with respect to your tutor, already taken, (and we all know what 'with respect' means) it's another dead end, because it's a rule not a tool.

Some writers answer questions, others tell stories, most do both.

I think one of the best building blocks of a story is to raise a question and set about answering it.

This afternoon I started reading a novel my son had got from the library. A teen dystopia. It was badly written. There were so many product placements on the first page alone I thought it must have been sponsored by Argos. But I kept reading because within the first two pages a brilliant question was asked. Some policemen arrive at a rather sterile home where a couple is bickering, and announce that the woman's teenage son is dead. The man is the stepfather. Then they ask why the mother hadn't reported him missing and she flusters and lies, despite being clearly very upset that he's dead.

I was so intrigued by why she hadn't reported the disappearance of her clearly well-loved son that I kept reading.

Answering questions and telling stories are very much connected, don't you think? In a way (and I'd not thought this before till you asked about your tutor's comment) they are almost the same thing. There's not much of a story if it isn't raising questions in the reader's mind that the reader wants to have answered.

Edited to say: Saturday, I so agree. If Jane whispered, she whispered. Saying she 'said' when she whispered just doesn't help. There's an art to good speech-tagging. I like tags that give character clues, like she announced or she coaxed or she grumbled. The art (imo) is to get the tag to resonate against the speech a bit. So, 'You like nice in that' she complained, has character. 'You look nice in that' she said doesn't.



Edited by cherys at 31/12/1899 00:06:00 on 28 August 2013

I have 'ideas', 'themes', 'questions' - but characters and plots aren't coming alive. It's all a bit academic.

And I always start with characters, but in writing down their conversations (for which I don't always feel I can take the credit) the smaller questions come to me, then very slowly, bit by amorphous bit, the rest emerges as I realise what I''m writing about. Often, for me, the story is the last to emerge. Which can be worrying when I read "the story is the thing"
And 67K into my current wip, I'm still not 100% certain how he died ...

One thing I've learned is that the writing world is a total mess. Quite a happy mess in some respects but the image the business side of it likes to project - super-clean covers, snappy blurbs, seductive looking successful author photos (along with a nicely concocted rags-to-riches story) - clashes somewhat with the reality. Hence, new writers think they're wrong to be confused, that they should be working out some super-slick life objectives for their writing career.

It would work better - at least from the standpoint of producing good writers rather than cash cows - if young writers were encouraged to go live a messy life; do weird and probably unproductive jobs; have lots of failed relationships; read anything to hand and maybe a few classics too - then write.

Another thing I've learned from teaching is that there are quite a lot of unpublished writers out there who are better at it than the big names. Successful commercial writers tend to be good at the business, or lucky or both. Talented new writers are usually hopeless, not just at business but at having any idea what they want from their writing.

I may write a bit more about this later, but about a week ago, I took a course at Denman College, which is the Women's Institute's centre for various courses. There was someone on the course, a literary writer, who is one of the best writers I've ever come across. She's just got 'it'. Not that she hasn't taken the trouble to learn the mechanics and 'rules': she has. But her work has that kind of effortless but inspiring flow, where you don't see the words, you just get the emotions, the images, the characters. She has a young child and a demanding job. She doesn't really know what direction to take. Now, it could well be that her talent needs to work outside of well-developed parameters towards success. I'd pay to read her stuff. I don't know if she'll 'make it' (although in terms of what she writes, she already has). But if she doesn't, it won't be her fault necessarily; it'll be the industry's or perhaps even the readers'.

if young writers were encouraged to go live a messy life; do weird and probably unproductive jobs; have lots of failed relationships; read anything to hand and maybe a few classics too - then write.

Ooh, I did this if you add the word 'very' before 'few classics'. A trainee writer without realising it!

Me too, Sharley

Me too, Sharley

Well, it's rare you get a free writing course. So I guess we should be grateful.

Ah, Alreadytaken, it's awful to think that the course had such a negative effect.

I think you need to give yourself permission to write the old shitty first draft. And have you come across the concept of Julia Cameron's Morning Pages?

I only loosely follow how she does it, but do find having a document I can just write any old rubbish in to be hugely therapeutic. I bet you felt better for putting all this into words even here? You sound very much like 'a writer' to me because it clearly makes you unhappy NOT to.

Go on, show those useless tutors what for. Get writing again.

Thanks, Caroline. I get very entangled in the 'why do I want to keep doing this painful, disorienting, often-fruitless thing'. (In fact, the only thing I can write very much about at the moment, is how much I can't write. The readership for this will not be vast).

But this thread is helping me to realise that the 'why' isn't as important as the urge. However dysfunctional, snarled-up the urge might be.

Cherys, this:

'You like nice in that' she complained, has character. 'You look nice in that' she said doesn't.

Splendid encapsulation of something I've struggled to explain for a long time.

Terry, your idea that writers need to live first - and, if I get your drift, to live badly, repeatedly - is compelling. For me, writing is definitely propelled by loneliness - not that I think I'm any more lonely than other people, but because writing for me is about connecting. I've derived such pleasure from reading about an experience or a perspective and thinking, 'Wow, I thought it was just me' - I would love to re-create that.

Since starting this thread, I've been doing my Morning Pages again. Nothing else is coming. I reach for stories and people and there's just my own reflection. But I'm facing the empty page for the first time in six years. So, thank you.

I get very entangled in the 'why do I want to keep doing this painful, disorienting, often-fruitless thing'.

I can write - in the sense of getting words onto paper - and yet earlier today I found myself wondering what pleasure I get from writing. Sometimes it feels more of a chore, especially when the chapters are heavy going (hopefully just the writing, rather than the reading).

Maybe I'm someone who likes the idea of writing and loves having written something. I think we all have our own reasons for writing, but the fact is that for many of us the urge to write overwhelms the reasons not to write.

Since starting this thread, I've been doing my Morning Pages again. Nothing else is coming. I reach for stories and people and there's just my own reflection. But I'm facing the empty page for the first time in six years.

Good luck. Don't look outside for the stories just yet. Maybe, for now, you could write about yourself - good or bad - and just keep it for yourself. Maybe, as you are writing something about your childhood a 'what if' may appear.

Stories may be like boyfriends. If you are actively searching, you can't find them for gold dust, but the minute you stopping looking, they step from the shadows.

Doing morning pages or the equivalent is enough. Just writing. If ever there was a case for not demanding a particular kind of writing of yourself, I'd say it was now.

I reach for stories and people and there's just my own reflection.

Ages ago I asked on WW whether people had come to writing fiction from storytelling, or writing journals i.e. what did you write before you sat down to write your first novel/story. And it seemed to be about 50/50, whether the writing had come from inside, or from outside, as it were; whether your creativity started with trying to pin down/express your own experience, or the experience of other worlds and people.

If you're usually writing about stories and characters which are very definitely outside yourself, then it can be devastating to find that the self-consciousness that this course has got you tangled up in is strangling that part of your imagination.

(For totally different reasons, I had a horrible, horrible bout of self-consciousness with the WIP a while ago, and it was hideous: every time my storytelling self actually got going, some other entity would lean over my shoulder and say, "No, you're not allowed to say that, because...". It was everything to do with my relationship to the project, and not much to do with my capacities as a writer, limited though they are, nor essentially with the idea of the project itself. I suddenly realised how beginner writers who feel really insecure about grammar and syntax feel: that Teacher is leaning over their shoulder with an angry red pen in one hand, and a ruler in the other...)

Maybe a lightly-fictionalised version of yourself would make a nice story, mind you. Just for yourself, obviously.

Apparently, when therapists use writing as a tool, it's not the morning-pages splurge of unmediated stuff that does the therapeutic work, though of course the process starts there. Apparently, it's in the editing and revising - in looking at the splurge and thinking "Did I really mean it that way? No, actually, it was more like X. And Y isn't really how I felt next, there was that minute between them when it was all amazingly Z..." It's the re-processing, not processing, which really sorts stuff out and lays it to rest.

So you might find that the process of fictionalising helped?

On speech tags, I unpicked the issue here, which might be interesting to some folks:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/05/talking-speech-tags.html

Alreadytaken, please don't judge the content of your morning pages. Isn't that the point? You can whinge your head off in them.

I found, when I did them regularly, that for a while they purged the urge to write. I'd just whinge on paper then go about my day. But one day I stopped whinging because I suppose the whinges were all cleared, like a cluttered cupboard being finally empty, so I just pootled on the page and a story just jumped up from nowhere. Not a good one, but fiction. Next day same thing happened, only it was a story I could work on. Third day, same again only it was part of a stagnant longer piece, come home to roost.

Trust the process. Also, the one disagreement I have with Cameron is that they need to be morning pages. I found doing them first thing meant an awful lot of sentences about 'sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee steaming at my elbow as the sun rises over the apple trees.' Once I started using the same process but at any time of day, especially at night, it all came tumbling out.

the one disagreement I have with Cameron is that they need to be morning pages.

Yes, I so agree. Dorothea Brande, who is the original of so much that Cameron and Ann Lamott and half a dozen other write so well about, suggests that you just make an appointment with yourself to write, whatever time of day is possible. If it's 4.25pm in the ladies' loo in your office, so be it. The only important thing is that you ring-fence that short time, come what may, and write.

And it's worth remembering that Cameron tells you not to re-read those morning pages, but seal them in an envelope. So the point isn't to to provide yourself with words to work on, only to discharge stuff that needs discharging.

Jenn Ashworth likens it to the washing machine, at the beginning of the cycle, pumping out the grubby dregs of the previous wash. Which is a very good analogy, I think.

Edited by EmmaD at 22:23:00 on 30 August 2013

Thank you, everyone. So, so helpful.

Just to say that I will be off for a bit now, as work engulfs me again. But I have printed this off and stuck it in a file called *It's Going To Be Alright*

(A less fluent version of Julian of Norwich's 'All will be well...', I think)

I will come back, to read, think, experiment and contribute

AT