Great writers - nature or nurture?

Are writers taught or are they made? Is the ability to produce a great novel somehow derived from the genes, or is it a craft that can be learned through effort and good teaching?

Like all such questions, this is a false dichotomy. For a truly great writer, innate ability is surely needed. But learning the craft also. I have been privileged to witness so many students developing their capacity to write beautiful, powerful prose that I am convinced of the importance of good teaching in this process and that the innate ability is not as rare as some people claim.

There is a problem however. I have seen people postpone writing their first novel because they feel they are not quite ready. Instead, they do another writing course. And another. And another. Courses become a thing to do INSTEAD of writing.

You can't learn to write novels without writing novels.

Last night I gave the first in a series of classes designed to combat that problem. The deal is this: each student works on their novel through the week. This is the process from which they will derive most of their learning. And on Tuesday evening we all come together to talk about their progress, share samples of their work, answer problems that have arisen, give suggestions and encouragement. Each class will be 50% taught and 50% manuscript workshop.

With 14 students, the class is full. We couldn't fit anyone else in the room. I discovered that, curiously, there are 13 female participants and only one male. (Writing courses do typically attract more women than men, but this is more asymmetric than usual).

Everyone seemed focused on the prospect of writing and I sensed a creative excitement in the air. Novel writing gives that - a sense of excitement. It is a journey into the unknown. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this course.

Six things you should never do... if you are in a movie

1. If there has been a murder recently, trust the police to look into it rather than starting an investigation of your own. Follow this instruction even if you knew the victim.

2. Just because a building is creepy it doesn’t mean you have any right to break into it on a whim.

3. Just because the front door opens when you push it, doesn’t mean it is a good idea to step inside and look around. Consider the possibility that the opposite may be true.

4. On finding an old book or box in the house, don’t take a deep breath and blow the dust off the top. A slightly damp cloth will do the job far better without giving you or your fellow searchers an asthma attack.

5. However much time you feel it will save you in your search, never say, “let’s split up.”

6. On tripping over body in the dark, immediately call the police (see point 1). They may remind you of points 2 and 3, but will realise you are more likely to be a stupid person than a killer.

Four Plot Problems

There comes a time when the novel or screenplay gets pitched. That's when the product of our imagination and perspiration gets boiled down to a few short lines of prose - the story in a nutshell.

With all the gorgeous imagery stripped away, with all the texture, twists, turns and sub-plots gone, the producer, agent or publisher see our stories laid bare. It is an unforgiving moment - one in which any fundamental plot problems will probably be exposed. These are issues I try to anticipate BEFORE getting to the end of the writing process.

Here are four classic plot problems that should be clear by the time 25% of the story has been written.

• We don’t identify with the protagonist. She/he may be in danger, in love or in pain but ultimately we don’t care.

• The trigger is not big enough to make us believe the protagonist will do the things she/he will need to do in the story.

• The trigger is reversible, so we do not believe the protagonist will stay the course when things get really tough. She/he should simply turn around and go back home to live a quiet life.

• The protagonist is too passive – events happen and the protagonist reacts. The protagonist has become a character drifting down a river rather than actively swimming, someone that events happen to rather than a person who initiates change.
  

Strangeness in Stories

I'm putting together a workshop on storycraft for inclusion in a filmmaking course later in the year. Preparing the worksheets has set me thinking about the question of 'strangeness' in stories.

When people describe the archetypal patterns found in traditional stories they sometimes talk about the 'ordinary world' and the 'strange world'. The ordinary world is the home life of the protagonist before he/she starts the quest. The strange world is the unfamiliar landscape the protagonist will pass through before reaching the goal, whatever that may be.

This transition from ordinary to strange isn't confined to traditional hero epics. It comes up again and again in modern movies and novels.

The ordinary world may not be ordinary to us, the audience. But it is ordinary to the protagonist. If the protagonist is a racing driver, 'ordinary' means hurtling around the track at 150mph.

In a similar way, the strange world may not be strange to us, the audience, but will definitely be strange to the protagonist. One of the most important qualities of the strange world is that the rules the protagonist used to live by no longer hold good.

The difference between Story and Reality

What is the difference between story and reality? According to Mark Twain: "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."

Tom Clancy made a similar observation: "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." However, he also commented on the overlap between the two: "I've made up stuff that's turned out to be real, that's the spooky part."

In his superb filmmaking masterclass last month, Chris Jones said: "The brain cannot tell the difference between a story and reality." That is why we cry watching a sad movie and scream watching horror. He also said: "Stories are about communicating truths not facts."

My take on it is this: Reality is a tangled knot made from an infinite number of threads. The full blinding complexity and intensity of it is available for us to experience in the 'now'. But as soon as events have past and we look back on what has happened, we start to order our memories into a narrative. From the tangle, we extract a single thread. That becomes the reality of our past.

As storytellers we do the same thing - extracting one thread from the mass of possibilities, cutting it to make a beginning and cutting it again to make an end. Then we present that to our audience.

Podcast extract from Vintage by Maxine Linnell

I recently had the pleasure of recording Maxine Linnell reading an extract from her new time-swap novel 'Vintage', in which a contemporary teenager swaps places with a counterpart from 1962.

I'm podcasting the recording here, partly to recommend the novel (which is excellent) and partly to experiment with embedding audio files in blogger - which I hope to do much more of in the coming months.

For those of you interested in the recent technical discussion of microphones and field recorders, this recording was made on my Sony Z1 camera, and not with the Marantz PMD661 - which I hadn't bought at the time of recording.

Note: As I write this additional note, the podcast link has stopped working. The audio file hosting site seems to be down - so that is probably the reason. I will clearly have to look for other solutions.

The Poster Test

I'm still digesting all the information from Chris Jones's amazing film making masterclass. When I wrote about it a few days ago, I promised to write more regarding lessons that novelists could take from the class.

One of the things in Chris's course that struck me most forcefully was a test he used in deciding whether/how to proceed with a film making project based on the title, strapline and poster image.

Does the title alone tell the potential audience what sort of story to expect? Or does it mislead? Does it imply a story or not? What about the strapline - does that help? And the same question goes for the poster image. Unless you have a HUGE advertising budget, your potential audience will make their decision to part with money or not based on this information alone: title, strapline and poster image.

How about these for movie titles that imply a story:

Home Alone
Snakes on a Plane
Star Wars

And for a perfect strapline:

Alien - in space no one can hear you scream

And a poster that tells the audience all they need to know about the kind of film to expect:

Chris described how he had designed three posters for one film project but couldn't get any of them quite right. Thus the film remains unmade. The poster test was revealing a flaw that would have come back to bite him at the point of trying to sell the movie - an ambiguity in genre and audience.

Perhaps novelists think they are above such base commercialism. But it seems to me that we have a lot to learn from filmakers. Even if money doesn't matter to you as a writer, surely having readers matters hugely. And in this game, one equates to the other.

So how about it? Before getting stuck into a long writing project, choose a title, a strapline and a cover image. Who is going to buy that book? Where will it be sold? And if you are really happy with your answers to those questions - why not write the back-blurb? Fifty words of hard sell. Do a mock-up of the book cover. Ask twenty friends what they think of it. Better still, ask twenty strangers.

Even if we don't like to think of our work in these terms, be sure that editors and agents have to.

Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass

The Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass by Chris Jones is a huge journey crammed into 2 intense days. It is film making from story conception through screenwriting, production, post-production and premier all the way to film sales and beyond to the development of your career in film.

Thanks to the work of Hive Films, Creative Leicestershire, Phoenix Square and of course Chris Jones himself, this workshop was brought to Leicester. And thus for the last two days I have been sitting, absorbing what felt like gigabytes of information. Some of it I knew before. Much of it was new to me. It was by stages uplifting, fascinating and frankly terrifying. In short, it was reality.

All the information I might have been able to dig up from books and the Internet. But nowhere could I have had the whole package served in one go. The effect of this was quite startling. Going through the journey of the filmmaker in two days from start to finish gives a sense of perspective. It lets you see the whole thing - every stage in its place.

And having seen the big picture, I can now go and learn more about the individual parts of the process and understand where they fit into the whole. Short of having done it - having made a feature film and taken it to market - short of that I can't imagine a better way to get perspective on the process.

If you are thinking of making your first feature film I strongly advise you to attend this excellent course. It'll be the best money you spend on your project.

I'll write more about one or two specifics in a later post - particularly some lessons that I will be taking from this into my novel writing.

Miss Garnet's Angel

To have closure or not to have closure is a question all storytellers must face. Does the protagonist definitely achieve or definitely not achieve the victory? Are all the secondary plots neatly tied up? Is every single thread accounted for?

Perhaps it is not a question of closure or lack of it, but the degree of neatness.
These were questions that tumbled around in my head last Thursday evening on driving home after an excellent talk by the bestselling novelist Salley Vickers.

Salley does not plot out her novels, she told us. She writes without knowing where she is going, prompted presumably by the unconscious mind. Although her books are not autobiographical, she weaves in threads from her own experience. This became clear as she wove the narrative of her talk, dipping into life experiences and into her novels with such lightness of touch that it was easy to become confused as to which was which.

These things struck me about the writing process as she described it: she reads her work out aloud to herself as she edits it, she walks when she needs to resolve issues and she never reads her own books once they are published. She is also fascinated by the workings of memory and the process of natural selection on ancient stories that survive today. These things struck me because in those respects I am exactly the same. She also visits art galleries when looking for answers, something I have not done but am now resolved to try.

But back to those tumbling thoughts. Have you ever wondered why some stories cling on to the mind after you have finished with them? Some talks too. I was so intrigued by her talk that I bought a copy of her novel Miss Garnet’s Angel.



My one regret about dyslexia is that it is a barrier to my reading more. Reading takes the work of my whole mind. In order to read a whole novel I need to set aside a chunk of time. You can judge then, how much Salley’s talk had clung to my mind, when I say that on getting home I started reading her novel. And that I pressed on to the end three and a half days later.

The story is tumbling right now in my head. I have the feeling that it will still be there tomorrow. Such is the quality of narratives which do not travel directly from A to B, but meander and bifurcate and recombine, beguiling the logical mind. Perhaps it is a quality of stories that are written with the unconscious mind in the driving seat. And perhaps it is a quality also of stories where all the threads are not quite so neatly tied back together at the end.

They say Miss Garnet’s Angel was a word of mouth bestseller. Having read it, I am not surprised. It is as delightful as was her talk.

Writing lines for actors

The process of writing for '43 pounds' is significantly different from the work I usually do. There are two reasons for this:

1) We are going to be relying heavily on the excellent improvisational skills of our cast. This should give us more of a documentary feel - less like scripted lines. So the lines I am actually writing will probably never be spoken. They are there to guide the actors rather than constrain them.

2) I already know some of the cast and have started workshopping with them. This has given me the seeds of several ideas. And when I type the words in, I can already hear the voices of the actors saying them.


Hearing voices may sound more like a mental illness than a writing technique. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that when I read the lines that I have written, I hear them in my head with the tone, accent and delivery of those individuals.

Getting the voices is one of the important milestones for me in writing any work of fiction. With this it has been given to me from the start.

Research for novelists

"How do you do your research?" is the question I am most often asked at public readings.

"I don't!" is the first answer that comes to mind.

But the deeper truth is that I am not aware of doing research. This is because I accumulate so much strange information on account of my insatiable curiosity. Some might call it 'being nosey'. I prefer to look at it as a vocation.

Research is not usually a conscious process. It is a way of life.

How about this one: a safe door can get jammed closed in cold weather because a partial vacuum is formed inside. Or this: thieves sometimes try to steal slate gravestones from cemeteries because the slate itself is so valuable. Or this: Policemen trying to keep warm sometimes put their hands inside their stab vests.

I wouldn't have known where to look to find this kind of information. But it is all gold dust to a crime writer. And it is free. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open.

Perhaps this approach comes from my dyslexia. It is easier for me to see things than to read them. And perhaps it comes from laziness.

How to write great sex scenes

How to write great sex scenes may be a blog title that will get my site filtered out for adult content. But if your search engine has allowed you to reach this point, fear not. Nothing below should make you blush too deeply.

Here is the problem: A novel should take the characters through the full range of their emotions. That frequently means a journey to or from romantic love. The physical expression of romantic love is usually an act of sexual intimacy. Thus a good proportion of novelists will at some stage have to sit down and write a sex scene.

As a species we fixate on sex. But there are only a certain number of ways to do it and to describe it (however adventurous or flexible a writer you may be). Thus it is hard to be original when writing about sex. The writer risks becoming clichéd if he/she is not experimental enough and risks ridicule if he/she tries something a bit different.

Witness the annual ‘Bad Sex Awards’

The Bad Sex awards celebrate some of the most entertainingly ill-judged forays by authors into this well-trodden meadow. These are the authors who tried to put a fresh spin on an act as old as geological time. Read and be warned.

Unfortunately I have no great wisdom to share on describing the act itself. Any attempt would certainly get this blog blocked. My suggestion regards the build-up to the scene.

If you are writing a story about a terrorist planning to blow up a building, the explosion itself is just a moment. A couple of lines of description. It may be spectacular, but it lasts a couple of seconds of real time and contains little inherent tension. But the reader’s awareness of the bomb that may or may not go off – this has almost unlimited potential for drama.

Perhaps I am side-stepping the issue when I say that the part of the sex scene that writers should be most concerned about is the lead up to it or its aftermath.

The cost of a Paperback

The year is 2020. It costs £5 to buy a paperback novel. £3 if it is one of the few hundred titles being stocked on the shelves of your local supermarket. Most of that money is needed to cover the direct costs of producing the physical book. Ink, paper, printing and binding. Some is needed to cover transport. The shop takes a chunk to cover its overheads and to keep its shareholders happy. How much goes to the author? A few pence per copy.

Alternatively you can buy your novel as a download and read it on your shiny new book reader. How much for? There is no printing, no transport and no shelf stacking. Shall we say, fifty pence for the author and fifty pence to cover the website design and management?

What about a third possibility – read the book online courtesy of Google and see a few adverts along the way. The author gets a few fractions of a penny from the advertising revenue. You pay nothing.

What do publishers do in this crisp new digital world? They have already out-sourced the job of selecting the best novels. Literary agents do that. As for editing – literary agents increasingly take a hand in that too. Cover design is usually subcontracted. Publishers rarely spend money on advertising for authors who are not already famous. All that is left is the sales team who work so hard going bookshop to bookshop. But with digital distribution, the bookshops are not needed.
A world without publishers?

It is a world in which anyone and everyone can publish by themselves. Digital distribution – costing so little it is basically free – makes this easy. I am lucky enough to have seen many as yet unpublished but wonderful books in manuscript form. But I have seen a far larger number of badly written manuscripts. In 2020 are all of them being published?

Google Book Settlement

The Google Book Settlement debate is heating up. Hundreds of millions of dollars are on the table. It seems like a lot of money until you remember that it is the entire future of writing and publishing industry that is being shaped.

In yesterday's blog post I wrote about business models in which artists give their work away for free. But here we seem to have a business model in which an artist's work is given away by someone else.

The crux of the matter is this - Google took it upon themselves to digitize huge numbers of books in order to offer them in whole or in part through the Internet. Some of these books would be out of copyright - in America if not in the UK. In other cases the copyright holders could not be found. And where a copyright holder could be found, some money might flow back to them from Google.

Although an author opt-out has now been offered by Google as part of the legal settlement, some authors are less than happy to have had so little say in the formation of the deal. There is also disquiet among the other Internet giants, who are presumably worried about the hold Google is going to gain over the digital distribution of books - which is surely the future of publishing.

Google has been parading supporters of the deal ahead of any final legal decision. One advocate apparently said: "We see access to knowledge as a civil right. Information enables individuals to learn, to create and to pursue their dreams. Access to knowledge defines the meaning of equal opportunity in a democratic society."

Hard to argue with that. Who would vote against spreading knowledge? Until you remember that the 'knowledge' being offered includes the creative work of individuals. You and me.

Is this the future of publishing: that all creative work will be accessed for free, and interspersed with adverts, from which revenue a trickle will return to the authors? Is the concept of copyright now so unworkable that this becomes the only way for artists to make a living?

How to publicise your novel

How to publicize your novel is a question most writers don’t start to worry about until the event is upon them. Let’s face it – there have been too many other things on our minds till then. Like writing the darned thing, finding an agent and getting an editor to be your new best friend. Important stuff. Publicity can wait.

But your publisher has been thinking about the selling of your book from the moment they read the drop-dead-brilliant opening lines: Where will this sit in the bookshop? What commercially successful titles is it similar to? Can I sell the book? Can I sell the author?

The hard truth of being a writer today is this: more books are being written than ever before, more titles are being published than at any time in history, but sales are not increasing. You do the maths.

Perhaps we should be thinking about publicity after all.

So here are some of the best known shortcuts to getting column inches and getting people talking about (and hopefully deciding to buy) your novel.

1) Have had a career as a journalist and therefore have lots of favours you can call in.

2) Be good friends with the author in-crowd so they will give you quotes to put on the back of your book and perhaps even write a review for the newspaper.

3) Be a celebrity. Or date a celebrity. Or get a celebrity to take out a restraining order against you. Or any combination of the above. (Or almost any other sentence that contains the word ‘celebrity’)

And if none of the above apply, how about these:

1) Put in time working with the local media. Keep knocking on their doors. Always say yes to their requests, even if they want you in the radio station to review the papers at 7am and won’t pay your bus fare. (Or be writer in residence in the local bus station for the morning).

2) Put time in working with the libraries and librarians in your region. Readers group after readers group. Year after year. These are your friends.

3) Over-prepare for every presentation. Even if you are giving away your time for free. If the local radio station has invited you in for 5 minutes of comment on the recent spate of fly-tipping, spend hours preparing, researching, rehearsing. Always shine.

4) If your novel wins something in a competition – even if it some small, local affair - start referring to it as an award winning novel. Keep honing and updating your biography.

5) Network with other writers, performers and artists. Go to their launch events. Be generous with your friendship. Support them and they will hopefully support you. And even if they don’t, it should be a pleasure.

6) Make each thing you write better than the last.

7) Have a website so people can find you when they need to.

8) And, yes, keep a blog.

Of spiderwebs and story arcs

Outside my window a small spider is trying to construct a web, a task made considerably harder by the buffeting wind. Watching it, I am struck by the thought that it can't see the pattern of the web that we are all used to. We look in form the outside on the finished item. It sits in the middle, so close that it can't see the whole thing.

How is it doing it and what has all this got to do with the construction of long fiction?

The parallel is clear enough. When you are working on a novel, you are too close to see the whole thing. Perhaps if I understood how the spider is doing it, I could figure out how to plot a novel!

All the spider needs to do is know the relative angles and spacings of threads. So long as those things are kept regular, the web will form its familiar pattern. Might it be possible to plot a novel using the same approach - simply seeing the detail of the chapter you are on at the time, using that to find out what must happen in the next chapter?

I think the answer is yes. In part. I have certainly met novelists who say they are very bad at plotting and follow the narrative drive of each scene to discover where the story should go. Raymond Chandler famously said that when he got stuck with a story he would have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

What is the starting state in the chapter? What is the ending state? Where and how does the change come about. What is a story but an account of a series of moments of change of escalating magnitude?

Having said all the above, the spider seems to have given up. Or perhaps he is resting. Or perhaps he's imagining how the whole web will look from a distance once it's finished.

Thinking Differently in the Digital Age

Some people think differently from the rest of the crowd. The different thinkers don't do so well in times when the mainstream crowd has life all figured out. At such times the different thinkers are easy to spot. They're the ones doing crazy stuff, heading for disaster. Or ridicule.

But in times of rapid change, when the mainstream crowd are hanging on to modes of thought and behaviour that no longer work - that is when we need our different thinkers. In my opinion, that is why dyslexics and other kinds of people who tend to think differently are so valuable to society.

Take the example of the movie industry today. Digital production and digital distribution have arrived but the industry has not yet adapted. Or look at the the business of book publication. Or music. There is a tendency for people rooted in the way things were to see the new technology as a way of making slight modifications to the status quo. This is when the different thinkers shine.

I came across the following video on Chris Jone's blog. It is the work of two film makers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, creators of Four Eyed Monsters. I this completely inspirational. If you are interested in the collision of old media and the new digital age, this is well worth the half hour it takes to watch.

Hadfield Library again

One month on and I'm heading up to Hadfield again.

A class on crime writing awaits. I have two and a half hours to get a group of people to go through the stages of sketching out a crime novel/screenplay story arc. In the process they will hopefully get a deeper understanding of how stories work.

Posessing that understanding has the unexpected side-effect of enabling people to reverse engineer the elements of a movie plot, and thus have a fairly shrewd idea of where the story is going to end up, having only seen the first 20 minutes.

Such knowledge can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing when you make a prediction and it proves correct and you get that smug feeling. A curse if it happens to be your partner who does the prediction and thus ruins your movie experience.

I'm well used to my long-suffering wife saying: "Stop! Don't tell me who did it!" I really must learn to hold my tongue.

When, just occasionally, a movie serves up something completely unexpected, it gives a special buzz of pleasure.

I say 'movie' rather than 'novel' because movies tend to be more tightly plot constrained. In story terms they are more condensed than novels. Being condensed, it is harder for the people who crafted the story to hide the tell-tale construction lines that, when projected, show where the story is heading.