Try the following exercise either by yourself or in a group.Introduction
Good writing depends on practice, like sports; the more limbered up you are, the better you perform. But how do you pass through that first, often terrifying, encounter with the blank page and find a voice that will carry your thoughts and feelings with eloquence and flair? You have lots of ideas, but little confidence in your ability to express them. What if it comes out wrong? What if it makes you look childish or naive? What if you can’t do it? The blank page seems to taunt you with your own underconfidence; it points to all the great works that have gone before and says, You can’t do that, or, What’s the point? It’s all been said already. The reams of sentences, the characters, the ideas that drove you to the page in the first place wither into nothing. Suddenly the whole project becomes impossible and your desire to write remains just that.
The only way to overcome this problem is to write. Get some material down on paper, however rough and ready. Start off with notes, fragments, half sentences, until the stuttering stops and you find yourself writing whole sentences, paragraphs, pages. Often the first hurdle is the writer’s own self-consciousness about the act of writing itself. And that hurdle might well take a few pages to clear, like an old car with a dirty petrol tank; the first few miles will be a juddering, stop-start journey. Be prepared for this. You are engaging with something unfamiliar to you, don’t expect to produce a masterpiece in your first attempt. Start off with what you had for tea, the last phone call you made, the colour of your lover’s eyes, your favourite song. Give yourself a subject and write about it, without stopping or correcting yourself, for five minutes. Just generate some pages, a body of work.
Then read it back to yourself.
This will be hard: a first-time encounter with your own work is not dissimilar to watching yourself on-screen or hearing your recorded voice for the first time – Do I really sound like that? Oh no, I never knew I looked like that. You might well be embarrassed or disappointed. Don’t stop. This is a rite of passage. Good radio presenters listen to their own voices over and over so they can control and improve their pitch and delivery. In the same way, good writers will read through their own writing, looking for sentences that can be improved, pushed further, expanded, cut. It is only when you have developed a sense of your own fictional voice that you will really have the confidence to jump in and write a story. However, paradoxically, it is only through writing that you will develop a sense of what your voice really is.
Your fictional voice is not a million miles away from how you speak. A good storytelling voice is a more honed and structured version of speech, and it is as individual to you as your fingerprints. Look at the books you read. What kinds of voices are clamouring for your attention on your bookshelf? You are likely to find lots of disparate voices talking, all with different accents, references, cadences, obsessions.
Voice in fiction or poetry can be interpreted as perspective or personality. It is different from style, which is something that you can develop later to create effects. A poem I wrote when I was thirteen still sounds like me in my thirties. Perhaps it’s a sad reflection on my continuing juvenility or, more seriously, it is the thread of me-ness that runs through my work, the personality that inhabits all the words I write.
Try the following exercise either by yourself or in a group.
Write down five sounds that you can hear. Then list the things that you associate with those sounds. A car engine may remind you of being picked up after school, clanking crockery of that summer you worked at Pizza Pie, an aeroplane of your holiday to Ibiza.
This exercise is especially effective in class because in the institutional hush of university buildings there are very few sounds to be heard: air con, buzzing strip lights, heels down the corridor outside, the droning of the lecturer next door. Everyone in the group hears the same or similar things, but they all use different words to express what they have heard, and the sounds have very different associations for them. These associations are unique, born out of individual experience; no one else has these particular stories to tell with these words. These associations and words are, very embryonically, the writer’s voice.
If you have done this exercise on your own, look at the words you have chosen to describe the things you have heard and the associations you have made with those sounds. These are your stories, this is your language, this is the beginning of your fictional voice.
‘I have to start to write to have ideas.’
FRANÇOISE SAGAN
Write every day. Even if it’s only a letter. Now you’ve put pen to paper, you want to try to write something every day. Set yourself some achievable targets. Try to write that story you’ve always meant to write about the mad woman with orange hair who lives down the road or that poem about your cat.
Choose concrete subjects: draw some word sketches of your living room, your backyard, the fish tank. Get into the habit of looking for the telling details, and don’t waste adjectives – when you qualify a noun make it interesting, pertinent, unusual.
You want to have words at your fingertips, so read like mad. Everything and anything: dictionaries, cookery books, novels, poetry, biographies, textbooks, car manuals, football programmes, magazines. Write lists of words and keep them near you; if you get stuck, write five hundred words using a new word in every sentence.
Buy a notebook and a few good-quality pens and take yourself out for the day. Go and sit in a cafe, get an extra-large cup of coffee and write for a few hours. When I lived by the sea I used to sit and write on the beach, right up at the end by the cliffs where no one could disturb me. With my writing class, one of the first exercises I ask them to do is to go and sit in a cafe or a pub and write a few character sketches of the people they see around them.
Good writing practice is about discipline. You want to be limbered up, supple, articulate, but this will only happen when you are locked into a groove. If you find it hard to pick up the beat day after day, trick yourself. I find it helpful when I stop for the day to leave the last sentence unfinished or the last paragraph only lightly sketched out, so that when I start again I can pick up where I left off the day before.
Writing creatively takes a peculiar kind of concentration. A concentration that develops its own little habits and tripwires to help set it off. We always want to know how authors write, as if their behavioural patterns might be an indicator of how to do it ourselves. But these habits are as idiosyncratic as the writer: Keats could only write if he put on a clean shirt, Virginia Woolf only in the mornings, Douglas Coupland likes to write in bed, longhand, between the hours of midnight and 2 a.m., and if he’s mulling over a problem, he’ll go out for a long drive and play the car stereo really loud.
Don’t expect to write a whole story in one breath. If you get stuck halfway through a piece, be prepared to go back and start again. Make notes on your story, your character, your setting. Though it may feel like treading water, like the notes aren’t ‘proper’ writing, they are essential to the process of developing a sense of what you want to say and of finding the added layers of character and setting that will make the narrative convincing.
I write in the same kind of exercise books that I used as a child. At any given moment I have a book on the go. I always carry one with me and each of them soon gets filled up with what I’m thinking about or descriptions of scenes I’ve witnessed or made up: irresistible snatches of dialogue from bus stops and shops. Little drawings, too. The books are my place to file things away.
The earliest notebooks I remember having and using in this way were from when I was about four. I remember an old-fashioned stationer’s in South Shields, which smelled of crayons and had scratched glass counters. I would insist on being taken there and I would spend all my pocket money on drawing books.
I think you can still get those Silvine books. I always had to have books with blank pages. I still don’t like writing on lines. That’s like ploughing, not writing. And where do you draw when you’ve got all those lines? Maybe I was fussy like that even at four, and I can see my dad hot and exasperated in the shop as I checked out their stock.
Their very biggest books had covers the colour of mushed-up bananas. Huge creamy pages, and only a few of them, so that after a few large drawings and a bit of writing the whole thing was used up. This was part of the excitement; using books up and getting to the last page. Considering the book as an aesthetic whole. (At four? But I do remember looking through and being pleased.) And having all the finished books in a pile, going through them now and then to remind myself where I’d been and who I’d been looking at and earwigging on.
The smaller books were the size of ordinary school exercise books and these were pillar-box red. I had even more of these.
I’d been set off on this whole writing and drawing business by my infants school teacher, Mrs Payne. She was large and hearty with a shock of silver hair and thick black eyebrows. She made me think she was a more famous version of my own Big Nanna. (Do all little kids think of their teachers as being famous? Whenever I saw a teacher of mine in the town precinct I felt horrible and thrilled; I thought them famous and no one else apparently did.)
Mrs Payne instigated this rule in her infants class that if we were good and industrious enough we would be allowed to have a Busy Book. She gave out new, fresh books and she explained what she meant. She ripped reams of brown paper off the parcels of books and slapped them down, one by one, on our desks. They were blue-covered Silvine books, the intermediate size. She told us that these books were for any spare time we might find. We had complete carte blanche and we need never show anyone what we did on these pages if we didn’t want to. The pages were wide, half lined, half blank. Perfect. What we weren’t to do, she told us, was to waste time. Fill up any spare time with Busy Books.
After that I made sure I learned everything fast: numbers, spellings, the names of trees. Just to get a chance to get back to the Busy Book. Everything went into those books; I built up quite a stack. After that, I had to have them at home as well.
The book you could put anything into, the book you never had to show anyone.
Mrs Payne had a burglar once and my dad was the copper sent round to take her statement. When he came home, he said he’d been surprised that her place wasn’t that posh. They had Venetian blinds up in the living-room window, and he didn’t think that was very nice. I was busy writing all this down in my book and, when I’d finished it, I realized for the first time that I’d written something Mrs Payne wouldn’t be pleased to read. She wouldn’t want to know what my dad had said about her shabby Venetian blinds.
The most important time for writing in these books was, of course, the weekend. Especially at the end of the seventies, when Mam and Dad had split up and he went off to live in Durham in the flat that smelled of new carpets. We stayed with him every weekend, and we would go to see matinees of films like Battlestar Galactica and The Wilderness Family. Then, before going up to South Shields to stay with my Little Nanna, we would sit in an ice-cream parlour and have milkshakes. I would start writing immediately, saving the last frothy glugs of strawberry milkshake till afterwards. My brother would have his own book, but he was only three or so, and he’d be filling the pages with vivid, laborious swirls of colour.
I don’t have any of the books I used then. With each successive house move everything went out. The oldest writing of mine I now have is from when I was twenty. Those first two hidden novels. A bunch of stories.
Recently I discovered that a friend of mine has kept Busy Books of her own. I’ve known her novels since I was sixteen; it was her writing that made me think I had every right to write about the people and things I knew about. I was staying with her in London and we talked about having Busy Books, and it turns out she’d kept them consistently since 1959. Little drawings and bits of dialogue, all that stuff.
I thought about how many hundreds of thousands of miles those biro lines would cover and it was exhilarating. That, to me, suddenly represented the real work that a writer does; the white heat of actual composition.
The things a writer publishes are just postcards; extended cards sent back from the distance they’ve reached. With all the lines she’d written in her Busy Books over the years, my friend had travelled immense distances, even though she’s lived mostly in South London.
What I also liked about what she was saying was that she used her notebooks and journals as a kind of anchor. She knew they were always there. When she looked back through different volumes – at 1987, 1976, 1962, whenever – she found that she could put herself back into that moment and into the person she was just then. She could familiarize herself with events and details that she, as a person, had forgotten, but that would always be there in her notebooks.
Some of those moments had made it into her published fiction. They had escaped and been distilled; the notebooks were never a very tight corral. There were fascinating overlaps between life and work if she wanted to find them. But to her the work in her own private books seemed more stabilizing and permanent than the writing that she had actually published.
Think of your notebooks as a way of capturing the things that go through your head. Think of them as yourself, your memory and everything you witness; all of it distilled. In notebooks and journals we see writers in mid-flight.
In my friend’s sunny kitchen, she explained to me that she needed the books to remind her of the smallest, most telling details; the things that she saw that rang true to her. These details were small nudges, she said, and you need them to make you feel confident and brave in your writing. You have to be ready to see them; you have to be watching and listening all the time.
‘I feel like I’m a pond creature,’ she said, ‘worrying at plants and busying about, seeing what’s going on underwater. And sometimes it’s hard. But it’s interesting. Very, very interesting. I need to live somewhere that’s raw and in the thick of things, but where I can pretend that it’s village life, too. And I like to go out in the morning and see wild animals. All of that is important to me.’
I thought: You have to stay open to everything. You have to take notice of everything. The purple in the cornflowers we bought at the tube station; the tea bags curiously left behind on the pub table being scooped into the ashtray and brushed away with the butts. You have to be alert to the twists and tangents of the myriad stories around you, even when they don’t seem directly pertinent to the main thrust of the plot you are living inside.
My friend was right. Immersing yourself in the tangents and detail really is like being underwater, and it is hard work. You have to make notes while you are in there. But if you skim over the surface, and if you don’t leave yourself prey to distractions and random preoccupations and observations, then what you write will be too composed and artificial. You have to stay open to the surprise of everything.
I end up meeting so many people who want to get their work ‘out there’. By which I suppose they mean into the public domain, into publication. And, of course, they want that special reader to get the point of what they’re saying. They want to make that connection with strangers. They want to leave a record of their own private view. Many of the writers I meet these days want to make that connection with millions of strangers. They want to be Stars.
To do that, I imagine, they would have to lose some of the privacy of writing. They’d need a microphone rather than a notebook. A writer who becomes a Star, I think, loses a little or a lot of their equilibrium and the stability their notebooks once gave them. They’re too concerned with divining what their massive public desires of them. They become genies in lamps. They aren’t writing for themselves any more. How can they love what they do? Everything becomes a deadline and it has to be what people expect. Everyone’s lamp-rubbing. They have to write books to fit a contract and a jacket that has been designed before they have even written a first line. No more Busy Books; there isn’t any time.
But that’s what some people want. It’s tempting to tell them, So why write? Go and be a Star. Go and be Shirley Bassey. How much time does Shirley Bassey get to experiment and produce the work she really wants to do? Where does a Star keep her private, sketchy work?
When I was staying in London, my friend gave me directions to an old-fashioned stationer’s on the King’s Road, opposite a cinema. I bought a new book there and walked into town, looking for a cafe, maybe in Soho, to sit in.
I have been keeping a diary since I was ten. I am now sixty. Half a century of diary-keeping, fifty-odd notebooks, are now lined up on a bookshelf, close to my bed. There have been years in which I wrote almost nothing. Others that filled up several notebooks. Roughly one per year.
What can I draw from that experience that could be of help to others – at least to some of the readers of this book? Everyone is different: keeping a diary does not suit everybody. Some very good writers have kept them; others, also very good, wouldn’t have dreamt of it. The thing is to find out what’s right for oneself. What is offered below, however enthusiastic and admonishing, is written in that spirit.
So, what diaries have been for me:
I could go on for a long time. But seven is a good number. And here I’ll stop.
I’m always interested to know when people first started writing. Lots of the students I interview to come on the Creative Writing course at UEA tell me that they have ‘always written’. They can’t exactly remember the moment that they first wrote for themselves. This strikes a chord with me because I’m the same and, like them, it always seemed natural to keep notebooks, journals, to invent stories and poems and make sense of the world, alone, with a pen and a book.
The students do remember a certain time, though, when they took seriously to writing. Often it was the first time that they decided to make something public. They typed up a story, or copied it out neatly, lifted it from the private notebook and attempted to turn it into a shape that someone else could appreciate. Maybe they gave it to a relative or a friend and maybe the reaction was pleasure, surprise, encouragement. From then on a new urgency came into the young writer. They had become aware of an audience out there, that would perhaps consist of just one person, but was there nevertheless. There could be a recipient of the writing that had previously been private and produced naturally as simply an offshoot of their personality. Now they would have to learn to craft their work.
Writers start writing at different stages in life. For every one who has ‘always written’, and started to learn the techniques of making their work audience-worthy early on, there are others who don’t start until much later in life. Perhaps they had all of their confidence knocked out of them by the educational process or their adult life since. Maybe they haven’t had the time to spend on an activity that is, in the end, a rather selfish one. They could well have decided that they weren’t clever enough or skilled enough when they read the work of other published writers. They might have become convinced that they had nothing to say. All sorts of thoughts put people off from doing the things they really want to do.
When I meet these people, whose confidence has been knocked or who haven’t had the chance to try their hand yet, it’s often apparent that, whatever reasons they give for not having written yet, they still really want to do it. It’s still the thing they would most like to do.
They need to clear some space for themselves. Complicated things like guilt, underconfidence, ambition, pride, and the rest of everyday life – these need to be set aside for a little while. They need to get to know themselves all over again, I think, and get some words down on paper.
Writers at all stages of their career talk about the terror of the white, empty page and that horrid sagging feeling – the hopelessness of ever being able to fill it with anything worthwhile. I think that in order to be able to write well eventually, we have to allow ourselves to write quite badly en route. What tends to hold people up in the first place is their determination that the first line they write down be brilliant. You can wait a long time for that first brilliant line to turn up.
We’re used to reading published fiction and poems and, of course, their first lines often are brilliant. They’re designed to be like that, in order to seduce us and draw us in. But you have to remind yourself – you have to be told – that these first lines were most probably not what the author first wrote. There could have been hundreds of pages of nonsense they wrote beforehand as they worked themselves up into a position where they knew what they wanted to write about.
So don’t aim at brilliance straight away. Nothing is more guaranteed to freeze you up and stop you writing altogether. What a writer publishes is generally only the tip of the iceberg of what they’ve actually worked through. For every one of my published novels and stories there’s another one that I wasn’t happy with or that didn’t quite work out in the end. There are scores of experiments and half-finished things. There is a lot of waste involved in writing. You could see it as a waste if you were only thinking about finished product. In the process, though, there is an awful lot to learn. I like to tell students that there’s often more to be learned from an interesting failed piece of writing than there is to be learned from something that arrives all in a rush, and seems tidy and perfect on first or second draft.
In this coursebook you won’t hear many of these authors talking about muses, flashes of inspiration, or the powerful overflow of emotion. None of us are much given to producing perfect works of art in a blinding crash of lightning. There is a lot of talk about craftsmanship and training yourself, and how that apprenticeship really goes on through the whole of a writer’s life. You never stop learning new things about this whole business. A writer wants to go on and on learning. That is, I think, why they do it. It’s a discipline with no end, no finite goal in sight.
Which is why people starting out – at any age, at any stage in their lives – shouldn’t be scared of not knowing the ropes yet. They shouldn’t be so scared that they prevent themselves from broaching that first white page. You have to remember that no one can write exactly as you do. You are the unique product of a unique life history. Even if you had an identical twin, they could never write precisely the poems, plays, stories that you will. So if you don’t write this text and in your own particular way, then no one else ever will. No one can ever do it for you. (The best illustration of this comes in the form of ghostwritten autobiographies. Usually they are of celebrity footballers, singers, actors. Have you noticed? In hiring someone to write up their lives for them, these reluctant autobiographers wind up with a blandly unexciting text, full of clichés and second-hand experience, something that just anyone could have written. Even the most exciting life story can be killed stone dead like this.)
Tell yourself that you are writing now because no one else can ever do it for you. It’s important for that reason alone. No one has to see the first attempts and experiments you make. Remind yourself that anyone learning a craft has to practise and waste materials as they learn. But our materials are relatively cheap – paper and pens. At least we’re not cutting diamonds or stained glass. One slip of the pen and you haven’t blown a fortune.
Also, remind yourself that writing practice isn’t something only novices do. All writers, at all stages in their careers, have to do it, and you can bet your life that even the most wonderful poets and novelists write wild unpublishable nonsense some of the time, just to get themselves going again.
Set yourself the following task:
You are going to write a page about each of the following topics. Don’t let anything intrude on this exercise. No distractions. Don’t even think about it too deeply or try to make much sense.
Write down (in five minutes or so for each topic) what you know about:
When you read back what you’ve written on these subjects, you might find that you’ve got a mess. A whole list of associations, maybe descriptions, maybe some clichés and commonplace observations. But in the reading back you will also find something you’ve written that will surprise you. There will be some reminiscence you’ve forgotten – some spark of memory that the process of writing has unearthed. Or maybe you’ve made some bizarre leap in logic and lateral thinking, which makes you laugh out loud upon reading back, so that your page of notes on Marilyn Monroe begins with you thinking about her singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to John F. Kennedy and ends with a recollection of a holiday to Lake Ullswater when you were six and you ate boiled eggs for breakfast on the rocky shore.
These leaps sideways – the moments in which you take yourself by surprise – these are the moments to capitalize on. These are the ones that make the rest of writing worthwhile, because they remind you that no one else could have made the connection that you just have in quite that way.
Allow your pen to wander, just now, on this range of subjects. Spend time afterwards on seeing what associations and connections you have made. Then set down these further associations as a list – ‘boiled eggs’, ‘Lake Ullswater’, etc., and see how far another blast and burst of writing can take you.
It’s endless. There’s an awful lot of ready-made material inside you that you haven’t even started to tap.