only when they met during a photo shoot at the orphanage that she knew his heart had not changed, for he stared at her as if seeing a ghost, crying brokenly, "Natasha, at last I've found you!" as they fell into each other's arms.' Far-fetched, yes, but at least you have tried to create a plausible explanation for the circumstances. Make things logically consistent. Your explanations need only be convincing enough to remove the boggle factor, the 'Huh?' in your readers' minds. Afterwards well, were you ever truly convinced that Viola and her brother looked so much alike in 'Twelfth Night'? What matters is that, watching the play, you did believe it. Unlikely human behaviour is yet another stumbling block. 'Lord Elmer gazed at his long-lost bride. "Knock, knock," he said, nudging her in the ribs.' I don't know about you, but if I'd just read this I'd say, 'Huh?' A man who's been searching for his long-lost bride doesn't tell her a joke when at last they meet, he's stunned, he chokes with emotion. Human behaviour can be surprising, as when a jilted man magnanimously attends his ex-fiance's wedding, but it can't be nonsensical, such as the man deciding to become a shoe salesman to mend his broken heart. (Huh?) A character who is too good, too pure, too generous, or conversely too evil, too grasping, too vindictive, loses credibility. An extraordinary personality needs to be justified by extraordinarily convincing reasons. We won't swallow: 'Natasha remained a pure-hearted girl even while climbing the cocaine-ridden, corrupt, dog-eat-dog ladder of Hollywood because, well, she was just a really nice human being.' But Natasha remaining a modest, selfless girl even when a movie star because, deep down, she feels she is unworthy of love after her husband abandoned her is something we'll (just) swallow. We have to be able to believe your characters' motivations. It has to ring true. In summary, don't push your luck. We, your readers, want to be swept away, but we still have our common sense. The more we stop reading to scratch our heads and say, 'Huh?' or the more we put down your book, laughing, to say, 'No way!' the more stumbling blocks you should have removed in those rewrites. Remember, it won't be your readers saying 'Huh?' and 'No way!', it will be a potential editor. And 'No way!' from an editor means 'No'.

A, B and C characters
"One more thing: if you upstage me again tonight I swear to God I'll walk off and leave you standing." Christine listened to her own voice, professional assessment balancing, but not leavening, her rage. "That's not fair! I'd never do that." Sam fuelled himself with his hurt. "It's not like you've never hogged my spotlight, and knew you could get away with it. And knew I'd let you!" The taxi driver turned his head as if movement could crack the icy silence. "You wanna be dropped off at the stage door, ma'am?" "Naturally," said Sam, making Christine instantly decree, "No, the front." "You're planning, after all, my dear," Horace asked gently from the jumpseat, "to make an Entrance?" "Against your advice?" she snapped. How like him to needle her in front of Sam! With his pseudo-plummy aplomb (oh, that was clever, she must remember that), his silk ascot

and English leather shoes, he was more theatrical that she would ever deign to be. "As you pay me 25% for it, my dear," he replied, " why not, just this once, accept it?" "You pay him 25%?" Sam asked, all forgotten for business. "What makes you worth it, Horace?" The agent eyed Sam's tie. "Because you shall be following Christine into the theatre, dear boy, and not vice versa." "Here y'go," said the driver thankfully, pulling up. If your story were a movie, the protagonists would be your stars. You would also have supporting actors and walk-on parts. In a written story, these are your 'A', 'B' and 'C' characters. In the scene above, Christine and Sam are 'A' characters, Horace the agent a 'B' character, and the taxi driver a 'C'. Your 'A' characters' are your story. The reader has to be able to see them inside and out, either by their self-revelation (by their interior dialogue or self-awareness) or through the revelation of their speech and actions (how they reveal or betray themselves). 'A' characters need all your creative power: you have to pour into them all your understanding of human nature, all your eye for detail, in order to make them come alive. And they must come alive, or your story is dead on the page. 'B' characters assist you and the 'A' characters to achieve that living, compelling story. 'B' characters, while fully complex and realised, merely support the story, illuminating situations and encouraging or forcing the 'A' characters to reveal themselves. Horace, by saying things Christine and Sam will react to, helps you tell the reader more about them. But the story is not his story. You don't need to put as much work into getting into his skin. Your main tasks with 'B' characters such as Horace are, first, to make them living individuals, not stereotypes and, second, to make sure that they are doing the job they are there to do. 'C' characters are in the story because your world should be filled with people whom your 'A' and 'B' characters would naturally encounter, such as waitresses, police officers, and taxi drivers. 'C' characters, while not brought alive to the same extent as 'B' characters, should never be cardboard flats. They should simply be people there isn't time to learn about in this particular story. The taxi driver in the scene above, for instance, should have the potential of becoming the 'A' character in his own story. We should be able to imagine him blowing off stream to his wife: 'You'll never guess who I had in the back today and, boy, was it a ride from hell!' The scene you've written happens not to be his story, just as it is not Horace's story. There is no point in fleshing either of them out if this does not advance the telling of Christine and Sam's story. You need from your 'C' and 'B' characters only what helps you propel the narrative, and nothing more. It is Christine and Sam who need everything you've got. One test of a writer is how she peoples her fictional world. A fully realised 'A' character will not be found living among stereotypes or nonentities, just as properly created 'B' and 'C' characters will not be so distractingly interesting as to overshadow the 'A' characters. All should have their place. It is your job to give them what they need, so that they can give the story what it needs. Horace stepped from the taxi into the babbling crowd, murmuring, "Ah, how they love her." He held the door for Christine, whose heart lit as she immersed herself in her fans. How she loved them! Everything forgiven within this flood of adoration, she turned to Sam. He smiled in return. One day they would love him as much. Maybe more.

Describing your characters through their actions


Jasmine was a nervous young woman who tended to fidget when she was under pressure. Even her clothes seemed to be on edge: they shifted and slid and drooped and were never still. Tony, on the other hand, was too sure of himself. But the more adamant he was about anything, the more Jasmine fluttered. The more she fluttered, the more irritated Tony got, until he was barking orders and she was near tears. That certainly tells the reader what they need to know about Jasmine and Tony. It is an efficient block of text, but it is not satisfying to read. If people want to read an encyclopedia, they'll read one, but no one should have to wade through sluggish fiction. Writing is an art as well as a craft. Let's look at the passage again. Normally, we would reveal Jasmine and Tony through their words, and weave enough gestures around the dialogue to show the reader the spoken and unspoken stresses within the scene: "Why--why Tony, I didn't think you'd really, you know, want me to go..." Jasmine's voice trailed off as she fingered the fringe of her shawl. "Didn't I say so?" Tony glared at her. "Didn't I say so on Monday? We've got to go." "But I--I just can't! You know how the Johnsons make me feel, staring at me, always--" "For God's sake, they aren't staring at you!" Tony jerked his head towards the bedroom. "Get some proper clothes on. Now!" "But, Tony...please, Tony, why can't we...?" She looked beseechingly at him, her pale eyes swimming with tears. It's easy to reveal character when you can combine action with dialogue. It's less easy to do it through description alone if, at the same time, we are trying to write well. Why would we need to reveal character without dialogue? In an adventure story or thriller, where action is the core of the plot, as a change of pace from dialogue, or simply as an exercise. Let's do that exercise now. Jasmine and Tony are at odds over a party invitation. They have had the conversation we've just overheard. Now they fall silent. Tony stood in the middle of the room, watching Jasmine shift around its edges, tweaking a cushion, fiddling with the curtains. Jasmine straightened a picture, seeing from the corner of her eye his fists shoved hard into his pockets. He looked embedded in the centre of the room. She closed and piled up the magazines, picked a hair from the back of the chair. He suddenly raised one meaty hand; she squeaked, but he was pointing to the bedroom door. In a flurry of shawl and scarves, she fled. Even without the preceding dialogue, you would have understood the dynamics between the two characters. Every action has to be the result of inner emotion or purpose. Every action has to propel the plot of the story, both in giving us further information about the characters, building tension (will Tony's impatience spill over into violence?) and speeding along the events. If ever "show, don't tell" was central to writing, it is in passages where actions must speak for all. Eddy, Jack and Herman slipped down into the ditch, Mike following with the rope. The search light's beam swept over them and they ducked. Jack wiped his mouth with a trembling hand, but was on Eddy's heels as Eddy crawled towards the road. Mike slithered in the mud, the rope tangling under him. Herman extended an impatient hand; Mike doggedly shook his head and started to re-coil the rope by touch. Eddy glanced back, checking them, his eyes lingering on Mike's face. Herman heard the guards first. He tapped

Jack's boot. Jack jerked as if shot, then froze. Eddy held up a hand, his head cocked, listening, his Uzi held against his body. The four men waited as motorcycles roared along the road, Jack shuddering as they passed. Eddy waved forward urgently and set a fast pace to the shelter of the culvert. This time Herman reached back and hauled both Mike and rope along in one massive grip. What do we know about these men? Which one is liable to break under pressure, which one is the natural leader, which one is trying to be tough beyond his strength, which one has the 'older brother' mentality? If the reader can't tell, the writer has failed. But if the reader learned something about the characters while being swept along by the story, the writer has succeeded.

Plot and narrative: the twin rails of the novel


'Narrative,' says John Gregory Dunne, 'is not plot.' And he's right. Here is how I understand his statement, and what it means when writing a novel. Plot is what happens. Narrative is what the reader sees and hears of what happens and how he sees and hears it. In some novels, plot and narrative can be very closely aligned. In others, considerable distance can separate what is happening and what the story is telling of it. In murder mysteries, for instance, the plot what is really going on, and why is obscured by the detective's narrative what she is telling us of what she sees, learns, and suspects. There's actually a whole lot more going on, but she will only know the full picture right at the end. In other sorts of stories, the plot and the narrative can be parallel, as what is really happening, say, a couple are getting divorced (the plot), is related is through the eyes of their eight-year-old son (his is the narrative), who doesn't really understand what is actually going on. One of the great challenges and joys of steering a novel-length story is the complexity and subtlety the two reins of plot and narrative offer you. While it can be enjoyable to tell a story from the point-ofview of the all-seeing, all-knowing creator, dipping into everyone's heads, explaining to the reader what is happening at all times, this becomes too easy, too much simply telling the reader what's happening, one darn thing after another, making them passive recipients or plot events: she did this and then he did that and then they agreed they felt like this and then this happened to them.... Far better for the reader, and for your creative pleasure, is to choose a limiting point of view. The limit is not a constraint; it's like the barre against which ballet dancers practice, or the torque of an exercise machine, giving you something to work against, giving your narrative movements power and direction. Let's see how, by limiting the way you will narrate your plot, you can make your story richer and deeper. Narrative is usually limited by keeping it within one character's point of view, like that of the eightyear-old boy watching his parents going through their divorce. Let's take another story. Here is the plot: An earnest young woman, Brenna, who has spent her years since college working for nonprofit organisations, is hired by a global industrial empire as head of its environmental overview department. She is at first dubious, and then thrilled, as she sees the possibility of making such a company truly responsive to ecological and human-rights needs. The fact that her boss, Joel, is her age, handsome, single, and plainly smitten with her, makes Brenna even more happy until a series of small things begin to make her doubt her reality.

An old friend from an environmental charity warns her that toxic dumping the company swore it had ceased is still going on. An anonymous email tells her that she is being used. Confidential papers are withheld from her with bland reasons. She turns to Joel, who apparently shares her concerns, but she grows wary of him when things she has told him in confidence appear to be known by the Board of Directors. With the help of some friends from the outside, including a Federal agent called Mike, and from secret allies within the company, she slowly pieces together a conspiracy by the Board to circumvent serious pollution laws by bribing top government officials in many countries and by disguising shipments of toxic waste as benign imports. One of Brenna's inside allies gets physical evidence at the cost of her own life. Joel tries to distract her with romance, and then with veiled threats. Brenna realises that some seeming accidents were in fact attempts on her life. As she gathers up the last bits of evidence that she needs, Mike helps her to fake her own death by plunging her car off a cliff into the sea. While undercover, she is able to place the evidence before the right Government people and finally triumphs at the press conference Mike holds to announce the arrests of Joel and several other corrupt Board members. The threat over, Mike is able to offer her a job at his agency and, in the final scene, his heart. A good, meaty conspiracy plot. Now, from whose point of view shall you tell it? Brenna is the obvious choice, but what happens if you choose Mike? Let's do this, and see how plot (what happens to Brenna) and narrative (what Mike knows and sees) run through the story together. You know your plot, but Mike only knows what he can investigate and be told. Opening scene: he's been on the case of the company for months, and is rocked when he learns that they have hired Brenna McDonald, the well-known 'green' campaigner, as head of their Environmental Department. He immediately assumes that she's been bought out and corrupted by big money. He interviews her and comes away troubled, wondering if she is, in fact, sincere. A mutual friend, once a colleague of Brenna's, contacts Mike to tells him that Brenna is clearly perturbed by something and is asking around. Mike speaks with her again and suspects strongly that she is being duped. Now you can have Brenna and Mike work as allies, Mike still not 100% convinced he isn't being played, but is slowly falling for Brenna and coming to believe in her or wanting to believe in her, which increases the tension. She tells him of some 'accidents' and he himself saves her from one, which gives him the idea of faking her death. And the final scenes play out from his perspective, as Brenna denounces the company publicly at his press conference and, in the emotionally-charged aftermath, falls into his arms. Clearly, I have not spelled out the details of the plot, nor have I specified points at which Mike's actions intersect with what is 'really' going on. Mike is like a hiker out in the night, only seeing the lay of the land when he turns on his flashlight, and then seeing only as far as his flashlight can illuminate. The main thing is that, by choosing Mike as your limiting narrative perspective, you have heightened tension and suspense, which is just what you want to do. Not only is there a conspiracy, but he doesn't know if he can trust Brenna, and he has all the terror of a man who knows that his beloved is being stalked by unknown killers. It is the twist of placing the narrative at a different angle to the plot that makes a simple story of uncovering a dastardly plot into a thriller. You have a legitimate reason for withholding from the reader vital clues and, at the same time, you can offer them strong emotions, as

we see inside Mike's head and watch him watching Brenna. Even if, in the end, you decide to tell this thriller from Brenna's point of view, it is a good exercise to plan it from Mike's narrative as well, so that you know what he is seeing and feeling at every stage. You might even try telling it from Joel's... Plot and narrative, like woof and warp, together lets you weave a strong and intriguing story by making the telling of the story as important an element of it as the plot. It makes the story more fun to write, and that will make it more fun to read. Plot and narrative, writer and reader: pairs that join to make a greater whole.

Explaining too much: why less is more


One of the usual mistakes beginners make is to explain too much. How much is too much? Deciding this needs a dispassionate eye, a sense of pace, and a sense of what is really necessary for the story. These come with experience, but a beginner can start developing them by recognising the problem. The problem is love. You love your story. You love your characters. You love the world you've invented. You want your readers to see them, appreciate them, and understand them just as you do yourself. And since you don't want your readers to start with the wrong impression, you pile up descriptive scenes as soon as the story opens. Or you drop in a big lump of description right after that 'grabber' first line you know you're supposed to have, in order to steer the reader into your vision. For instance: The car plunged through the barrier and over the cliff. Nadine prayed the airbag would save her, her generous mouth opened in a scream, her periwinkle blue eyes fixed in horror on the ocean below, her auburn hair, thick and luxuriant, streaming behind her, her elegant, long legs braced for the crash. Nadine had always been strikingly beautiful, even as a child. Her hair, less golden then, was always held back by a blue ribbon. In summer a few delicious freckles dusted her nose. Wide shoulders had led, in adolescence, to a bosom of graceful proportions. Her hands were elegant and beauticians often commented on her healthy nails, nails that were now digging into the car's upholstery.... and so on. How to guard against the mistake of explaining too much? Rewrite your work, excluding every scrap of description. Now how does the story read? If a detail was not necessary, its absence will not be noticed. If you take out all the description of the Nadine section above, you would have a better story (it couldn't be worse). Personal appearance matters only when it influences a character's motivation or has an impact upon the story. If your protagonist thinks that her big nose makes her ugly and unlovable, she won't believe it when the boy next door says he's crazy about her. If a character plunges into a burning house to rescue a child, it is important that we already know he is disabled. It is not important that he has red hair. You'll be surprised how little description you actually need. Then there is the problem of the lovingly-described setting: Nobody came to the farmhouse anymore. It was a big square building approached by a long track. Built in the 1890s, when the valley had been opened up by pioneers, the house had a

porch running about three sides, gable windows, and gingerbread that once had been pristine, but now was gaping here and there like teeth gone bad. The front door barely hung on its hinges and the front hall was full of little tumbleweeds that had trapped themselves and now rolled like dustballs over the rotting hall carpet. The parlour, once the pride of the house, was musty with the smell of decaying horsehair furniture, of wood and fabric neglected. Across the hall, the sitting room ... And so on and so on through every room of the house. Where description is necessary, avoid a solid, dull block of descriptive prose by integrating description with action, or by having the description filtered through the eyes of a character. The abandoned farmhouse should not be described in advance of its first visitor for ten years, but rather should be seen through the eyes of that visitor. Give the reader the fewest descriptive words necessary to convey the scene. Better to have one piercing sentence than three paragraphs of room-by-room description: Harold stopped in the middle of the hall, breathing decay. He could hear the curtains blowing in every room. It was like standing inside an empty heart, desolate, familiar. The emptiness of the house and the reason Harold is in it begin to come together. Later, you can add a scene, perhaps where he pushes the tumbleweeds out the front door or rubs the dirt off a faded photograph, to build both the atmosphere of a house long neglected and Harold's own personality. More insidious is the psychological or background description, for this is often considered good writing: Daniel came from a long line of copers. He had coped when his father had died, supporting his mother financially and emotionally, he had coped with his wife's illness and miscarriage and now, facing her across the table, he put on his usual smile as he sorted through the divorce papers. He never questioned why he carried the burdens or made light of his own feelings. It had always been his duty; he had done it for so long that it felt a part of him. This might sound fine, but it is actually an info dump. What are you going to say next? How can the conversation do anything but repeat some of this information? Info dumps are never as compelling as action, and dialogue is the most compelling action of all: "What's this, honey?" Daniel asked, even though he could see the work divorce on the top paper. "Don't give me that smile," Joan snapped. "For God's sake, Dan, your life is falling apart." "Getting angry doesn't solve anything," said Daniel, pressing a blanket of calmness over his feelings. "We can sort this out." "No, Dan, we can't," Joan sighed. "Sometimes things just can't be sorted out. Especially this. You keep doing what you did with your mother after your father died, but I'm not your mother. I need more from you. Needed more." Why was she doing this to him? "Honey, I've done the best I knew how." As always. By revealing the past within present action, you can let it resonate with the what is going on now, the one enhancing the other. You also avoid boring the reader by preventing the characters from becoming wind-up toys, doing what we have been told they do. It is better to see Daniel 'coping' when he is really doing it or thinks he is. A basic rule of writing is to have nothing that does not propel the narrative, either because it furthers

the action, or because it illuminates character within that action. Two people rushing through the night to the hospital is action, two people arguing in the car as they rush to the hospital is character development within action. The fact that one of them is six foot tall with blue eyes is neither action nor illumination. Advice for beginners: cut. And keep cutting until you think you have reduced your story to a skeleton. The skeleton is your story. The rest is blubber.

Description: what's it for?


1. It was a dark and stormy night and he was lost in the forest looking for her cottage. 2. The world was plunged into stygian gloom, the wind and rain pelting as from nowhere into his face as he struggled onward through the undifferentiated forest, seeking her tiny, tumbledown cottage. 3. He staggered through the darkness, moon more smear than light, buffeted by trees that sprang from the darkness against him, cut by rain sharp as ice, his squinting eyes seeking a better light, lamplight from her cottage. 4. He edged through the darkness, arms outstretched, fingers on the softly-peeling bark of a birch, then the roughness of hemlock, as the branches above him groaned in the wind he could hear but not feel. He flinched from the whip of the icy rain, his exhausted eyes jumping with sparks, fooling him that the lamp above her door was there there until he lost faith in them and shouldered like a bull through the thick-matted pine trees, moving forward because he would not turn back. Four descriptions of the same thing: a man lost in a forest in a night storm. Each of the four strives to achieve the same purpose, but why do two work and two do not? What is the purpose of description? It's not simply to tell the reader about something. 'She was fivetwo, medium build, redhead, green eyes.' This is fine for the police, but not for the fiction writer. Every detail in a story has to have a reason, and that reason is to drive the narrative forward. A descriptive passage gives details about someone or something in order to give the reader a better understanding about the characters and their world. "'She was five-two, redhead, green eyes, and a badly scarred face' will give the reader vital information about that woman. Why the scar? How does she feel about it? How does it influence her actions? In the same way, the detail describing the man lost in the forest has to tell us more than it was night, it was stormy, and he was lost. The first passage, above, does nothing more. There is no excitement, worry, fear, wonder. It is dead, dull prose. Surely you want to do better than that. The second is merely elaboration on the first, using fancy language in an attempt to disguise flaccid thought. Some writers think that elaborate language lifts ordinary vision into literature. 'She was a redhead' and 'She had tresses the colour of wheat kissed with raspberry' say the same thing, but the first is honest and the second is balderdash. 'Dark night' and 'Stygian gloom' also mean the same. The writer is not imagining the actual night, but simply dressing up a clich. And clichs never propel any narrative anywhere. They just take up space. The writer has to enter the environment he or she is describing. Say your protagonist is loading a ninepound cannon with grapeshot on a frigate. What does he see and smell? You have to see through his eyes, feel what he would feel, know what he would know. Writers are supposed to have this vivid

imagination, the ability to create a world for the reader. Creating a world means specific, concrete details. 'His uniform was uncomfortable' tells you little about a young soldier at Gettysburg. 'He had a raw patch under his chin that his stock rubbed open every morning, a black bruise where his haversack rode his shoulder, peeling toes inside his sodden boots, and an arm growed two inches longer 'cause his gun was so damned heavy' takes you into his private misery. This intimacy is the other half of a good descriptive passage. You must not only see, feel, hear, smell the physical environment, you must also share the character's feelings. Passage (3) of the lost man gives you this. The man staggers, is abused by the elements, seeks for light. It tells of painful, unrewarded searching. This passage has specific detail and implies something about the man. It moves the narrative forward by giving him motive (a search) as well as a predicament. The last passage takes us into the man, into his weariness, gives us some measure of his drive to find that cottage, and it is done with concrete detail that gives the reader the feel of the birch tree, the sound of the trees and the weight of the rain, yet evokes, by the words 'groaned' and 'flinched', some measure of his own physical state. Environment and character create a sense of being there with that man, helping the reader to understand his determination and encouraging an interest in who 'she' is and if he will find her. A good descriptive passage has three elements: (a) specific, well-observed detail (b) revelation of the character's inner life and (c) motivation, the impulse that drives that character. 'She was a redhead with a scarred face' is detail, 'She was a redhead with a scarred face who took his love as pity' combines it with the character's inner life, and 'She was a redhead whose scarred face made her take his love as pity until the moment she opened her cottage door and caught him, frozen and half-blind, into her suddenly believing arms' is a story.

Killing your story: 8 guaranteed ways to wreck your writing


There are so many ways not to write your novel. You don't consciously not want to write you do want to, you long to, you want to write productively and to finish your projects, and yet you have ideas, bits and pieces, starts without endings, and nothing completed. The intention is there, the backside on the desk chair might even be there, but the writing isn't there. Writing doesn't happen if, on some level, you don't want to write. Why wouldn't you want to write? Fear of producing work that is less good than you hoped, or committing yourself to work that will take years to finish, or wanting to avoid disappointment and rejection and frustration, or an unwillingness to defer your pleasures, or, to be blunt, wanting all the wonder of accomplishment and success without having to do the work first. We all have ways of subverting our novels. The most obvious one is never actually to write. I know wannabe writers who haven't sat down at a desk for years. They are 'still thinking' or 'still planning'. Yeah, sure. There are more subtle ways of achieving nothing, and they all involve putting your writing second. Here are some of the popular ones. If you identify one or more in your own writing life, you can choose to deal with it. Or at least know the exact reason why you'll never be in print.

1. Your day job


News flash: we all work. If you haven't yet been published, you aren't living off your huge advances (and, even if you have been published, only 0.01% of you have advances big enough to live on), and

that means your days are taken up with work, paid or not. Your job comes first, because that's how you put pizza on the table and a ceiling over your head. You come home tired. Maybe you put in extra hours. Maybe your shifts mess up your days. Your head is filled with buzz or stress. You tell yourself that you need to chill, need to wind down. You just can't write tonight. Or you have those accounts to review and here's an evening you could do it in. You'll write tomorrow. When you're at work, your work comes first. But you still sleep and eat, do chores, and have a life outside work. So you have the hours to give to writing. Nobody is stopping you. Your boss isn't coming into your home and stamping on your fingers. Your colleagues or customers aren't driving nails up through your desk chair. You can sit down and write. Every other beginner writer is facing what you're facing. You aren't specially cursed with an especially awful or demanding job. You can find the time. You can learn to put work and the stress of work aside for 90 or 120 minutes a day. You can write in those minutes. Nobody is 'making' you not write. Except you. Give your boss your best effort and commitment, and then give your writing your best effort and commitment. Every other successful writer has done this. You can do it. So do it.

2. Writus interruptus
You write, you write all the time. Well, maybe not every day, but regularly. And yet you don't seem to be getting anything done. Writing is a daily chore. I mean daily. Not weekly, not every so often, when you're in the mood. I mean every morning or every evening. Weekends included. Vacations and holidays included. Forces outside your control will occasionally de-rail you: an illness, a catastrophe, but these need to be big to be surrendered to without shame. A cold is not serious enough to stop you writing. Pneumonia is. Outside commitments might require you to reschedule your writing: to drive the kids to school or to attend your spouse's office party, but these aren't permission to abandon writing for that day. They're permission to do it at a different time, say 5.00am-6.30am instead of 6.30am-8.00am. You have to write every day to keep continuity of thought. A novel has a lot going on in it and you have plenty of plates to juggle. You can't expect the plates to suspend themselves in the air while you watch a DVD or go visit your folks. They don't, they crash, and you spend the next session at your writing desk trying to recoup, remember and recover. Writing, like any other serious, skilled endeavour, requires constant practice. You get better by the doing it. Skipping days or weeks makes you lose fitness. When next at your desk, you puff and blow and pull mental muscles instead of performing your writing at peak condition. This makes the writing harder and what you write worse. Writing for publication is a discipline, not a hobby. It can't be put aside with impunity because something else seemed a little more interesting to you. It will suffer. Form the resolve to write every day and then do it. This is part of becoming a real writer. Your reward is not only a completed writing project, but also the satisfaction of having kept your resolve. There's another reward: your writing becomes better. Writing becomes exhilarating. You almost literally get high on it. It's what makes that resolve continually easier to keep.

3. Writing the wrong book


If you find yourself stalling rather than writing, it might be because you aren't writing a story that interests you. If you're grimly pushing out sentences, wishing you were anywhere else but at your desk, then you are either one of those geniuses who write masterpieces through torment, or else you're

writing a book you don't want to write. Speaking statistically, guess which one you more likely are. A good story grips you. A story that isn't congenial to you has you putting a gun to your own head to make yourself write the next paragraph. Why are you doing it? Why are you writing something so wrong for you? Why are you irritating yourself and yet hoping, one day, people will want to spend money on this round peg being extruded from a square hole? If you aren't so utterly consumed by your own story that you can't keep away from it, if you aren't in love with it, if it isn't taking up your attention night and day, ask why. You should be flying, not groaning. Analyse your story. Why is it that you chose this of all stories to write about? Are you aspiring to intellectual fiction when inside you really want to write westerns? Is pride making you choose the wrong genre for you? Did you choose this subject because you felt it would be a 'proper' book? Or because a book like that did very well on the bestseller lists and you decided to write for the money? Except, of course, you aren't? It's hard and unrewarding to write about something that doesn't interest you. So stop. Find a story that does. Nobody is looking for a book that the author didn't enjoy writing.

4. Telling your story before you've finished it


Have you told someone about the story you're writing? Have you shared its plot with family or friends? Have you let people read parts of it? Have you discussed problems in its plot or its characters' motivations with a writing group? Do you attend a writing group? The point of writing is to tell a story. If you've already told it to someone before you've put it on paper (or screen), you're killing it. Maybe only a bit, but each time you do, more life-blood drains from it. I can proudly claim to have killed not only a book but ten years of my life in this easy way. I described the story to a friend and for the next decade tried to inject interest and urgency into what I had already thoroughly told. One day I recognised what I had done and quietly laid it aside. Retrospect is the least fun of perspectives. Don't talk about what you are writing. Ever. Not until it is done to the point of sending it to an agent or publisher, or until you are at the point of giving it to your one trusted intelligent reader-friend (don't tell them about it, just hand it over, and then listen to their feedback). If people ask you 'what's your book about?' tell them 'a thriller', 'a young-adult novel', or 'I'm sorry, I don't discuss my work in progress' and then don't. You don't have to satisfy their curiosity. They're interested for a nano-second, but your book dies forever. You'll notice I've included writing groups. I'm afraid I'm not a fan of these. Talking about writing isn't writing. If you can't write unless you have a group to motivate or support you, then you have more issues than not being able to commit to a book. I've found that writing done for a writing group is shaped for that experience, becomes something fit to be read out or circulated, something altered by an anticipated performance. It turns a book into a serial drama that is not about the book itself, but about you, your thoughts, your hopes, what you want it to be. Shut up, write by yourself, for yourself, to your own standard, and become your own editor and critic. Don't release it into the world until you know it's ready. Don't share a dish not yet cooked. If you want to tell a story, tell it and get instant gratification, or write it and reap long-term satisfaction. You can't do both.

5: Your social life


Marge Piercy says of writing: "You have to like it better than being loved." You're a writer first or you aren't a writer. Writing comes before all. Hard? Yes. Necessary? Yes. I'm not saying that you have to become a loveless recluse. I am saying that you mustn't always put loved ones first. You can't, if you want to get any writing done. If you haven't always been writing and then you start a writing life, your family and your friends will assuredly not like being demoted. They'll start by indulging you but, as you persist, they will resent it. You've introduced a new thing into their lives, a rival for their affection and attention. They don't have to be nice about it, and often won't be. They'll try to distract you or tempt you away from your desk. You can give in and please them, or you can stiffen your spine and do the work you think necessary for your own life. They'll get over it or they won't. If someone doesn't 'get it', then they aren't someone who should be in your life. You are a writer. It's who you are. It's what you do. They have to take you on your terms. Remember that, when you put your writing first, you get the reward of writing. Your friends and family get nothing. They don't care as much, or even at all, about your creative work, not even that person who adores you (she or he tolerates it and supports you because they love you, but let's not get big-headed; it's no more than that. Even though that is wonderful.) They have no dog in your fight. Don't expect them to make more sacrifices than you do for your sake. Choose these sacrifices yourself (give up watching the game, or gardening) rather than asking others to make big changes in their lives for you. Try to minimise the impact of your writing on them. But write. There will be times you stand at the door of your study (or wherever you write) with a heavy heart, knowing that someone yearns for your company, that you long for theirs, and yet you still must close the door on them. It's tough. You might find family relationships strained and your friends giving up on you. You can work on the percentages ("I'll have 23% less time for my son, but he'll still get 77%, which means I won't have all my free time for my writing, but I'll have more than none, and I can live with that balance.") but what you can't do is give 100% of your time to the people in your life. Books don't write themselves. They take a lot of time. But so do a lot of voluntary things. Nobody raises an eyebrow when an aspiring marathoner spends two hours a day jogging, even if it takes time away from a partner and children. You already take time from your friends and loved ones to do things: chores, hobbies. You have to do the same with your writing, if you want to be a writer. And then, when you have that precious time, you must write. No playing solitaire or reading blogs. If your loved ones are losing your company, and you're losing good times with them, at least ennoble the loss by actually writing.

6: Indulging in advance marketing


I'm always astonished at the number of beginning writers who don't have a finished first draft, but do have the blurb for the cover their paperback already written. Planning your publicity is always fun. But thinking about your fame ("what will I say on 'Ellen' if she asks about...?") isn't doing writing, it's dressing up in the clothes of a professional writer when you haven't earned them. If we didn't think we'd gain fame and money from our writing we couldn't keep going. Those serious about their work curtail the make-believe, don't indulge themselves writing jacket cover text ("This hilarious first-person story will keep you laughing from the first page to the last"), but instead, write. Included in the fun stuff of advance marketing is drafting your synopsis before you've finished your book, and by 'finished' I mean re-written to the point that you can find no more ways to improve it. I've

gone into detail about the synopsis (see The synopsis: what it is, what it isn't), but let me repeat here: if you are writing a synopsis at any point before you're about to put a stamp on an envelope containing your query letter, you're writing it too soon, and you are displacing the real writing. Save your synopsis and query letter for the time when your book is done, when it is ready for an agent's or a publisher's eyes. Write these then and only then. Here and now, when your book isn't done, you must concentrate on it and it alone. Writing your synopsis, your query letter, your jacket blurb, your future reviews, is goofing off, not writing. They are contributing nothing to your story. You might as well be playing solitaire. At least that's honest procrastination.

7: Background research
If you're writing a story that needs information, be it historical details, technical data, geographical accuracy, or some other special knowledge, you can spend many happy, happy hours doing the research and hardly any minutes doing the actual writing. Some of you have chosen to write a story that needs research because you love the research. Don't love it so much that the story dies of neglect while you become the world's expert on nuclear-powered submarines. If you love it that much, write a non-fiction book. The lust for accuracy can impede your novel over and over again while it's in progress. If you've spent an hour finding an historical photo confirming the layout of a harbour long since altered in a city you've half-fictionalised, just so you know if the protagonist has to run down a pier or jump into a tender, you have to remind yourself that what you are writing is FICTION, you're allowed to make it up, and you need to stop going a little nuts and get back to the story. That telling detail is unimportant if it is not absolutely required as an element in the on-going conflict. Don't fool yourself that "it's all part of the writing". Writing is part of the writing. Writing is writing. If you didn't do a single scrap of research, if you made everything up, including your nuclear-powered submarine, you could still produce a crackingly good book. All those hours at your desk have to produce a novel. If they've produced research notes, congratulations: you've created a database.

8: Reading writing advice


What are you doing here?!? Get back to work!! There's a time to learn, and there's a time to do. There's a time to seek advice, and a time to put it into practice. If you have a novel started, you're no longer at the learning or seeking stage. You're at the writing stage. If you sat down at your PC or laptop today and googled 'writing advice' when you should have been writing, then you're not actually writing a story, you're messing around. Your story's dying and you're pretending that you're doing something productive. When should you read articles such as this fine one right here? When you aren't actually writing a book. If you're learning and writing at the same time, the book you're working on is a practice run. That's OK, but remember that it's practice and not going to be published. It won't be published because it's a student piece. When you've stopped teaching yourself, you'll write seriously. That doesn't mean you won't continue to seek out good advice. We learn how to write our whole lives. Finally, however, the real learning comes from actually writing, for writing teaches you how you write. Hunting up writing advice in your writing time is displacement, with a thin lie of 'I'm learning my craft'

smeared on top. If you meant to write something in this hour and now you're here reading this, get offline and back to it.

To sum up
These eight guaranteed wreckers of writing are lurking in all our lives. They'll get on top of you from time to time despite your strongest commitment. We are but human. You aren't a bad writer because you sometimes struggle and fail to resist temptation. You will be a bad writer, in fact, you won't be a writer at all, if you keep giving into it. There are so many things out there ready to kill your story. Don't let one of them be you.

Point of view: how to drive a story from inside a character's head


If you've chosen to tell your story from a God-like point of view, you've made it easy for yourself. You can swoop inside any character's head and tell all. You can show the reader whatever you like: his thoughts, her thoughts, the thoughts of a stranger watching one or both of them, and you can create a rich, dense tapestry of information. You can even address the reader directly, as if both of you are onlookers. That style of story has fallen out of fashion. More challenging to write, and more suspenseful to read, is the story where we, the reader, have a restricted view. It's like looking through a submarine's periscope and trying to understand what's going on. It's used in the classic detective novel: we have only have information that the detective sees or is told about and we try to solve the puzzle as if we're the detective, too. Most novels in all other genres are also restricted to one person's point of view, either in the first person: 'Miller punched her and she fell before I had time to catch her' or the third person: 'Miller punched her and she fell before Davey had time to catch her.' We, the readers, find that form congenial because we, too, live in a world, one that includes our interior world, that we see and know imperfectly. Stories are about characters doing things, heading somewhere, either a real place (Oz, Oregon) or an emotional destination (marital bliss, forgiveness) or a situation (peace, justice, the solution of the crime). You have to show the characters acting, and show why they are acting, or else the story isn't a story, it's just one damn thing after another. 'I, Huck Finn, ran away from home and then I did this and then I did that and then I headed west.' But that's not why we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We read it to share Huck's inner adventure, how he responds to moral and physical tests. We see him change and grow into a moral man by the choices he makes. So how do you do that? How do you describe the inner mental and moral actions and changes as well as the exterior physical action in a way that tells your reader about why the characters, especially the protagonist, make the choices they do, and what actions spring from those choices? How do you do that when you can only see out of one character's eyes? Let's talk about the protagonist only for a moment. Your first challenge is how to convey his or her rich interior world to show motive and impulse. How do you show why he makes the decisions he does, why he acts the way he acts? You want the reader to understand him, to be with him each step of the way.

Beginner writers tend to reach for what is called 'interior monologue', and what I call the info-dump. Info-dumps tell us, the readers, everything. An example, in first person: Straddled over her body, not daring to look down to see if she was still breathing, I tried to meet Miller's eye. I knew I didn't have the courage to face up to bullies. I was bullied as a child and, every time I ran into the same bullying personality, the same sick fears welling up inside me. I recognised it, yet I was helpless. I wasn't proud of it. I had knuckled under, had humiliated myself, so many times before. And here was Miller, smirking, laughing at me, knowing I didn't have the guts to face him down, even with Jane bruised and unconscious at my feet, and his knuckles red from the impact against her cheek. But something I'd never felt before was stirring, something strange, something that felt like a cold river. Jane was helpless, and it was up to me to act like a man. For once in my life I was called upon to protect my own, and I suddenly found that I had the strength and the will to do it. Why did the writer give us this info-dump? Because that was the only way he could think of explaining what was going on inside Davey? Because he couldn't think of another way to do it? Because he didn't want to work up a sweat doing real writing? It doesn't matter, because his readers will have given up on him. The writer could have give us readers another version of the same scene. This time, no internal analysis, but instead a narration a telling of what is actually happening: "You're a a m-maniac." I straddled Jane's body, hovering over her. "You're a psycho." I could hear the waver in my voice, could feel my skin shivering in waves across my muscles, and saw Miller's smirk deepen. He smelled it on me. A nausea of fear made the night swim with smears of streetlight yellow and neon blue. "I don't think I'm gonna to have trouble with you, am I, Davey?" he sneered, pretending to blow across his knuckles, still red from the impact on Jane's cheek. "Miller, you haven't had any trouble from me before," I began, the sick little half-smile I always smiled starting to form on my lips, but as I spoke I felt Jane's warmth against my leg, her helplessness. I was the only one standing. Standing by her. Standing up for her. My mouth moved to a shape I'd never felt before, a bared-fang rictus. I took a breath that cooled me like a river of ice. "But this time, yes. You got trouble." That's the character 'reporting' on what he sees and hears and what he feels. He tells us his physical responses and his emotional responses, not blatantly, but merely touching on them. The writer has to choose what to tell and what doesn't illuminate the scene. Of all the facts he could give us, he has to select only what propels the protagonist to the next action. A good writer selects only just enough. He could keep piling detail on detail, but he doesn't. Just enough. Here's that scene again, pared down: I straddled her body. "You you're a--a m-maniac. A psycho." "Yeah, and you're gonna give me trouble, right, Davey?" Miller pretended to blow on knuckles still red from Jane's cheek, then raised lazy hands. "Sure." I felt my sickly grin widen to a rictus of hate. I stepped clear, found I was staring across my own fists. "This time, yes." He swung, but I was already inside his reach, my arm like iced leather, strong and hard, slamming the smile off his face.

Three scenes told three different ways. The first is an info-dump. 175 words where almost nothing happens, and almost nothing is explained. The writer could have summarised: 'I'd always been a coward but something crossed over in me', but no, we get that long-winded info-dump. The second is shorter and the reader learns much more: the setting, the atmosphere, what Davey is feeling and doing, and why. The style is good for a literary novel, a more atmospheric adventure story, or even a romance. The third scene is terser still. Its pared-down style is good for a thriller. The first is dull and lifeless, the other two are real narratives. They combine action, observation and feeling to bring the scene alive. That's how a good writer tells us about Davey from Davey's periscope on life. He could keep the spotlight on Davey, with the other characters remaining two-dimensional cutouts (Jane-the-loveinterest, Miller-the-bad-guy) or he could bring them alive, too. But he has to stay within Davey's point of view. We, the readers, can't know more or see more than what Davey knows or sees. What happens if he isn't very smart, or isn't very observant? This problem was solved a long time ago. Read The Canterbury Tales for an example. Your character is a video camera, taking in all sound and action, and you, the writer, can select from only those sounds and actions to tell us what illuminates the thoughts and motivations of the other characters. It is the writer's perception that shapes his choices of what to tell us. You may have had the experience of a colleague telling you about a scene: And when I sat down I realised I hadn't got any sugar so I asked him to bring me some, and then I'd forgotten napkins and he brought me some and then, when I asked him for a stirstick, he said in this real snarky voice "This is a self-service restaurant, lady" and I just couldn't believe it! Talk about rude." They've told you the world according to them, but you, the perceptive writer, have made your own judgements: that the attendant's patience finally snapped, that your colleague is lazy and self-centred and not too bright, and that you can learn more about an incident than the person telling it realises. Your colleague doesn't know what she's revealed about herself and about the attendant, but you do. And if this were a scene in your story, we, your readers, would know, too. Let's get back to Davey. With a couple of punches driven by rage and determination, Davey has brought Miller to his knees. Jane stirs and comes to consciousness. Let's up the stakes and carry on the story in third person, although still knowing and seeing only what Davey can know and see: He tried to lift her, but his hands were already swelling and darkening with bruises. "Jane, honey, Jane, let me help you." She sat and rested her forehead against his chest. He almost put his arms around her, but she shivered as if sliding back into herself and stiffened. "Miller !" "He's gone. He ran." Davey tried to keep the pride from his voice, but Jane's look of surprise did that for him. "You fought Miller?" Her hand went to her head. "Are you still dizzy?" "I'm fine. You really fought him?" "He was going to keep hurting you, Jane." "Well...I guess I'm glad you invited yourself along." He felt a little smaller around his edges. "You know why I did. I never trusted him. I told you so." "Yeah, that he wasn't right for me." She shifted away. "Help me up, will you? You're a bit of a surprise, Davey. Oh, careful, I'm losing my shoe. I'm good now." She grabbed his arm. "Or maybe not. Will you take me home?"

The new feeling came back. It was warm and sure, like the grip on an axe handle or a sword. "You're safe with me." "You know, I might just be." The whole episode shows changes within the two characters and has pushed the plot along. Davey has found his manhood, Jane has accepted that Davey isn't the weakling she thought he was, and they've taken a step towards that future they know nothing about, but towards which the writer has just taken them by one scene. And it's been done through Davey's sensory perceptions. We don't get any information other than what he sees, hears, thinks and feels, but we now can see Jane as her own separate self, as a real person. The 'unreliable narrator' is simply a story told from the point of view of someone who really doesn't get it, or who is deliberately lying to us. In the latter case, of course, he is really lying to himself, or about himself: he is trying to make us believe something that will show him in a different light. But it is still him as our video camera, and it is still the writer who is choosing, from the abundant possibilities, the important details of that video to show us. Once you have decided on which point of view you'll be using, you have to stay faithful to it, because only in that way will you be staying faithful to your protagonist as a real, living person, with all the imperfect observations and understandings a real person makes. That protagonist will, in turn, make all the other characters real people. Real people choose, decide, act, and that makes a narrative, and that makes a novel.

Art of the unspoken: saying more by describing less


Kelly, a newscaster, lured by newspaper stories of the tragedy, is visiting a small town some months after a fire swept through the local nursery school. She strikes up a conversation with a woman called Pat, and discovers through it that Pat is the town's news reporter. The conversation continues: "You must have been the one to cover that big fire a few months back," Kelly realised. Pat's mouth tightened to a thin line. "Yes," she said in a constricted voice. Kelly, poised on the verge of asking further questions about the tragedy, hesitated when she saw Pat's obvious reluctance to speak further and, instead of the question she intended to ask, quickly substituted, "So, how long have you been working as a reporter for the Bugle?" In this section, we see two characters interacting and learn something about them. Pat remains traumatised by her experience and is reticent about it. Kelly is empathetic to other people's moods and does not push in against someone's distress. Two sensitive people, yet the language is not sensitive. It clunks against our heads like a lead pipe. The writer has told us too much and we become impatient, wanting to yell, 'Okay, okay, we get it!' The purpose of clean, lean, stylish prose is to tell the story in a satisfying way. A good writer does not hum and haw, does not repeat information, does not bore her readers. Instead, she draws her readers into the story, letting them feel the action viscerally. Good writing is like Occam's razor, the fewest possible words achieving the greatest possible meaning. This is done two ways: first, by removing everything unnecessary and, second, by achieving precision through combining what is happening with the way it is happening.

If you are a genius, you achieve this sort of graceful prose in your first draft. If you are merely human, you achieve it by rethinking, refining, and rewriting. You work until nothing else can be cut or altered without risking the full meaning of the content or damaging the narrative flow. Let's look at the snippet of dialogue above. How do you turn that mediocre prose into dynamic language? You start by pruning. Here is the same passage with some padding removed: "You must have been the one to cover that big fire here." Pat's mouth tightened. "Yes." Kelly, about to launch further questions, hesitated when she saw Pat's obvious reluctance to speak. Instead of the question she intended to ask, she quickly substituted, "So, how long have you been working for the Bugle?" This tells us, but with fewer words, what the first version did. The passage reads more smoothly, yet you see that your work is not yet done. You must cut more and rewrite that clumsy last section: "You must have been the one to cover that big fire." Pat's mouth tightened. "Yes." Kelly saw Pat's obvious reluctance to speak and, instead of the question she intended to ask, quickly substituted, "So, how long have you been working for the Bugle?" The action is starting to get close to 'real time', the actual pace of a real conversation, but you sense that you can do better still. You have pruned; now you must combine. Pat is laconic. Her 'yes' changes the direction of Kelly's questions. Why not let the reader feel the impact of the question? It doesn't need the prop of the preceding words. You cut those words. You also consider Kelly's first question. Is that how she would say it, or did you write it that way because you thought we wouldn't 'get it', and so slipped in a little elucidation? Trust us: we 'get it'. "You must have covered that fire." "Yes." Now that the first part makes us feel impact of Pat's monosyllable, the last sentence feels sloppy and too long. It takes longer for us to read it than it does Kelly to think it. You want to show the quickness of Kelly's response in the quickness of your writing style: "You must have covered that fire." "Yes." Kelly sensed Pat's obvious reluctance to speak. Instead of her intended question, Kelly quickly substituted, "So, how long have you been working for the Bugle?" You are still describing too much. We have already seen Pat's obvious reluctance in her terse 'yes', so Kelly seems three paces behind us. Then we have to wait two whole clauses to see Kelly's supposedly quick, sensitive change of direction. Kelly's response has to be as adroit a change of direction for the reader as it is for her. You rewrite and finally you get it: "You must have covered that fire." "Yes," said Pat in a way that made Kelly ask instead, "So, how long have you been at the Bugle?" Your reader, like your character, turns on a dime and heads in a different direction. By thinking about what is happening and mirroring that action in your style, you have been able to strip out all superfluity and have made the passage a better reading experience. You have moved into the

narrative instead of describing it. You don't have to spell everything out, hit every nail on the head, cross every t and dot every i: we get it. Trust us.

Dialogue: the best action


David crept along the ledge to the window, traffic forty floors below. He slipped the flat steel jimmy between the frame and the latch. A quick jerk. The window bulged. The latch held. Sweating, his teeth bared with the effort, he repositioned the steel and jerked again. The window's metal frame groaned. Now he had no time; they'd be investigating the noise in seconds. He braced his heels on the ledge and rammed the steel home. The window jumped open, he was through and into the darkness as the light in the hallway flicked on. Exciting stuff! But even Tom Clancy doesn't write exclusively in descriptive prose. Novels are about people (yes, I know Black Beauty was a horse, but a personified horse) and we best understand people through what they say. Two men having a fistfight can enthrall, but two men arguing is even more gripping, because we see the conflict of their minds as well as of their bodies. This is why Hollywood often has improbable conversations held in the middle of such fights: "I knew you'd never accept that our rules applied to you." Bash! Pow! "No they're for little men like you, Georgie." Biff! Slam! If you've ever overheard an argument between two people, you know how riveting it can be. Even two people debating where to meet later will make you stop reading to listen. If you want to glue your readers to your pages, get your characters talking. The more dialogue there is, the more interesting it will be. "I can't believe you could leave Coopersville just like that!" "You of all people should know why I am." "Oh, Johnny, you take things to heart. I was having a joke, a silly joke." "You should know when the time for joking's over." Dialogue is more interesting than description because it tells us more. Dialogue provides greater magnification into a person's soul and with more immediacy than description. The 43 words of the snatch of dialogue above tells us much more about these two people than the 94 words tells us about the cat burglar David. Johnny is a serious young man in love with the girl and the girl is contrite, though not contrite enough to apologise properly. But not all dialogue works. Sloppy, dull dialogue that simply reproduces the way we talk every day is unreadable. Here's a conversation from real life: "Put peanut butter on the, y'know, list." "Peanut butter?!" "Yeah." "What for? I already know that, uh, we've got plenty. Lots." "Right now, maybe. Not for long, though."

"What's that supposed to mean?" "When that brother-in-law of yours gets here, we sure won't." Dialogue in fiction is not supposed to reproduce this every-day speech, it is supposed to mimic it, sounding real while actually being terser, tauter, and to the point: "Put peanut butter on the list." "We've got plenty." "Once that brother-in-law of yours gets here, we won't." Dialogue, written properly, reveals the inner thoughts of your characters, shows their conscious intentions, propels action both by causing something to happen (a change of mind, a change or heart, an action undertaken or hindered) and by enriching the connections between the characters. You can't achieve all that with description or with interior monologue. Dialogue is a universal tool: it can do everything, as long as you have at least two people. Imagine a pair of cat burglars on that window ledge and remove all the description, just for fun: "Pass me the jimmy. Okay, nice and easy..." "It won't open!" "The latch is stronger than I thought. Help me push this in further." "That ought to...oh, God, they could hear that a mile away! And it's still stuck." "One more time. Push! Now: one--two--three--" "It's...coming..." "That's it! Inside, quick!" You obviously can't write a whole novel in pure dialogue, although radio drama had to, with the occasional sound effect, and worked thrillingly, but tense, crisp dialogue with the smallest amount of supporting description will give you a limpid, muscular prose style that is clear and easy to read. It will also grip your reader far better than stodgy lumps of description. Let your dialogue tell the story: The window jumped open. They were through and into the darkness as the light in the hallway flicked on. "I ain't imagining things," Raymond was saying as he came in. "There was definitely a noise." "It's the window. Someone forgot to lock the damn thing." Bill tried to latch it. "Christ! It's busted!" "That means he's in here " "Shaddup," said Bill. A pause. "Okay, David, come on out." "Don't do this, Davey boy," Raymond pleaded to the darkness. "We're you're own flesh and blood. It ain't " "Shaddup!" David heard a click of a safety coming off. "Bill, you can't not to Da " "SHADDUP!" A faint "damn" beside him; Teresa was slipping her Beretta from her pocket. "No!" David hissed. Would you keep reading?

Style, the life and death of a writer


Style is two things. It is the way you write something, and it is the way you write. One you should work at, the other you should avoid. Let's look at the first kind of style: how you write something. "I love you," he spat. "Always will." "Me, too," said Jane. "Count on it." Their fists gripped, their gaze locked like blades. "Hell, you're sweet," he hissed. Tough-guy style, romantic content. Not really the way to tell that story, is it? The author has badly misjudged the right style. Or: It was a warm evening. The sun touched the edge of the woods and disappeared in a haze of red. Free, the vampire stepped from the house. A natural, easy style, yet this is supposed to be a High Gothic vampire story. Maybe the author is bucking the trend, or maybe he just didn't realise that style has to be appropriate to the subject: The evening was deathly hot, the air like sweat. The sun sank into the tangled grasp of the old woods and died in a slow, blood-red pool. Freed at last from the lance of day, the vampire slid like a foul breath from the tomb-like hulk that housed him. Form follows function, and the function of this story is to settle the reader into the queasy folds of a ripe and luscious tale of the undead. The second way works, the first doesn't. Style is how you tell your story. The best way to tell a story is as simply as possible, using the fewest words that convey the sense of action and character. But it's not just a task of minimising your prose. If it were, all stories would sound like newspaper articles. A story has to be told the best way for it, and if that means the foetid atmosphere of the damned has to pervade every sentence like an unholy night fog, then so be it. This doesn't mean writing to formula, making your action thriller all tough-guy prose, your romance all poetic metaphors. You are even allowed to write a story of vampires as if it were a high school comedy (or has that been done...). What it does mean is seeking a sense of fitness between your story and how you tell it. There is a "right" way and many wrong ways. Toby glanced down the hall, full of perplexed regret. His eye caught a mark along the edge of the floor; it was Old Fluff's paw print, and must have been put there last summer, a whole year ago. Dad wasn't much of a housekeeper. He had probably cleaned up only because Toby was coming again. Although it's written is a plain, clean style, and seems appropriate to the story of a boy, your sense of "rightness", of style, tells you that something isn't working. The style is that of an adult's voice, but this story seen through a child's eyes. You try telling it again a different way: Toby looked down the hall. Dad had mopped, but there was bit along the side where he never got. One of Old Fluff's paw prints from last summer was still in that bit. He felt a ball of tears inside him, tight, like the ball of worms that got pushed up through the cracks in the sidewalk after winter. He saw how the sunlight along the hall picked up every smear he'd made last summer, and it was like nothing changed in Dad's house when Toby went away. This kind of style is telling your story in the right way. What it is about and how it's told have a unity.

You know you don't have this unity when you can't seem to write easily, when the words don't flow. It's as if you're forcing something against the grain. All stories have their own styles, and what you need to do is find it for each one you write. This might involve shifting from third to first person, or setting it as a lush Victorian novel of manners, or putting it into present tense, or using deliberately pared-down language. It is only through constant writing that you get a feel for what style is needed and learn to give the story that style it needs to live. You have to cultivate a good 'ear', a sense of pitch. You also have to learn to listen to that still small voice inside, what Hemingway called the 'bullshit detector' that tells you 'this is wrong' or 'that just isn't going the right way' or 'why do I feel uncomfortable every time I re-read that section?' This is you seeking the right style. If you are thinking this way as you are re-writing, you are doing the right thing. Critics sometimes say that a young writer "hasn't found his voice". What they can't feel is a distinctive style, the way the author presents his works, the over-all sense of "writer" that a real writer gives off. Critics, like hunters, know the fragrance of a fully mature Margaret Atwood and can differentiate, even in the twilight, between this and the scent of a Stephen King gnawing something nasty in the underbrush. These authors have their distinctive styles, even though they might write individual books in different styles. Their over-arching style, their "voice", is something that is intrinsically them. Stephen King knows his contemporary America like the grit under the skin of his own eyelid. Atwood knows the hearts of the unsatisfied, the discontented, the ones on the margins, and dissects them over and over again from new angles. Their styles for each book have become a greater "style": their authorial "voice". Style is the culmination of work and thought and obsession and craftsmanship. It begins when you write your first book and it matures through your next book and your next. The stories you choose to write and the way you choose to tell them begin to be recognisable from the outside. You aren't setting out to be distinctive, you are just telling stories, but that pure motive creates something outside of you that becomes a distinctive signature, something that readers recognise, even if they can't put it into words. But be warned: a writer who concentrates on having a "style" can't, just as people who desperately want to seem cool aren't. It's the wrong goal. Many writers cease to be great when their style overtakes them, when they realise they have one and start to write to it, instead of just writing. Hemingway is an example. If a writer has derived a style out of writing the best way she can and it is distinctive enough to make people start talking about it, the writer finds it hard to resist wearing it like an identifying hat, 'her' sort of perfume, 'his' special tie. It stops being a "signature" and becomes a tic or a trope. Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, quite suddenly stopped writing forever. Asked some years later why, he said, "It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have a style." Don't let that happen. Keep your eye on your story, seek the first kind of style: the best way of telling the story, while all the time hoping that you never see the second kind looming behind you. The first gives life to your story, the second takes it away.

Historical fiction: who rules, researcher or story-teller?


You want to write historical fiction. You are intrigued by how people lived and thought in the past. What was it like to be a Varangian slave in Byzantium? Or a Confederate soldier at Gettysburg? You

also have a story to tell. A scene has popped into your head, perhaps that Varangian slave escaping over a wall, or you've become interested in a real historical person, that Confederate soldier, your great-great grandfather. You want to write that story and you know you have to do justice both to the characters and to the history or your novel will fall flat. Do you need to be one of the world's experts in Byzantine history to write about that slave? Of course not. Will reading Gone with the Wind tell you enough about the American Civil War to write your soldier's story? Of course not. If you don't want to do the research, perhaps you should think twice about writing historical fiction. If you're so absorbed in the history that you aren't really gripped by your characters, perhaps you should be writing non-fiction. But if you want to achieve that balancing act that is a good historical novel, then you need to know what history to put in and what to leave out. Let's say you're drawn to the idea of a Dutch privateer in the 16th century, one of the famous Sea Beggars who were the early heroes of the Netherlands' Eighty Years War against Spain. You should have, or acquire, a reasonable understanding of who was fighting who and why, what the politics were in each country, and what opinions were held by the population. You don't want to make a major blunder, such as not knowing if the Netherlands had a king or not (it didn't). But more important to know are the daily realities of life: what people wore, what they ate, what songs they sang, what beliefs they held. It is through these details that you will conjure your lost world and bring your characters to life. Let's assume you've been inspired by that idea of Willem, your privateer. Perhaps you saw him standing on the deck of his ship, his blond beard flying in the wind. Perhaps you saw him boarding a Spanish ship and being confronted with the Captain's intrepid daughter. Your research should begin at his skin and work out. His clothes are woolen and linen, his boots and coat leather. They're heavy, especially when wet, as they will be in a sea fight, or when cold with ice. What food does he have aboard? If he offers a meal to his Spanish captive, she'd better not be served hotdogs and a cup of coffee. You'll have to know what his weapons are. How does his pistol work? What could stop it from working? And what are the consequences of that? Is there enough time to shoot him while he frantically tries to reload? Will his captive, Maria Dolores, have time to flee, leaving him to his fate? The realities of the everyday things in your chosen time period will shape what your characters can and can't do. This will constrain your own plot choices. It's part of the challenge and joy of writing historical fiction to share with your characters the real problems, the real world, they live in. It stretches your imagination. If you aren't fussy about your details, if you think it's all right to have Willem know latitude and longitude or for Maria Dolores to carry a purse, then you aren't up to the demands of historical fiction. Your characters will not be real, your story will have no life, and you will have failed your readers. If you're that kind of writer, you'll have stopped reading this essay as soon as you hit the word 'research'. But you're that other kind of writer, the historical novelist, the one who cares. You'll have done your mountain of research both for the love of it and for the love of your story. What to do with all those cherished, hard-won facts? First, use them to develop an historically-grounded plot. Your log-line (story in a nutshell) is: pirate gets girl, pirate loses girl. He gets her by capturing her, that we've seen. How to keep them together? Willem is a privateer, a legalised pirate. Pirates want money, so he sends a ransom demand to Maria Dolores' father, who escaped in the sea battle. You've learned that communication was slow in the 16th century. By the time Willem's ransom demand reaches her father, the two will have spent some months in each other's company. What is Willem's ship like? Typical of the time: small, crowded, dirty, open. No on-board romance likely to blossom there. So where? Back on land, at his sister's house, which like any typical Dutch house has a walled courtyard, the perfect place for man to woo woman. Romance? How, between Protestant and Catholic? Religion in the 16th century could literally be a burning issue. Neither Willem or Maria Dolores will lightly give up their faith for the other. You have to accept this

hurdle to their romance. If you love history, you won't outrage historical facts. If you love writing, you won't outrage your readers. Historical realities force you to accept plot developments you might not prefer, but you know, as a writer, that a satisfying reading experience results from the consistent and logical development of your opening situation. Willem and Maria Dolores are opposites: that is their attraction and your burden. Logically, then, you'll make your plot their struggle to overcome their ingrained antipathy. Once you've created your plot, you begin to write. Knowing the realities of the small, everyday things of your time period now allows you to conjure an authenticity into Willem's and Maria Dolores' lives. Long skirts swept the floor. Willem knows she's hiding in the courtyard because he sees the lines her skirts have made in the sand his sister sprinkles on the paving tiles. Maria Dolores seizes a tankard to brain him it's leather, not metal, and her escape attempt collapses in laughter. When a Calvinist mob, incited by Willem's sister, bays for the blood of the Catholic woman hidden in their midst, Willem and Maria Dolores are able to escape across the ice in the harbour, for this is the time of the Little Ice Age, when broad rivers froze. Notice that the sand on the paving tiles, the material of the tankard, the unusually cold winter, are only included because they help propel the plot. As much as you'd love to discuss the construction of the typical Dutch house or the rise of Calvinism in the Netherlands, these aren't pertinent to the actual events in the story. It's pertinent that the leader of the mob has skates, it's pertinent that the gunpowder in Willem's pistol cakes when soaked with ice-water, it's pertinent that the woolen skirts of the time were thick and heavy enough to stop a bullet. But if a beloved fact (the wheat for their bread came from Poland) doesn't propel the action of the story, it doesn't belong. You'll use less than 20% of the facts you've researched in the events of your story, but the other 80% filling your head will give you a heightened understanding of the period, illuminating your characters and their world for you so that what the reader sees is the distillation of your sympathetic imagination, a richness condensed. The story of Willem and Maria Dolores is fairly remote from the present day, and it will involve a lot of serious historical research. What if your story is set in the 19th or 20th centuries? The problem here is too much information. How to decide what you need to know? If, say, your story is set in Colorado in 1910, you should read some good general histories of the USA from 1900 to 1910, should read the local newspapers on microfilm, if those exist, and perhaps a history of the state. Then look for 'my early days' autobiographies of people living at the time, and also read novels and magazines written from about 1905 to 1910, as these will have shaped your characters' worldviews. If you need to know specific things, such as what automobiles existed then, or how steam locomotives worked, there are plenty of resources. Focus on what your story needs, those facts that will bring it alive, but also know what could not happen in 1910: women could not vote, women never went out bareheaded, but always wore hats, all those sorts of detail you find in ordinary magazines, almanacs, advertisements, and old copies of Marshall Fields or Sears catalogues. You have riches to explore, but don't lose your head. The good historical novel is the wise selection of the right fact for the right effect. It doesn't surfeit the reader by too much information, it doesn't starve them with too little. But, in the end, it is the story that must rule. If you've swept your readers into Willem's world by judicious use of historical fact, you must hold them there because of Willem himself, because of Maria Dolores, and their struggle to love each other. If you don't engage your readers' emotions, all the research in the world is for nothing. You must make them thrill when Maria Dolores flings her heavy woolen skirts around Willem to save him from the mob's bullets as he frantically reloads, and they must weep when he stoops over her lifeless body on the ice. Historical fiction, when it is done right, when its facts are compellingly used, will take the reader into the story of real people. For all people are real if they are honestly imagined, whether in the now or in the long ago.

The doldrums: when the wind leaves your sails


At some point when writing your novel, usually when you're between a third and a half of the way, that fiery burst of energy you started with dies on you. You find yourself adrift in a calm sea without excitement, without the hunger to write, too far into it to abandon it easily, but too far from the distant shore ahead for a final surge of commitment. You're in the Sargasso Sea of writing. Around you are the decaying hulks of stories that other writers abandoned. These fragments drift past, their half-realised plots hanging in tatters from the masts, their characters, once alive and full of hope, languishing, ghostly. You stand on the deck of your own manuscript, debating whether to jump ship and condemn it to a similar fate, or to break out the oars and strive for a word, a sentence more. You might be tempted to think that there's no point in going on. The wind is gone. Your initial impulse is gone. Without it, the task seems pointless. The Doldrums are where the real writers are forged. When the going gets tough, it's the real writers who can be seen still moving out there, almost imperceptibly perhaps, but never giving up, never abandoning their ship. How do they do it? How do they find the strength to blow into their own sails, to get into that longboat and tow the hulk of their novel back into the freshening wind? First, they have a map. They know where they're going. The map is called a plot outline. They had their first hint of the Doldrums when they created it. As they came to those middle chapters, they were tempted to leave the details 'for later inspiration'. But a wise writer tackles the problem when it first appears. If you don't know where you're going, you'll find the Doldrums last forever. The real writers do their best to fill in their maps as best they can, charting courses by the latitude of motivation and the longitude of obstacle, and making sure why they'll be at every point they reach. With their plot outline spread before them, they know that, if or when they reach the Doldrums, the efforts they make to progress, no matter how small and weak, will not be wasted: every keystroke will be pushing them forward on the right course. Second, the wise writers have provisioned their novels with characters richly imagined. These characters are as real to them as their friends, perhaps more real, and even in the worst of the Doldrums the writer can't abandon them. With a compelling crew of characters, the writer finds that the Doldrums seldom last for long. In fact, writers often find their characters taking over, manning the oars when the captain loses heart, powering the story along with the force of their invented personalities. A writer who has faith in his characters, the writer who has chosen to take this journey with them because he thought they would 'go the distance', will find himself rewarded. Third, they steer by the lodestone of commitment. They don't let present despair wreck previous hopes or future plans. If a writer only wrote when the fever of creative energy was upon her, she would seldom pick up her pen. Writing a novel is like a long sea journey: you don't know what you'll encounter, but you do know that no sea is without storms, dangers, Doldrums. You pushed off from shore knowing this: now, when the Doldrums come to pass, you accept them, square your shoulders, and start blowing into those sails. The lodestone points the way even when you doubt your map and your characters. You made a commitment to yourself to see this journey to the end. That's why, in the middle of the Doldrums, you can be found, day after day, with your fingers on the keyboard, never giving up. Fourth, the real writers follow their inner star. Beyond the confines of this dreaded Sargasso Sea, even beyond the bounds of this particular novel, they have a passion that leads them, that lights their way.

This star, this inner burning core, marks the true teller of tales. It is the hunger for story. It is the need to write, even through storms and danger, clinging to the wheel, or in the windless Doldrums, inspiration lost and alone on deck, it is the need to croak, though dry-throated and without hope of seeing the end, "Once upon a time..."

The strenuous marriage (1 of 3): careful observation


"Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just carefully imagining truths you haven't had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary strict toiling with language." - John Irving In this and the two articles to follow, I will be discussing those components of the art of writing that John Irving calls careful observation, careful imagination, and the toiling with language, that is to say, what a writer brings to her work and how she does that work.

Careful Observation
Fiction writing is not merely observation, it is not reportage. But lasting fiction, even the meta-fiction that goes beyond realism, is powered by the author's accurate and original study of the world. This study, this perception, sees into the infinitely small as well as the infinitely great. This perception is the skill of observation. It is what the real writer must learn. Learning to observe means slowing down Time. Just as details reveal themselves in a slow-motion film, so too do the details of human behaviour and natural action when acutely observed and accurately remembered. You walk down a street, you see two people arguing through a restaurant window. You become a camera, recording each gesture: his hand clenched on his wineglass, her head tipped forward to make her hair fall into a shield, his direct stare over her head. You might not consciously be aware that you're taking in all these details you can't be consciously aware of everything you see every minute of the day but you find, later, that you can replay the scene in your head, can zoom in on her, zoom in on him, can replay the feelings you felt in exact detail as you watched them. Try with something that happened to you today. Choose an ordinary moment, perhaps waiting for the lights to change, perhaps watching someone buy a burger. How did the light fall across the hood of your car? Or that person buying the burger: what do you know about him? Young, cool, poor? Old, tired, disillusioned? What about the person serving him? Stressed? Impatient? What is the difference between a cocky jut of the chin and a frightened one? Observation is expanding yourself into the world. You must live in the moment to see the light across your car and the way the wind moves the wires overhead, the way being in a car makes you feel like a cyborg. You make yourself remember these things about yourself, the sense of the plastic under your legs, the smell of the hot dashboard. If you can't play back all of your senses easily, take time deliberately to turn them on. Sight, say. What sort of light illuminates a burger place and where does it lead your eye? Look at objects as if you've never seen them before. How do they make you feel? How do you think they might feel, if they had feelings? Are birds cheerful or malevolent? Thoughts like these feed your stories. Observation is the expanding yourself into other people. You must know yourself, be honest about your every emotion and impulse, for it is the sympathetic understanding between you and others, what might

almost be called the empathy, that lets you comprehend another human mind. Learn to recognise in others the outward symptoms of those inner feelings we all share. Maybe that person buying a burger reveals his stress the way you do: getting forceful, punching his finger in the air. Maybe he goes stiff and silent. You have to know the feeling, then learn the infinite ways people demonstrate that feeling. How does an elderly Chinese-American man react to stress? How does a Russian teenage girl? Observation is looking. It is not judging, guessing, or assuming. A man goes stiff and silent. Carefully observe him. Is he angry? Or embarrassed? Watch what he does and you will learn. Ah, he is apologising: he was embarrassed. So that's how that sort of man exhibits his embarrassment. When you next write about someone like him, your memory will deliver to you what you need. You might not know what the real man was thinking, but you can surmise: "He stood staring at the young woman behind the counter. What has she said? These foreign accents, he couldn't understand them, not with his hearing getting worse all the time, and she was something, Albanian, Russian, one of them. He didn't want to upset her, she could have been his grandmother come over from Canton, it was important to remember, that everyone was once new so he could help her by apologising, maybe, asking if she would say again. Apologies cost nothing." Watch actions, see the consequences. Was it a lover's tiff you saw through that restaurant window or the split second after she had blurted out that she loved him? Was it sunlight across the hood of your car or the reflection from a window? Once you have a data-bank of memories, you can use them. You can play with a memory: "What if I were a bodyguard and the light on the hood of my car suddenly moved? A gunman opening a window to take aim at my client, maybe? What would I do then?" Or you can take the tense couple in the restaurant and invent the next few sentences they might say to each other: 'I saw you with him last night.' 'So what? Jack's a friend of mine.' 'You were kissing him, Steve.' Careful observation gives you the building blocks you need to write convincing scenes in vivid prose. If you can conjure up the lighting of a burger joint, the light on a car, the facial expressions of a quarreling couple, you can encourage that trust in a reader you need. The reader will trust you because you show them a recognisable world. They will enjoy your startlingly 'right' images: "The counter gleamed like a polished locomotive and behind it, like engineers in their peaked caps and jaunty neckerchiefs, the short-order cooks jumped to the needs of roaring grills, the steaming bread ovens and whistling deep fryers, their kitchen open-throttle until midnight." The reader will be held by you because you give them insights that illuminate their lives, and so will keep reading. And that's your goal. If you can't see what's around you every day, how are you going to create a real imagined world? If you can't get inside the head of someone you're looking at, how are you going to get inside the head of someone you've made up? How are you going to write a real story unless you know the real world?

The strenuous marriage (2 of 3): careful imagination


"Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just carefully imagining truths you haven't had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary strict toiling with language."

- John Irving In the first of my three articles inspired by John Irving's words, I discussed the need for careful observation. But, as Irving says, it's not possible to see everything, not in the world right now, and not at all in the world of the past. You have to use your imagination.

Careful Imagination
Writers make things up. They are inventors of people who never lived, of actions that never occurred. They want to slip the leash on their imagination and set it bounding across unknown territories. Some writers do go into strange territories, writing what we call fantasy or magic realism, making events into metaphors. We, the writers of basic, ordinary stories, admire these masters for their strange fecundity, but we recognise that their quest is something we don't crave. What we want to do is to create convincing truths, is to imagine realities that could be, a world as real as the actual world. In my previous article I spoke of the need to render details of personal behaviour and the physical world accurately. Well-observed details are the building material for stories. You write of a man falling to pieces after the woman he loves leaves him. How does he act? If you've had a family member or friend who's suffered this fate, you can recreate this reality, create an accurate portrait of a person's world cracking into shards. You can tell this story convincingly and movingly, sweeping your willing readers with you. That is careful observation. Now let's suppose you've never seen someone fall apart like that. Now you're writing a story that needs that scene. How can you imagine what it's like? You start by plumbing the depths of your own psyche for a similar event. We learn jealousy, loss, rage and love before we're five years old. But maybe you're lucky enough never to have felt terrible grief or despair. You read how other writers have portrayed it, but that's only a guide. All you can turn to is your imagination. Or you have a character, a cowgirl in the Old West, say, fallen from her horse, her leg broken, who must get back to the ranch to warn her father that renegades are near-by, bent on running off the herd. You live in a city: you've never been on a horse, you've never been called upon to display stark physical courage. How are you going to create that harrowing trek, how are you going to glue your readers to their seats, keeping them with your protagonist across every agonised inch of prairie? You can't call upon a shared experience, but you can call upon imagination. Imagination is the ability to conjure truths from thin air. Truths, because they are within the bounds of reality we all accept every day. Truths, because they are logically consistent with the circumstances you have established within your story. A man falling apart after a rejection can do many things: he can harden, he can drink, can shrink inside his life, can swear revenge, can become obsessed with his pain. A man falling apart shows something. What does your character show? How do you show him showing it? You do it by sliding yourself into his skin. You get to know what he knows, to see what he sees, then you stretch yourself, using every particle of your understanding of human nature, into anticipating what he will do next. Let's say you've invented a passionate man, touchy, proud, a man who's never before lost anything important before. The woman he loves has left him, has thought him unworthy. What does this man do? Think. Feel. What is the obvious next step? He doesn't resign himself, no, that's not his style. He's the type that vows revenge, vows to hurt the way he's been hurt. You've carefully imagined his response: now all you have to do is show that response in action, and suddenly you're telling your story.

And that cowgirl, down in the grass with her horse run off. Yes, you must do the same thing: get into her skin. And more than that, you have to get into the landscape. You think of the sky darkening to the west. Just the sort of weather a renegade could hide his actions in. She hasn't much time. Think. Feel. There's a creek nearby: all ranches are built near water. She drags herself there, where there'll be cottonwood trees. What keeps her going, as she binds her leg to a stick to keep it straight, as she uses her pistol to shoot off a high branch to be used as a crutch? Think, feel. She's fueled by pride, fear, by a sense of honour that demands courage, that won't let her give up. In other circumstances it might have been too stiff a sense of honour, perhaps could even have been called arrogance, but here it feeds her strength. She's on the move, and you are with her, feeling the same pain, narrowing your world to the next ridge, the next step. You keep it feeling so real that when you finish writing it, you'll look up from your desk, exhausted. Imagined truths first have to convince you, the writer. If you cry, if you glow with satisfaction, if you shudder with pain, so will your readers. Careful imagination keeps each action real, keeps it authentic, keeps it in check by comparing it to what you know is true. You've never hobbled across the prairie on a crutch, a thunderstorm blackening the sky above you, but you know that you wouldn't start to sing and dance, you wouldn't start to fly, you wouldn't pretend to be a rabbit. Your actions would be sane, logical, in keeping with the sort of person you are and the motivation goading you. So your cowgirl keeps moving, maybe crying a little when she stumbles, but refusing to give in even when (and here you have to imagine a storm that's as real to your readers as anything they've been in) the wind sharpens and cools, when the air fills with that ozone stink that warns of lightning coming. Imagination: the careful construction of what you haven't had the chance to see, know, or do, based on what you have. The imagination to think: what if I were an angry man, hurt, obsessed with revenge, what would I do? Strike at my once-beloved, yes, aim to ruin all she holds dear. If I had doubts, I'd stifle them, I'd ride myself harder, hold my weakness in contempt. Does this mental action ring true to you, the writer? Does it seem realistic that this man would do this? Careful imagining means knowing a person has many choices, but that he will choose one that is entirely in keeping with the person he is. It might be exciting to have your character murder the woman who rejected him, but that's not really what he'd do. His pride is twisted honour, just as revenge is twisted love. He wants to see her suffer but mostly he wants to see her. Imagination is combining your wealth of observation and your lifetime of watching people and things with your innate sense of how people work, what seems logical human behaviour, combining them towards the direction of narrative. After all, you aren't trying to imagine people and weather for mental exercise, you're trying to tell a story. You want to tell a story that convinces the reader that this could happen, could even have happened to them, had they been there. You want to conjure up a world that they don't want to leave. Every step towards the climax of your story has to have them agreeing, accepting, wanting more, so each step has to be imagined with immaculate care, with no out-ofcharacter mis-steps, no bloopers, nothing that makes your readers pause or makes them frown in disbelief or puzzlement. You must imagine truths in your invented world that could just as easily be truths in the real world. All this is real: a young woman in pain, struggling to get home; a prairie storm, frightening in its power; a man bent on revenge, using the storm as cover for his strike against all his beloved cherishes. Lightning stabs down as the man and his gang gallop towards the ranch. In its sudden light he sees her hobbling on a crutch to try to save her ranch from him, and she sees him, the man her pride sent away. Use your imagination. What happens next?

The strenuous marriage (3 of 3): strict toiling with language


"Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just carefully imagining truths you haven't had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary strict toiling with language." - John Irving In the first and second of my three articles inspired by John Irving's words, I discussed the need for careful observation and the need for precise imagination. But all the acute observation and brilliant imagination in the world will come to nothing if you can't convey your images, characters and the narrative action to your readers.

Strict Toiling with Language


You've just seen a foggy winter's day and have carefully observed it. It has inspired you: it's will help the scene-setting opening of your next ambitious novel, the one that will feature a set of characters diverse in their class, their attitudes, and their fortunes, all involved in a theme of ignorance, unknowingness, and obtuseness, where the world is a labyrinth and the only true guide is love. That fog is going to be your opening, defining scene. You carefully imagine what would be in that London of 1840. Carriages, ships, farmers in the lands around, poor people suffering from the cold, and one of your central characters, revealed in the midst of all of it. Welding together observation and imagination, you write: It was dark with wet fog, with winter rain, with soot, and mud was everywhere, making walking hard and horrible for horses and pedestrians. The fog made the ships in the river docks indistinct, made the low estuarine land cold and uninviting, made everyone on those ships shiver, made those on shore huddle near their fires, if they were lucky enough to be indoors and not in the fields. It was a dull, nasty day in November, and the Lord Chancellor sat, part of the fog and gloom, closed off in his room in the heart of the city. Gosh, that certainly summons up the dim, oppressive misery of that day in a specific time and place, doesn't it? All that careful observation and imagination let down by third-rate language. Language is the only thing you have. It is your single instrument, your tool kit. If a carpenter turned up to do building work with a wonky hammer, a rusty chisel and a single screwdriver, you'd rightly dismiss him as a joke, yet novice writers set to work with a poor vocabulary, a shaky grasp on grammar and spelling, and a slender acquaintance with punctuation with the confidence that they are adequately equipped to write a novel. I don't think so. Good writing is more than knowing a semi-colon from a period, a subjunctive from a future tense. It's knowing these so well that they are like a dancer's muscles: so exercised, so trained, that the dancer need only concentrate on what he has to express, paying no mind to the muscle actions he has to make to express them. Strict toiling with language begins with learning your tools. I have yet to meet the real writer who did not love words for themselves alone. Real writers have decided, sometimes impassioned, views as to the best use to be made of the ellipsis, the colon, the past imperfect, or indirect speech. Real writers keep teaching themselves the rules of good writing and keep practising what they have learned. This is

part of the strict toil. You can never become complacent; you must always be learning, striving for higher mastery. A real writer reads the best writing he can find from past masters, from present colleagues and from rivals to know both what he is aiming for and how those others have achieved what he is seeking to achieve. He is never too proud to sit at the feet of his betters. This is not to imitate them or to steal from them, but to appreciate the ways in which language can be used. The way Henry James shows a character realising that she is trapped in a circumstance of her own making is very different from that of Barbara Kingsolver or Eudora Welty, but how they each do this are lessons a real writer wants to learn and learns. But good writing is more than good grammar, a wide vocabulary, an expert understanding of good writing from others, and the confidence to use them. It means cultivating an ear for the right sounds and training your eye for the look of the words on the page. You need to develop the sense of the rhythm of the paragraphs and chapters, an understanding of the pace and swing of the narrative. When the flow turns a little sour or strikes a dead note, you have to train yourself to spot it, to know what went wrong, and to deal with it. Language takes hard work at both the macro and micro level. You have to learn to 'feel' your story as a whole and to be able to sustain a voice throughout. You also have to be able to zoom into a single sentence, a single comma, and make a considered decision. Cut or not to cut? Reverse verb and noun? Alter the subordinate clause? You'll find yourself debating over one adverb ("she said sarcastically? sardonically? caustically?") as much as you do over the over-all structure of the narrative. A real writer doesn't pretend to be a genius. He assembles a tool kit: an etymological dictionary, a thesaurus, grammars, slang dictionaries, literary references such as Brewers, books of quotations, books of aphorisms, a spelling dictionary and he uses them. Strict toil is feeling that scene, feeling the shape of it as it is and as it is within the whole of the novel. If that ambitious novel of yours is to be a long, complex one, full of detail, each scene has to be a microcosm of this, filled with specific detail and language that sets the mood. Strict toil, because you have to work at it. You have to rewrite and rewrite until you can't face going through that manuscript one more time and then you go through it one more time. Toil: you might revise a sentence ten times, the opening five pages twenty times, testing it against the carefully imagined scene in your mind's eye, comparing what you've written to that mental image until you have made as perfect a match with it as you can. Strict, because you don't let yourself off the hook until you get it right. Only you can keep yourself to a standard, only you can set that standard. Strict toiling, yes, and the real writer would not trade one agonised hour of it for all the easy work in the world. What could that raw winter day in old London be like? Here's what one strict toiler wrote: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their timeas the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Yes, it's Dickens. I guess you'd call him a real writer.

The three abouts


A writer, say all the writing manuals, should start writing with a synopsis. He should start with his characters already fully fleshed out in his mind. he should know what's going to happen. All of this is good advice, and true. What the writer shouldn't know is what the story is about. "What?" I hear you cry. "How does someone write a story when he doesn't know what it's about?" There are three "abouts" to every story. The writer has to know the first one, has to learn the second, and has to accept the third. The first 'about', to borrow a term from scriptwriting, is the "log line." This is a one-sentence summary that says who the protagonist is, what the opening dilemma is, and what the conclusion is: "Reavi, a street-wise thief, overhearing a sorcerous plot to overthrow good Queen Tolvodua, outwits Murg, leader of the evil sorcerers, saves the Queen and becomes her Consort." There's your story summarised in a log line: a canny pickpocket, a noble queen, a few evil sorcerors, a never-a-dull-moment plot, plus a happy ending. All you have to do is sort out what happens in each of the twenty chapters and the story will practically write itself. Easy. But as you write about Reavi's death-defying adventures, you'll find a curious thing happening. As you struggle to bring him, not to mention Tolvodua and Murg, to life, you'll start to think about their ethical and moral dimensions. You'll have to if you want to give your plots twists and turns and provide a nail-

biting ending. To make your story work, you have to know why Reavi risks his life to save his queen. More importantly, you'll find you have to know why the evil sorcerers, especially Murg, are scheming against her. You want Murg to be a real human being, not a cartoon baddie, so you find yourself delving as deeply into him as you do into Reavi. They both have to be complex, driven by good and bad motives, hindered by their own fears. And what of Queen Tolvodua herself? They all challenge you to create them properly, to let them act like real people torn by conflicting passions, loves, pride, and ambition. As you rewrite and rewrite, the moral issues become clearer to you. You see how you can tie everything together, make everything "work," by using the idea that people's defences against their own hurts becomes their weaknesses. Rejection becomes, in Murg, vindictiveness. Jealousy of Murg's powers has made Tolvodua harsh. Reavi is cunning, but it prevents him from trusting anyone. You weave this motif into all your character's actions to give your story a satisfying unity. This is your second 'about', the 'about' you discover as you tell yourself the story. As it happens, you find yourself a publisher and soon the novel "Reavi the Thief" hits the bookstores. You read reviews about your book, scan the readers' comments in on-line bookstores, get feedback at readings and by letter. You discover that people are seeing something in your story that you never saw, never even guessed was there. The reviewers comment on the way your story parallels the Cold War. You go "Huh?" Readers say what they liked was the way Tolvodua took over the story. Your mind boggles. You keep being told such weird things about your story that you wonder if they're reading the book you wrote. Can't they see the motif? It's right under their nose. Over time, if your book lasts, you find a consensus forming on what "Reavi the Thief" is "really" about. You learn that the commonwealth of readers has decided that the theme of your book is: "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." You are amazed. You ask, "Did I mean that? Was that truth in there?" Yes, it was. But it was there only because you created a fully complex world, because you opened yourself up to the moral complexities of your characters, because you were willing to let the motif shape the log line or, to put it another way, you let the growing wisdom of the story itself shape its plot. It is not the writer's business to decide what the theme, the third great 'about', of his book is. That is the readers' job. The writer has to choose the log line and then be adventurous and brave enough to accept what his story is telling him. The theme lies like a vein of gold within the story; formed by the pressures and fantasies weaving in the writer's brain, it lies waiting to be found. The theme is where the reader creates the writer.

Details, Details
Accuracy of observance is one of the hallmarks of the good writer. Accuracy rests on the acute and sensitive observation of detail. A writer has to train herself to see, and to remember, the details that give insight, that reveal more than just colour or size. A single detail should be both a description and an insight into the personality of a character: the lines on his face and why they're there; the way she listens to a symphonyand what she's feeling. The trick is to choose the right details to tell. Detail doesn't mean every single thing about a character or place: 'He had brown hair two inches long at the top, tapering to a razor cut at the back of the neck, a forehead three inches from hairline to eyebrows, ears of average size set slightly higher than average on the sides of his skull...' This, of course, is absurd, and also tells us nothing about the character.

Not does a foolish exactitude: 'He had hair the colour of oak leaves five days after they begin to change colour in the autumn and eyes the shade of green found along the edges of New Zealand mussels' is both ludicrous and unrevealing. 'Thin laugh lines bracketed his stern mouth' reveals character because it gives the reader insight into the character. Again: 'As she sat listening to the symphony, her hands tore the programme into jagged fragments' gives us both the act a single detail of behaviour and the mentality behind the act. 'The porch sagged from the front of the farmhouse like an old, comfortable stomach, its stovepipe jutted above the weathered roof like a cowlick' is all the reader needs to know about this building. It also gives a hint about the sort of people who live there. Details ought to be powerful, and therefore must be used sparingly. Bill remembered the afternoon Angie came. The dandelion heads were blowing fields of white feathers into the hot August wind. Behind him, the screen door opened and banged, opened and banged, as if fighting its instinct to be welcoming. He watched the taxi, halfhidden in its own dust, turn by the herd of mailboxes and rock along the straight rutted road to the house. It sagged to one side the way Ralph's taxi sagged when a big person sat in it, but when Angie got out Bill figured her no bigger than the girl on the billboard towards town who measured up small against the Dr Peppers bottle. Small, but town dressed. He had guessed her larger, based on Ma's talk. This isn't just a picture of a male watching a taxi deliver a female visitor, it's the picture of a poor, rural farm-boy watching a dangerous woman approach. The details: the dandelions, the screen door, the mismatch of sagging taxi and small woman, create a picture of disharmony, of more than is said in this single scene, of what will be revealed as the story continues. Detail is exactitude. 'The old farm house had a screen door' is not exact enough to conjure the image for us. 'The old farm house had screen door that banged as cheerfully as a baby with a spoon and a saucepan' gives us better detail, a better understanding of the house and its inmates. 'Angie wore a spotted dress, a little jacket and a hat' gives us a picture without an edge, without sharpness, but 'Angie wore a white dress with a dozen big red spots, a little red jacket with short puffed sleeves, and a red straw hat with white feathers raised like a fighting cock's comb' tells us much more about this stranger who has arrived at the old farmhouse. Detail is character. 'Bill wore his baseball cap yanked low over his eyes'; 'Bill wore his baseball cap back so far the bill pointed to the sky.' Your readers will have a very different experience if the first Bill is your protagonist rather than the second Bill. Detail is language. 'She stepped on the torn programme.' 'She trod on the torn programme.' 'She ground the torn programme under her heel.' 'She scuffled the torn programme like a gum wrapper stuck to her sole.' You have to convey not just what your character is doing, but exactly what she is doing, with as few words as possible, and you must also be conveying your character's mentality at the same time. 'He called to his mother, "Angie's here"' or 'He called to his mother, 'Miss Angie's got here."' what is the difference? The precise difference? Those two words 'Miss' and 'got' imply powerlessness (the need for respect) resistance (she got here unfortunately), even defensiveness. It is that exact detail, that exact use of language, that turns a narrative into a vibrant story. Detail is interpreted description: He took the cigar from it cellophane, rolled it thoughtfully as if he could hear the mellowness of the leaves through the tips of his fingers, then struck a long match with one inward-curling stroke that almost took its head off. It flared into panicked flame. He looked at the slender fire as he inhaled one, twice, his lips pursing, inhaled a third time as if he would stand no more nonsense. The match was dismissed into its dish of sand and he sat

back to enjoy his first slow puffs. If this man is a manager in an insurance company, we have a good idea of the sort of boss he is. If he's a bicycle messenger, we have a good idea of the sort of man he aspires to be. You could merely have described the rolling of the cigar, the length of the match flame, even the brand, but it is the interpretive details that tell us what we need to know. We haven't learned everything: how he clips the end of his cigar, where he is while he smokes, what he wears, and we don't need to. We have his measure. We reveal ourselves every minute by the way we sit, watch television, tap our foot. We judge places and people by the way they stand in line, the way the door bangs, the smell the dust smells in the August heat. 'As she approached, he watched her study the house' gives us one level of detail. 'As she approached, he watched her measure the windows of the house as if for new curtains' takes us to another layer of understanding. Find the details, the exact details, the pertinent details, the details that reveal more than the one aspect of what you are describing, and you will have seized the secret heart of creating reality. A story that is fully conjured up becomes world so compelling that your readers, almost without realising it, will find themselves not merely reading, but experiencing it. So much so that, when they come to The End, they will look up, blink, and find the real world so much less real than the one you have made.

Microwave writing
Elmore Leonard coined the phrase 'microwave writing'. What he meant by it you can see in his novels. Here's what I take it to mean. You want to roast a chicken. You can turn on your oven, let it heat up, stick the chicken in the middle of it and wait an hour until the extreme heat has made those chemical changes that turn a raw chicken into a cooked one. Or you can put it in a microwave at the right setting and in twenty minutes you have a roast chicken. The oven took a long time and wasted a lot of energy to do what the microwave did in a short time. The oven needs to heat up and cool down. The microwave is on in an instant, then off in an instant. Your story can either be the oven or the microwave. The chicken is still going to cook, but it depends on how hungry you are. In the days of whiskered writers such as Trollope, people were content to wait a long time to start to eat, and took a long time to finish a meal. Now, we want food fast and we eat it fast. And we understand fast. If a movie or a story is slow, we say: 'C'mon, cut to the action. What's taking so long?' Let's say you're writing a thriller. You've started: Joey settled back, his empty pasta plate evidence of Mama Rosa's famous good cooking. Mama had been here since he was a little boy, when his uncle Frank would bring him here to eat and get used to men's talk. Joey liked it here. It had always better than home, even then. Mama Rosa didn't care about table manners. She liked men to eat and enjoy. And Joey had enjoyed it. Right now, he was finishing his cold beer when he saw Spanish Dan's youngest girl across the room. Joey had known her since forever, because Spanish Dan had always hung out with Frank and all the other uncles Joey had by blood or otherwise, until that all came to an end in the big feud. Spanish Dan had been in Rikers Island for years. But there was Carla, looking great, and looking right at him. She was pointing at him. It was a gun pointing. Joey felt the bullet go through him before the noise hit his ears. The last thing he saw before he passed out was his plate, sauce and blood rich and red.

When he came to, he was in a cold, hard place. The smell of blood was all around. His own? He remembered getting shot. Heavy shapes were hanging over his head like weighted ghosts. He blinked and focused. Sides of beef, swaying on their hooks. He was in a truck. If this were a gentle stroll down memory lane, fine. But it's not. It's a thriller. Were you thrilled? Try this: Joey looked across his empty plate to see Spanish Dan's daughter looking at him. He'd known her before Spanish Dan went to Rikers Island. Long before. Nice family place, Mama Rosa's. Everybody came here. Carla was looking great. She was looking at him. Pointing. Pointing something. Joey felt the bullet before he heard the shot. Blood flooded his plate. He woke up in the back of a meat truck. Notice something? No build up. The characters, the setting, the action, bang, then it's on to the next scene. No fuss, no waste of time. The story has started and it's cooking from the first word. You can tell a story two ways. You can explain it or you can show it. The first example explained it, putting everything into context. The second one showed it. Joey doesn't explain his world to himself. He knows it. The writer has to give the reader enough of what Joey sees and knows to let them get what is going on, but no more than that. Think of your story like a lot of video clips. Clip one: Joey gets shot by Carla, a woman he knows. Clip two: Joey is taken to a warehouse in a meat truck but escapes, thinking that Carla is his enemy, that he can't trust anyone. Clip three: Joey needs explanations: he tracks and finds Carla. Clip four: Joey and Carla decide to end their criminal families' feud. And so on. These first four clips could be four short chapters, or four scenes in the first chapter. It's up to you. End one, start the next. If you write: Joey spent the next week recuperating in the back of the abandoned trailer, living off water from the gas station's tap and long-life cheese sandwiches from the station's food court cooler, feeling his strength come back, feeling his anger cool and his sympathy for Carla build. It wasn't her fault. Spanish Dan had a long reach, even from prison. And Family could mean more than life itself. then you have written a paragraph that needs to be demolished. Remember, it's a thriller, a story that's supposed to grab the reader and not let go. Video clips. Show, cut, show. Don't explain. OK, you're saying, I get it. Thrillers have to be tough and fast. But what about a romance? I'd sound crazy if I said: She saw him across the room. She wanted him. Always had. He was the one. Forever. Too bad. You'd say that this wasn't appropriate for a romance, that readers expect a gentler pace more suited to the story, to wit: She looked at him where he sat at his ease. The length of the room separated them, and yet she felt as if they were the only two in the restaurant, as if she were right beside him, feeling his strong presence. How many times had they sat across from each other at a table so small that their hands naturally brushed, so small that nothing could distract them from each other? Then her father had decided that he needed a bigger world and she had been

torn helplessly away but wait, Joseph was lifting his head he was looking at her, a look that warmed his eyes as he recognised her. Her heart twisted like a beam of white light broken through a prism: her refuge, her love, the man meant to be hers as far from her as surely as if he were dead. Eyes blurring with tears, she opened her purse, groping inside for what would help her meet her inescapable destiny. A gentler pace. So you're saying it's all right to bore your readers because it's about love? I don't think so. Microwave it, don't slow-cook it. Life moves fast, even when you're in love: She looked at him across the restaurant, after so long still feeling as if she sat with him at an intimate table. He lifted his head. His eyes warmed as he recognised her. Her heart twisted as she opened her purse, hand fumbling on the cold weight. You've given the same information in the second example as in the first. Not every twig on the tree, but enough to know that these two people were once close. You don't want to spell out everything here. It's about the moment, not a history lesson. Let's say our heroine rushes from the restaurant in tears, frightened and appalled, hides in her apartment, remembering all the good times with the man she loves. He finds her, and she is stunned by remorse and surprise. "I I never thought I'd see you again." "Do you think death would keep us apart?" She buried her face against his rough shirt. "It has. The curse of it. Deaths we can't escape." His hand was on her hair. "That doesn't need to be our business. Leave that behind. We can finish this, now, and be together." "Romeo and Juliet?" She pulled back, blinking hard on tears. "They killed themselves." "So you tried a variation." He shrugged and grinned. Intimacy can be conveyed without flowery language and excessive detail. 'He smiled, and the sun rose in her heart' conveys more powerfully the change in her than: 'He smiled, and she felt her whole essence warm in it and come to flower, as if the sun were lifting over the horizon and filling everything in her world with warmth and light.' The first example is more powerful because it's compact. The second example takes too long to say what it means, and I for one nod off. Microwave writing means starting the scene where it starts, not a second before or after. You don't need to 'build up' to the scene. And you don't need to 'tail off'. When it's over, it's over. You don't need to write bridging passages to get the characters from one scene to the next. Movies have long dispensed with the titles 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch' or 'Comes the dawn...'. If they can do without explanatory bridges, so can you. "Are you coming with me?" He put on his coat. "I can't leave New York. They'd know. They'd find me." He smiled. The innocent Miami sun was hot on her cheek. "There's the Paradise Hilton," she said, turning to the constant miracle of him beside her. You could have said: "Are you coming with me?" He put on his coat.

"I can't leave New York. They'd know. They'd find me." He smiled. She could never resist him and couldn't now. She quickly changed and packed a bag. They drove to the airport, where he picked up two tickets, and they were soon high over the eastern seaboard, heading south to Miami. She felt as if she were in a dream, coming into the hot Miami sun so soon after the cold, dark days in New York, those days without hope. He opened the door of the rental car for her and gave her a map. Content flooded her. Such a small gesture, yet meaning so much. She read off the streets as he drove. Looking up, she suddenly saw the hotel. "There, that's the Paradise Hilton," she said, turning to him, and was struck again that he was with her. It was a miracle, a dream that wasn't ending. That's the way you'd expect a story to cook in an oven: slowly, with lots of unnecessary steam and heat, all its juice drying up, making it dull, dull, dull. Microwave writing means putting just the right amount of energy into the ingredients, that is, the characters, the setting, the action, the conflict, ensuring that they change just enough for that scene and have the potential to keep changing. It's hard to do. It means thinking about every scene, because each scene has to mean something, to do something, to propel the narrative. No scene can be padding. That's not cooking it, that's stuffing it. If you've written a fine scene where the two lovers are snuggled in the stern of a fishing boat, sharing a beautiful afternoon on a tranquil, sunny sea, and nothing happens but that, then you've wasted a lot of heat that hasn't changed any of the ingredients. Change it, get that dull afternoon out of the oven and into the microwave: She seemed to have been nestled in his arms forever, the sound of his heart and the slap of small waves on the hull like peaceful clocks marking no time at all. He jolted slightly, his muscles suddenly iron. "Carla, get your gun." She had seen the dark blot on the horizon. "How do you know ?" "It's coming straight at us. Must be them." He leaned for the controls. "We can't outrun them." She felt whitened by fear. "What will you do? What can we do?" "Let them get real close." Joey turned and grinned. "After all, I know how effective a Beretta can be at short range." Microwave writing lets you pack a punch that slow-cooked writing can't deliver. Cut to the essential. Cut everything but the essential. Turn on your power, focus it, tell the story, and nothing but the story, rich, concentrated, cooked down to its essentials. That's the feast your readers will savour.

Rewriting
You've finished your novel. Well done! Now it's time to get to work. Work? you protest. OK, you say, maybe a bit of tinkering, but the work is over. Sorry. Unless you're a genius, you are mistaken. Your manuscript in its first draft is merely the raw material for the final book. Your first draft is a shapeless lump of inspiration and creation, poured hot from the fires of your mind

and heart. Now it is cooling and, like iron, must be beaten into its final state before the heat goes out of it. Some people begin to rewrite straight away. Some put it away first, then come back when their eye has become more objective. If you lose interest in your story when you put it away after the first draft, then begin to rewrite at once. There will come a stage later when you know it has to spend time in the deep freeze before you can see anything new. Let's concentrate on that raw first draft. What should you do? First, read the whole thing through, jotting notes to yourself as you go, not attempting to tinker with specific problems right now. What you are looking for in this first read-through is faults in consistency, pacing, connections, and drama. Faults in these areas have to be solved first before you tinker with the language. Consistency covers many things. Are the details constant, or does somebody's hair change colour halfway through the story? Is the flow of time clear? Do people speak in the same way throughout? You might have an inner-city gang member suddenly forget to speak in slang. Are motivations consistent? Is each character's journey through the story an intelligible arc, or does one of them have an unaccounted-for change in personality or motivation? Are there characters wandering through the story doing a little of this, a little of that, for no consistent reason? This leads to pacing. Beginning writers tend to panic about making their story long enough, so they stuff the story full of Styrofoam to bulk it out, that is, they wedge filler between the action. Styrofoam does not nourish the reader. It's boring. As you read through your draft, mark the passages where you became impatient or bored. Your story should be a climb from that first moment when your protagonist is impelled to act to the final resolution of his initial reason for acting. Anything that fails to push the narrative to the next stage slows the pace. If there are long, slow sections that could be removed without injuring the flow of action, make a note to remove them. Better still, take the red pen of death and slash through them. Connections. Have you built them in? Connections between characters, such as showing why two people are falling in love, or why two people are enemies. Connections with a place (what is it between Scarlett O'Hara and Tara?). Connections between your background events and your foreground story, such as having background historical events mirror or counterpoint your protagonist's action (e.g. the shooting of JFK occurring as your hero loses his political innocence in Vietnam). Foreshadowing is also a connection, tying together early and later actions. If you see places where you can insert or strengthen connections to the enrichment of the story, jot them down as you read. Delivery. If you have set something up earlier in the story, it needs a 'pay-off' later. This could be as small as a character, who has bought a guitar for the son of the woman he's dating, listening to the boy playing it at the end of the story. The pay-off is not just closing this loop, but what you can do with it: the man finds himself proud of the boy's dedication to learning a skill; the boy has become his son. Delivery is important in small things, but crucial in big things. If your story is of a woman who is being stalked, and you make a point of mentioning that she was an archery champion when she was in high school, you can't leave this hanging: you have to show her using this skill to defend herself. Why else did you put it in? You might not have been sure why in Draft One, but re-writing is the time to find out what your sub-conscious planted for you. Foreshadowing is one kind of delivery: the archery skills carefully placed earlier needs the pay-off, but there are grace notes that can lift a story, small things that make the reader nod or go 'ah' in satisfaction. If your story is about a man who leaves a difficult marriage for a new relationship, and the narrative concerns that second relationship and the ways he learns, through new love, to forgive, understand and

appreciate his first wife as a person, then you might have a tiny scene very early on where the first wife gives him a crazily-decorated iced cupcake on his birthday, as is her tradition. Several years later, as the story ends, when the man has made peace in his life, a courier interrupts the preparations for a party: it is a decorated cupcake: the forgiveness has gone both ways. These little touches come in the re-writing; they are the delicate brush-strokes that bring your canvas to precise art. Other forms of delivery are the 'promises' you need to keep. If you are writing a thriller, the pace has to get quicker and quicker, the tension has to rise, until the reader is reading breathless, unable to put your book down. That's what readers buy thrillers for: to be thrilled. If you find your thriller pacing along as stately as a dowager duchess, you aren't delivering. In the same way, a slow and gentle journey of growing wisdom in a young man learning from his second marriage should not rush to its finale, although it does need to swell to a moment of enlightenment, an epiphany. In the inital rush to complete your first draft, you may have put in a lot of things that have the potential to become one of these delivered loops. In the rewriting, as you get the feel and pulse of the story, you decide which ones to keep. Perhaps your protagonist was good at a number of sports; you drop the archery set-up as too exotic and leave in soft-ball because, later, it works better to have her throw something hard and fast to defend herself than to shoot an arrow. Drama is what a story is all about. If it doesn't entertain, it doesn't deserve to live. Is there conflict of some sort in every scene of your first draft? Do you care about the people you should care about? Or did you go off the rails somewhere? A story that has slipped its leash and gone on a frolic of its own tends to have no dramatic structure. It's becomes one darn thing after another. The difference between a story and a tale is that the story is crafted, and the tale "jest growed." A story is sustainedly gripping by design, a tale, if at all, by accident. Having read through your first draft with these four aspects in mind, you can now begin rewriting. Start at the first page and do all the changes you pointed out to yourself, checking always for consistency as you alter details. Print out the revised version and go through it again. And again. Start honing the language, removing the deadwood (such as unnecessary qualifiers, descriptions, and interior monologue) and trying to make every sentence both fresh and concise. If you haven't yet put the manuscript away for a rest, do so after four or five rewrites. Your eye and inner ear will need the break, and you will be more ruthless when you return to it. When everything is fixed as much as you can fix it, look again at the first five or ten pages of the first chapter, especially the first five paragraphs. Are they as enticing and gripping as you can possibly make them? Do they pull the reader into the story? Your opening scene is your only chance of capturing a reader, so it has to be right. And then you're done. How many re-writes do you need to do? Some people do three or four, others a dozen. Always do one more than you think you can bear to do. Then send it out. Once an editor accepts it, you'll begin rewriting all over again!

Paper: the re-writer's power tool


Your computer might be subverting your writing. It saves you time and makes writing easy, but it doesn't support the self-editing habits and disciplines required to produce a good novel. The screen is a linear window. You can only see a small chunk of your work at a time, and you must scroll up and down. It's hard to lay two non-contiguous pages beside each other (though you can do so

with two windows). It's hard to get a 'feel' for the work as a whole. It's hard to catch errors, repetitions, developments started but not finished, bad ideas, and long, boring chunks of writing. You can get trapped in a series of little boxes and lose the fact that this is a novel: a long narrative with a complex, developing, inter-woven structure (yes, it is). Some of you may be able to re-write and self-edit brilliantly on screen. But I suspect that even you geniuses will find working on a paper manuscript enlightening. All writers can benefit from moving their inner world into the material world. What's to be gained by working on paper? A higher-quality editing process, leading to a betterconstructed, more tightly written, less self-indulgent story. Don't think so? Go ahead, print out your story, and have a read. First things first. Kids, don't do this with a partial story. Finish it before you begin. Then set it up properly by formatting it in the way you will submit it: double-spaced, preferably in Courier New (or Times New Roman), one-inch margins, with a running head and page numbers top right, the text left aligned, with no bold and all italics indicated by underlining. It's useful to work in the format you be using with your agent or editor, so you might as well get used to it now. Print it off. Your first reaction might be: wow, that's a lot of paper! It's good to meet your creation in physical form. This is what you have brought into being. This is what you must mold and shape. Printing it out makes your novel, in a strange way, more real. It becomes a thing, a job, something that will eventually be detached from you. If you are looking at 1000 pieces of paper, you are facing your first problem: you've written too much. The screen can hide the sheer length of your story, but paper tells you the truth. That huge stack is telling you to start trimming. If you've printed out 102 pages, and the last one says 'The End', then you aren't looking at a novel, but perhaps the little seed of something that will grow. Or not. Now start reading. Reading your work on paper will bring to light many things you need to address. As you turn over the pages, you'll be experiencing your story much as your readers will. Things look differently on paper. Words have a different weight. The passages that you can scroll over on screen with a flick of a finger might now strike you as long. Very long. Too long. There seems to be a lot of physical distance between action A and action B, or not enough. Paper can reveal pacing problems the screen hides. You might see that you've inadvertently created jarring juxtapositions. You describe a lovely crimson sunset and then a bloody fistfight with much the same imagery. "Crimson", "a splash of", "oozing" and so on. They resonate together in their paper closeness in an uncomfortable way, a way you never noticed on the screen. Or you might notice repetitions. You didn't pick them up on-screen, but on paper you realise that that you've used "she blushed modestly" five times in fifty pages. Its easy to repeat yourself when you lose the sense of the physical nature of a novel. On paper, these stand out as the blemishes they are. All those sentences you started with "But": there they are, like wads of bubblegum: But But But But But. Or "Suddenly she realised", "Suddenly she turned to him", "She stopped suddenly'" "Suddenly it stopped raining". Suddenly you decide not to use so many "suddenlys". Inconsistencies jump out at you on paper. She's Lydia Hotchkess up to page 134, then Lydia Hotchkiss for the rest of the story. He turns into the driveway left one time, right another time. Where is that house, left or right? A character might appear as if from nowhere. Or disappear. (To cut him out

altogether, or to write him back in? You can decide, now you've spotted it.) If the old lady was walking towards the library in town in chapter two, how did she get home fast enough to spot him sneaking through her back door in chapter three? It can be shocking how many of these slips you don't catch on screen. The screen is like a gentle stream: it's all the same, it flows, it's easy to scroll on and on and on, it lulls you into a state of not noticing, and that makes it hard for mistakes to shout at you. Paper allows you to concentrate on the words. Each separate word. The look of them as they lie on the page. You might see that too many of your paragraphs are dauntingly long. Or you can see that each page is a shower of short paragraphs, single lines, stuttery, as if you can't sustain a narrative flow. The pages look jumpy. Your eye senses the jaggedness and doesn't like it. Now that you are seeing that your story looks wrong, you can start to fix it, clumping those short paragraphs together, or cutting those massive paragraphs into livelier little ones. Whatever the physical problems of your story's narative method, paper will reveal them. There might be pages of dialogue where you get lost trying to remember who is saying what. Or now you can see the ugliness of having every piece of speech start "Henry said" and "Lydia said". You realise that you don't need to label every piece of dialogue, especially in a conversation between two people. On the other hand, maybe you have a long passage of dialogue that seemed clear on the screen but is confusing on paper. Now is your chance to help your readers out. Pick up a pen and make improvements. You can spot unimportant passages more easily on paper. There's that section that describes your characters getting down from the carriage and walking to the house. It seemed fine and necessary on the screen, but paper is a crueller medium. You see now that all you need is to have them rein up, and the next scene is Henry in his library. You dont need the bit where he helps her down, hands the horse and buggy to his stable boy, stomps after her into the house, turns pointedly to the library and slams the door after him. It was, in fact, dull on the screen, but you don't see how dull and unimportant it is until it's on paper. And red pens are very useful for crossing out whole passages. In the same way, reading your story on paper can show you what's important. Perhaps you thought that a certain scene was not only adequate, it was more than sufficient and you are darn proud of it. On paper it looks, well, a little skimpy. It doesn't take up enough physical space for such an important moment, and it doesn't take up enough emotional space. Having seen this, you can fix it. Paper can also reveal bigger structural or pacing problems. What felt like development on-screen can look suspiciously like plot-drift on paper. You can lose the sense of drive and thrust. On screen, it's effortless to spend a few minutes describing that party, her dress, the old lady's kitchen. Why not do a quick biographical sketch of old lady, how she grew up poor in this very house, how she dreamed of becoming an artist, perhaps in Paris, but her family lost all its money and now she's a teacher? Why not? There are no constraints on a PC. You can keep typing that info-dump for as long as you want. On paper, however, you become the weary reader and start to think: why is this here? What's the point of it? The screen can make it easy to forget that every scene everything has to be in the story for a reason. You can drift far from your intended line of narrative when you are floating on a sea of effortless wordprocessing. The screen isn't going to tell you that you have wandered down a lane to nowhere. Reading your work back to yourself on-screen might not tell you. On paper, you'll be experiencing your story as a reader, not a writer, and suddenly that wander away from the story is there in all its embarrassing glory. Time to cut, re-write, get it back on line. Paper allows you to put segments of the novel side by side. Your story will have developments, turning points. Working with your printed version, you can sharpen these, structure them to work better not only in themselves, but also with each other, and at the same time you can remove garbage (always

good!). Let's say your character is confronted with challenges and temptations throughout the story and you want to show why he makes the choices he does. Pull out all those 'he makes a choice' passages from your stack of paper. Physically put them side by side: on your kitchen table, on the floor, wherever you can line them up and see them in one glance. You have challenge one, choice one, challenge two, choice two, and so on. Do they build up in seriousness or tension, the stakes a little higher from one to the next? Are they consistent with each other? Or do some merely repeat, with a slight variation, the one before, that is, has the plot stopped moving forward? Is your character's personality consistent throughout? Is the length of time between one choice and the other too much, i.e. is there filler or boring stuff or garbage between choice one and choice two? Can something be cut? Does more need to be added? It's when you put related or linked scenes together that you clearly see where the chain of motive weakens, where something isn't consistent. Thanks to paper, you've seen this flaw and can correct it. Reading your story on paper gives you the physical knowledge of what the eventual book will be like to read. As a reader, you experience a book in a certain way. Readers pick up details in ways the writer never imagined. If you don't spot a gaffe, they will. If you don't sense a longeur, they'll be yawning through it. If you haven't made an obvious connection, they'll wonder why. On paper, it will be you spotting the gaffe, you being bored by the longeur, and luckily you, before publication, identifying the connections and adjusting the relevant scenes to build them in. Once you've gone through your printed-out manuscript in the standard submission format (doublespaced), print it out again, single-spaced. This gives you close to the page density of the final printed book, and other problems suddenly become visible. Two events or pieces of dialogue that were two or three pages apart might now be at the top and bottom of one page, and the closer juxtaposition might reveal a repetition or a clash or some other infelicity. Surprisingly, it reveals boring bits better than a double-spaced print-out. It gives you yet another chance to hone, shape, and improve. Paper isn't the only way to spot and cure your story's deficiencies, but it's a powerful tool to jog you into changing your approach and your perception. It allows you, even forces you, to re-think of your story, because it takes you out of your comfort zone. Working on your paper version in another room from where you usually write, or even going to another building, can also get you into a new mind-set where you are less indulgent about your baby. A new setting makes the words feel new, feel less 'my special thing' and more 'a book', and that can reveal a lot. Paper can jump-start inspiration. It can shorten the work of re-writing by bringing issues to your attention. And it gives you that wonderful feeling that your story is real, that your words are alive, that they are on their way to their home 'out there', beyond your little, enclosed screen. Even if your book is published strictly as an e-book, using paper as part of your rewriting will make it a better book. Yes, trees will have died, but it will have been a worthy sacrifice to art.

The synopsis: what it is, what it isnt, how to write it


Publishers and agents require a synopsis of your novel before you submit the MS (thats 'manuscript' might as well learn the jargon now). The synopsis is your most powerful, in fact your only, selling tool. Your cover letter is less important, and I'll cover it in a future article, but what you are selling is your novel, and your novel's representative is your synopsis. Before I get started, I want to quote a wise editor I know, who said that, to the author, writing the

synposis was writing the story's obituary. The story is done, the characters are gone from you. It is over, and now you are summarising them in what you hope is an honest and compelling way. You have to be professional in you approach to your synopsis, but don't forget that mourning might interfere with the clarity of your perception of your own work. The synopsis is hard to do because you are grieving. Now let's get briskly back to business... A quick look at the submissions guidelines from both agents and publishers shows that they seldom want to see the full MS, and often don't want to see even a part of it. At most, they tend to ask for the first three chapters (or first 50 or 70 pages) and a synopsis. Sometimes they want only the synopsis. What is a synopsis? The word is sometimes used to mean 'plot plan or story outline, that is, the guideline you write yourself as a map to write your novel. That is a specific tool for you alone. In the writing of your novel, you probably deviated from your original plot plan, modified it, perhaps even discarded it. Whatever happened to it, this is not what you send to a publisher or agent. I try never to call that the 'synopsis', as beginner writers get all excited and think they've done the work already. Sadly, no. That work is yet to come. The synopsis is not your thoughts on your novel. It is not your view of its themes, its potential, its rivals out there in the market, its greatness, or the greatness of you (although I'm sure you are). The synopsis is not something that sounds like a jacket blurb. Often people call the breathless attentiongetter on the back cover a 'synopsis', but it is in fact a marketing tool, aimed at potential purchasers. If you write this sort of thing as your submission synopsis, you will get a swift rejection. You dont sell to publishers or agents that way. What I mean by jacket blurb is something that reads like: Patrick Hanrahan is a down-on-his-luck journalist, dreaming of being a white knight on the mean streets of Hollywood while he scrounges sleazy stories about two-bit crooks and chiselers. On a stake-out he witnesses a crooked agent and his goons murder a young woman. But when the police get there and the lights go on, there's no blood, no body. Miliana Rostov, a police detective, traces him as the caller of the anonymous tip-off. Convincing her that he wasn't pulling a stunt is as easy as showing her his photos. Together, they begin to puzzle out a crime that isn't there, a girl that isn't missing, and soon find themselves up against a crime-lord who won't be thwarted, not by one of the shrewdest detectives on the force and certainly not by a washed-up reporter who dreams of being a hero... This might sell the book to a reader in a bookstore, airport or on the internet, but it won't sell it to an agent or publisher, because it doesn't tell her what you're offering. It's a thriller/mystery, yes, but is it a good one? Is it a mystery that plays by the rules, is it a thriller that twists your guts as you turn the pages faster and faster? A good synopsis will tell her, because it tells what happen and she can see for herself. The synopsis is a summary of the plot of your novel. It is a one-to-two page summary of what happens. That's it. I stress 'of what happens'. The synopsis has to tell the publisher or agent what happens in your novel. She needs to know what the book delivers. Publishers and agents are professionals and have seen it all

before. They are not a market to be intrigued by a cliff-hanger or enticed by mystery. They dont get their excitement from wannabe novelists who try to pique their curiosity. They are excited by something that will make them money. As this money-making ability is something you want them to share with you, you have to give them what they need to make an informed decision about what you are offering. But a good synopsis is more than a bald statement of the action in the book. It is your first and your only chance to command their attention, so you have to make it as compelling a piece of writing as it can be. If I may modestly offer my own experience, I once had a publisher say 'if the book is as well written as the synopsis, we want it'. (The history of that book {sob} is not for this article.) I told them what happened in the book, and I did so in a way that showed that I could make even a summary of a novel into a gripping read. If I can do it, you can do it. The writing of the synopsis takes a few stages, and none of them is easy. It's a tough job, but getting into print is a tough job, too, and real writers are willing to do the tedious stuff as well as the lovely creative stuff. Stage one: go through your MS and jot down what happens in each scene. A usual novel has between 60 and 80 scenes, grouped into chapters. Ignore the chapters. Your first jot-down might read something like: Patrick (hero) on surveillance of Oscar, crooked agent, at Oscars office, from his car. Car filled with night's worth of junk food. Patrick bored, feeling his tip-off that Oscar is doing something very illegal was a bum steer. Then light comes on in office. Patrick grabs camera-binoculars. They're old and cheap and dont work properly (typical of Patrick), but he focuses them enough to see Oscar and two goon-like guys with a clearly frightened young woman. Argument in office. Girl man-handled by goons. Patrick squeezes off photos, angry but elated. Then, to his horror, one of the goons hits the girl hard. The other joins in and they beat her until theres blood everywhere and she is clearly dead. Oscar is shouting through it all. To stop it? To cheer them on? Patrick is shaken and sick. The lights go out. His first instinct is to go to the girl, but he doesn't want to be found at scene, he doesn't want to mess with the evidence, and he wants the scoop. He chews piece of beef jerky, his cigarette-substitute, and decided to phone police with an anonymous tip-off. He doesn't want to drive away, in case he is spotted, and he wants a ring-side seat, so he scrunches down in his car and decides if the police roust him, he will claim to have been asleep in his car the whole night. The police turn up. Patrick eases up just enough to watch through his binoculars, ready to take more photos of gruesome scene. But when the lights go on again, the room is pristine. There is no body. No blood. Even chair the girl was sat in is gone. He watches the police search the premises and leave, his mind stunned with disbelief. He sits in his car for hours, trying to figure out what happened, and then drives home. All too early, a knock on his door. A plain, tough-looking woman flashes a police badge at him. She explains that his cellphone call was traced and she knows he called in that anonymous report. She has looked him up and knows of his reputation. The police are not amused to be dragged out to nothing. What is Patrick's game? He protests that he really saw something. The police detective suggests he might face charges. His agitated protests, his

detailed descriptions, start to convince her. He hauls out his camera-binoculars and transfers the shots to his laptop. They are terrible quality, but it is clear that something happened. The police detective is convinced. This is a lot of jotting down and all you've done is summarise the first chapter and a half of your novel, that is, the first four scenes. You keep going through all the other scenes and you end up with about ten to twenty pages of jottings. You have finished stage one. Now you have to condense and combine the action in those scenes. You do need eventually to give the reader (the agent or publisher) a little bit of the incidental information that comes along with the action, but you aren't at there yet, and you certainly can't include all those details you've jotted down, or your final synopsis will be too long by a factor of ten. Stage two is the condensation of your jottings into a summary. Taking those first four scenes, your synopsis would begin: Patrick is a scruffy freelance journalist who feeds on the grubbier end of celebrity tittletattle in Los Angeles. He is nosing into the unscrupulous contracts made by Oscar, a modeland-actors agent who feeds on the wreckage at the bottom of the pond. While maintaining surveillance on Oscars office one night, Patrick witnesses what looks like a murder. He calls the police anonymously and hangs around to grab the scoop, but they find no blood, no body, no evidence. One of the detectives on the case tracks down his cellphone number and grills him, thinking he has used the police for his own purposes. He insists that he saw something real, and Miliana, the police detective, finally believes him when he shows her the photos he took. Notice that you start with the first action. You give a line setting the scene, explaining where the protagonist is and what he is doing, and then you give the starting point, the kick-off of the novel's arc of action: Patrick witnesses a murder. This is the action from which all others follow. This is what your novel is about: a murder and its consequences. Notice also that you ignore your chapters. Chapter breaks are an impediment to reading a synopsis and add nothing, so don't put them in. The condensation above has turned the 479 words of the first four jottings into 126 words. Short is good. The shorter the better, if you are going to cram the action of your entire novel onto no more than two pages. The condensation should begin after you have completed all your jottings, as you will then see where you can mention a later fact earlier, or an earlier fact later, if that makes the explication clearer. The synopsis should on the whole follow the development of the story as it happens, but sometimes you need to rearrange a bit for clarity. You are telling the story of the action, not making a record of a legal trial. Notice that the condensation retains motives and emotions and is quite chatty. You might the sort of writer who can go from stage one to stage three without the condensation step, but most writers can't be that ruthless that fast. It takes more than one step to get used to this icy sea. So do this condensation stage before Stage Three. Stage Three is the paring down. Patrick, ne'er-do-well freelance reporter, watching the office of Oscar, crooked Hollywood agent, one night, sees the murder of a young woman by Oscar and his two goons. He phones in an anonymous tip. He watches as the police turn up and find nothing at all. Patrick is contacted by the police the next day. The detective, Miliana, accuses him of

involving the police in a hoax and threatens prosecution. Patrick downloads his photos from the night before to show her his evidence, and she is convinced. That works as a synopsis, but these 86 words are a little stark. Continue to pare down, in any case, because the leaner you can make it, the better. It is hard work to shorten a whole novel and you have to be ruthless. You have to write these pared-down sections well. Very well. They have to be clear and concise. The beauty of your prose is gone, all romance, mood and humour stripped away. You might be tempted to stick with your condensation, but trust me: this paring-down stage is necessary. You have to let go of the idea that you can keep those parts of the story of which you are especially proud: the descriptions, perhaps, or the subtle character development. Lose them now, because soon a vestige of them will reappear. This begins in Stage Four: the enrichment. This is where you very gently add a touch of flavour, a touch of story-telling, into that pared-down skeleton. Not too much: you dont want to inflate the wordcount, but just enough to give the agent or publisher a sense that you can write. Not a sense of how the story is written, its tone of voice, but a sense of your own skills ('if the book is as well written as the synopsis, we want it'). Take that pared-down version and, with one eye on the condensation, add in just enough just enough to flavour it. Patrick, a seedy freelance reporter in Hollywood, has staked-out the office of Oscar, crooked agent, one sultry Hollywood night. He witnesses the murder of a young woman by Oscar and two of his goons. Shaken, but wanting the scoop, he phones in an anonymous tip and stays put. The police arrive and find nothing: no blood, no body. Patrick drives home, mind reeling, to be woken early the next morning by a police detective, Miliana, who has traced his call and now threatens him with arrest. Patrick's honest distress surprises her and his downloaded photos, despite their poor quality, convince her. This is 101 words, a mere 15 more than your pared-down version, but now with motive and emotion (shaken, wanting the scoop, honest distress, surprise). The action is all there, enough description is there to give the reader an idea of who Patrick, Oscar and Miliana are, and you have added in some human action: Patrick, though not admirable, is human enough to be horrified, and Miliana is observant enough to change her opinion of him. You dont need to add that Patrick's home is a dump of a motel room, or that Miliana is an older, world-weary police detective who thinks she's beyond surprises, or that Patrick's secret dream is to be a modern-day Philip Marlowe. You can only hint at the richness of your characters by these tiny touches, but your reader will be acutely aware of what you are telling her; she will pick up on all these touches as if they were from a loudspeaker. The synopsis should mirror the genre of the story. If it is a limpid romance, it should flow like a romance, delivering its unfolding love story in a charming, beguiling way. For a mystery mystery, it must become more tense and even thrilling as it goes. While still summarising and giving the action with a few tiny 'colour' touches, you can make it exciting. Yes, you give away the ending, because you must tell all the action, but you can do so in a way that the agent or publisher finishes it saying, 'Wow!' But, more than this, she will have read a synopsis that demonstrates that you can take an opening scene, develop the action in an arc of subsequent actions that logically derive from that first scene, and end it with a satisfying conclusion that closes all loops and which 'delivers'. Stage Five. Yes, you have a bit more work to do. This is your sense-check, your last read-through of the synopsis. You must judge whether you think it is an accurate and honest representation of your novels action, whether it delivers an emotional impact as well, and whether it is, in and of itself, a

good read. As this is the only reading experience the agent or publisher will have of you, it has to be a good one. If your synopsis tells a good story, if it IS a good story, then they will trust that the novel itself will be a good story, too. The synopsis has another use, and that is to you. As you begin to condense and pare down, flaws and omissions in your story may will come to light. You might only now realise in the condensation stage that you forgot to 'close off' a loop about one of Oscar's goons. The story needs a scene of his arrest, to give closure. Aren't you glad you spotted this now? Go and write it. Or you might suddenly see that the big character-signal you stuck in early (Patrick re-reading The Maltese Falcon and ruminating on the motivation of Marlowe) is, in fact, unnecessary and can be removed. Go cut it now. The writing of the synopsis might send you back to rewriting the whole novel, and this is a good thing. When you come back to write the synopsis, you will have a better story to tell and to sell. The synopsis is your 'elevator pitch', the one and only opportunity you have to sell your novel. You have five minutes of an agent's or a publisher's busy day. Get it right, and it will be the best five minutes of her day and, when her call or email comes through, of yours. Afternote: don't forget to put your name, contact details, and word-count in the top right-hand corner of your synopsis. This makes it safe to detact and hand around, and you want that to happen in a literary agency or publishing house.

Plagiarism
Some years ago I was the victim of bare-faced plagiarism. A kind reader alerted me by email and I saw the evidence myself: a writer with her own website had lifted an article of mine on the NovelAdvice site, had topped and tailed it with a few lines of her own, and had presented it as her own work, arising from her own experience. My first reaction was sickness, the same sort of sick violation that someone feels when their house has been burgled. I then became so angry at this brazen passing off that I literally saw through a red mist. Then helplessness: how could I make this plagiarist remove my work from her site? What sanctions did I have? None except reproach...reproach, against a bare-faced thief? I am proud to report that it was my fellow writers at NovelAdvice who swooped in on the attack as I was paralysed with fury and shock, and who carried the victory. The offender did not remove my piece from her site, but fully acknowledged me as its author and put in links to my site for those who wanted to find me. That was good enough for me: while it remains there, it will be her brand of shame. I have never thanked my fellow writers enough for what they did. I was deeply moved. Their actions gave me back my faith in my own community. Afterwards, when I was calmer, I mused on the episode. Why did that writer, who had more published books to her name than I had, choose to steal another writer's words? How did she justify it to herself? I also wondered why, in particular, plagiarism is so despised. Highwaymen, cat burglars, even car-jackers can be anti-heroes of a sort, but plagiarists are always down there with the scum. I came up with some answers that felt right to me and which might interest you. Plagiarism is despised because it is stealing someone's mind, the manifestation of themselves. Alzheimer's is fearful because the person, all that makes a person, is gone. It is like a physical assault, yet insidious, because the Self cannot show bruises. How do you explain what the damage feels like

inside? How that loss feels? Plagiarism is frightening. How do I prove my words are mine? How do I prove that I composed them and didn't steal them from someone else? In courts, disputed copyright is decided upon dated manuscripts, on witnesses who remember reading the drafts, on letters in a publisher's filing cabinet, on receipts for postage in the author's filing cabinet. Even then, it is hard to prove. To be plagiarised in the world of paper is bad enough, but in the world of the internet almost impossible. What power does an email protesting the theft have? How do you prove in the digital world that you own any specific thing? Plagiarism is hard to detect. In my case, I might never have found out. Maybe other words of mine are out there with someone else's name on them. Unlike the high school essay industry, where teachers are far more savvy than their students dream and who have sophisticated searching software to use, no search engine can be guaranteed to return sites carrying identical phrases from my work. A plagiarist on the internet, although she can never rest easy, can rest more easily than most. Friends tried to make me feel better by saying that plagiarism was a subtle form of flattery: the plagiarist wished she had written my essay and had tried to share a bit of my mind by putting her name where mine had been. My friends did flatter me, but I wasn't convinced, as I had already felt the plagiarist's contempt. To her, I was someone who didn't have to be considered. I was obscure. For all she knew, I wasn't a published writer. I wasn't anybody. What did I matter? Plagiarism is the despising of another human being. Aside from her contempt for me and, who knows, an uneasiness over the possibility of being caught, what did my plagiarist feel? I have never asked her; I have never contacted her. But I can surmise. A touch of envy, yes, or why steal? Idleness: why write your own piece when you can take someone else's? Arrogance, thinking that she somehow had the right or the rank to do it, that she was 'special'. A certain truculence: 'who's it going to hurt, after all?' Maybe a certain glee. None of these is attractive. None of these is an excuse. I suspect that all those feelings paled beside the shame she felt when caught, and the anger against her victim that perpetrators feel when their crimes are exposed. And maybe a tiny touch of relief, now that she was forced to remove the source of that tiny itch of guilt. I hope so. Plagiarism isn't an 'academic' or 'theoretical' crime, one that only eggheads or lawyers care about. It's not a crime against the high ideal of intellectual authenticity. It is not a victimless crime. It is theft. It is damage. It cannot be defended on any ground. It's just a low-down skunk kind of thing to do. It hurts. It hurt me. My two main comforts, after learning of the plagiarism, were the rallying around of my fellow NovelAdvice writers and the fact that my plagiarist was caught. Plagiarists are almost always caught, sooner or late and, as search engines get better, will be caught more frequently online, too. My plagiarist was discovered within about a year. Several famous writers and journalists have been exposed as plagiarists in recent times. 'Sampling' and 'deconstruction' were their feeble defences, but their reputations suffered. Posthumously, plagiarism can taint a writer's legacy. What he thought would make him immortal makes him merely contemptible. Who wants to be famous for that? Plagiarism is consciously passing off someone else's words as your own. It is not the same as 'fair use'. 'Fair use' is quoting, sometimes at quite liberal length, for certain purposes without having to pay the author for subsidiary rights. The key word is 'quote'. You have to acknowledge your source: who said it, in what publication, and on what date. You cannot use someone else's work and pretend it is your own. Not fifty words. Not even five. Yes, there are combinations of words that many authors have shared: 'But officer, they are innocent' or 'I wanted to marry her' or 'In a kingdom far away'. As with musical notes, we all use the same words, and

often in the same combinations of them. The difference is that, when you plagiarise, you know you're copying. You know you are appropriating something that you are going to pretend was your own. Perhaps you are writing an historical novel and one of your source books has said something in such a perfect way that you can't better it. Or a phrase has so captured your imagination that you can't bear not to delight yourself by weaving it into your own work. As a tribute, you argue, to the original author. Or it may be that you are so steeped in an author's work Tolkien, Grisham, Cornwell, whoever that all you want to do is to be part of that author's creation, to write an extension of that universe. Or you think, 'I can do better than that' and out comes your version of Elmore Leonard or Anita Shreeve. What is fandom, what is homage, what is imitation, and what is plagiarism? There are many books and articles and websites on copyright that will tell you which is which, but I think the best guide is within yourself. If you love Star Trek so much that you want to live in it, and even make up new narratives yourself, then you aren't stealing. You may not be the most imaginative writer in the world (real writers like to invent their own worlds and their own characters, unless they're jobbing for a syndication) but you are having fun and you not pretending to be doing anything else but what you're doing. Fandom. If you enjoy reading romantic novels set in the old west, then you will probably write romantic novels set in the old west. It is, after all, what interests you. Fine, and you may well get published. It's genre writing, and these have their own rules that must be obeyed, which means certain ideas will be repeated. That is the point of genre writing: more of the same, though each slightly different, like pizzas. Genre writing has a long, honourable history and it's a tribute from you to the many happy hours you've spent reading just that kind of book. Homage. If you want to be an author and can't think of an idea that sells, you can take a cold, hard look at the market and decide that writing a Kellerman-style thriller or a Rowling-style children's book is the best chance of getting into Borders or Amazon. After all, publishers want something they can sell without raising sweat and, if they can't get enough product from Mr Grisham, they will take a Grisham-style thriller from you. It may not be admirable to tread a trail broken by a better writer, but it's an economic decision that's often successful. Imitation. Then there is the work you lift. Steal. Quote without the quotation marks. 'Sample.' 'Weave in.' The fan writing, the homage, the imitation: all these you could admit to on a talk-show without the audience booing you. But those paragraphs you 'kinda borrowed', well, they would make you feel funny if your writing group or your TV audience recognised them. Or there's that phrase you wrote in all honesty and only remembered later that you'd read it somewhere but which you do not delete, once you remember that it isn't yours. Or there are plot devices that you know an editor would reject your MS for if he identified it. It's the words you know you are stealing, even if you never get caught, even if you never get published. Plagiarism. Plagiarism is a crime against your community. The writers who encourage and support you, who will defend you (as they defended me) when you are helpless, the writers who will supply blurbs for your new novel, the writers who work for P.E.N. to rescue writers in need around the world they are your community. Plagiarism rips the fabric of our mutual trust and support. It is, in a metaphoric way, the crime of Cain: killing your brother. Plagiarism is a crime against your own writing future, because a plagiarist is something a publisher or a fellow writer doesn't want to get involved with, doesn't want to touch. It's a crime against your own mind. Do you think so little of your own brain that you couldn't write something of your own making? It's a crime against your own honour, that you would put your name to something that wasn't yours in the hope of being admired for it.

Mark Twain said that pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas. If you plagiarise, you have no pride. No pride in your work. No pride in yourself. If you had any, you have lost it with this act of theft. Plagiarism is a sad crime: it is a crime against yourself.

I am your editor: submitting your novel


I have been in publishing for over ten years, mostly as an editor. I am the person who accepts or rejects your manuscript. Here is how I make my decisions. I look at the envelopes I am opening as I work my way down the slush pile. Sloppy presentation is not a good sign. Neat, clearly labeled parcels give me hope. I haven't even seen what's inside, and already I'm making judgements. Out come the manuscripts. I check each one for a self-addressed return envelope with sufficient postage attached or with enough international postal reply coupons (if it comes from overseas). Is the SASE big enough to hold the whole MS? Or is there a letter-size SASE for my reply? Good in both cases. I keep this submission on my desk. No SASE? I put the MS to one side. Maybe I'll read it. Probably I won't. I've had writers who've said: 'You won't find an SASE here because you won't be rejecting this novel.' Yes, I will. He just won't be seeing his MS again, because I won't be paying to mail it back. I also say goodbye to submissions without return addresses and submissions from overseas with their local postage attached. If the writer makes it too difficult or costly for me to contact him, believe me, I won't. Why would I give him more consideration than he has given me, an overworked editor? He's not that special. I am not that into him. The submissions with proper SASEs are sorted again. Most rejections happen right then. Why do I reject them? First, because the genre was not right. I've received children's picture books when I was working for a publisher of true crime. Didn't the writer check out our product? I've worked for a feminist press and received MSS from men. What did they expect? I've had science fiction when I was publishing poetry, poetry when I was editing short stories. Most publishers' websites have guides on what they publish, and will clearly state 'we do not accept short stories', or 'we do not publish true crime', and yet writers send them short stories and true crime. What a waste of time, paper and postage. Specialist publishers do not publish outside their speciality. You won't be the exception. Second, the submission was not publishable. I have received one poem. What did the poet expect me to do, write back saying 'Gosh, such was the brilliance of this single poem that I ask, no, I beg, you to send me anything else you may have'? That doesn't happen. I laugh and put aside. It's not even a rejection, because it's not a submission. It's a foolish dream in an envelope. I have been sent strange compilations of paper, objects, and CDs. Is it a work of abstract art, a novel pushing the envelope of creative invention, or the work of a frootloop? Does anything about it suggest that it is worth my time? Hmm, didn't think so. Rejected. Third, the submission was unreadable. I have received MSS written in white ink on black paper. I have received photocopied MSS so faint that I could hardly read the words. In fact, I didn't. Do these writers think that their genius removes them from having to follow submission guidelines? That I'll be charmed by their funky individuality? Sorry, I'm a busy editor. Writers who don't make it very, very easy for me to understand what they're offering are begging to be rejected. And so I do. What does make it easy for me? To begin with, a cover letter that tells me succinctly what the author is sending me. Something like this would do: 'Please find enclosed my novel entitled BLOWING IN THE

WIND. It follows the struggles of a young actor to fight his cocaine addiction in order to win the heart of the scriptwriter he loves. It is a romantic comedy and will appeal to readers of POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE. It is 70,000 words.' This pleases me. I know what I've got. Why would I reject at this stage? Usually because the genre is wrong, or we have too many of that kind of novel already. A pity, but that's life. Those still on my desk get their cover letters read in full. The classic show-stopper is the letter that tells me she's written this story and she knows it needs a lot of work and someone to edit the spelling and grammar, but she's sure I'll like it. Like it enough to do her work for her? I imagine a chef saying "I don't really know how to cook meat and I couldn't be bothering mashing the potatoes, but I'm sure you'll show more commitment to this meal than I have." It's the author's job to submit to me as perfect a story as she knows how to write. I am not Ms Fix-It. If you tell me in your cover letter that you haven't done your job, why should I take you seriously? I won't, I really won't. I also enjoy the breathy cover letter that explains the psychology of the characters, the themes of the book, and the spiritual depths of the author: 'This is a sensitive, brilliant, yet deep-felt novel exploring what it means to open yourself to the love that flows through the universe. The author is a reincarnated Hopi wisewoman who offers deep mystical insights as the heroine becomes wife, mother, and shaman.' Hey, who's the editor here? It's my job to decide if the novel is sensitive and brilliant. Don't write me the cover blurb you have lovingly crafted for the published work, write me a synopsis. The author proposes, the editor disposes. 'Bye! If the cover letter hasn't told me I've just opened a loser, there's still time for an author to head towards the rejection pile, especially when I put aside the cover letter and look for a synopsis. None? I won't reject yet but I probably will. Also bad news is the overly-long synopsis. I've been sent a fifty-page synopsis on a 200 page MS. It's a synopsis for pity's sake. Two pages should be plenty. One page is even better. Or the synopsis might try to excite me with a tacky cliff-hanger: 'Ricky and Sandra are trapped in the car as it plummets into the ravine... and if you want to find out what happens next, you'll have to read the whole book!' No, Mr Author, I'll have to reject you, mostly because anyone who tries to pique my interest this crudely will write this crudely. Goodbye. Now I have a much reduced pile of not-yet-rejected MSS. The cover letters on these are to the point, telling me what the submission is (novel, collection of poems, non-fiction), what it's about, how long it is, what genre it fits into (romantic western, thriller, classic whodunnit), and what its rivals are. Now I want to see what else the writer has done. Not his life story, but the relevant other things he's written. I'm all too familiar with the tricks that writers use to disguise a thin portfolio, but having even one professional sale is important. This guy has a track record. It means it's not just my opinion against the world. What happens if there is no track record? MS rejected? Not if I've been impressed with the writer's professional submission, but it does make me cautious. My good opinion can still be lost at this stage if the submission has one or more of the following: (1) a letter from the writer's pastor/mother/best friend/teacher/parole officer, telling me how much they enjoyed the enclosed book and recommending it to me (2) a photo of the author [when I want it, the publicity department will ask for it] (3) a photo of the author's family/dog/pastor/favorite car/vacation (4) anything cute that's supposed to catch my eye and make me soften towards the writer, such as felt animals stuck to the cover letter or MS, cookies, hand-made bookmarks, a prayer card, and so on (5) the MS itself tied together with ribbon, bound in any way [comb, spiral, glued into covers], decorated with bunnies and flowers [unless those are the illustrations]. What kind of serious, self-respecting author would include such stuff? You think Toni Morrison sticks toy animals to her manuscripts? Please. The submissions that have passed through my first tests will have, besides a good cover letter and a

polished synopsis, a MS clearly typed, double-spaced on one side of the page only in Courier New or Times New Roman on standard white paper, left-aligned, with one-inch margins all around, pages numbered and with a running header that contains the author's name and the page number. The MS might be in a folder or a box or, better still, will be the first three chapters clipped at the top left corner with a paper clip. I feel enmity towards any MS in a plastic folder or binder: they slither and can't be stacked. Editors hate these. If I have a nice pile of cleanly typed pages, I am happy. It is at this point, and only at this point, that I start reading. Scary, isn't it? What do I read? Not cover to cover; I haven't the time. I read the first five pages. Does it grab me? A bad book is a bad book from the beginning: I don't need more than five pages to tell me if I'm holding a dog or a possibility. If it's the former, it's barking at me from page one. If it's the latter, I'll find that I have a desire to read further. Even if it's a dog, I will still dip into the MS two or three places further in, just to make sure the author hasn't suddenly found genius at page 95. If I liked the opening pages, I read four or five randomly-chosen chunks, working my way through the MS. Prose still of the same quality? Story seem to be moving along? Is the text clean, i.e. no rash of typos or spelling mistakes? I might even skip to the last five pages and read those. Does the story seem to match the synopsis? Does it seem any good? Would our customers want to read this book? Can I imagine it improved with editing? Is it a product my sales team can push? Can I envisage it having market out there? I can't? Too Bad. I reject it. If I'm not sure, I put it away to look at in my spare time, with a three-month deadline. I suspect I'll probably reject it then. I usually do, but I want that rejection to be confirmed by a calm second look. So no news is not always good news for a writer. But hey, I've found one that is giving me that tingle I love! I have a good feeling about this one's potential. I read the first five pages, then fifty. I'm excited. I take it home and read it from start to finish. I bring it to the editorial meeting, I fight for it, I might even get to publish it. And if I do, I will have read it dozens and dozens of times, in draft, in galleys, in the final proof, and each time I say 'yes'. This is what you want to happen. And this is why you have to be professional. You have only one fleeting chance with me, so be sure you've made a no-gimmick, no-hassle crystal-clear submission that will get me to that first point of reading. Why give me an excuse to say goodbye?

Are you a writer? Take the quiz


Most famous writers claim that they always knew they would be a writer when they grew up. Despite set-backs and struggle, they had confidence in their own innate talent and creative instincts. But not all writers have that rock-solid confidence (or, as it's known in the writing business, 'arrogance'). How do you know if you're truly cut out for the life of a novelist or if you're actually some sad wannabe who's pitied by friends and family? Just take the Clarke Patented "Am I Really a Writer?" multiple-choice test below and find out once and for all if you've got what it takes!

THE CLARKE PATENTED "AM I REALLY A WRITER?" TEST


(Asking your writing group, tutor, or best friend to help you fill out this test is cheating. So is asking a writer to do it for you, such as Margaret Atwood.)

A. I think I'm a writer because: 1. I enjoy writing 2. I enjoy reading 3. I enjoy typing 4. I enjoy knowing that I am a creative being B. I tend to get my ideas from: 1. the world around me 2. the fantasies within me 3. the TV in front of me 4. the concept of "idea" is so, you know, anal retentive C. I try to write: 1. one sustained period a day 2. one sustained period whenever inspiration strikes me 3. you mean I actually have to write something all the time? 4. only when it won't violate my imaginative flow D. I believe that adjectives and adverbs: 1. should be used sparingly 2. should be used vigorously, fulsomely, and without stint 3. are what, exactly? 4. are pathetic attempts to limit my creative energy E. I structure my novel-in-progress by: 1. writing to a prepared plot outline 2. writing according to how the story seems to be telling itself 3. writing whatever comes into my head from moment to moment 4. how mundane actually to have a "novel-in-progress"; I have a concept F. I achieve the self-discipline to write by: 1. forcing myself to work whether I'm in the mood or not 2. letting guilt finally force me to do something, anything 3. jotting down half a page now and again and rewarding myself with ice cream 4. self-discipline is the enemy of creativity G. I deal with difficult, blocked or 'dry' periods by: 1. working on something else to retain good writing habits 2. panicking and bingeing 3. wondering if I shouldn't take up decoy carving instead 4. only real writers are really blocked H. I strive to make my work: 1. as good as it can be by rewriting and polishing 2. as good as that first true inspiration will allow it to be 3. as unembarrassing as I can before going to my writing group they're really mean 4. as unintrusive in my creative life as possible I. I approach the task of finding an agent or publisher by: 1. researching the market thoroughly and learning how to make a professional submission 2. sending my manuscript and a very nice letter to my writing tutor's publisher 3. sending my manuscript to the publishers of the latest best-seller

4. they'll be knocking on my door begging me for my manuscript J. I accept rejection slips: 1. with a pang, then move to the next submission 2. with a little sigh: I secretly knew it was no good 3. with a howl of unbelieving rage: ignorant jackasses, don't they know true talent when they see it... 4. I'm too sensitive to put myself through such a negative experience K. I see myself in the future: 1. finding satisfaction in writing novels my readers enjoy 2. becoming a rich and famous best-seller and appearing on TV 3. winning the Pulitzer, the Booker, and the Nobel Prize for Literature 4. being the most famous person on the planet. Hey, in the universe! L. I want to write because: 1. I have characters and stories bursting to come to life 2. I like the idea of having a book published 3. I like the idea of being a writer 4. I didn't say I wanted to write, just that I know I'm a writer, and this is a dumb test, anyway How to score this test: Count up the numbers of the answers you have selected. If you have a total of: 12-16: You seem to have what it takes. I'll see you in print one day. 17-25: Time to get serious. Take one giant step towards a professional attitude. 26-35: What a dweeb. Quit dreaming and get a life. 36-48: Jerk extraordinaire! Out of my sight, thou posturing ninny! Having taken the Clarke's Patented "Am I Really a Writer?" Test, you now know if you are a real writer or not. If you are, congratulations! If you aren't, contact me for some useful websites on needlework, photography or windsurfing. But seriously, folks: the basic test of whether someone is a real writer or not is if they really write. There's no magic to it. Either you write or you don't. It's that simple

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