Writing Discipline

I had a very interesting Twitter conversation the other day about flash fiction, and the skills needed to write it. It’s such a great thing, Twitter, not only for connecting people, but also for allowing users to engage in conversations like this one, which turn out to be so useful. I’ve been wondering all week, ever since this Twitter discussion, about the discipline of writing, and whether the skills you gain from one ‘style’ of writing are always easily applicable to other styles.

Words are words, of course, and writing is – basically – writing. But I’m not sure it’s as simple as that.

Do genres always mix easily? Discuss…
Image: ebookfriendly.com

The Twitter discussion which sparked off this idea came about because both the person to whom I was speaking and myself were, at the time of our Twitter exchange, working on pieces of flash fiction, with the intention of submitting them for publication and/or competition. We were discussing the intricacies of creating a good, workable piece of flash fiction and what the difficulties were in doing so. At one point, my correspondent asked me whether I was going to submit a short story, as well as a piece of flash fiction, to a particular competition; I told her ‘no’, mainly because I hadn’t been able to write a short story which I’d consider good enough for submission. Then, she said something along the lines of how she prefers to write flash fiction anyway, as it takes such a short time and requires such a small amount of editing.

This, I have to say, is the opposite of how I experience flash fiction, normally. I find flash fiction to be an extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming thing; sometimes, I remind myself of a glass-cutter, laboriously etching an intricate pattern out of the delicate and unyielding material he’s chosen to work with. I agonise over every word, I fret about structure, I sweat over characterisation, I pour myself into each image and metaphor, and I always struggle with the ending. My friend, however, has one distinct advantage over me when it comes to writing flash fiction.

She is a poet, as well as a prose writer.

Ever since we had this discussion, the connections between poetry and flash fiction have been on my mind, and I’ve been seeing the distinct links between the two genres. Poetry doesn’t work without delicate and judicious word choice, and the ability to arrange these perfect word-jewels into just the right structure to make a sentence hum with life and meaning; the same, of course, is true of flash fiction. Poetry can often operate within very tight structures; most competitions will limit poems to a particular length, but as well as that a poet, if they choose to, can write within a particular style, which will have its own unbreakable rules. A sonnet which has too many syllables in any one line is no longer a sonnet; a villanelle is not a villanelle if it has twenty lines. Break one rule, and you may as well break them all. Because of this, then, poets are used to working in tight spaces, and they bring extremely good word-skills to the table.

Poetry has also, since its earliest beginnings, exhibited an ability to make words work as hard as they can, and to carry as much symbolic meaning as they’re able to. Poets are able to make the most extraordinarily evocative images out of very little, and they have a way of making the everyday seem new. These skills obviously mean that poets come to flash fiction with a completely different skillset than a person who has only really written prose – and long-form prose at that – will have. All of this adds up to one inescapable fact: my friend is far better equipped than I am to write flash fiction.

However, I wondered further. I’ve had a few months’ experience with flash fiction now. I’ve written many pieces, some of which have been successful for me. I enjoy the form, and the challenges it poses, and the opportunities it offers. The burning question now is: Does being able to write reasonably successful flash fiction make you a better poet?

If the skills are transferable in one direction, do they transfer in the other direction too?

I’m not too sure about that. I don’t think my newfound flash fictioneering skills have any bearing on my ability to write poetry – I’ve never been a poet (or, at least, I’ve never been a good poet), and while I can appreciate the skills required, and even talk about them in an abstract, academic sense, I find them impossible to apply. It seems strange that I can be in possession of the skills needed (or at least be working toward them through my flash fiction), and be aware of how to write a poem in a ‘paint-by-numbers’ sense, and still have no ability to put a piece of poetry together. There’s more to it than just having the ‘mechanics’, clearly. Poetry takes something else, something besides an ability to use words – I hesitate to call it ‘sensitivity’ or ‘an aspect of the soul’, or anything arty-farty like that, but perhaps those words are as close as language can bring us to the secret of writing a good poem. You need the word-skills, you need the sensitivity to language, you need the ability to thrive within limits, and you also need something extra, something special, which only a poet can truly describe.

What do you think? If you can ‘write’, does it make you equally able to write a screenplay, a piece of drama, an epic poem, a novel, a short story, a piece of flash fiction? Or are there so many differences between the genres that each one is its own separate discipline with its own rules? Do you think its possible to be an ‘expert’ in more than one field of writing? I’d be interested to know what your take on these issues is.

Oh, and happy Friday, by the way.

Image: dididado.org

The Sense of an Ending

Today, the world is wearing winter’s wedding dress. The whole place is white and lacy, and there’s a layer of frost over every surface. The sky and the ground blend into one another. It’s quite lovely, but it’s very cold!

Image: 5ksandcabernets.com

As I write, the sun has started to peek up over the horizon, bringing touches of gold to the whiteness. Hopefully soon things will start to thaw and I’ll be able to get outside. Nothing is as refreshing as a lungful of cool air on a crisp day like this.

While I’m waiting, I’m still thinking about short stories. I wrote three yesterday, all of them very different – one was about a frustrated wife trying to get revenge on her oppressive husband (very much not based on reality, before anyone asks!), another about an anxious child who feels she has done something terrible, and the third about a man convinced that his life so far has been meaningless and he’s wasted any potential he had. Two of the stories are narrated in the first person, and one is third-person; one of them features a lot of ‘salty’ language – it seemed appropriate for the character – and all the protagonists are different in terms of age, race and gender. But all the stories have one thing in common.

None of them end very well.

I’m not sure if this is a problem for others, but it’s certainly a problem for me. I find it very difficult to bring short stories to satisfying conclusions. It’s even the case with the longer pieces I’ve been working on over the last few months. With ‘Tider’, I felt happy with the ending at first – I thought it was exciting and snappy, leading the reader into curiosity about the next book, and it wrapped up most of the plotlines, leaving some strategic threads unresolved. Then, I read on several internet forums that ‘cliffhanger endings are a no-no’, which gave me a bit of a headache. How do you end a book which is the first in a planned duology without leaving some plot threads unresolved? I was stumped. Luckily, this isn’t such a big problem for me any more because I’m planning to completely overhaul the book anyway, but it speaks to the larger problem I feel I have. Stopping the writing process, rather than starting it, seems to be my biggest challenge. I’m really enjoying the focus on short stories lately, because they don’t come naturally to me, and finding solid, convincing and meaningful conclusions to them is vital to their form. So, with every story I write, I’m learning.

But how does it work, this ‘concluding’ business? I suppose it helps if you plot religiously, and you know exactly where you want your characters to be at the end of the piece you’re writing. But, as we saw yesterday, sometimes writing short pieces is a case of listening to what the characters have to say, and letting them finish in their own time. It can be hard to plot when all you have to go on at the beginning is a flash of an image, or maybe a couple of words of dialogue. Perhaps, if you’re lucky, a whole opening sentence will come to you. Trying to write a story like this is a delicate business, and I fear that trying to tie these bursts of inspiration to a tight plot will strangle them. Then, that’s where drafting comes in. Perhaps the first draft of a short piece should be a listening exercise, finding out who your character is and what they have to say. There has to be a point to the story – otherwise, it’s just a pointless ramble. We’ve all been on the end of another person’s bumbling, and it’s usually not much fun. So, the second draft is where the real work comes in. You take your character’s thoughts and turn them into a narrative. Find out what was so important about what they had to say. Chisel out the kernel of their thought process, and find out what concerned them so deeply that they felt they had to tell you about it.

It’s not as easy as it sounds.

The story I found the most difficult to bring to a conclusion yesterday was the one about the anxious child. The image was very strong – a little girl who was sick in the night and who was too afraid to wake anyone up to help her in case they’d be angry with her. She was tiny, cold, afraid and very lonely, and I felt her very clearly. But I wasn’t sure what was important about what she had to say. Her younger brother had been very sick and he’d just been released from hospital; her father had a hard job and he needed his sleep. All of these things were on her mind. As well as that, she was terrified of something, but she wasn’t able to tell me what. I’m going to revisit this story today and find its point – redraft it until this child’s message becomes clear.

I know I sound like a nineteenth-century Spiritualist here, knocking on tables and making the lights flicker in my attempts to contact ‘the other side’. I just find it easier to talk about characters as though they were actual people trying to speak. Sometimes, it is a bit scary – they seem very real and, sometimes, in a lot of pain. Most of the characters that step into the parlour of my mind don’t want to tell me about how happy they are and how much love they have in their lives – something terrible or sad has happened, and they want to explain it all to me. But they’re all a bit like me (which makes sense, I guess); they like to ramble on, and they find it hard to wrap things up.

Perhaps it’s just a case of practice makes perfect. The more I listen, the more I’ll learn, and the more I read, the more I’ll discover about how to master the art of conclusion.

Back to the drawing board for me!

A Rough Edit

I have finished my fifth (possibly sixth?) draft! Now, it’s time to collapse in a twitching heap.

This is kind of how I feel right now.

It was a really hard edit, this time. This draft, I used purple ink to distinguish my corrections from the first hard-copy edit I made, in which I used red ink. When I tell you there’s at least three times as much purple ink as red on this paper beast, I’m not telling you a word of a lie. I’m actually a bit frightened by the fact that glaring omissions, errors, downright stupidities and unfulfilled storylines were overlooked by me first time round, and the red pen passed over them, unconcerned. It took the might of the purple pen to bring them to heel. Sort of ironic, when you consider the idea that ‘purple’ is usually a term you want to avoid when you’re writing – I guess, when you’re me, it can be a good thing.

It might interest some readers to know that my prologue (to which I was deeply, emotionally and powerfully attached) has been junked. Yes, junked. It had been reduced to a blur of scribbles and tiny, scribbled mutterings, until I finally decided last night that the reason I was so unhappy with it was because it was unnecessary, stupid and not working. I loved it, though – it was the first thing I wrote, the first gentle dip into this fictive world, and I clung to it like a limpet for all these months, despite the advice of my brother, my husband and my friend Claire. They all read it and said – look, this needs to go. I snarled like a wild animal protecting its young and told them all to sod off, that it was my book and the prologue was staying. So, to them, I wish to say ‘sorry for being such a silly auteur and thank you very much for your constructive, clever and correct criticism’. It just took me a few months to let it sink in.

I’ve read so many guidelines to writing, all of which say things like ‘if there’s something about your writing that you really love or feel unaccountably attached to, it’s a sign there’s something not right with it’, or ‘if there’s something that needs to be tweaked and tucked and adjusted and stretched and which, no matter what you do to it, just doesn’t fit, get rid of it’, but I never understood those tips until now. I really loved that prologue, written in the protagonist’s voice after the events of the book have taken place; battle-worn and life-weary, she introduces us to her world and lets us know that bad things have taken place, and will take place. She alerts us to the fact that her family are not what they seem. I thought it was important, and for a long time it seemed important. Perhaps it seemed important because the book wasn’t finished, and it was only when the story had played out that I could understand the reader doesn’t need all the suspense sucked out of the plot. I’m thinking, now, that it’s better to drop the reader into the heart of this family which seems loving, if a little dysfunctional; it’s better to let them work out for themselves that what the protagonist’s family does for a living isn’t quite wholesome, instead of having it told to them in the first page or two. I wasn’t able to make the protagonist’s retelling of the mythology of her world, which had been a big part of the prologue, sit properly – it just felt clumsy, and sticky, and it bothered me. Eventually, and finally, it dawned on me that the only way to fix it was to take it away. It’s explained throughout the plot anyway, so there’s no need to introduce it at the very beginning. It was a horrible, heartbreaking decision, but I know it’s the right one – even writing this post, explaining to you (and myself) why I took the decision to change it is making sense to me.

My only regret is that I didn’t have this epiphany before I entered my work into the competition, back in October; the prologue is the first bit that the judges will read, and if it puts them off reading the rest of it, I really will kick myself.

Gah. I coulda been a contender…

Anyway. Despite the fact that I feel like Clonycavan Man (that handsome gent in the image, above), I need to keep working. Making edits with a pen onto my print-out is, of course, only the first step in a long process. Now, I have to go back through my work and make all these edits and changes, hoping that they all work and that I don’t spot any more gaping plot anomalies. I can’t promise not to weep when I highlight my beloved prologue and hit ‘delete’ – please don’t hold it against me.

Right. Time to make some coffee and get cracking. Happy Tuesday!

Narrative Voice, and other stuff

This morning, dear readers, I’m a bit of a mess.  My head’s swirling, my thoughts won’t sit still and behave, and my poor brain feels like it’s trying to tapdance and balance plates on its head simultaneously.  So, before we begin, I beg your forgiveness.  There were so many things I was going to blog about this morning – I flicked through my memory-book from childhood in order to pick out some juicy reminiscences, and then I thought maybe I’d comment on some current events.  Then I discounted that in favour of yammering on yet again about how much I love books, or perhaps lamenting the fact that I need not only to replace my clapped-out mobile phone, but also my end-of-life (and much beloved) CD player.  Sigh.

(I might yet mention all these things – we’ll have to see how this thing pans out!)

For lack of any other point of beginning, though, let’s start today by talking about the book I stayed up late last night to finish – ‘The Obsidian Mirror’, by Catherine Fisher.  My poor tired husband had to put up with my reading light for far longer than he should have, and for that I thank him.  I really loved this book, but that’s no surprise to anyone who knows me, because Catherine Fisher’s work always meets a warm reception in my house.  This book is also somewhat connected with my blog from yesterday, where I wrote about feeling as though your cherished ideas are no longer ‘yours’ when you see something similar on a bookshelf; when I saw ‘The Obsidian Mirror’ my heart first leapt, then sank.  It leapt because I love few things in life more than collecting a new Catherine Fisher, and it sank because the book proclaimed itself to be about the theme which has been occupying my mind these past few years: time travel.  Well, my WiP isn’t about time travel, strictly, but there is a certain similarity of theme going on, and I had to read the book immediately to see if there was any point in my continuing with my own novel.

As it happened, the plot of ‘The Obsidian Mirror’ is brilliant, and nothing like my own work, which was a bit of a relief.  I won’t spoil anything for anyone who wants to read it (I recommend it highly), but I do want to talk about some of the things which I feel Catherine Fisher does very well, namely dialogue and narrative voice.  I’ve always enjoyed reading her interactions between characters, especially when they ‘speak’ in their Welsh accents, as they do in some of her books (not ‘Obsidian Mirror’, though).  One of the special beauties of her work is the fact that the reader can ‘hear’ things like accents and intonation, just from the way she writes.  Her dialogue is among the least flat and sterile I’ve ever read, and I know enough to realise that’s a talent she has honed through years of practice.  This skill is immensely useful near the end of the book, when we’re hopping from character to character and from storyline to storyline; it’s never unclear who is speaking, because Fisher is able to differentiate each character’s voice so perfectly.

‘The Obsidian Mirror’ is written in the third-person, but I’d hesitate to call it omniscient – the reader finds things out at the same time the characters do, more or less, but it’s not exactly limited strictly to their points of view, either.  We (the reader) get hints at the start of each chapter, when there are excerpts from diaries, letters or ballads to give us some idea what we’ll be facing.  My own WiP is written in the first-person (with one small exception, yet to be written, at the very end), and I’ve been thinking about the benefits and drawbacks of that choice since finishing Catherine Fisher’s book.  Of course, with first-person, you get the chance to really explore a character’s development and personality; you get the chance to allow your readers to love your character as much as you do.  But there’s so much you miss out on, too.  For instance, my protagonist is ignorant of a lot of very vital knowledge about her world and her family, and because of the way I’ve chosen to narrate her story, it’s difficult to write about her learning process without having other characters tell her things, or without having her overhear conversations, and that sort of thing.  There are things she needs to work out in order to survive, and I want to express her intelligence and resourcefulness, of course.  But because (through me) she’s narrating her own story, that doesn’t always come across – she’s not the type to blow her own trumpet, so the challenge is to hint at it through other characters’ reactions.  Things she might notice, or dispassionately comment on, are far more meaningful to a reader than they are to her.

This works, up to a point, but I know I’ve loads of room to improve.  The last thing a writer wants to do is have page after page of a character gently explaining to your protagonist things like, ‘Well, darling, you really should know that your mother was a flatulent swamp-monster made of broccoli – it’ll make certain aspects of your life now seem much clearer.’  Instead, you want to have your character feel a mysterious pull towards broccoli, which leads her to investigate further and uncover an arcane mythology about broccoli and swamp-monsters which bears some uncanny resemblances to her own life – we should see her put the story together herself, instead of being told what to do or think.  Or, if the story must have explanation, it should ideally be ‘off-camera’ – as in, a character learns something without the reader being privy to it.  Again, this is difficult when you’re writing in the first person.

How do you write, in terms of narrative voice?  Do you have a preference for first- over third-person, omniscient or limited?  I’m interested in how others find ways around the challenges posed by each type of voice.  My current WiP demanded a first-person limited narrative voice – I couldn’t have written it any other way, though I really do feel a third-person would have been easier.  If anyone has any narration tips, I’m all ears!  I’d love to know if there’s something I’m missing…