Here's me with my plaits. My hair was so long that I could sit on it. Mum plaited it every day - I must have been one of the few kids in my school that didn't get head lice, probably because they couldn't get any purchase on the tight braids.
I write books. I live with my artist husband, Alan Lees, in a 200 year old cottage in Scotland.
How Not To Be A Writer - Part One
Tacit Knowledge and Creative Writing Workshops
Not-a-workshop in Grantown-on-Spey |
I have regular Zoom chats with three friends, started before the pandemic as real life meetings, but continued online. All of them are professional artists. I'm the single writer, and it's always interesting and enlightening to compare the way I work with the way they work - although obviously they don't all work in the same way either.
A few weeks ago we started talking about tacit knowledge and they asked me how that applied to my work. My first impulse was to say 'it doesn't.' But I've been thinking about it ever since, and of course it does. It's just that most writers either don't realise it, or feel uncomfortable acknowledging it.
Most creative professionals don't retire but as time goes by, we tend to acknowledge what we do and don't want to do. We learn how to say a polite 'no'. Here's an awful admission. I've always disliked doing workshops. Worse, in all my years of actually delivering workshops, I've had an uneasy feeling that I don't know what a workshop is or should be.
Nor do most of the people who ask you to do them. I've seen all kinds of events described as workshops from writers speaking about their books, how they researched and wrote them, to full on, participatory 'how to' sessions for a few people, which is more or less what I think of when I see the word. I still love doing the former, but the latter? Not so much.
If you write non-fiction or historical fiction, you can give an entertaining and informative talk about your work and how you set about researching it. For example, I've enjoyed every talk I've given about The Jewel, my novel about Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, and I hope other people have too. This is partly because I'm comfortable with describing my research, but also because the audience for this kind of talk is usually knowledgeable, so they will ask interesting questions, and offer their own contributions.
I've taught intermittently throughout my working life, three happy years teaching English as a foreign language to adults in Finland and Poland, numerous drama and script-writing workshops, radio workshops, and some hugely rewarding years as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at our local university, helping students with their academic writing.
I enjoyed the RLF fellowship most of all. In those one-to-one sessions I was using my tacit knowledge as an experienced writer (although I didn't call it that) to help students see their own way through.
'How can you read my essay and immediately point out the main thread, when I'm floundering about?' one of my students asked me. It was down to years of practice. We never did the work for them. We just showed them a way of working things out for themselves. Mostly by asking the right questions. It's what good editors and producers do for writers too. They ask the right questions and in finding the answers, you make the work better yourself.
That same tacit knowledge is what I use when I'm writing - for example - dialogue. I've had years of writing plays for radio and the stage, and now in fiction. But if I'm asked to do a workshop on writing dialogue I feel a sense of panic. I can do it. I know what works and what doesn't. But I don't know how to explain how I do it to people who don't have an ear for it.
It's like when my woodcarver husband takes a block of lime and cuts off all the pieces that don't look like whatever he wants to make. He can teach people the basics. Teach them about wood and tools and techniques, but if they can't see the wonderful thing inside the wood, can't feel the shape of it, it will take more than a couple of workshops to acquire the feel for it that is the result of years of practice. It's the same with writing. I can give people rules for writing dialogue. I can frame exercises to help them. But there is no shortcut.
None of which is to denigrate the role of really good mentoring, done with a light touch. Somebody with lots of tacit knowledge helps us to find a way through our problems, often by questioning what we're not doing, rather than telling us what we ought to be doing.
Intuition is a whole other can of worms. On the whole, I think the more you work at your craft, whatever that is, the more intuition you will acquire. That way, your tacit knowledge becomes intuitive, so that you can look at a piece of work, get the feeling that something is wrong with it and often, but not always, fix it for yourself.
Plotters and Pantsers - which one are you?
A friend inspired this post and I'm grateful to her. She observed that she had been taken by surprise by the ending of one of my novels called Ice Dancing and my immediate thought was 'so was I!' I honestly had no idea how it was going to end until I started writing the last couple of chapters, and suddenly saw what should have been staring me in the face at the same time as the narrator herself discovered it. The odd thing was that it didn't involve any manipulation of the story. When I looked back, the clues were all there. I didn't have to plant them at all.
Which in turn led me to think about a couple of other novels where the ending had taken me by surprise. Without any spoilers, in Bird of Passage, I discovered the trauma that the 'hero' (if he can be called that) Finn was trying to remember at about the same time that he realised it himself. Until that moment, I knew there was something, but didn't know what it was. I literally woke up in the middle of the night saying 'So that was what happened!'
Similarly, in The Physic Garden, I knew that the ending involved a shocking betrayal - because that's how it begins. With the narrator mentioning it, without explaining it. Again, I realised the nature of that betrayal and its consequence only when I got to that part of the story.
I am what I believe is known as a 'pantser' in creative writing circles. I write by the seat of my pants. Although that isn't how I'd ever describe it myself. I write to find out. I always know the beginning, and I sometimes have a very vague idea of the ending, sometimes as little as the last few lines - but I never know how to get there. And if I did, I would get so bored that I would never finish writing the book.
Outlines were always anathema to me, because I could write them (with difficulty) while knowing full well that the finished book would be nothing like the outline. How could it be when I just didn't know? Plotters do seem to know. They plan everything out, including detailed character sketches. I never do that either, because I've only just met these people. It doesn't feel precarious. It feels uncannily as though the story is already there, waiting to be uncovered.
All the same, for many writers, plotting works extremely well. I don't write crime fiction or the kind of thrillers that depend upon intricate plots that must fit together but I suspect they do need to be pretty well plotted in advance. Otherwise you might find yourself desperately trying to tie up too many loose ends in the last chapter. Or in the last episode, as happened with a recent, deeply annoying TV series. But it would be interesting to hear from crime writer friends if this is indeed the case, or if there's a sort of half way house where you have a broad outline that you flesh out as you're writing.
There is, of course, no right or wrong way - only the way that works well for you. The trick, as with so much writing, is to find out what suits you best. And the only way to do that is to carry on writing.
Writing Advice: Getting the Details Right
This isn't really a 'how to write' blog. But I've been writing in so many different media for so many years now, that occasionally things occur to me that may be useful for people who are just starting out on the long road to publication or production. I used to teach Creative Writing for various organisations, so I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't. For the New Year I've dug out my big folder of 'how to' notes and I'll be including an occasional post with what I hope may be useful advice. Some of it should be self evident - but isn't always.
I've been reading a contemporary thriller. I won't name it, even though it's a very good read. It fairly gallops along with plenty of surprises along the way, although less than half way through, I've guessed at least part of the ending. That, though, is more my problem than the writer's. The more you write yourself, the more you tend to be able to guess what's going to happen next.
No. The niggling irritation involved a garden.
The story is set in spring (I think) a warm late spring, in the South of England. The house has a big garden. Early on, we're told that it is full of wild garlic and lavender. Now, although wild garlic flowers and scents the air with its wonderful pungency through the spring of the year, it tends to be found more in ancient woodlands, bluebell woods in particular, flowering from April to June after which it is masked by other growth. By May, the scent of bluebells usually takes over. Lavender stays green throughout the year in mild climates, so that's fine. Although it wouldn't be all mixed up with the garlic. Later though, that same day, we're told that the garden is miraculously full of flowers including foxgloves, night-scented stock, hyacinth? As any gardener, even the most amateur among us, knows, your foxgloves and night scented stock are summer flowers. Hyacinths? Not so much. Not even bluebells if that's what's meant.
We all get details wrong. But it is this kind of precise detail that can pull the reader right out of the story, challenging her willing suspension of disbelief. On reflection, it's indicative of a wider problem, because I'm still not 100% sure at exactly what time of year the story is set. Sometimes it feels like summer but other details mean it must be spring. In which case, yay for the wild garlic and hyacinths. Not so much for the foxgloves and night scented stock.
It shouldn't matter at all. But it sort of does. It irritates, because this is a much lauded traditionally published novel and it's exactly the kind of thing that a good editor should immediately pick up on, writing 'flowers? time of year?' in Track Changes. Then perhaps even extrapolating from that a question about timescales, the when of the story. That's what good editors do. They pick up on the small things with wider implications. They ask the right questions and in finding the answers, you, the writer, make the piece of work better.
So much of writing involves finding exactly the right word. That goes for things as simple as garden flowers, as well as complex emotions. If you're not a gardener, then Google is your friend.
No More Workshops
Book event in lovely Grantown-on-Spey |
Let me say up front that I love doing book events. I enjoy speaking about my books, and my writing and the research that goes into them. I love doing readings, and answering questions about the work and explaining as best I can how I write. There are always lots of questions, and audiences at book events are usually interested and interesting people.
Advice About Advice About Writing.
What to write? That is the question. |
I had a sudden insight today: one that has been creeping up on me for some time, but that only resolved itself into a firm conviction this morning. So I'm going to share it with you, although I'm uneasily aware that I may be offering you advice about NOT taking advice about writing.
Nevertheless, I've been at this game for longer than most of the people I know, so I'm going ahead anyway.
How to write.
To be clear, advice about writing itself, how to do it, can be good, bad and indifferent and you have to tread warily because all too often, you only manage to distinguish between them afterwards. I've had all three. But most of us would agree that a good editor is a pearl of great price, and you want to cling fast to her when you find her.
Sometimes the very best advice comes in the shortest form.
Here are three pieces of advice I was given by more mature writers, quite early on in my career.
All of them have stayed with me, because each one was, in its own way, invaluable.
1 Read a lot.
2 The only way to learn how to write is to write.
3 Stop watering your Dylan Thomas adjectives and watching them grow.
You'll find something very similar to the first two in one of the best books about writing I've ever read: Stephen King's On Writing, a short memoir with a bit of advice on the side. It doesn't matter whether you appreciate King or not, by the way. The advice is just as valid. The first should be self evident, but isn't. It constantly amazes me just how many people I meet who say that they 'want to be a writer' but go on to say that they 'don't read very much.'
Even more astonishing is the number of people I meet, sometimes on writing courses, who don't actually do any writing, even though they also assert that they would love to be a writer. It's the equivalent of me saying I would love to win the lottery, but it's never going to happen, not so much because it's a statistical long shot as because I never buy a ticket.
The Dylan Thomas adjectives remark was probably the best of the lot. It wasn't a wholesale 'remove all descriptive words' piece of nonsense - it was a good way of saying, 'Cultivate your garden. Weed things out a bit' and I've remembered it for ever.
What to write.
So what about that sudden insight?
It makes my heart sink to reflect on it, but I offer it here for your consideration. While a good deal of the advice about writing that I've been given over the years has been helpful, none of the advice about what to write has done me any good at all. Never. Ever. Not even once.
It didn't stop people offering it though. Do this, do that. This will sell, that will sell. Don't write this play. Write that play. Don't take up that offer, take up this offer. People don't want this, they want that. Write this book, or this or this. Can you do this? Can't you do that?
None of it - when followed - has ever worked. None of it has ever earned me money or success or fulfillment. In fact the very people who advised me to do this or that or the other thing have invariably changed their minds later on, leaving me stranded.
All of which tells me that my own instincts were right all along. The books and plays that have been most successful have been written because they were my personal obsession. It would have been better - or at the very least no worse - if I had always just got on with writing exactly what I passionately wanted to write. Which, oddly enough, was the piece of advice given to me many years ago by my first and best literary agent, sadly no longer around.
Only write something if you can't bear not to write it, she told me.
Which is exactly what I plan to do from now on.