Writing tips : There are no rules...

Writing tips

12 October 2011
by Clare Wigfall





1) YOU CAN’T JUST GET ON A BIKE AND RIDE IT DOWN THE STREET





If you’ve never learnt how to ride a bike, you wouldn’t expect to
climb onto a saddle and sail off down the street. If you’ve never learnt
to play a violin, you’d be unlikely to pick up an instrument and reel
off a Bach concerto. If you’ve never learnt to swim, jump into the sea
you’ll probably sink.





Okay, I’m stating the obvious. But why is it that people seem to
think that with writing it’s different? They imagine they’ll just sit
down and write something outstandingly perfect? The next
Booker-prize-winner? The truth is, writing involves a lot of hard work. A
lot of practise. Numerous failed attempts. A huge amount of struggle.





Don’t think you can skip this step.






I’m not trying to scare you off. I promise. Quite the reverse. I love
to write, I love it with a passion, but the simple truth is that I
also find it one of the very hardest things to do.





So, if you’re ever feeling discouraged, lacking in confidence, or
just finding it difficult, please simply remind yourself that all of
this is part of the process and it’s how you learn how to write. Keep at
it.





2) I PROBABLY DON’T NEED TO SAY THIS BUT... READ LOTS





I was one of those nerdy kids who used to get excited about going to
the library. I would take out a stack of books that I’d plough through
before the following week’s visit. After I’d read all the books in the
young people’s section, I set to work on the adult shelves; before I
was barely even teenage, I’d encountered the Brontes, Antonia Frost,
Solzhenitsyn, Muriel Spark, Alison Lurie. I didn’t have anyone telling
me to read these books, I just picked them by myself, mostly because I
liked the covers or the titles caught my imagination.






This voracious appetite for reading in my youth was no doubt my
impetus to later write books of my own. All that reading gave me the
confidence to experiment with style. I was reading for pleasure, sure,
but a part of my brain was also working analytically - how did a
particular author carry off what they were trying to do, what techniques
did they employ, what was new to me, what could I take from them?





I firmly believe that the more you expose yourself to the work of
others, the better you’ll grasp how to do it well (and also, perhaps,
how it can be done badly). Short stories work particularly well for this
because you can read them in one sitting and then really analyse how
the story works. Try getting hold of anthologies, or magazines that
publish fiction and identify the stories you like. You’ll find the
authors who most inspire you, but a handful that I can recommend
include: Alice Munro, Yiyun Li, Truman Capote, William Trevor, Z Z
Packer, Raymond Carver, J D Salinger, Tobias Wolff.





Post script: sadly, I learned just recently that my local childhood
library in Blackheath Village was a victim earlier this year of council
library cuts - without that library I probably wouldn’t be the writer I
am today.





3) NOTES, RESEARCH, AND MULLING TIME





Once or twice a story has come to me fully-formed. Almost as if it
has just blossomed in my head overnight and all I have to do is write it
down. Free came to me in a semi-dream, for example and When The Wasps
Drowned took less than a week to complete from start to finish. When
this happens, it feels something like a miracle.






Unfortunately, such cases are rare.





Mostly, I’m a very slow writer. I will often be thinking about a
story for months, if not years, before it reaches a state that I’d call
finished. I call this mulling time. For me, the mulling is an important
stage of the process and it can’t be rushed. That’s not to say that
I’m exclusive to my stories. I’ll often have several mulling at once.
They come in and out of focus, but it feels like a part of my brain is
always still whirring away on the ones in the background.





For most of my stories, I also write a lot of notes. Pages and pages
of notes. Information and facts that will probably never make it into
the story, but in the writing of these notes I often discover what my
story is about and where it’s going. Sometimes I fill in lengthy
profiles for my characters. Sometimes I’ll just start free writing and
see where it takes me. Knowing all of this background to my story and my
characters is what brings them alive for me. It allows me to identify
what is important.





Another thing I do a lot of is research. Don’t think that just
because a story you’re writing is 'short' you can get away without doing
the research. I like to write about places, times, and people I don’t
know very well, and I think one of the reasons why is because I love
having an excuse to find out about new things. Again, libraries are a
great resource. So is Google. Not to mention finding people you can
interview or visiting the places you want to write about (if you can
manage to do so). This is another reason why my stories take me so long,
because I want to know everything about the world I’m writing about.
When I was writing The Parrot Jungle, for example, I went on the
internet and printed off driving directions mapping the whole route my
characters drove from Arizona to Florida, I researched what plants might
have been growing in Liza’s front yard, I even identified the exact
shade of mint green for Johannes’ Karmann Ghia.





That’s not to say you should feel bound by your research. You’re
writing fiction, feel free to take or leave the facts as suits you. When
I was working on The Numbers, for example, my island was inspired by
the islands of the Outer Hebrides. I read about how extremely religious
the Hebrideans are, but I made a conscious decision to make my
islanders godless, specifically because I wanted to emphasise the fact
that they had almost no influence in their lives from the outside
world. I know that sometimes disregarding the facts will annoy readers
who want everything to be exactly as it is in the real world, but hey,
they can go read a history book or an encyclopedia. You’re at liberty
to use your imagination!





Essentially, what I’m urging is for you to give yourself the time and
space to live with what you’re writing. Don’t feel that it has to be
written in a single sitting. Enjoy it. Your work will be all the richer
for this approach.





4) WHO ARE YOU WRITING FOR AND WHY?





Oftentimes, when I’m writing those notes I mentioned in the above
point, they will begin with the words, ‘This is a story about...'





This is a good exercise for yourself when you’re writing. Try to
identify in a sentence or two what it is you are aiming to write about.
What is it that you are trying to say? Knowing this will help you to
focus and will ensure that your work has substance. Keep this sentence
in mind when you go back to the piece and you’ll find you have much
greater control over what it is you’re doing.





That’s not to say that you always know everything that you’re writing
about - you might surprise yourself. I did. When the stories in my
collection all came together, I realised that one of the themes I’d been
writing about over and over again without even realising it was
protection. This rather unnerved me at first because it struck me that
this book that I’d thought wasn’t at all about myself was actually much
more revealing of my subconscious than I’d ever intended. But it also
taught me a lot about why I write. I write to make sense of the world.






Once you know what it is you want to be writing about, you’ll find it
a lot easier to turn to the editing of the piece. That’s when you will
begin to shape it and hone it. You’ll probably find that there is a
lot that is extraneous, especially if you’re writing a short story.
Economy is a necessity of story writing. Once you’ve finished a draft,
you might want to look again and try to identify what can be pared
down. How can you say what you want in as few words as possible? Always
trust in the intelligence of your reader. You don’t need to spell
everything out for them. They will be able to fill in the gaps. Allow
for their interpretation. This can be disarming for you as the writer
because it relies on you relinquishing control, but the end experience
for the reader will be far more satisfying if they feel that they are
involved.





Aspire to emoting reaction in your reader, be it laughter, tears, or
surprise. You want to make them think. You want your story to stay with
them after they have finished the final line. You want them to feel
that you have told them something they didn’t already know, or that
you’ve helped them to understand the world a little better. You want to
entertain them. Make them believe in your characters and scenarios
because this is why they will care, but don’t be afraid to surprise them
and to do the unexpected.





5) THERE ARE NO RULES





There is one maxim that I always swear by when I teach creative
writing and this is that THERE ARE NO RULES. No one can tell you how to
do it! This is what makes writing constantly exciting, exhilarating,
and challenging. You can read a score of ‘How to’ books, but only
through practice will you work out how you write.






You might find you work best in cafes. You might like to start at the
end of a story and work backwards. You might need to plan everything
in advance. You might find your mind is most focused first thing in the
morning. You might want the support of a writing group. You might have
a phobia of the letter h.


Whatever works best for you is the right way for you to work.





So please, feel free to disregard any of the suggestions I’ve given
above if they don’t seem appropriate to you. Try out any that you think
might be helpful.