Stage of revision 10: Detail and description should be slipped in small chunks

Why earlier writers included more description

When Dickens wrote his works he had to include far more description than we would normally expect today. His readers were less widely travelled than we are and had less access to visual information. Even the rest of Europe was exotic. The town was different from the country-side. London was different from Manchester. Indeed, Bolton was different from Manchester and even different from Bury. 

The modern reader

These days we can take short cuts. Even people who have never been to New York will get an image when you just use the name. One detail about a row of terraced houses may be enough to give us the whole picture. The mention of dark lino on the floor of the pub indicates almost at once a certain type of establishment whereas chintzy curtains indicate another.

Writing with the sense

When we write with the senses we always write well. When creating a scene we might refer to what we see, hear, smell, taste and feel. This allows reader to experience good writing but when we’re writing a story – flash, short or a full length novel – we need to be sure that we don’t indulge too much in exquisite prose. It may become too rich if it is sustained for too long.

One sense will often carry another.  If we hear the bacon sizzling in the pan we can probably smell it. If we can see the trees blowing in the wind we can hear it howling around the building and we can feel its cold chill on our cheeks.  If we can see the waves on the ocean we can taste the salt in the air. We tend to use the visual. Check that you have a balance of the senses with which you create your description.

Narrative balance

Your overall narrative should in any case be balanced: there should be a mixture of action, dialogue, description, inner monologue, and exposition.  The latter may even be avoided and should only take up a small part of the text at best. Dialogue may be more dominant in popular fiction. Look for the narrative balance in works you expect to be comparable to what you are producing.  Do they have a similar balance to your own text?   

Image by Pexels from Pixabay 

Think seasons and festivals

It will be Valentine’s Day tomorrow. I go to a Spanish Conversation group once a month and this month we have been asked to prepare something about the day. Have we got a story? I’m sure it will be an interesting session.     

I’ll often accept something seasonal for CafeLit. I schedule in advance and we’ve had something ready for Valentine’s Day for some time now. I even have several Christmassy stories scheduled for December 2019.       

Days of the Year  provides useful tips about significant days.

http://www.holidayinsights.com/moreholidays/index.htm gives a more succinct day by day description.  

http://www.holidayinsights.com/moreholidays/index.htm is also useful. 

There are the obvious ones of course: just a few coming up in the next few weeks include Pancake Day, Ash Wednesday, Mothers’ Day (UK) Easter and  - dare I mention it - Brexit Day.

Then there are the seasons.  If you write with the senses you are sure to make good use of the cold crisp days, the warmer afternoons blessed with spring flowers, the balmy warm days on favourite beaches and the glorious colour of the autumn.

You may have to rely on memory a lot. You could find yourself writing about Christmas on beach days, about spring on the dark days after Christmas and about seaside holidays in February because of publishers’ deadlines. One good thing about being a writer is that you can enjoy all of these sensations-packed scenarios from the comfort of your own writing-den.  

These settings may provide another resource when you’re all out of ideas.                 

 

The Physical World and the Writer

We tend to think of writing as a very cerebral activity. Writers are often introverts and can frequently be found day-dreaming as they fail to escape from the world they are creating. Many of us would like to stay in our writing rooms, have room service brought along three times a day, and money for our best-sellers delivered straight to our bank accounts. 

However, it doesn't work that way. 

For starters, if you're not in the world, how can you write about it? Secondly, what we write and what we read always relates to the physical world. 

Perhaps most importantly, the very best writing happens when we write with the senses. Often the visual brings the other senses with it; if we picture the sea, we can generally also hear it crashing on to the shore, taste the salt air, feel a sea-breeze and smell the sea-weed. When a writer gives us details like that we enter her world. The film in her head plays out also in ours.

Marcel Proust tried to capture the whole of his life by writing about its physicality. For him taste and smell evoked memories. A little French caked dipped in tea brought him back to his mother.

  

A detailed, but not necessarily overlong, description of what the world is really like helps us to avoid clichés. Try describing these:

• What orange-peel looks like
• What chocolate tastes like
• What rain feels like

Perhaps we also need to get out of our boxes in order to explore this physical world more closely. If you want to write about the park, go and sit there for a while and even make a few notes.

We often get our best ideas anyway when we are away from our desks. My ideas often come to me when I'm cooking, driving, ironing or walking. We are not alone in this. Archimedes had a Eureka moment in the bath, Pointcaré as he stepped on to a bus and Einstein when he was coming down in the lift.

Yes, the physical world is important to the writer. In fact, we can't do without it.              

The Anti-cliché Edit

I knew I was a writer a long time ago, even if it did take me ages to take myself seriously. Probably even before I received some praise from my teacher because I had written in my account of visiting my grandmother that “Sandy, her little brown dog made us welcome.”  That is actually one great big fat cliché but the teacher was delighted because I had taken my work beyond  the very simple level of subject verb object, which is what most other seven-year-olds were producing. I had managed this probably because I had been reading a lot – that too was no doubt a joy for my teacher. She probably hadn’t noticed that it was mainly Enid Blyton.

Yes, I’m currently completing the “get rid of clichés” edit on The Tower, and I would not tolerate that “made us very welcome” phrase in my work, nor in any of my students’ work, nor in any of the texts I edit.

But clichés are there because they work

Yes they are. And often it’s very difficult to express that idea any other way. How else do you describe a bull in a china shop? It’s probably all right now and then. But too many really weaken your work. Close your eyes. Look at your scene. What do you see, hear, smell, taste, feel (in both senses)? Now write. Writing with the senses helps you to avoid cliché and always produces good work. Try these: How do you describe rain to someone who doesn’t know water? What does chocolate taste like? What does orange peel look like? Pretend you’re an alien and look at your own planet differently.

It’s okay if it’s a part of someone’s voice

Yes, you can use them as much as you like in speech – as long as it genuinely is part of the way that person talks.

Borrowing form other language can be effective

Indeed you may have an advantage if you speak another language. You can borrow clichés, sayings and proverbs and they will sound fresh in your own language. An angel is passing, they say in France, when the conversation suddenly stops. Young women shouldn’t eat soup before lunchtime in Spain, if they don’t want to end up as single mothers. Many a Spanish man has taken delight in staying on top of his wife. Germans may tread on your tie, put their mustard in your sausage and find that a problem is in fact nothing but sausage. The Greeks are wary of announcing the spring if they have seen but one swallow.

Avoid the lazy option

If your resort to a cliché, no matter how apt, you are simply being lazy. Use them sparingly even in your characters’ speech. Maybe making up clichés peculiar to your characters is more effective. And even take a little care with borrowing from other languages. Only use the new phrases if they really fit – don’t contrive to find a space for them.    

      

Creative Writing in Other Languages – Again

European University, Nicosia, Cyprus
We sat in a round room on comfortable executive-looking chairs. A great space actually for creative writing. There were thirteen of us. We started on the theme of “April”. The trick was to jot down as many words as we could think of. And then look for the opposites. This was quite easy for the people here in Cyprus. They speak fluent English though are certainly not “native speaker” level. It was easy for them to find the opposites and write their “Hello Goodbye” poem.
We then went on to the “Demons and Angels” exercise, but used “sun” and “moon”. There was the usual discovery of extraordinarily original sentences as we put the two halves together.
These students were not familiar with haiku, but they did the usual trick of counting sounds on their fingers. Yes, even I do this when I write haiku. The haikus, as haikus generally do, turned out to be rather pleasing. The not-quite-native-speakerness of the students’ language heightened the charm.
The acrostic poems also were quite easy for these particular students, yet even they would have benefitted from using a bilingual or even a monolingual dictionary.
I introduced them to OULIPO and we invented some language games of our own. One student’s growing snowball was particularly effective.
The piece de resistance was the writing with the senses. I had expected them to produce mainly prose but they actually produced something mainly akin to poetry.
“Does it matter if it doesn’t rhyme?” asked one girl.
Well, of course not, but this just goes to show that we take a certain level of knowledge / familiarity for granted.
As usual, writing with the senses produced excellent writing all round. I was particularly encouraged by one piece that had a lot of repetition, where at the end there was a sentence that was different. Had the writer remembered the “turn” from the haikus? Had she picked this up from an example I had given in another exercise?
She didn’t know.
“I just wrote it because it seemed to work,” she said.
That says it all really.

Memory

Memory is an important ingredient in writing. We use it all the time. Even when we write fantasy or science-fiction we are using our knowledge of how the world works. We look at scenes in our imagination and set about writing with our senses. But what makes us choose those particular visuals, those particular sounds, those tastes, those smells and feelings? And the colours we see and the order in which we describe the details?
Our mind jumps around in a particular random way and we seem to have three levels of consciousness, almost. There is the higher self, having its grand thoughts, often analysing and symbolising the world. A matter-of fact voice then just describes what is happening in human terms and a third part is just aware physically of the world around us. Which voice speaks in those rich scenes created with the senses?
I’ve been teaching this week about the characteristics of the novel and about writing autobiography. Both can use some of the same techniques and it’s often all to do with bringing the reader into the middle of a scene, setting them in what feels like a real time / space. We create that scene with our imagination and our memory and our imagination is based upon our memory.

“The Lombardy Grotto” as a basis for your courses

As I make my way from school to school reading from this book and talking to students and teachers about writing in general and this book is particular, it does occur to me that it could form the basis of a very good course. It would even be a course which could be quite crosscurricular.

One could, draw out the following points:

1. Characters. I use Chapter 2 quite a lot. Here they meet Uncle Sparky for the first time and find out more about Jayne, the main character and her two brothers Toby and Michael. You could use this chapter to analyse how we know what they’re like, but also to look at how a writer creates character. Then students could write their own.
2. Writing with the senses. Well, exactly how do you describe chocolate to someone who has not eaten it before? Chapter 5.
3. For that matter, could we invent some food? There are plenty of new tastes in the Lombardy Grotto.
4. How do you create a fantasy setting? This goes through the whole book. The river may be allowed to go backwards, but only if that is consistent with the world you create. Establishing the fantasy world requires as much research as writing an historic novel. It’s just that you search within your imagination. What fun one could have creating another world with a group of Y6 students.
5. Making a computer game based on this story. Well, after all, that is what Uncle Sparky does in the end.
6. Examining the story arc. What is it? Is it there? Could the youngsters create their own?
7. And of course, that favourite question, “Where do you get your ideas form?” I’ve pretty well explained that to those schools I’ve visited. Maybe we could get the students to create their own story from the same stimuli. Or perhaps we could collect some random items to spark off a story.

If anyone out there is interested in developing this further, do contact me. I’d be happy to put together some work packages if there is enough interest.

Prose Poetry

I did some work on this yesterday and I’ll be doing more today. I think I approach it in an entirely different way from my children’s and Young Adult fiction. There is still, however, that balance of “visual” writing and aural writing. Yes, I do hear the words. But I also “see the scenes and try to record them. I say “see” because I also hear, smell, taste and feel them and am aware of thoughts in my head at the same time.

I’m finding even with this I actually write it better straight on to the computer. I remember the scene and write from that. So, what use the writer’s journal? Every use in the world. I use that for making notes of those fantastic ideas I have as I drive. I also spend time in cafés plotting and planning. I like to make notes on lectures and meetings. I rarely look at them again. It’s the mere act of writing thoughts down which seems to fix them.

I’m up to 49 pages of the prose poetry collection. I’m calling it “Glimpses”. It’s a little Proustian in its attempt to recapture times, but times complete with their atmospheres. It’s impossible to tell whether I’m getting it right. My head fills the gaps so much. Those 49 pages are complete. I’ve edited and edited until it sounds right. I’m not sure I do it so much for my novels. Yes there’s the 18 edits, but many of them are just tinkering. Longer pieces become unfixable. It’s almost easier to start something new.

I intend to make the collection something over 100 pages long. I’ve started a new section – Loved Places. The first excerpt is about Nerja. There will be further sections about Bursledon, Salford, Manchester and Bangor, - or North Wales in general. I think I’ll also include a section on “People” and “Commentary” which talks about society as it is today.

Working with Smaller Groups

I worked with just six Y6 students yesterday. It was in a very rural school deep in Kent. Three of the six had passed the eleven-plus to go to the local Grammar School. The others had tried and failed. But it was very clear that these kids loved reading and loved story. From the conversations we had, they were pretty good at it too.

I really did much the same talk that I’ve done in my other visits. I start off asking them to guess which are the two questions that writers dread getting. This particular group didn’t get there. Then I ask them about their story-telling and ask them where they get stories from. I then go on to talk about how I came to write The Lombardy Grotto and read a passage from it. I either use Chapter Two, and ask them what they think of the characters. So far, it’s been very gratifying: most schools have got the ages of the children right and their characters, and have given a good description of Uncle Sparky. Or I read Chapter Five and ask them to work out why the Lombarders call the wizard Old Fuzzy Locks. I sometimes ask them if they like chocolate, and then we talk a little about how you would describe chocolate to someone who had never tasted it before. Unusually, yesterday, I read a short piece from when the mansion starts to dissolve.

The response was good. They all became enthusiastic about the book and one of them bought it. Three others took home order forms. Working with a smaller group was good. It was easier to engage them. A couple of times I had to remind them of the etiquette of talking in a group, but it was only because they were enthusiastic.

As I left the school, their class teacher popped his head out of the door.

“They’ve come back very motivated,” he said.

Ah well, I guess that was the purpose of the exercise.