← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE Literary Festival - How to write a novel- an introduction for beginners with Justine Mann
00:52:54
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
My name is Justine Mann. And you're here because presumably you're thinking of or have embarked on this exciting process of writing a novel. For this first hour session, I'm going to basically talk through my experiences and the experiences of the writers that I've worked with in the last few years in terms of getting the first draft of a novel written. But before I start, because I'd quite like to know my audience, I'm just going to ask you a few questions about where you are with your writing. It's sort of pitched towards beginners, but some of you may be kind of writing or may have embarked on a draft. So I'm just going to ask you to do a bit of hand raising initially so I can get to know you a bit better. So how many of you have actually already writing in some form or another fiction? Okay. And how many of you of those are writing short stories or shorter pieces of fiction? Okay. Has anyone actually started on a novel? Okay. And of those of you who have started on a novel, how many have a first draft? Okay. So a couple of you have got a first draft. Okay. So quite a few of you are writing, some of you have written short stories, and a number of you have started on a novel. For the. For the few of you that have actually got to the end of your draft, what this workshop will do is probably serve as a useful checklist of some of the key components of a successful first draft. For those of you who are kind of part way through or just have ideas emerging, then hopefully talking through some of these technical bits will just help you. When you're struggling with a bit and you're not understanding why it's not working, perhaps you can reflect back on some of the things that we talked about this morning. It's interesting to note that quite a few of you are writing and you haven't got to the end of your first draft and you're here. So presumably there's some sort of block in the way whether it's time or whether it's because you think that what you're writing isn't good enough. And I'm going to kind of talk through some of these typical problems. Procrastination is quite a big part of this talk. About halfway through, I'm then going to start talking about things like characterization, structure and plot. So it's a mixture of why you've had problems with kind of getting through to the end of your first draft or why you're putting off writing when you should be writing. And then finally Kind of how you might get to this end point. So why am I qualified to talk to you about this at all, you may ask? I started writing about four years ago and was sort of terrified by the prospect of writing a novel. So I wrote short stories initially and having had some success with those, I decided to attempt a novel. And I enrolled on a creative writing course which did give me some space and time to write, but it also gave me constructive feedback on the novel. And I actually ended up abandoning the first draft that I had and starting on a completely new draft. So very recently I completed a kind of, I suppose it's a second draft, but a first draft of the new version of my novel. So I come very raw from the process of actually getting to this end point. And so hopefully that will be useful to you. But also I've worked with quite a few writers over the years and I also teach creative writing as part of the Open University undergraduate program, so can offer some insight there. Okay, so your reasons for writing. I'm going to again kind of ask you to do a bit of arm raising. Now, quite often our impulse to write will be because sometimes you just get literally a voice in your head. So the question is, are you going a bit crazy or is this a character that's emerging that you need to jot down in some form? Has anyone had the experience where lines just come to them at a particular moment? Okay, so some of you have had that experience. It doesn't happen to everybody, but it's one way in which fiction starts to come through. It kind of breaks through the unconscious into the conscious. It can happen when you're getting a tube ride home or something. You've been out for a stage stimulating conversation with a friend or something that just takes you out of your everyday and suddenly that writer's voice starts emerging. So having a notebook in your bag and being able to jot those things down is helpful. That's often where ideas start to emerge from. For some of us, and particularly when we think about a political novel, it's the urge to kind of record what's going on in the world around us, to make sense of events that are happening either, you know, contemporary society or in the past. So sometimes you may just feel compelled to write based on your response to a particular world event. And for other people, it's because perhaps you have a sort of a day to day existence which you feel stifles your creativity. The job that you have may be very interesting and stimulating and it may tick other boxes in your life. But the kind of creative side of you isn't being rewarded. So that's another reason, and one of the most common is that you really enjoyed writing at school when you were asked to write stories, when the teacher was a bit hungover and didn't have anything prepared on Monday morning and asked you to write what you did at the weekend, or write something imaginative, that's when things really. School sort of took off for you and came to life. So do people recognise themselves in some of those scenarios and kind of feel that's where the voice comes from? That tends to be the way it is. Hopefully you're not writing because you think it might be glamorous. There are glamorous bits to it. And Christie, I'm going to leave Christy to talk about those because I'm certainly not yet at that stage, but hours of sitting at a computer and being quite isolated isn't the most glamorous thing in the world unless and deep frame thrombosis has happened to somatis it spend rather too long sitting in one place. So do make sure that you do exercise when you're writing. The other impulse thing I wanted to talk about was some people want to write but don't read any fiction. And I think this is quite dangerous. I'm not suggesting that anyone in this room falls into that category, but if you have a real urge to write fiction but you're not actually reading any fiction and it's. It sounds unlikely, but I do come across writers who don't read. And the problem there is that there is quite a lot of technical aspects to writing and, you know, if you're reading other people's fiction, that starts to be imbibed. So I think it's important to remember that you need to read. And also if you're writing contemporary fiction, and often people are kind of. They love the classics and they're quite wedded to historical or a particular genre, but writing outside of that genre. So just make sure that you are reading lots of different material and certainly some contemporary fiction alongside your old classical favourites. So that's on the kind of impulse side. I hope you're not writing for the money, because this is the sad truth, it doesn't really earn very much money at all. And this figure actually includes J.K. rowling's movie Millions. So you can imagine that some poor authors aren't getting very much at all, if that's the average. But that's probably not why you're here. You're probably here because you enjoy the process of writing. Or think you will enjoy the process of writing if you haven't started that already. So I'm going to talk a little bit about procrastination now because it's something really common to writers who don't finished their first draft. And I know a lot of talented writers who I've been on courses with and kind of listened to them read and listened to some of their work or read their work and been really blown away by it and kind of trying to sort of catch up with them a year later and say, so, you know, have you finished your draft? And I'll find that they haven't. You know, they say, oh, my job's really busy at the moment. I just haven't got any writing done. So forgive me if I dwell for a moment on procrastination because I think this is really key to getting a draft actually finished. So the number one thing is waiting until you have time. Does anybody here waiting until they have more time to write? Be brave and raise your hand. Okay? Right. Okay. Well, that time is never going to arrive, even when you're retired. I'm sorry, it's just not going to happen. You're. You have to crowbar the time in. You have to make the time. And even a very, very short amount of writing time each day is better than waiting for this day to open up at the weekend. So I suppose you've got some choices. Let's imagine for a moment that you all work in London and commute as well. So that takes up energy and time. So when you get home in the evenings, by the time you've eaten, maybe relax and read the paper a little bit, you don't feel like writing. And then you get to the weekend, you've got friends to catch up with, you've got all your domestic chores and so on. There will always be something filling the space. So the best advice I can give you is to just make some crowbar in half an hour here and there, keep a notebook in your bag and just keep also maybe the last page of writing that you wrote. And the reason I say that is because the world of the novel that you create is complex. And the characters, it's a bit like friend, you know, you need to know them really intimately, your main characters. And if you can, try and keep their voice in your head by rereading the last page that you wrote, maybe on the tube, if you're lucky enough to get a seat one day, who knows, can write another line. If you distance yourself from the world by putting your writing away from week to week and only coming back to it once a week or maybe once a month. When this magical day appears, you find that it actually takes a long time for you to climb back into the world of your novel, into the setting. You have to recreate it almost in your mind. So I think that's a really important thing, is to keep a notebook with you and scribble down things when you think of them. And actually, things will occur to you in random places, like in a team meeting. There's an agenda item which you're not particularly interested in that isn't relevant to you, and suddenly you're thinking of, oh, yes. So do make sure you capture all of that and record it in your notebook and be quite. I think, you know, you shouldn't suddenly stop seeing your friends and family because writing has to balance out with other things. It's a very difficult road to travel. And if you suddenly start devoting all of your time and energy to writing at the cost of other parts of your life, then that's not a good thing because it's a really difficult area to get into and to get published, and you're putting too much energy into one direction. So it is that old chestnut of work life balance. If you can find half an hour a day that's ideal, do take a lunch break. You are entitled to it, even if it's just half an hour sitting in prep with a coffee. I did that when I worked at LSE for a couple of years. Used to force myself out of the office just for half an hour and sit with a coffee. The great thing about going to a chain coffee shop is that you could almost expire in the corner for three hours with one coffee. They won't mind if you go to an independent coffee store. They can't sit at the table asking, do you want more coffee? Coffee? Do you want this? Do you want that? So, you know, you may feel politically sort of a certain way about the chains, but I think they come in really useful for writers, actually. So try and get that time. Sorry if I've laboured that point too much, but it won't arrive. You have to create it. Does anybody have problems getting started with writing? Yeah. So can I ask just why what your problem is to throw you on the spot there? Well, just in terms of thoughts will be there, but actually kind of using some of that to paint my name, or sometimes I can't, because when I start writing. Right, okay, so you're looking for a beginning, but actually the middle's kind of emerging and you're. Yes. So what happens with that page when you've written it? Do you. Do you cast it aside or do you hold onto it? It takes a while to make sense of it, right? Sometimes it doesn't ever make sense. Okay, so you've got some material gathered together, but still. Yeah. Okay. So I was going to talk about the lumpen draft actually in a little while, but anyone else have problems of a different kind with getting started, or is it the second line? Okay. Funnily enough, you've kind of just. I'm going to get you to write now in response to this, actually, just to prove to you that I plucked this line out of the middle of a book, and I'm going to ask you now to write for a few minutes just to show that the second line can come relatively straightforwardly. So this line that I've put up here may have nothing at all to do with what you're thinking of writing, but I'm just to prove to you that you could go to Pretty for half an hour at lunchtime and write. Don't wait for your first line to come. Just pluck one out of the air, out of the middle of the novel that you're reading at the moment. And I'd like you just to write for a few minutes. I'm not going to ask you to read it out, but this is for your benefit. So write away and just see what happens. Okay, I'm going to give you one more minute. If someone's had a real flash of inspiration and thinks, I could write for hours now. God, she's going to stop me in a minute. Just write down those thoughts really quickly in summary for me so that you can come back to them later. Okay, I'll get you to stop there. So that was me partly proving a point. If this was a real writing workshop, I'd get a few of you to read out, but I won't. Some of you may be looking back at that and thinking, won't you be using that? Others might be thinking, that's quite interesting. One of the reasons for getting you to do that is for those of you who haven't written for a while just to kind of get you back into the process of it. For those of you who find it difficult to find your second line or continue with a piece of writing is by stopping. When you do sit down for a session of writing, if you could stop before you run out of inspiration. Some people stop, some writers stop kind of mid sentence, which seems a bit strange to Me or stop the sentence and maybe write in a little square bracket. This is where I would have. This is how I would have developed this. If you carry that with you, you never have to have that terror of the first line kind of start somewhere else. Someone mentioned that they seem to come up with middles rather than beginnings. I think definitely postpone perfection. When you're working with a first draft, it will be really sort of lumpen. And by that I mean that you will write scenes that don't seem to follow on one from another. Writers write in different ways. Some people see, sit down and write a very detailed outline of what their novels, each chapter. Some people do that right at the beginning before they write. Some people do it kind of after they've written a certain number of chapters and feel they're losing their way a little bit. But some writers just literally write down and write just prose. They don't tend to plan. And I don't know what kind of a writer you are and you don't either until you get some material down. So I would say don't worry about the beginning. Maybe just continue on with these beginnings. And the beginning may suggest itself when you've got a certain amount of material there. So self doubt is a big problem with procrastination. Why would anyone want to read this? I read my published book in the evenings and then I read this and the two just do not measure up. Well, of course they don't because you're writing a very rough draft. As Christy will explain later on a draft of a novel. There'll be so many drafts and so many stages of writing. You can't possibly write something that's going to look like a published novel. In the beginning. It is quite rough and raw. If you constantly go back and try and polish and make it seem like a published work, then you won't get further than the first few chapters. So I think it's really important just to let yourself write to a certain extent, even if it's quite rough. I think there's a writer who said if you Google this, it's called shitty first drafts, but it's basically an article from a writer who says no novel would ever get written if you didn't allow yourself to write a shitty first draft. So that's another key thing. So why do we abandon our beginnings? For some of the reasons that I've just mentioned, we're waiting for a big idea and it doesn't feel quite big enough. What we've got constantly worrying about what other people would think no, you don't have to share this really early stuff with anybody. You're just finding your voice, you're finding your characters. So the haves and the have nots. And by this I mean people who have completed a novel versus the people that haven't. And it's not because they're more talented. It's because they've got stamina, commitment. So, yes, talent is important, but actually, the people who get to the end of a first draft just put in the hours they get up. They treat it almost like another second job. If you wait for one of those wonderful days where you feel really inspired, you won't have very many writing days. Most writers sit down without feeling that kind of creativity. I haven't got my creative mood on today. It actually comes from starting to a little bit like we did with the writing exercise just there. If you find that you're having one of those days where it's just not coming, your kind of work's here and family worries are here. If you do a kind of writing exercise just to limber up in the same way that you might if you were playing an instrument, sort of play a few scales or play a piece just to get yourself into the zone, don't wait for a day when you feel like that. So it's the people who. Who have the stamina and drive to finish and think of it as training for a marathon. It's getting down to doing the writing. That's what a have is as opposed to a have not. This is a quote from a writer, and I think it sums up really well the difference between perhaps someone who's always wanted to write, has an idea and has developed something, but hasn't actually finished. This writer is someone who recognizes that actually you're going to have a mess on your hands. A Word document which you would not want to lose on the bus because you'd be mortified if anyone was to read how lumpen and messy it is. So most authors will report something similar to this if they're honest. There's days when everything they write ends up in the bin, and there's days when everything, it just takes off on the page and just really works. And actually, most days for a writer aren't as dramatic as that. They're not one of those polar opposites. There'll be days when you just write some stuff which you'll keep and some stuff which isn't so hot, and you'll play around with it a bit and edit it a bit, and that's you're adding word count to your draft. So I really am ramming this home, aren't I? But it's true. It's a shame. I know lots of writers who are great writers and, and they never get finished. So this is one of the reasons. The great ideas come, or a reasonable idea comes that you can work with, but then the hard work doesn't follow. And because writing, you're not getting paid, are you? And also your friends are thinking, well, you'd rather stay in in front of a computer and do that for three hours than come out and have time with us. So you're having to argue the case for writing when you don't know if it's going to lead anywhere, you don't know if it's going to get published or all that kind of self doubt creeps in. So you have to have some faith in your work. I'm not trying to put you off just to emphasise that there's a lot of hard work ahead. The benefits of not going back and trying to perfect things is that you don't judge your first efforts too harshly as well. You keep going and you find that the voice of your character, whoever is narrating the story, is getting stronger and stronger and you can reflect back on that early stuff and think, of course, now I know how to do that because I've got to know the character better and the setting and the story's coming more to life. So I'm going to talk through now some components of a successful first draft and this is where it kind of gets into more technical speak. So forgive me, but I'm going to ask you to chip in because I think some of you are already writing and have some thoughts on this as well. So as well as just having my kind of experience invite some other experience from those of you in the room as well. So I'm going to assume for argument's sake, that you've tackled this procrastination and that you're writing regularly. Half an hour in pret. Or maybe you do write on Sunday mornings before everyone in your house is awake. But basically you've found your time to write and that you're writing regularly and that you're gathering some material and that material could develop into a novel. So strong characters and good characterization. I mentioned in the, in the blurb for this that I would talk about the political novel and wanted to kind of emphasize some of the pitfalls of a political novel. But really any of the things that I talk about can be applied to any novel. One example I wanted to use was J.M. kutzeh's Disgrace. And the reason I use that is because it's a novel that in some ways you can read as a very quiet novel about post apartheid South Africa, but it's also a novel about a very human failing, the human condition. On a very small scale, it's about an academic called David Lurie. And the disgrace of the title is that he has an affair with one of his students and he's cast out of the university and goes to live with his daughter on a farm. But actually it's on a much grander scale than that. It is about post colonial South Africa and he actually represents the kind of old, white South Africa. I think regardless of what you think of the novel and whether or not you've read it, what's. What's really important about Disgrace, I think is that the reader is reading Disgrace on two levels. One, because it's kind of expanding this world, political kind of environment, but also because they get to know this character intimately and deeply, and he's actually quite a flawed character. When I say strong characters, they don't need to have a nice square jaw, be all muscle bound and out to save the world. They can actually be flawed people and in a way that makes them more interesting. But they do need to be three dimensional and your readers need to care about them. So if you're writing something that is political or you're attempting a kind of grander canvas, it's important to arrange that canvas around a few characters. And if you read any of the kind of key novels, kind of political novels of recent times and historically, they are. They're built around the human condition. So that needs to be the kind of driving force. There needs to be strong character and good characterization. What do I mean by good characterization? The character needs to come to life in some way. You can have really beautiful writing on a sentence by sentence level where the language is just working wonderfully well. But if the reader's not engaging with your character, can't quite visualise them, can't quite hear their voice or the voice isn't consistent enough, they start to lose their interest, they start to disengage a little bit with the text. So if you think back to any novels that you've really, really admired, go back to them and look again at character and character's voice and see how the author used that. If it is a political novel, how the author used a character to sort of expand their canvas, they're used as a kind of prism in which to get these points across. So, yes, your characters need to be seen and heard. Their tone of voice needs to be clear. And I know a writer who actually isn't sitting too far away from me, who, when developing characters, has a notebook, a tiny notebook for each character and just occasionally writes when they get a thought of such. And such a character would say this in this situation and just writes it down or writes down a kind of object that they might see when they're out shopping. So and so would have a scarf that color. I can see how it might be wrapped around, you know, so things like that. You might never use that material word for word in the text, but the fact that you know that character incredibly well will start to show in the writing, in the way that you get across their conversation. And you'll know as readers, you just verbal tics and things. And they reoccur in the novel. Finding the plot, depending on kind of what. Depending on what kind of novel you're writing. If you're writing a genre novel, and I'll say a little bit more about genre and literary novels shortly, but if you're writing a crime novel, there would be quite clear conventions about what should happen at various stages in the novel. You wouldn't have to necessarily pay attention to all of those. You could subvert them if you wanted to. And people play with form all the time. If you are writing a more literary novel, if you think of this as a continuum kind of literary novel at one end and a kind of airport thriller at the other, the literary novel might have characteristics such that it might be quite experimental with form or not have a very clear plot, for example, whereas the airport thriller might have very clear devices which are quite obvious on a page. But all writers have a sense of an order of events that are taking place in the novel. So whatever kind of novel you're writing, there will be a series of events. And as I said at the beginning, some writers kind of write and find their plot or plan, and others kind of know their plan from the outset. I think depending on kind of what novel you're writing, this will be more important or not. And knowing your kind of the kind of novel you're writing and reading novels in that genre or area will help you to know more about structure. I'm going to talk about structure in a moment. But it's different to plot. Plot is the series of events that take place, structure, tension and narrative drive, or how you choose to order those events. So, as you know, in novels, authors play around with the Time, Spanish. You might have the past flashbacks. You might start out in the narrative, present a particular day and then kind of weave back in time, might move back and forth. So your plot is a kind of linear, this is what is going to happen in this time period. And then the author might play around with those events and put them in a different order in the actual final structure of the book. Tension, if we think about tension. If you imagine strings on a string instrument, just nicely finely tuned. Narrative tension relies on the author kind of knowing when to reveal just enough information that holds the reader's attention. So you've had a series of events happening, you withhold some information and perhaps move to a different time period. The reader's thinking, I wonder what happened next? But they're already immersed in the next phase. So narrative tension, narrative drive. If things happen too simply in a very linear way, you can lose some of that tension building for the reader. Narrative drive is about kind of pushing forward with events, so not dwelling for too long on a particular incident. So there needs to be forward momentum in your novel. The reader will read it on because they want to know what happens next. So if you're playing slightly with the order of events, they want to know what happened in section one, what's going to happen next. But you've already led them into another time period. Perhaps you want to know what happens there constantly. Whenever you're moving away their attention from a particular character or a particular setting, you're leaving them with a kind of hook, I suppose. And the degree to which you do this and the degree of subtlety employ when you're doing this will depend as well on whether it's a genre novel or a literary novel. Narrative drive in a kind of more literary novel can be quite different to something. If it's a crime, is there a dead body on page 30? And do we find out who the murderer is on page? So that's a bit simplistic. So narrative drive might be quieter in your novel if you're writing a quiet literary novel. So structure, then, as I said, you might use flashback. It might be layered and there might be time shifts. You might have whole gaps in the narrative where a 10 year period just isn't covered at all. And these are all considerations that you have as you're writing. Quite often people just write a first draft and think about all these things to do with plot and structure. Later on, when they come to the second draft, they just generate lots and lots of material. And I think it's important not to get too Hung up on the order of a particular scene during a first draft. Because it's another form of procrastination in a way. If you kind of think, well, I can't do any work on the novel at the moment because I don't know what. What scene is going to come next. I think just writing out your first draft, perhaps, and getting to know your characters, their voices and the different settings, knowing your plot, certainly the sequence of events might be important or kind of having an idea of where you're going. But structure, as in what the final structure will look like and whether you'll play with time and layers and things like that, I think can possibly be worked out either towards the end of the novel or in a sense, second draft. But as I said, this is based on my experience and the experience of other writers, and each writer is different, so you may find things different for you as well. Can anyone suggest why it might be good to write what you know, that Old Testament of write what you know. Has anyone got any ideas. Where did that. Yeah, more convincing. Okay, absolutely. Yeah. So there's advantages there, isn't there? And that you can create a world and a setting that is familiar to you and therefore get it across to the reader. Yeah, absolutely. So there's less research involved and so on. Anyone else got any suggestions? Most likely to be original. Yes. Because it's your own kind of world view, isn't it? Your own view of that particular. Yeah, absolutely. You can also go into detail. Much better. Yep. So you wouldn't have to kind of perhaps plunder your imagination as much. It would be more readily available in your consciousness because you're living it every day. That's right, Yep. Absolutely. Can anyone think of any disadvantages to writing what you know? That's right. That's exactly. I think there's a danger that you might need yourself to kind of offload a particular situation that occurred. It might not necessarily have some of the things we talked about, the kind of narrative drive and tension or objectivity that you need to create a convincing world. So the converse is true as well. In order to be convincing, you might have to step slightly outside of your own life. But if you work with the areas that you don't know, you can be more vulnerable, more frightened, more surprised, and take perhaps the writer, not the reader, but a different journey, more in self discovery. Yeah. You're actually, in a way, you're recreating the reader's experience as well. If they're equally. If this is an equally alien kind of situation to them, then you're right. As a kind of writer, you can almost convey their own experience back to them. Yeah, absolutely. Be a freshness there just from your own original sort of insight. So, yep, there's pitfalls in writing what you know as well as in research as well. I'm going to ask now if anyone's got some ideas on why it might be what you might need to proceed with caution if you're doing research for a novel, a world that you're not sure about. Anyone got any ideas? Sorry? Accuracy. Yep, That's right, yeah. So you might be able to get your hands on certain factual information, but it wouldn't necessarily convey the kind of human experience, as it were. Yeah. Depending on what kind of research you were doing. Not able to get the authenticity across. Is that what you meant? Yeah, That's right, yes. I think if you spend hours doing lots and lots of research and you've got loads of copiously written notes, it's another way of procrastinating, by the way, is to do the research and not actually get on with the writing, is that you feel, God, I've got all this stuff, I've got to somehow get it in. And Christy will talk a little bit more about the dangers of this and how to manage it in her session. So that's another thing to be cautious of. But yes, absolutely valid points there. Some writers write a whole first draft and only do the research at the end, just to check facts, because they want to get the kind of human condition side, as you said, they want to imagine their way into the human elements and then check facts, the settings and so on later on. You could possibly create quite a turgid novel if it's weighted down too much with research. Choosing who tells a story is a really key decision to make. But again, in the first draft, some people find that they choose one character to write one character's voice, and they may change their mind in the second draft. Not always. So who is the protagonist? Who should really. Who is best placed to tell this story? You might have a semblance of kind of a setting and a series of events. Which character it might not be. The most obvious choice might not be the person at the center of events. It might be an observer. There's also issues of whether you write in first person or third person. I'm not going to try and cover all these technical points in a lot of detail today because there isn't the time, but there are advantages to writing in first person to depending on what kind of atmosphere you're trying to create with first person present tense. There's a real sense of immediacy and being right inside the head of the character. With a third person narrator, there's a little bit more distance, although arguably you can get just as close to the consciousness of that character in third person and actually go back to JM Katsir's Disgrace, that's written in third. Third person. But when you see it reviewed, they often say, and Coetzeer's novel written in first person. And the reason that the reviewers make that mistake is because it's so very close to the character's consciousness that there's hardly any difference between first and third person. Whereas in other novels you might read quite a distant third person narrator. Cormac McCarthy's the Road would be an example, actually, of where there's quite a bit of distance there from the consciousness of the. The Boy and the man. Some authors have multiple points of view. So some chapters being told from one character's point of view and then shifting to another, that can be quite technically challenging. But equally, if you feel that you can't convey the story that you're trying to convey through one character's consciousness, then it can be a useful device to bring in another point of view. I just encourage you to look at some novels with multiple points of view. Andrea Levy's Small island actually is one to look at. There's quite a lot of points of view in that, and they're all in first person, I believe, and I think the novel took quite some time to produce. But they're very convincing. Different voices there, each kind of interwoven. There's loads and loads of examples and you'll know some yourself as well. Does anybody know what I mean by showing versus telling? That old chestnut. But it's really, really important. Anyone want to volunteer why showing might be useful? Yeah, that's right. It's kind of. Instead of telling, I suppose it's more kind of summarising what happened, an event. Whereas showing is literally allowing it to unfold, as you said, kind of visually, the reader's invited to witness a scene taking place. And that can be really powerful. They're kind of almost sitting on the writer's shoulders, observing in real time, the scene telling is where the narrator kind of sums up what happened. They might describe that scene in passing. You need both in a narrative, because if you showed or dramatized every single scene, your novel would be like Gone with the Wind, you know, it would just be too big. We could argue about what's too Big and what's. I won't get into that. But basically telling can be useful for those events where it's not really necessary for the reader to witness what happens. As a rule of thumb, the key events, the really important significant events which will have emotional significance. And you want to get that emotional significance, significance across the reader. Those are the ones that should be shown. So when you're reading, you can kind of look at text and see when the reader's kind of choosing to slow down things and allow things to unfold in real time and kind of show you a scene and when they're quickly summarizing through something. I haven't got time to cover all these in a great deal of detail. But dialogue is very different in fiction and, as you know, to dialogue in everyday life. So making sure that the speech is quite tight, you know, there isn't urms, ahs and did we get any milk, by the way? All those asides that you make in real life, they're gone and they're cut. Description, again, this is all about. I think I've used an example of a kind of a piece of orchestral music where, you know, each of the different sections, there's just enough balance sound from each area of the orchestra. And it's a little bit like that with fiction. There needs to be just enough description. Your reader does need to say. When you say he walked into a room, the reader's like, oh, what kind of room? They're trying to kind of visualize it. So you need to give some. Even if it's just a very small amount of detail of setting or what they're wearing or what the weather was like just for them to get a sense of. Of the atmosphere. But equally, if you overlay, if you laden it with too much setting, that can also be quite turgid. A long description of a room when all the characters are going to do is have a very quick conversation isn't worthwhile. But having said that, in a first draft, you're allowed to do that. You're allowed to kind of meander a little bit. And when you go back and edit, you can make these cuts. It's just something to bear in mind. So reader expectations is quite important. And the books that you enjoy reading tend to be the books that you would aspire to write. So hopefully you're already reading in the kind of the sort of section of the market that you would be hoping to publish in. And so you can almost start to see the story structure of those novels. Not saying that you should Imitate, but just to kind of get a sense of what is being published and how readers respond to texts. Why did you like a particular text? Was it a particular characterization? Was it the beautiful language or was it a marrying up of all of those things? So these are some of the considerations to make when you're deciding the direction of your novel. How dark will it be and how long will it be? So just certain considerations like that reading in the area that you're interested in publishing in, be really important. I touched on kind of literary versus genre before. So anyone who's thinking of writing, for example, a crime novel, it's quite an exacting genre in terms of convention. So understanding those conventions is a. As I said, you can always subvert them and then understanding, perhaps, where a literary novel sits in the marketplace. I think Christie will talk a little bit about this in relation to her novel as well. With a literary novel, you might be more preoccupied with language and the rhythm of the language. With a crime novel, it might be more Pacey. Constructive feedback. It's important that you don't show your work too early, because if it's just really rough stuff, then people are going to say how disappointed they are. But what a writer sees when they read back what they've written is sometimes what they intended to get onto the page, rather than what actually made it onto the page. So sometimes you might. You might write a piece. You might write a couple of pages, let's say, on a Sunday afternoon, and about two weeks later pick them up and think, God, this is awful. I just can't understand what I was trying to get at here. And it's because the whole world. This is what I meant about kind of keeping the world in your head and the world of your novel, the setting, the character's voice was all working internally here, but it didn't quite make it onto the page that day. So it's important to recognise that shitty first draft actually just needs you to get a little bit more of the world on the page. So when you come back to things fresh, don't be tempted just to put a line through it, maybe try and look and see what could be preserved. The time to get constructive feedback is when you feel you've had a bit of a gap from the writing and you feel it stands up to what you were trying to get across. And one of the first things that writers do often is show it to friends and family. But that can have its pitfalls, really. They might try and please you, and because they're not writing, they Might just be a bit as you are. Perhaps in your early days you read published work and then you read yours and the two just don't weigh up. And they might just think, sorry, so it could be brutal and leave you feeling like you should never write anything again. Or they could just be being very, very kind and trying to find something that they like in the work. It's probably best to get feedback from other writers, people who are more objective about your work and don't have a relationship with you. That said, some people find it really great sharing it with their partner and get lots of useful input. It just depends on the relationship, I think. But at some point when you've got this draft together, it would be useful for you to get some objective feedback. And you can do that through writers groups. The only thing I'd say is with the novel. I know from my own experience of being in a writing workshop environment at the early stages of writing a novel, is that I would take a kind of chapter in. And I didn't really know yet what was going to happen in the later stages of my novel. So it didn't feel that convincing to me. I was quite worried about sharing it. And some of the things that came back echoed that. And it's almost like maybe if I'd got to the end of the first draft and then started precisely presenting chapters where I knew I was more convinced of the world and the characters and the voices, it might have been more productive for me. Other people feel they need the support of a workshop group in order to keep turning up each week and having some writing to present. So it can be quite good way of dealing with procrastination. But you will have holes picked in it if you haven't finished it yet, because of course you don't know yourself. These characters, the setting, this world. So getting constructive feedback can kind of be quite brutal sometimes, but very useful. It's just the timing of it and feeling strong enough to deal with it. I was going to say just something about whether people should go on creative writing courses. I'm not going to answer this question, but just to throw some ideas out there. As I said, joining some sort of workshop group or going to a creative writing course can help with procrastination, just in the sense of that you come together as a group, you're all sharing an experience of writing. So that can be quite helpful. There's lots of kind of things I've talked about, can you teach writing? And so on. But if you're an artist, you learn your technical aspects of your craft, you may subvert them later on and be a very original artist, but you would still go to art school and learn certain things. The same with a musician. You would have some sort of formal training. So not all writers study creative writing. And I'm not suggesting that you all go out and sign up to a creative writing course by any means, but it is something to think about. There is quite a lot of technical aspects to writing and I've really only just touched on them very lightly today, where some writers just read and read and read and read and read and learn their technical craft that way, and other writers choose to get into a writing workshop environment or perhaps on a creative writing course and do it that way. So it's up to you, but do treat it as a craft. And as you all know, you're kind of probably struggling with your novel, that there are certain technical aspects to grapple with. I wanted just to mention a couple of other texts that you might like to look at. How Novels Work by John Mullen, which is basically, it takes apart about 10 different novels that, you know, wrestle with some of these points that I've mentioned this morning, like point of view. It's a good book. There's a couple of creative writing textbooks there. I'll leave these up on the slides. We're going to take a break now before Christie's workshop, which starts at 11, and allow you to have a comfort break and so on. I will leave these up here and you can can make a note of them if you want to. And what these textbooks will do will just go into a bit more depth. I've deliberately stayed away from talking about the next stage of how to get an agent and the process towards publication, because that's going to be covered by Chrissy in the next session. Could you just say I'm quite curious about your background and how you got into writing. Could you say a tiny bit about that? No, not at all. I mean, I was one of the people that had voices in my head. But I think I also ticked the box of someone who enjoyed writing at school and did used to write in my spare time quite a lot as a child. And then adult life took over and work got in the way. And I always thought I'd do something, perhaps in retirement. I didn't think you could write and work at the same time. But actually the reality is that's if you want to get stuff done, you kind of have to write and work at the same time. So I just would be kind of thinking I don't really want to write a novel right now. But these characters, voices would just keep coming to me on the tube and so I would just start in a notebook, starting to write things down until I amassed an amount that just, you know, kind of needed. I realised I needed to kind of sit down and do some writing. I was curious. You said kind of the beginning that you got into first starting short stories before worked up in your experience, do you think that is a good way of training into it or is it kind of procrastination sometimes in itself that novels are so scary that if I only have to write a thousand words, I mean, it worked for me. It wasn't so much procrastination as just I wanted to know if I could write that thing of, you know, you don't kind of know until it's that chicken and egg situation. And I thought, well, at least I can complete, I suppose, in a way, procrastination. I didn't really have a strong novel idea at the time, but had what I thought were short story ideas and it was less daunting for me and I started to read short stories and then I knew the form is quite different and there's different demands. I think some people just can't write short stories. They'll start trying to write a story. I knew some people at university and then they just expanded into novels. So I think if you're one of those writers that you're finding your stories, it's too short a form and you want to carry on. You're probably a novelist, but certainly it worked for me in terms of being able to polish something off to finishing point and then sort of, I don't know, that gave me some hope that I could do it in a 90,000 word chunk as opposed to a 2,000 word chunk. Yeah. You didn't say anything about language. That's one thing. Yeah. And people said there are essentially limited number of plots. Yes. And then you could use that knowledge. So. Sorry, could you just explain that point a little bit more? People say they're just limited number of plots. Oh, yeah. There's seven plots. There's seven ways of telling a story. That's right, yeah. And whether you could use that knowledge to help you write the novel? Possibly. I mean, I found that. I think as I'm writing Hope, my novel's kind of fallen between a genre and literary novel. It's kind of in the middle way of that continuum. And I found that having a prescriptive idea of the way a story is told quite inhibiting. So I actually didn't. I read about the seven different types of plot, but I. And then I thought, well, I'm still going to write it in this way. So, I mean, I've probably made more work for myself. I'll probably be asked to change it to fit, who knows? But it certainly can be a useful starting point. And actually, in the textbooks here, it does flag up those seven different ways of telling a story. So if you're interested in looking at those in a bit more detail, they're definitely. And they have been helpful to some writers, I think. New language, too many adjectives, too many adverbs and so on. Absolutely. Kind of. I should probably let everyone have a break, actually. Do you want to come down and talk one to one? Because I just conscious that Christy's going to come on. Yeah, sure. In terms of. In terms of language. And some of the textbooks are going to these. And I apologize for not going into it in more detail, but you're absolutely right. Prose that's laid down with too many adjectives. Adverbs. Sorry. Okay. I didn't realize you had to all leave. Thank you. Okay.