Writing Fiction

Linda Anderson, Derek Neale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135035693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Writing Fiction offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities, making use of insightful, relevant readings from well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. This volume makes use of new versions of key chapters from the recent Routledge/Open University textbook Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings for writers who are specializing in fiction.

Using their experience and expertise as teachers as well as authors, Linda Anderson and Derek Neale guide aspiring writers through such key aspects of writing as:

• how to stimulate creativity
• keeping a writer's notebook
• character creation
• setting
• point of view
• structure
• showing and telling.

The volume is further updated to include never-before published interviews with successful fiction writers Andrew Cowan, Stevie Davies, Maggie Gee, Andrew Greig, and Hanif Kureishi. Concise and practical, Writing Fiction offers an inspirational guide to the methods and techniques of authorship and is a must-read for aspiring writers.

1

Stimulating creativity and imagination:what really works?

Linda Anderson

Writers speak a lot about the ‘blank page’ – usually the daunting emptiness of it or, sometimes, the lure of it. How do writers get started afresh each day, facing the pristine pages or the empty screen?

Let’s look first at two opening sentences. These are the habitual starting points used by two novelists at the beginning of their daily practice. One of the novelists is a fictional character and the other is a real living writer.

Can you guess which sentence was written by an imaginary character and which by an actual author?

One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

The first sentence is one version of the constantly reworked opening of a novel by Joseph Grand, a somewhat comic figure in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1960 [1947]), which explores the impact of an outbreak of bubonic plague on the inhabitants of the imaginary town of Oran. Joseph Grand is an aspiring novelist who devotes all of his spare time and energies to writing. He is impelled by the dream of a publisher reading his work and being so thunderstruck that he stands up and says to his staff, ‘Hats off, gentlemen!’ (Camus 1960 [1947]: 98), which conjures the faintly surreal vision of publishers sitting in offices wearing their hats. But Grand can never progress beyond his first sentence. He worries at every detail of it, ponders the derivation and meaning of words, frets over the tastefulness, the rhythms, the factual accuracy. Is ‘sorrel’ really a colour? Are there really any flowers in the Bois de Boulogne? He makes minor alterations, never satisfied. And of course, the sentence doesn’t work – we see the writer’s fussy effort more than the scene itself.

The second sentence is the well-known line which uses all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. In volume two of her autobiography, New Zealand writer Janet Frame (1984) describes how she started her daily writing sessions by typing this sentence repeatedly when she was creating her first novel. After a long period of hospitalisation during which she endured over two hundred electro-convulsive shock treatments, ‘each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution’ (Frame 1984: 112), she was living in the home of Frank Sargeson, an established author who took her under his wing. Each morning she went into a garden hut to write, while her mentor pottered about outside, tending his plants. Desperate to appear gratefully industrious she would type that line, alternating it with ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ (Frame 1984: 144). There was no ‘theory’ behind her strategy – she was acting out of timorousness and embarrassment. But it worked. She was safely at her desk, tap-tapping away. Eventually, the self-consciousness gave way to absorption; the mechanical lines to real work.

Frame’s opening lines didn’t matter at all; Grand’s mattered far too much. The portrayal of Grand is exaggerated for satirical effect, of course, but he does show traits and motivations recognisable to many aspiring writers. He is ambitious and eager for success. He is also dogged by a paralysing perfectionism. His soaring ambition and crippled creativity seem to go hand in hand. Ambition and high standards are important, even essential at certain points, but they can obstruct and deaden writers in the production stages of work.

A researcher into creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996), warned that artists must not start wondering how much their work will sell for or what the critics will think of it, not if they want to ‘pursue original avenues’. He found that ‘creative achievements depend upon single-minded immersion’. He introduced the concept of ‘flow’, that state of timeless-seeming happiness and concentration which comes when one’s whole attention is absorbed.

Virginia Woolf has described this inspired state memorably:

I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me.

(Woolf 1953: 115)

The question for many writers is how to get to the ‘rapture’ without having to go by way of resistance. Some lucky people never have a problem but many will recognise this scenario:

You sit down to write and then run the gauntlet of self-sabotage: ‘must have another coffee/wasn’t that the phone ringing/should really check the electricity meter/maybe pop down town briefly/that three for two offer in the bookshop won’t last forever/maybe ought to read something just to get the engine going/you’ll never be a writer, anyway/who do you think you’re kidding …’

It may be comforting to know that even the most famous writers can be assailed by doubts and inner saboteurs. Here is Vladimir Nabokov:

Just when the author sits down to write, ‘the monster of grim commonsense’ will lumber up the steps to whine that the book is not for the general public, that the book will never – And right then, just before it blurts out the word s, e, double – l, false commonsense must be shot dead.

(quoted in Boyd 1991: 31)

How can we slay these lumbering monsters or at least shut them up? Let’s explore some practical strategies commonly used by established writers.

Develop a writing habit

‘Excellence is not an act, but a habit.’

Aristotle, quoted in Sher 1999: 8

Think again about Janet Frame’s procedures. She established a habit of writing. Some new writers think that the correct thing to do is to wait for inspiration. They fear that if they try to write in a down-to-business mood or at routine times, the writing will not take flight. But inspiration will not reliably hunt you down at the supermarket or even on some idyllic country walk. Even if it did, you would need some practised skills and discipline to make the most of it. Court inspiration; make yourself available. Inspiration comes most often through the habit of work, unexpectedly, in the form of sudden ideas, ways and means, wonderful words and phrases, and sometimes complete breakthroughs. Kenzabura Oë, Nobel prize-winning novelist, said that it is ‘accumulated practice’ which enables the writer to ‘reveal a landscape no one has ever seen before’ (quoted in Sher 1999: 16). Writers practise regularly, just as musicians play and artists sketch.

Perhaps you’re wondering how you could possibly fit regular writing practice into a busy life? In his essay, ‘Fires’, Raymond Carver, 1986 [1982] describes a decade of struggle to write while ‘working at crap jobs’ and raising two children. The essay is about his ‘influences’ as a writer but he subverts the usual listing of beloved books and revered authors. For him nothing could be more powerful than ‘real influence’ – the grinding daily responsibilities that obstruct literary work. He describes a Saturday afternoon spent doing several loads of washing in a busy laundromat. He exchanged sharp words with a customer who objected to the number of washers he’d had to use. Then he was waiting with his basketful of damp clothes, ready to pounce on an available dryer. After half an hour, one finally came to a stop and he was right there. But a woman appeared, checked the clothes, found them not dry enough and inserted two more coins. Frustrated to the point of tears, Carver had this revelation:

At that moment I felt—I knew—that the life I was in was vastly different from the lives of the writers I most admired. I understood writers to be people who didn’t spend their Saturdays at the laundromat and every waking hour subject to the needs and caprices of their children. Sure, sure, there’ve been plenty of writers who have had far more serious impediments to their work, including imprisonment, blindness, the threat of torture or of death in one form or another. But knowing this was no consolation. At that moment—I swear all of this took place there in the laundromat—I could see nothing ahead but years more of this kind of responsibility and perplexity.

(Carver 1986 [1982]: 33)

It can be consoling to know that most writers have to contend with obstacles to their work. Do you identify with any of Carver’s difficulties? Or do you have your own problems? Make some notes to yourself about how you might be able to surmount any practical obstacles to your writing.

Can you carve out some time each day, even if it’s just half an hour? It’s the constancy that counts, the building of a habit, rather than the length of actual time you are able to spend each week.

Include consideration of times when you cannot actually be at your writing desk but can mull over and progress your ideas, or figure out ways of expressing some things. For example: late at night; when you’re travelling by bus or train or even while driving (but don’t take notes without stopping the car!); in the bath; in the middle of a boring meeting; during lunch breaks at work; in supermarket queues. In this way, you can keep the momentum going between your longer sessions. Start experimenting to find whatever suits you in terms of allocating time.

Experiment also with special rituals and different locations for your writing. Will it help if you play music? Stick inspiring mottoes on your computer or wall? Have a little shrine of favourite books propped on your desk? Where is the best place for you to write? Proust wrote in bed in a cork-lined chamber. Roald Dahl lay on the floor of a garden hut. J. K. Rowling wrote the first ‘Harry Potter’ in an Edinburgh café. Find out what works for you.

Postpone perfection

The poet Louise Bogan once used the haunting phrase ‘the knife of the perfectionist attitude’ (quoted in Olsen 1980: 145). Perfectionism can kill writing, cutting it dead as it tries to emerge. There is a time for perfecting writing and it is not at the outset. Remember the hopelessly stalled Joseph Grand.

But what if you find it painful to produce clumsy, ineffective sentences? You should understand that all writers, even the most experienced, can write badly. The gift of writing is a power that flickers – everyone has mediocre days as well as magical ones. Try to cultivate an attitude of curiosity. As Flannery O’Connor said: ‘I write to see what I say’ (O’Connor 1990 [1971]: ix). Don’t expect everything to be fluent or valuable. Virginia Woolf wrote about finding the ‘diamonds of the dustheap’ in her daily output (Woolf 1953: 7).

Most successful writers have a high tolerance of raw, messy first drafts and of a series of imperfect subsequent drafts. They know that stamina, the ability to stick with a piece of writing until it emerges as the best they can do, is as important as whatever talent they possess.

For example, Canadian writer Alice Munro said in a Paris Review interview that she has ‘stacks of notebooks that contain this terribly clumsy writing’ (Munro 2007 [1994]: 407). She described how she reaches a point in about three quarters of her fiction when she thinks she will abandon the particular story. Days later, she will suddenly see how to write it. But this only happens after she has said, ‘No, this isn’t going to work, forget it’ (Munro 2007 [1994]: 407).

This kind of struggle is typical. One of the most prolific writers alive today, Joyce Carol Oates, is often thought of as an ‘effortless’ writer because of her vast output: over eighty books including novels, short story collections, poetry and essays. But she says: ‘When people acc...