Category Archives: Writing

Animal Instincts

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I don’t know if animals truly are good judges of character – but they can be used to show it in fiction. I am focusing here on how animal characters can illuminate the human ones.

The way your characters treat animals can be a simple method to indicate empathy. They might take care to feed birds over winter. They might use humane traps for vermin. They might lift their piglet on the wall to see the parade! More conflicted characters can be revealed by a confused approach – vegetarian but eat fish, or keep urban chickens yet feed foxes. You might use concerns about animals as a plot driver: the vegan diver who liberates lobsters from local fishermen, the shoplifting  lady with too many cats or the kid with a catapult keeping magpies away from  nesting birds.

On the other hand, their behaviour towards animals can be used to show a character’s darker side. The green-stained fish tank, the donkey with untrimmed hooves or the stinking rabbit hutch speak of neglect and failed promises. What about the horrors who train magnifying glasses on ants, or pull legs off spiders? The choice of animal associated with a character can speak volumes – Philip Pullman knew that well with his use of daemons. And where would a world class villain be without an appropriate pet?

But it’s not just our character’s attitude towards animals that indicates personality – it’s the animals’ reactions to them. Ever since Bucephalus, the behaviour of the horse around a person has been used to  indicate nobility and trustworthiness. Similarly the wagging tail of a dog can suggest they sense a warm open personality. An affinity with wildlife in particular has been used for innocence and patience – I love Dickon in ‘The Secret Garden’ for that.

Ambivalence, mystery or less stereotyping can be created by the showing the trust of more unusual animal in a given character. How will your reader react if a character wins the affection of a hooded rat,  an ocelot or a seal? What if they are generally unpleasant – but feed deer at dusk on nectarines?

Of course, the fear or hatred of  animals can be used to great effect. The reader does not feel comfortable round someone who makes the joyful blackbirds fall silent, makes a wolfhound tremble and droop its tail or a wildcat cower. And having a carrion crow as a companion certainly says something about a person.

So using an animal as a minor,  secondary or ( as in the case of Black Beauty) central character can be useful strategy for letting your reader see personality in action – without hanging a label around your characters’ necks.

Better to travel…

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There you are , not sure how to open your story.  You don’t really want to fire off all your exciting stuff immediately, – how could you build a crescendo from there? You could do worse than start with a journey.

Your reader will appreciate being introduced to your central character by herself, and then secondary characters individually. This can happen naturally with the preparations for a voyage or trip. How and what  your central character packs, for example, can say a lot about her. It’s not unlikely that further characters could board the bus, or walk up the gangplank one-by-one, giving your reader time to see them separately at the very least.

Another advantage of travel in fiction is the setting. You have the opportunity to show minor characters going about their business in active and interesting harbours, airports etc. and interacting with your main character. You also have the reaction of the main character to the place and its challenges – how does she cope?

There is nothing forced about description of a new place animated by action. There’s nothing forced about showing the reader a situation which is strange to your main character, so that’s all good too. You have forward movement because your character is doing something: the sense of place is integral to the small dramas like getting a visa stamp, misunderstandings about customs or simply choosing food.

And these little things, these mundane events can evolve. An insignificant interruption might lead to a delay. The delay might mean missing the connection, missing the connection might lead to a stay in a hotel on the wrong side of the tracks and so on. It could be comic, it could be tragic – but consequences of even a straightforward journey could be huge.

So if your writing’s going nowhere, try taking a holiday. Who knows where it might lead?

Is there anybody out there?

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You know the one: the social situation with people milling about, being polite. Someone asks you what you do. You tell them you write. Then they ask what sort of thing. You explain you’re a children’s writer. At this point, you may be asked what you’ve had published – or if it’s someone feeling clued up, who’s your target audience?

It’s then I translate their question into the one I want to answer – like a politician. What I hear is ‘Who am I writing for?’ My immediate response is me. There’s an element of ‘you can’t please everyone…’ in there, and the child inside. I write the books I wish someone had written for me.

Then, of course, come the second thoughts. A nasty little Imp of Doubt asks whether modern children could possibly have any interest in my concerns. I bat it away with the assertion that adults’ needs and desires haven’t change over millennia – and neither have children’s.

My third thoughts bring me back to the original question about ‘target audience’.

I don’t have one.

Chasing trends, thinking about demographics and responding to focus groups is SEP* as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps it’s arrogant, but I think my calling is to tell this one story as well as I can.

And what I see, who I am writing this book for, is a boy (I have three sons). He is boy fascinated by the sea. He is a boy who wonders if there’s some truth in myths and legends. He is a boy who half-sees things in grungy corners, who wants to escape into another world. He thinks the ’60s were cool.

I hope he’s out there – him and his mates.

*Someone Else’s Problem

Chicken and Egg

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Easter holidays; no bus trips to college and time to do some serious wordage. One thing I have learnt is you’ve got to have form ( no, not that sort). Think of a garden – it can be colourful, jam-packed with plants but it won’t impress the Yellow Book judges much if the hard landscaping’s all to pot. That’s certainly how I used to garden – and my writing is still a bit that’s good- bung-it-in-and-hope-for-the-best.

One antidote to splurging is looking how other people do it. I had a spot of ironing to do, so I popped on Radio 4 and listened to ‘On Mardle Fen’. I scribbled down notes on the structure in between pressing Gorgeous Hubby’s poplin shirts and the posh tea-towel. There were plenty of mini-dramas including finding the remote restaurant, kitchen disputes and a runaway daughter – but one overarching  familial drama. A big feature that holds it all together, like a wall round a vegetable garden, or a central fountain, definitely creates an effective structure.

An external event can be a good device – the count-down to a wedding, for example or that highlight of East Wittering’s year: the opening of the refurbished Co-op. It doesn’t take too much imagination to realise how many mini-stories are possible with so many people  involved. What about the reporter with the comedy cardboard scissors, the football coach holding the giant cheque, or one of the fitters looking down from the roof? And it wouldn’t have to be limited to the contemporary: think of the excitement of the first supermarkets arriving, or the fuss the Victorians made opening a shop.

But, of course, all these possibilities lead off in different directions. You can follow your protagonist and secondary characters wandering off along all sorts of paths. And where’s your planning, your pre-formed structure then? Back to the venerable Plotter v Pantser debate.

I’m trying Plot-the-Big-Stuff and Wing-the-Details at the moment. It feels like herding cats – or trying to control couch grass.

Any advice?

“It matters not what a person is born, but who they choose to be.” J.K. Rowling

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As part of my MA at West Dean College, I gave a presentation about my work-in-progress. I used images and texts to evoke the period and place that my story was set in quite comfortably. I felt confident about portraying the 1960s without cloying nostalgia, and happy firmly locating it on the Yorkshire coast. I was able to outline the general social background: the underlying tension between the seal people and the fishermen of Scoresby Nab.

But then I reached the specific ‘who’- my central protagonist – and it all went a bit vague. Come the plenary and it was clear my audience had been left in some fuzzy hinterland they disliked.

I determined to do something about this.

I had no joy with writing a bog standard character description. It came out twee, stereotypical. If  I could sneak up on him sideways somehow, Mattie might become clearer. It occurred to me that in the best stories we learn a good deal about a character by the reactions of those around them. I hit upon the idea of ‘asking’  Mattie’s grandmother and others: I could see him through a matrix of other people’s views.

So now I am creating chunks of Grandma’s diary, newspaper cuttings, and  a doctor’s note. I wonder what else might inform.

Any suggestions?

Focus

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The writers on the Creative Writing MA at West Dean College are reshaping their work in different forms. Some have chosen to explore screenplay; some poetry; others are working in the radio play format. I am tackling a theatre play – in much the same way that my first forays into gardening involved equal parts of enthusiasm and ignorance. My initial attempts have pruned a story set in Scoresby Nab right down to the bare stems – a very useful exercise. I’ve had to hack away all sorts of extraneous matter. But now it needs to grow.

It is abundantly clear to me that it needs a clear framework. Storytelling in any form is about how you choose to reveal the sequence of events – but you first must have a sequence. I am learning oh so slowly how to intertwine one story strand with another. It’s pruning rambler roses all over again: which to tie in, which to cut back hard, which diseased shoots must just go.

Add in to that the Head Gardener standing over me and my secateurs just come to a halt.

Self-consciousness must be like honey fungus. Its evil rhizomorphs lurk, waiting to spread into any crack . Then the mycellium of despair get in and you’re done for. According the RHS, the only prevention is a physical barrier – and I hope concentration will act like that for thought.

So my intent is to persist, following the Head Gardener’s patient instructions, doing just one bit at a time. It might be slow and painstaking but my ambition is to understand. I want to be able to do it for myself.

Sound advice

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Today’s theme for me has been sounds – and how to use them.  I wondered how I could employ sound in writing to convey atmosphere, aid transitions and heighten emotions.

This morning I was woken by rain hissing on the tarmac outside. The wind rattled our tiles and made the rain hush and then tossed it down again like spilt rice. It made my bed seem all the more snuggly.

Some nights I hear the shingle gently susurrating along the shore; other nights it grinds against the beach, chucks and thunders as it  erodes the groynes. The sound creates two utterly different moods from pretty much the same action.

I walked down the drive to the College to a raucous chorus of rooks and jackdaws. The sound took my mind away from the traffic noise and away towards the countryside. Add in the odd baa from sheep and you’re right there. I  might have sparrows twittering and arguing and and fluttering in an scrap of urban wasteland- or inner city starlings that whistle and clamber on slate tiles. What about the thrilling shriek of a peregrine high in the roofscape? Or the lazy coo-coo-coo of a pigeon on a summer’s day?

Moving away from our flapping friends, I might consider sudden scream of a fighter jet exulting through a high valley or the throbbing rumble of a great earthmover gouging out clay to move the reader from one location to another. I might use the eeriness of swinging wires thrumming in an easterly breeze when all else is still – or the menace of unseen feet flapping closer on stone. From the rumble of the bus approaching to the rush of its airbrakes, there’s sound in movement which underlines action.

Which sounds do you like to use – and why?

A small matter of education for all…

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Regular readers of my posts and my tweets will know I love libraries. I mean to write about them again and here are some reasons

                As a consequence of the Comprehensive Spending Review 400 libraries are under threat. Compare this with the situation in South Korea where 180 new libraries are being built.

South Korea is top of the PISA international rankings for competence in reading. In ten years the UK has fallen from seventh to twenty-fifth. This is no time to cut libraries.

  • I checked about Korea and the reading stats

    courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/philbradley/

  

After all that, I have nothing left to write except Support Your Local Library!


Bloglet

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It was snowing when I walked down the road into the West Dean Estate this morning. I could feel the little pills of white plocking against my coat. I shivered and pulled my hat further down over my ears. I stuck my hands further down inside my pockets and felt the northerly wind pass through my all-too- hastily chosen trousers. 

My back curled protectively around the heat of my heart. I wanted to hold it in. I inspected a puddle by my feet . Was it frozen? I rushed on, feeling my thighs glowing. They would look an attractive shade of day-glo pink, I thought. 

My head was bent down, tucking my scarce warmth beneath my chin. I passed a lovely cottage garden – topiary, beansticks and a green-touched set of windchimes faintly sounding. And there beneath the hedge, snowdrops, diffident among the rough cut grass. And a little farther, a single winter aconite. And farther still, the ghosts of crocuses yet to come danced spindly rounds in the orchard.

Chris Coomber

I thought: I could have just looked  the way I was going. Could have just focused on the job in hand. But what I would have missed.  The snowdrops’ heads dangling on threads, each petal fingerprinted by jack-in-the-green.  The aconite a globe of promised sunshine and the crocus tribe mustering to see off old Winter. 

by Tim Bray

And now at home, I think of my characters. Which of them would see the Jenny Wren tip into the hedge? Which of them would keep their gaze on the grey and haily road? 

by Isfugl

What about you?

What’s inside?

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This afternoon, I stood waiting for the bus from West Dean. I began to chat with a young woman studying metal conservation and we reached the inevitable conversation about books. What she liked, she said, was when the characters had “a life between the pages”. It kept me thinking on the way home.

I connected this to something Jean (a colleague on the West Dean Creative Writing MA) had elaborated upon. We were considering how much of yourself you might wish to reveal as an online author and Jean put forward a concept of layers- perhaps like a daffodil bulb, or the shells of an atom. Deepest and most concealed was an inner self that no-one is privy to. Then the private person that our friends and family see, followed by an outer professional self which we might post. The best characters, it seems to me, give the sense that all the layers are there.

If you trawl the internet looking for how to create characters, or read a fair few how-to books, you are often told about character description. It strikes me that this is only the outer layer – the appearance that the character gives. It’s down to authorial decision whether to show what they look like – but as in business, you only get one chance to make a first impression. You can only do it once.

Next comes the personal layer – likes and dislikes, musical taste, the sort of stuff you might post on your Facebook profile. It may inform their mannerisms, tics, the things they do when talking.  All well and good – but still fairly superficial. You’re not really giving much away.

Now we come to something much more intimate . This is where the conscious anxieties lie, where the dreams reside that the character might share with her closest friends and family. This is the stuff that makes a difference. It will be largely behind the scenes, suggested by action or hinted at in speech. But it is the very innermost core, full of secret desires and fears, that provides the character’s volition. It provides the unseen addiction, the desperate need that gives energy to the forward momentum of the plot.

When you have all these, then you have a character.

As my bus reached Chichester Cathedral, I made a further connection. Kate Mosse, writer of Labyrinth and Sepulchre, explains how her characters can seem at first to stand behind her, just out of view, hazy and indeterminate. Then they step forward, next to her and assume a solid form. She starts writing only as they move off on their own adventures – and she records what they do. For me, then , my characters can only have a life ‘between the pages’ , can only step out into their world when I have fully imagined what’s inside each layer.