Helen Falconer's Blog - Posts Tagged "creative-writing"

I've been hosting creative writing workshops for more than a decade and I've manage to distill some useful information n the process. See what you think.

The purpose of fiction to create an emotional journey in the reader, with highs and lows, delights and fears, and ultimately a sense of satisfaction – a restoration of the emotional balance.

There are three stages to creative writing.

1. The first stage is creative. This is the stage when we write directly from the heart. If your purpose is personal therapy rather than story telling, that’s where the process can stop. But if we want to get published, we have to remember that when we are telling a story it is not our own emotional journey that is important but the emotional journey we can generate in the reader.

2. The second stage is reading your own work. After we have produced our work, we have to detach ourselves from our work and read it as if it was written by someone else. (We have the skill to do this – whatever genre of fiction we like, we can tell the difference between a good book and a bad one.) When we do the reading we have to remember to be a reader, and not a critic. The reader is on the side of the story – the project – and just wants it to be a good as possible. The critic wants to bring you personally down and tell you are a failure. The critic is a psychological nuisance, not useful to the creative process. But the cool-headed objective reader is essential.

3. The third stage is rewriting. Now we knock the product into shape. We re-engage with the work, but in a more conscious way – like an artist with a roughly hewn lump of rock, to polish and hone first so we can see what we meant, and secondly so that other people can see what we meant. (The writer’s job is to make themselves understood. The reader has no duty to understand the writer. The writer is not paying them. The reader is paying the writer.)

When we are writing a story, we need:

Character. Character comes first. Without a good character, with clear desires and needs and motivations, you cannot have conflict, and conflict is essential to all drama.

Plot. The plot is generated by conflict – the character had to overcome a series of obstacles and arrive at an emotionally satisfactory resolution of story. (Emotionally satisfactory doesn’t have to mean happy).

Point of View. This is the window on to your tale, and needs to be consistent. The POV you choose will make all the difference to how your story turns out. Imagine the story of Eden told from the point of view of the snake. Or from the point of view of Eve.

Showing and telling. You might have been told always to show and never to tell. This is not strictly correct. Every story has to be delivered in a mixture of telling (which is straight narrative) and showing, which involves description and dialogue.

Style. The only strict rule of style is that our words have to be useful, in terms of moving the story along or revealing character. Ideally, they should also be ornamental. The worst literary style is where we have ornament without usefulness. Simple is good, but think of the simplicity of good poetry rather than the simplicity of journalism. To help your reader ‘see’, use specific not general words (‘silver birch’ not ‘tree’; ‘sparrow’ not ‘bird’).

Every writer has to master the basic essentials, just as every architect needs a roof and a front door on their house, however elaborate and unusual the structure. In good fiction, the essential rules look like natural developments in the story. This leads us to think the best fiction is good because is avoids the rules – but this is an illusion. It is merely that good writers conceal the structure more successfully.

We all now what it's like when you put down a book and feel really satisfied with the story you've just read.
When it comes to writing a good story, we've al had the feeling – well I have anyway - that for some reason our story sags, or fails to satisfy fully.

But how do you identify the problem in a saggy story?

Telling a good story is a real skill and not many people are lucky enough to be born with it.

But the ingredients of those satisfying stories can be discerned. Looking at plot structure can illuminate how the best ones are made and maybe help identify problems when you feel your story sags a little.

Plot is the foundation of narrative structure, the skeleton without which your story won’t stand up.

There are considered to be only seven plots in the world(!). These can be broken down into:

TASK: Overcoming a specific evil in order to save the world. (St George and the dragon. Any Hollywood action movie.)
QUEST: Going in search of something that is needed to make the world a better place, usually something quite spiritual – the holy grail, or some other expression of perfection, such as the truth (murder mysteries are quests).
JOURNEY: Leaving home, returning as a changed person as a result of challenges faced and overcome. (Any coming of age story.)
THE FALL: Tragedy. Begins at top and falls to the bottom. Tragedy, loss of paradise because of a fatal flaw. (Any Shakespearean tragedy.)
RAGS TO RICHES: Begins with nothing and receives everything (Cinderella).
REBIRTH: Begins in oppression and ends in freedom. (Any prison break story.)
COMEDY PLOT: Not necessarily funny! A complex difficulty, possibly a misunderstanding, separates two characters but in the end they are brought back together. (War and Peace. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Any romantic story.)

An alternative suggestion is that there are two basic plots:

Here we begin with a closed circle – containing the place of safety, like a family or small community – and the circle is broken and redrawn in one of two ways:
(1) The adventure plot, in which the character leaves the confines of the circle to confront a threatened evil and then returns, having preserved the sanctity of the circle;
(2) The siege plot, in which the circle is invaded by evil which has to be expelled before safety is restored to the inhabitants of the circle.

Every plot has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In the beginning (after we have established our character) comes the event which upsets the order of things and so requires a reaction. The middle consists of our character reacting to that event. The ending is where order is restored.

The danger is that the plot sags in between the beginning and the ending – creating what publishers refer to as a doughnut. What is needed is a series of turning points in the course of the story, which act like tent poles supporting the centre of the plot structure.

Joseph Campbell, an expert in comparative mythology, distilled the central story that underpins all famous myths and legends, and called it The Hero’s Journey.

Interestingly, Hollywood plots also follow The Hero’s Journey. see Conquering Plot structure by Michael Hauge

SNOW WHITE broken down into the classic Hollywood plot structure:

Set-up: Happy princess, beautiful stepmother
Turning Point 1 Mirror, Mirror on the Wall scene
New situation, step-mother want to kill Snow White, asks hunter to do it
Turning Point 2 Hunter can’t do it and abandons Snow White in wood
Progress, Snow White searches through wood and finds a cottage. Sleeps, wakes up, and meets seven dwarfs. Frightened but makes friends (finds out friends and enemies).
Turning Point 3 Snow White agrees to live happily with the dwarfs and mind their house. Can't go back home.
Trials and tribulations, queen tries to kill her – the poisoned stays?
Turning Point 4 Queen kills Snow White with poisoned apple
All is lost. Dwarves bury her in glass coffin.
Turning Point 5 Prince kisses her. Apple falls out of mouth. Hooray.
Aftermath, marriage and queen dies of mortification.
Next: Thickening the plot

In every story your main character must undergo an inner journey as well as outer journey.

In the outer journey, real material events happen to your character. In the inner journey the character changes emotionally, reaching the end of the story as a fundamentally altered person.

The balance between the inner and the outer journey is up to the writer. A crude distinction is that commercial fiction emphasises outer journeys and literary books emphasise inner journeys. Great books describe an outer journey that keeps the reader turning the pages, and supply an inner journey which affords a lasting sense satisfaction.

When writing a story, most of your hard work should be accomplished in the first half. This is because the first half of the narrative (1) introduces the main character(s); (2) poses the dramatic question; (3) sets up the answer to that question.

All narrative is about asking a question (what if this happened?) and supplying an answer (then this would happen)…

Example: In Anna Karenina, the dramatic question is: What if a dissatisfied wife runs off with the man of her dreams in socially restrictive aristocratic 19th Russia? The answer is: Society would be more forgiving of the man; Anna’s social sphere would therefore become restricted to her relationship and that she would become less interesting to her lover. NB The answer has to become apparent by about half way through the narrative. If in AK the first 90 per cent was taken up with the two lovers being absolutely delighted with themselves we’d be wondering from half way through what was the point, and ultimately feel cheated when it all goes pear-shaped in the last chapter.

All story-telling is the art of asking questions that rouse the reader’s curiosity, and then giving answers that satisfy it.

The way we move the reader through the narrative page by page is by making the reader ask themselves a question, and by then answering that question, but NOT before the next question is raised.

EXAMPLE: We open with a knock on the door.
(Q1: Who is it?)
If your character, Mary, opens the door and finds Mr Smith from next door wanting her to move her car to let him out the driveway (A1) we have answered the question and therefore created a closed story, which we have to get going again in the next sentence.
If you answer the last question BEFORE asking the next question it will bring your story to a temporary halt.

(Children use SUDDENLY a lot is because they keep accidentally shutting down the flow of the story and having to kick-start it. EG "I was walking down the road" (why?) "on my way to school" (question answered! Full stop.) "SUDDENLY a purple monster leapt out at me."

So in our story, when Mary opens the door, then let it be a worried-looking stranger (Q2: Why is he worried?) who says: “I’ve just moved into the area (A1) and I was wondering if… er…” (Q3: What does he want?). And so on.

If any part of your narrative has a flat feel to it, either it is serving no purpose (in which case take it out) or you are proceeding like this:
QUESTION 1, ANSWER 1;
QUESTION 2, ANSWER 2 etc
Instead of proceeding Q1, Q2, A1, Q3, A2, Q4, A3 in an overlapping sequence! etc etc etc!!!

Most writers have been told how important it is to show not tell. This is good advice.
However it is often perfectly acceptable to tell, but it is important to remember that telling has its limitations.

Telling doesn’t have to be bad writing, but it treats the reader as a passive consumer, informing them unequivocally what is going on.

Showing lets the reader work out what is happening in the story for themselves. This makes the story into an interactive experience.

Most critically Showing requires a consistent point of view.

In order to show what is happening in a story the reader has to be given a pair of eyes and ears, and a physical position in the story.
The new writer who indulges in a great deal of telling will often have no concept of point of view and will flit around from one character to another at random.

Different types of paragraphs play different roles depending on whether you are showing or telling.

Narrative and expository paragraphs are about telling, and descriptive and dialogue paragraphs are about showing.

Narrative paragraphs can introduce the reader to a new situation.
Example: In Newtown, the school holidays were a long empty space to be filled, and every day the children hung around in the street wondering what to do. It’s perfectly acceptable, indeed often necessary, to do a certain amount of telling in this way.
BUT the purpose of telling the reader is to whet their interest – to take them by the elbow and point their attention in a certain direction. Once we’ve got their attention we need to let them come closer to the action, so they can see and hear what’s going on for themselves. That Thursday, Emma and Jacob were sitting cross-legged in the dust with their noses pressed to the dressmaker’s window. (A specific time and place has been given. And now let’s listen as well.) “Mine spider’s winning,” said Emma. “Her web is nearly done already.”

At some point we might need an expository paragraph, to explain things. Ever since the bomb went off the spiders had been getting larger and faster on their feet.

An expository paragraph is like a narrative paragraph except it is not introducing the current story but giving a quick explanation of how we got here in the first place.
This is called Back story.
A brief note on Back Story: We often start a story near the interesting part of the action, so we might need a bit of back story to explain what happened before the story started. NB If your back story is VERY interesting, you might consider showing it, instead of just telling it. If it’s boring, leave most of it out and deal with it in the minimum number of sentences possible, scattered through the text.
Because always remember, your reader isn’t interested in the boring stuff.

Dialogue paragraphs are a crucial way of Showing – inviting the reader into the action, in a way that allows the reader to judge for themselves what is going on.

The first thing to remember about dialogue is that it would be very boring if it reflected the way we speak in real life, which is very rambling and repetitive. When you have written a passage of naturalistic dialogue, go back and remove all the repetition, and you will be amazed how much this improves what you have written without losing the flavour of real dialogue.
The famous 19th century novelist Anthony Trollope maintained that no character should speak above a dozen words at a time unless the occasion truly demands it.
Sometimes there is a good reason for a protracted monologue. For instance, a character may reveal something very important about their inner motivations (ie recounting an incident in the past that has made them the way they are today), and you can’t do that in twelve words. But like a Shakespearean soliloquy, such speeches should only occur at plot turning points, because they are in essence part of the action, rather than real dialogue. (Consider the detective summing up after the mystery is solved.)

Dialogue Dos and Don'ts
Never use dialogue as exposition (“Hello Mrs Smith, how sad your husband died in that tragic accident five years ago”).

But you can use it as description (“How beautiful the fields look now the yellow irises are out.”)

Dialogue tags should not be stage directions to the reader – “I’ll do it,” he said bravely – so lose the adverbs and write: “I’ll do it,” he said. Good dialogue requires no stage directions. Let the reader contribute the adverb in their head.

By far the best dialogue tag is “said”.
In good novels, almost all dialogue is tagged either ‘he said’, ‘she said’, or ‘I said’. If you use something else like ‘murmured’ or ‘sighed’ or ‘joked’ or ‘screamed’, remember these are very visible words and don’t repeat them more than once a chapter. “Said” is best because it is an invisible word – it has no colour, nuance or image attached to it – it is a pointer word, only there to let the reader know who is speaking.