NEXT EXTRACT FROM LIFE-WRITES:

STUCK IN THE MUD

Whenever a group of writers get together, sooner or later the subject of writer’s block will be introduced into the equation. In most cases this is an over-milked excuse for not starting or completing a typescript. As I’ve said before, a professional writer can’t afford to employ such a plea for sympathy, although they do recognise the need for regular stimulation to generate ideas.

If an idea isn’t working and there isn’t a dead-line to meet, the professional will leave it alone and do something else – read a book, do some gardening, take the dog for a walk, or attend to the pile of research material that needs filing. Even the most seasoned writer will ‘dry up’ from time to time but they don’t stop working, they turn their attention to something else for a while. Dead-lines are probably the most effective means of beating the dreaded blockage since they ‘concentrate the mind wonderfully’, wrote the late Nancy Smith when she was asked for a comment when I was compiling From An Editor’s Desk.

“If a professional writer is commissioned to write a piece by a specific date, it’s rare for them not to finish it by then. Writer’s block does exist but the main cause is probably due to lack of planning, so far as the novel is concerned, at least. It may be that the story-line isn’t strong enough and needs to be abandoned, or it may be that they should leave it for a while, and start on something else until their enthusiasm is re-kindled.”

Many of the techniques discussed in Life-Writes are designed to push both our conscious and subconscious minds to extremes, even when we’re relaxing. We soon come to realise that some of our best ideas have occurred when we’re away from the computer and not thinking about anything remotely connected with writing. An author of my acquaintance recently admitted that she had an astounding flash of creative insight while she was in the middle of cleaning out the cat’s litter tray!

Hopefully Life-Writes will provide more pleasant ways of clearing any blockage because it illustrates that there are more facets to creative writing than sitting at the key board for hours on end, churning out mere words. By taking a break from writing, and under the right conditions/atmosphere/exercises, we can often achieve far more with an hour’s relaxation than by forcing ourselves to carry on typing.

Although we need to remain focused on the job in hand, there should be plenty of time allowed for the unconscious mind to put in its own four-penny worth. Thinking side-ways means allowing those right-brain influences to come through even if we happen to be in the middle of writing something else, because those new ideas might make the piece even better.

Who said you could only have one good idea at a time?

Next extract from Life-Writes: Life’s like that!

For our next mental exercise we will choose another simple subject that can have many meanings. It would be tempting to go for ‘Love’ because Roget’s Thesaurus has something like 33 entries, while the opposite, ‘Hate’ only has nine! This means we’re going to have to work harder and delve deeper.

Firstly, we need to define what we mean by ‘hate’ because it is a word that is over-used today. We may say we ‘hate spiders’ but do we really? We may feel frightened, repulsed or nauseated by them – but hate? The dictionary definition of hate is: “Extreme dislike or aversion; detestation; to abhor or detest; enmity or ill-will; loathing”, while the on-line Wikipedia has hatred (or hate) as an intense feeling of dislike. “It may occur in a wide variety of contexts, from hatred of inanimate objects or animals, to hatred of oneself or other people, entire groups of people, people in general, existence, or everything.”

The depth of expression is largely dependant on the person making the declaration, or the circumstances under which the declaration is made. A trivial person will ‘hate’ anything and everything that they don’t like, from cabbage to an unimaginative wedding present. Someone else may actively hate racial inequality or social injustice, but on the other side of the coin in living memory we have had Holocaust that resulted from Nazi hatred of the Jews. Of the fictional variety, the character of

Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo gives us an epic tale of hatred and revenge. Very few of us would, if we were completely honest, have ever really experienced the true emotion of hatred but there are nine category listed in the Polti Theory that could be fuelled by hatred:

·         Crime pursued by vengeance

·         Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred

·         Revolt

·         Enmity of kinsmen

·         Murderous adultery

·         Madness

·         Discovery of the dishonour of a loved one

·         Mistaken jealousy

·         Erroneous judgement

Using the same lateral thinking, what, for example, would you consider to be the greatest love story ever written? After careful consideration, my choices (and for totally different reasons) would be a toss-up between Wuthering Heights and The Lord of the Rings. In terms of romantic love, the destructive tide of passion that drives both Catherine and Heathcliffe, renders all other fictional lovers superfluous. The type of love contained within The Lord of the Rings is the bond or spark that exists between the ‘Fellowship’ and is expressed in terms of loyalty and comradeship against over-whelming odds. The actual romantic interlude pales into insignificance beside the heroic deeds of those fighting together against Mordor. On a purely personal level, both novels can still produce that gut-churning, throat-tightening feeling no matter how many times I read them, and yet neither would qualify as ‘love stories’ in the traditional sense of the word.

When we refer to ‘love’ in our own writing, we are going to use it in the context of the storyline to give the work ‘reader appeal’. We can use it in the bitter, destructive context of the television series, Mother Love, which starred Diana Rigg in the title role. Or the desperate variety of Bridget Jones’ Diary. Or the escapism of Shirley Valentine. Love does not necessarily mean ‘romance’ in Mills & Boon mould and although we might couch it in different terms, it still makes the world go round. Love and hate are highly emotive subjects, so handle with care!

Secret Step Three reveals that no matter how mundane and/or familiar a scene, there are countless different angles from which to view it. Emotions are the very life-blood of creative writing whether we are utilising them in fiction, non-fiction or poetry. Described as ‘the various phenomena of the mind’

(including anger, joy, fear, sorrow, etc), we also use them to arouse those emotions in our readers – to make them care about what they read. Emotions are also extremely complex and we can weave a tangled web of intense feeling within our writing to force our readers to suffer along with our characters, article content or poem.

Neither can emotion (or the reason behind it) be cast in stone. We can be angry – but anger is rarely generated by one single action. It has usually been compounded by numerous smaller, insignificant happenings. We need to create these multi-layers in our writing, especially when creating characters for a novel, because without them the finished piece will lack depth. There was a popular method of encouraging lateral thinking in business management training back in the 1970s called ‘mind mapping’. It was an idea-generating technique that breaks down linear thinking – thinking in straight lines – and encourages the mind to work laterally by accessing our ‘zip-files’ in the right-brain. Instead of running ideas in a straightforward top-to-bottom list, start by placing the key word in the centre of the page and circle it. As word-association triggers off other ideas, write them down and circle them, linking them to the key word and each other with connecting lines.

For this exercise we start with the key-word = fear. As the circles move outwards, we can travel a long way from that original key-word. We may find we’ve thrown in things that would never have occurred to us when using lists to flesh out a story or article. Mapping is also a useful technique for developing plots and characters and can be included in your Ideas Book when you are stuck for ideas, or don’t know where to go next.

Whenever you feel the urge to make a list of ideas, use this mapping technique instead. You may find that it can even replace doodling when you’re on the telephone.

Extract from Life-Writes:

Innermost Thoughts

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does or music.  If you are born knowing them, fine.  If not, learn them.  Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”  

                                                                                                                                  Truman Capote.

It was Marcel Proust who said that the voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes with which to view them.  It was a former tutor of mine, Bob Clay-Egerton, who introduced the concept of the ‘mystical mug’ into his teachings to demonstrate how we ‘see’ things:

Pick up an ordinary drinking mug.  Imagine that the mug is floating in front of you at eye level, the handle standing out to the left.  Imagine now that you are describing exactly what you see to a blind person. What do you actually see?   Assume you have never seen a mug before; it is a strange and wonderful phenomena.  You would have to say you saw a roughly square or rectangular object but perhaps tapering slightly towards the base.  It appears to be convex towards you.  Standing out to the left is a curved projection, joining the main body just below the top and about two thirds of the way down the body.  You describe the colour and decorative pattern if any. Sex?  If it has any it must be male, because of the projection.

The blind person then has the mug described to him by someone seeing it from 90 degrees to the right of the first observer.  Same general shape, colour, texture and pattern but no projection.  It must be similar but not the same.  Sex?  No projection, so it can’t be male.  No hollows, so it can’t be female.  It might, therefore, be neuter. The next description comes from someone viewing the mug directly from above.  The basic shape is now circular, either tubular or cylindrical, and flat at the end.  A single stem projection juts out from the main body as the top of the handle covers the rest from view.  Same colour but no decorative pattern.  It cannot be related to the first or second object at all.  Sex? Projection indicates male, hollow cylinder indicates female; might be hermaphroditic. 

If several people viewing the mug from the top, bottom and four sides (let alone at oblique angles) gave a description, the blind person would assume they were all seeing different objects, some of which may, or may not be related.  If each viewer described what he saw to an outsider who had not seen the mug, none of them would believe the others had only described a different view of the same object.  Someone familiar with a mug might realise what it was, but even then, the description, if it could be evaluated by those who had never seen one, would not convey what it was made from, how it was constructed, fired, decorated, glazed — or even what its purpose was.

We use for this example of selective angles of viewpoint - a simple mug.   Imagine how complicated it would have been to describe, from different angles, an old-fashioned typewriter!   The more complex the subject, the harder it is to imagine its nature and purpose.  Yet many writers (and some tutors) approach writing from a limited standpoint … that black is black, and white is white. Never stopping to think that there might be forty shades of grey in between the various different ways a subject might be viewed or written about.  There are innumerable planes of existence on different levels, in many dimensions of time and space.   Mankind exists, physically, in one dimension … mentally he can penetrate other levels … spiritually he can reach even more … it’s all a matter of perspective.

So … in all aspects of our writing we need to develop the ability to see things from all angles.  The successful writer ‘sees’ everything from every angle and viewpoint, and weighs this in the balance before committing themselves to action.  For the purpose of Life-Writes, we will substitute our readers for the blind person of the exercise.   They can only ‘see’ from our writing what we want them to see.  If our characterisation (in terms of empathy and/or human interest) gives the opposite impression to what we originally intended, then the picture has become distorted and the creative dynamic of the plot or narrative is lost.  And if a writer complains that an editor or competition judges has ‘missed the point’ of a story, then it’s probably because it wasn’t made clear in the first place. 

Ø  Always keep the lesson of the ‘mystical mug’ in mind!

The latest extract from Life-Writes …

People Watching

Nothing we take on board during our daily routine is ever wasted if we are writers, although this doesn’t always mean things that happen to us personally, because few of us live life in the fast lane. Quite a large number of those ‘happenings’ that are of use to us will have involved other people and so we have to learn to become an avid people-watcher – in other words, a snoop! We watch, listen, spy and eavesdrop in order to collect ideas to convert into the written word. Just as we learnt to take notice of everything that happens on our patch, so we extend our awareness to people, what they do, how they react, body language, etc. Whenever we leave the house and travel to work each day, we have plenty of opportunity for people watching but what happens if we happen to be house-bound, or work from home? In that case we watch life by proxy.

All serious writers should take a daily newspaper because this, more often than not, will stimulate the creative processes on a mundane level. Newspaper stories and articles will give you the true human angle, because these are the real-life dramas that sell newspapers. And what better gauge of public interest than the daily scandal-rags or broadsheets?

Listen to conversations going on in public places and jot down what you hear. This is a great source of one-liners, even if the rest of the conversation is missed, or contains nothing of interest. Just as importantly, listen to how people say things and express themselves, because this can provide added depth to your character without resorting to long, wordy descriptions. Colloquialisms and similes, especially those of a regional or localised nature can convey volumes if used in the correct context and dispense with the urge to attempt to write in dialect.

 People watching is the writer’s fuel for good ideas.

Body Language & Gestures

What we generally refer to as ‘body language’ is someone’s unconscious reaction to a situation or person. People watching adds a whole new dimension to the way individuals react to one another and, like a picture, can easily convert into 1,000 words of narrative. The married couple who do and say all the right things, and yet their body language may give off conflicting signals at variance with the outward show of domestic bliss. Or the pretty, well-turned out child that does not appear relaxed in the company of a step-parent. Or the dog that refuses to respond to a particular visitor’s overtures. Each reaction can be detected in body language.

Gestures also tend to be an unconscious reaction to situations or people, and usually involve making some symbolic movement of the hand. Some are comparatively modern, while others can be traced back hundreds of years, but as Desmond Morris points out in his book, Gestures, this is a form of visual slang and just as slang words go out of fashion, so can gestures. Body language and gestures can be used as a ‘conflict’ device so essential to fiction writing, as a cause of misunderstanding, or the give-away in a thriller.

The observation that too many people go through life never looking around at what’s actually going on in their immediately vicinity. A writer needs to realise the importance of taking the ‘time to stand and stare’ because this is the only way to add to the inner retrieval system of our cerebral ‘zip file’. We must learn to observe in order to be able to record what we see and to be able to retrieve this information when we sit down to write. Because there really is a story, article or poem behind everything we encounter during our daily routine.

·         Accept the fact that writers are, without a doubt, vampiric creatures, in that they can only exist by sucking the life out of any situation or encounter, and it using to further their own writing careers.

Handy Hint:

People-watching provides us with additional material to use to develop characterisation and the obvious expert on the subject is undoubtedly Desmond Morris. His books, The Human Zoo, The Naked Ape, Manwatching, Intimate Behaviour and Gestures not only provide hours of entertainment but also plenty of background information about human body language. At least one of these titles should be among a writer’s reference collection but they should not be used as substitutes for the real thing, i.e. personal observation. Second hand copies are usually readily available on www.ABE-Books.com

Try This Exercise:

Take a copy of your regular daily national newspaper and mark each of the items that arouse your interest. Cut them out and keep them in files, together with any comments/ideas you might have for future writing projects. As the collection builds you will find that certain subjects occur more and more frequently; others were just a passing whim. Go through this collection every couple of months to stimulate ideas if you’re feeling uninspired. Throw away any clippings that no longer interest you. Use this opportunity to jot down ideas for:

• A short story

• An article

• A poem

"The antiques trade hasn't been this much fun since Lovejoy left"
Carys Llewellyn - author and reviewer

The Hugo Braithwaite Mysteries are set in the shadowy world of antiques and fine art, where villains rub shoulders with millionaires in grand country houses and seedy back streets.  Hugo Braithwaite is an antiques dealer and acknowledged authority on British watercolours, a talent which often throws him into the limelight of popular television to help sate the public’s thirst for discovering valuable family heirlooms and treasures in the attic.  On the down side, it is also a murky realm of fakes, forgeries, felony ... and the occasional murder.

Looking From All Angles

“Research, like writing, is an individual, creative process. It cannot be ‘taught’. In his quest for original material – and who does not dream of stumbling upon a cache of hitherto unknown, unpublished papers or the answer to a problem that has baffled scholars for generations? – the writer never ceases to learn.”

Ann Hoffman, Research for Writers

Many budding writers lack the confidence to take the first step into the commercial market place because they feel it is impossible to produce something completely new that no one else has ever thought of before. But as we’ve already observed : there is no such thing as a new idea. Most creative ideas have been used before, over and over again. What we are looking for are innovative ideas, so let us return to the dictionary definition to find that innovation means: To introduce alterations; to put forward novelties. To alter or change by the introduction of something new.

This is what will give our work that spark of originality. In all honesty, even the most block-busting novel is only a variation on a familiar theme rather than ground-breakingly new. For an example: in an earlier creative writing book, From An Editor’s Desk, I threw in the Polti Theory, which maintained that there were only 36 dramatic situations on which the writer of fiction can draw. By using single situations or several combinations, the basic theme of every story (long or short) ever told, written or devised can be summed up in the following list:

Supplication

Deliverance

Crime pursued by vengeance

Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred

Pursuit

Disaster

Falling prey to cruelty or misfortune

Revolt

Daring enterprise

Abduction

The enigma

Obtaining

Enmity of kinsmen

Rivalry of kinsmen

Murderous adultery

Madness

Fatal imprudence

Involuntary crimes of love

Slaying of a kinsman unrecognised

Self-sacrifice for an ideal

Self sacrifice for kindred

All sacrificed for passion

Necessity of sacrificing loved ones

Rivalry of superior and inferior

Adultery

Crimes of love

Discovery of the dishonour of a loved one

Obstacles to love

An enemy loved

Ambition

Conflict with God

Mistaken jealousy

Erroneous judgement

Remorse

Recovery of a lost one

Loss of a loved one

Twenty years later and retired from editing creative writing magazines, I would add that most non-fiction and poetry submissions probably  fall into those categories, too.  If you don’t believe me, check out the theme of the major features or stories in any selection of magazines or newspapers and you’ll find most of them are loosely based on one or more of the above. If we remove the smokescreen of exotic locations or glamorous lifestyle, we will find that most of the plots used by our favourite writers are telling the same old stories, over and over again. The basic theme of murder, intrigue, adultery and chivalry are all there – they just have an innovative backdrop.

Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Morse introduced us to the esoteric world of academe by casting his novels amongst the traditions and dreamy spires of Oxford University life; while

Simon Raven did the same for Cambridge. Dick Francis came up with his own original formula set amongst the racing fraternity where wealth frequently rubs shoulders with the lower echelons of society. Jilly Cooper moved from Wimbledon Common to the equestrian set, before turning her attentions on the international orchestral and art worlds, and has since moved on to horse racing. Ellis Peters went back to medieval Britain. While in the fantasy department, Tolkien created Middle Earth and J K Rowling, Hogwort’s … and more recently Maureen Carter solves her crimes in gritty Birmingham; David Hewson stages his Nic Costa series in Rome, while Andrea Camilleri utilises his knowledge of Sicily to great effect in his highly entertaining series of novels featuring Commissario Montalbano

Nevertheless, strip away the mystery, glitz and the glamour and you’ll find that nearly every single piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, will be loosely based on those themes given in the Polti Theory.

Rather than waste time trying to buck the system by coming up with original thought – go for an innovative approach.

The next extract from Life-Writes: Where do writers get their ideas from?

On Your Own Patch

To become a truly creative writer we have to start to notice and register the world around us from different angles and perspectives. It may be that our own particular patch has become so familiar that we no longer register what is going on there on a day-to-day basis. Make time to walk a familiar route and take notice of:

• what is growing in front gardens;

• new building developments;

• people standing at the bus stop;

• trees in the park;

• changes in shop window displays

Make a conscious effort to register these gradual changes as flowers begin to bloom; the buildings near completion; different people stand at the bus stop at certain times of the day; the trees in the

park altering their appearance through the seasons; and window displays rarely remain the same for very long.

Think about where you live now. Is it the same place where you grew up? If so, how has it changed?  For better or worse? Did you move away from your childhood or teenage stomping ground? Try to define the differences. What we need to remember, of course, is that memory is deceitful and illusionary, so what we think we can recall, may be almost as fictional as the novel we’re trying to write. How many times have you argued with an old friend or sibling over the way you both remember things from the past.

Train yourself to become more observant about the common everyday things that go on around you. Recall to mind the words of William Henry Davies’s Leisure:

“What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?”

As writers, we owe it to ourselves to make time to stand and stare; even if it’s only to study the dress code, mannerisms and body language of fellow travellers on the subway, train or bus to work.

REMEMBER:  Always be on the look-out for useable ideas

Handy Hint:

Always keep a small notepad handy for jotting ‘things’

down. Ideally have a couple on the go that fit easily into a

bag or pocket. Don’t delay in making a note of snippets of

conversation, ideas for future investigation or character

sketches – we think we can recall them later but we lose

that spontaneous reaction and the ‘thing’ becomes stale.