I am sure Terry is right about the distinction between hard and soft skills. I immediately recognise myself as a 'soft skills fiction witer' being far more at home with character and dialogue than plot and infrastructure. In fact, I often have massive problems with macro-organisation and fail to see the piece as a whole, no matter how hard I try.

In order to control the big picture I am dividing the tale into discreet blocks and 'filling them in' - much against dictates of my inspirational mode, it helps to 'contain' the whole thing.

I also recognise Terry's acute observation: one is often reluctant to hone the weeker side. Why? Because it detracts from the flow. (But it must be done.)

Agreeing with Len, I think the two skills do feed each other and have a mutual dependence, and the feeling that 'something is not quite right' is one I am trying to pin down in my own work as well as others. It is this feeling (which I get with myself and others very often) that tantalises me the most. How can one transform that feeling into a analytical tool and, eventually, a maxim?

I also agree with Terry that bad movies are splendid examples on how not to write! (Many a 'bad movie' has passed through my waste bin.)

A question for Darryl. If plot is character-driven, how do the characters deal with the unexpected? (Surely, the writer creates the unexpected.)

And, yes, a good writer is also a good amateur psychologist (a philosopher and moralist too).

Concerning form and rules, it strikes me that as with any subject, one has to understand and master the rules before you can successfully break them.

Hamburger Yogi

Thinking about this further, as well as understanding the rules (of writing) well enough before you can successfully break them, there is the question of understanding oneself well enough to be able to break out of one's own restrictions too. A wise friend once said to me, "Terry, some day you have to strike out for independence in yourself." He didn't mean strike out against the unfair world, publishers who just don't understand how brilliant you are, call centres, Sven's affairs, or whatever - he meant to strike out within onself and be brave, creative and write from what really moves us.

Last night, I watched a film, 'Mona Lisa Smile', which was fascinating in that it was all about being onself in the face of huge expectations from society, friends, family (set in the 1950s) and yet the film itself could not do the same. While it was well-made and pretty well acted, at no time did anything life-challenging happen to the main character. She didn't go on a journey through the film, being pretty much the same at the beginning as at the end. It's tempting to think this was the studio playing about with versions until they found one that wouldn't rock any viewer's pyschological comfort zone too much. But, I don't know, maybe the writer and director found it hard to rock their own comfort zones. Apparently, when 'Some Like it Hot' was first shown to a test audience, the audience didn't like it. But the director refused to make cuts, stuck to his guns and, well, the rest is history.

So, perhaps I'm saying that writers have two battles: one with understanding how writing works well enough to be able to set free our intent, and the other to be able to break free of our personal restrictions enough to have something worth setting free in the first place.

Terry,

This 'breaking out' idea is something I am also thinking about. My problem with this attitude hinges around imagination and fact. Generally, I only write fiction that has a basis in personal experience that I want to explore - to a certain extent all my fiction is autobiographical - from an emotional viewpoint, anyway. And I sometimes wonder if I mess up a good piece with 'inappropriate' imagination.

I wonder where this 'break out' is taking me. Am I a demon or a moralist? I trust in the unconscious but I also think it will drag me through the mud before I become enlightened.

But breakout is necessary, it seems to me, because fiction is about the (comparatively) unreal - a voyage into what might have been. That's its freedom and it must be lived if one is to grow.

Hamburger Yogi

'to be able to break free of our personal restrictions enough to have something worth setting free in the first place.'

Definitely agree with you there, Terry, but what, for you, is involved in that breaking free?
Myself, I think it's something to do with putting past experience and knowledge into some kind of framework so that you can understand it as a complete picture, integrate it. Not so much learning something new as realising what you already know and letting that break the boundary of what you already are.

What would your breaking free consist of?

Sharon

<Added>

And Yogi, I know what you mean about your unconscious dragging you through the mud :) but can you elucidate?

Sharon/Yogi,

These are very fundamental areas to be discussing. I'm still working on what 'breaking free' means for me - there's a tendency to see it as a painful, cathartic experience. But, actually, in the rare times it's happened for me, it's been exhilerating, often very funny and above all creative.

I think I understand what you're saying, Sharon, that a similar process can be achieved by 'breaking free' of one's history. The way that works for me is to re-visit key events in my life, from time to time, and try to apply the reasoning/experience I've got now. It's remarkable how often this results in seeing that the way you understood an event was at best shallow and at worst completely wrong. The ability to look at one's own past and realise you had no idea what was going on is, I think, a good tool for a writer to have. I guess it's why we warm to certain comedians, the ones who have the ability to tell stories about themselves that we can indentify with, and thereby laugh at ourselves. And in this respect, Yogi, I think any writer has to happily embrace the powerful tool of exaggeration - something that has always been understood by story-tellers: that the point of the story is more valuable than it's literal fact. I remember once a friend of mine telling a group of people a story that involved an adventure he and I had been on. At one point he said that we'd spent three months, night and day, tracking this particular piece of information we were after. I corrected him at this point to say that it was actually a month and hadn't been every night and day, just most of them. Well, as you can guess, the story died a death and later I realised that his exaggeration was necessary for the essence of the story to transfer. And that process is a truth about story-telling, just as much as accurate measurement is a truth about the scientific process.

I'm off to Wales for a week now and won't have access to a computer, but thank you for your fascinating comments on this.

Terry

<Added>

Sharon, I didn't really answer your question, about what breaking free means for me. I'll try to describe it with an example. I once used to be a trainer in experimental theatre and at one time was working with quite a difficult group. Because I wanted to make sure everything was right for this one particular session, I planned meticulously and went in armed with notes, exercises and answers. But just before I started, I looked around at everyone and suddenly realised that it wasn't the group that was the problem, it was me. I had too restrictive expectations on myself about delivering the perfect session. So, without thinking, I said to them, "This is my plan for the evening", and then tore up my notes. I then started the session with absolutely no idea what I was going to say. All I could trust was my years of experience in the area and my instinct. Well, that was the best session I ever did - everyone enjoyed it, mainly because, I think, I was in the same boat as them - a small one without a paddle. I remember it was very funny, too, probably because we were all flying by the seat of our pants (just to mix analogies somewhat). I've had similar experiences in writing, in fact it's what I aim for - to be thoroughly prepared then, at the point of writing, to tear up my notes and just launch into the exercise, whole-heartedly and without self-censorship.

Where ya goin' Terry? I'm just back from Porthmadog.
Hwyl fawr, Sharon

Sharon and Terry,

What are we getting into? Polemical stuff. I will respond in two ways.

Firstly, writing is a kind of therapy and exploration into the notion of absolute freedom. What would one do with a world in which all one's potentialities have expression? In writing we are free to experiment these things without consequences in the real world but still 'spiritual consequences' for one's inner world. This, I think is demonstrated by one's state of mind after a successful session at the keyboard - one enters the world one has created and lives its atmosphere and the consequences of what one has created for the rest of the day. This can be good or bad: if you write about evil, evil will appear to you and be a presence in your life until you move on. If you ruminate on the past, the past will revivify itself and you will digest what you have done from a more mature viewpoint. It is a settling of accounts. So writing is a kind of magic (see my other posts) in which we conjure up the contents of our possible lives and live them by proxy.

Secondly, concerning one's unconscious dragging one through the mud, I believe that a writer has to live all possible aspects of herself in order to become wise. This means acknowledging the existence of the shadow (all the things that would normally be repressed back into the unconscious as unacceptable - sex, anger, hatred, the sheer glee of being a murderer, for example) and see what happens as they develop in the light of day. Anybody who approaches fiction noir will see these things popping up like partridges, waiting to be dealt with.

Perhaps I can best illustrate what I mean by referring to Mario Puzo's work. On a superficial level he was a chronocler of norms and values within Mafia society - he showed the world how Mafiosos think - but on a deeper level he was investigating the darkness within his Italian soul and meditatiing on evil and its consequences (his earlier books also do something similar). A question Puzo constantly asks is : Are human beings essentially evil? And the answer frequently seems to be yes.

The don and his family are not just protypes enlivened from personal acquaintance - they are a meditation on archetypal absolutes: What happens to a person if they embrace their shadow absolutely? What kind of world is created? Remember, the don's wife spent her days in prayer asking God not send the don to hell on his eventual demise. And Mario Puzo was very eloquent on these things - more so than Hollywood bothered to show.

All writers are different in substance and have different issues to put on the page, but I think the most significant writers are those who awaken similar thoughts in the reader and take her on a voyage of philosophical discoveries - even Harry Potter can be seen from this point of view and it is no accident that these books became popular among the young whilst paganism and the occult revives and flourishes amidst adults.

Whoops - a bit off topic.

Hamburger Yogi

Hi Yogi
Topics are there to be wandered from but what you say does relate to the differences between the skills that Terry started this thread to talk about. If you are trying to explore (or maybe not even trying, but just inevitable end up doing it whether you mean to or not) archetypal aspects of yourself in your writing, then I think that happens more through the arc of the plot and the resolution of the characters actions than through the descriptive elements of your writing. The sensual description (which is, as you say, your favourite bit) and dialogue, develop the sense of reality of your story, but it's in the plot that the conflicts and resolutions come, and that your moral point, if you are making one, exists. What the characters do and what results conveys that.

I'm also interested in how a culture allows or forces an individual to live out an archetypal aspect, rather than someone just doing that within themselves.
Have you read 'Hero with 1000 faces' by Joseph Campbell, or 'Story' by Robert McKee?
Sharon

Sharon/Hamburger ? Yogi? - first name?

(Sharon - I was staying just 5 miles from Porthmadog, believe it or not.)

Because I have a tendency to want to explore ideas/emotions that are important to me, there is a lesson I have to constantly re-learn in regards to writing fiction that might be pubished for a broad audience, and that's that the story must always come first. I went to a reading by Philip Pullman recently and one of the questions I asked him afterwards was to do with research. He'd been talking about his Victorian detective novels and the kind of research he'd done: mainly reading and looking at photos of people of that time. I asked him how, given that virtually nothing was written at the time by working class people, he would set about ensuring that such a character in his books would be accurate. He said that what's important is that it's plausible. In other words, the story comes first. Another children's writer at the same event was Jan Mark, and she similarly was very strong on story and characters coming first. One of her bugbears, for instance, is that there is currently (for obvious reasons) a lot of fantasy being written for children but most of it misses the point that first and foremost it must have great characters - the ideas/systems/worlds should always come second.

Incidentally (or probably not) both these writers were also adamant that you have to write fiction that you are moved to write, that it's pointless trying to work out what publishers want. For example, someone asked Philip Pullman how to write a book that a publisher would want to publish and he said it's simple: write a first paragraph that the reader can't resist, then a second paragraph they just have to read, a first page that they just have to turn and a first chapter that they just have to finish before finding out what happens in chapter 2.

Shorthand of this: write what moves you but in a way that the story is universal, focussed on characters rather than ideas, and put together in such a way that the reader just can't stop turning the pages. Simple(!).


Terry