This post follows on from last week with the focus on perfecting your craft. Last week I shared some hints and tips from writing workshops and talks I’ve attended over the years (read here )

This week I’m going to share some highlights from two of my favourite books about ‘the craft’; Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott and On Writing by Stephen King. The reason I love these books in particular is because they are down-to-earth, honest, funny, include memoir style anecdotes from their own lives (particularly King), and neither writer pretends to know everything about writing. So I trust what they say.

Anyone who pretends to understand everything about how stories or books or poetry work is probably not doing it right, because no matter how much you try to ‘teach’ someone how to put words together, I always think there’s still going to be that indefinable piece of magic (soul, imagination, instinct – call it what you want) that can never be taught and can never truly be explained when analysing a text. But as I said last time, if you want to give your work a good chance of heading in the right direction, you can make life a little bit easier by understanding the foundations which hold it all together.

A lot of what King says in On Writing aligns with other advice I’ve heard in workshops and I recognise a lot of his points when I receive feedback, or when I read others work. I really recommend reading the whole book as it’s a great memoir alongside the hints and tips. I believe there’s various editions of it; the one I have in the house is from the year 2000 (which I think may be my husband’s copy as I used to own an earlier one I am sure). Bear in mind when you get to the part about submitting work that publishing has changed a lot since King started sending books out to publishers/working with agents, so I’m not going to reference any of that. I’ll do a separate post about being out on submission on a future post.

Adverbs and dialogue attribution

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs – Stephen King – pg 139

To back up this quote King uses this example; Instead of saying ‘he closes the door firmly’ Just slam the door! Other examples I’m thinking of as I write this would be He ran quickly. You could just have him run.

The over-use of adverbs is one of the biggest mistakes writers probably make. King even admits to still doing it in some of his work, even when he knows it’s a ‘thing’.

He also talks about dialogue attribution On page 140-142 he gives various examples of this:

Jekyll grated. Shayna gasped. Bill jerked out (all after lines of dialogue)

King then goes on to say, ‘writing he said, she said, is divine‘. Just letting the dialogue do the work is something that’s quite hard to do when you are anxious about getting your point across. King acknowledges that mistakes in these areas are exactly because of this, ‘fear that our reader won’t understand us.’

I also think the over-use of adverbs, and adjectives and verbs, (she whispered softly, he shouted loudly), hark back to primary school days when we were learning grammar. I don’t say this to dismiss the importance of learning grammar, (the foundation of any language), but I bet each time you were taught something like an adverb or adjective you then had to insert them into several sentences for homework. And then you got a gold star for creating interesting sentences littered with them. So it’s almost like learning new rules all over again.

Style

King talks about being conscious of using the passive tense (the body was carried from the kitchen being one example he uses of being too passive). He digs deeper into style and how paragraphs are formed. Something I learned when writing my Young Adult mystery thrillers is how shorter sentences and paragraphs can help keep the pace. No one wants to be bogged down by a lengthy description at a crucial tense moment. But then if there’s no variation in your style, it might all feel a bit too frantic, so you need to know when to slow it down too. Feeding in more description is something I’ve become a bit more conscious of, as I know I can sometimes rely too heavily on dialogue and because I’m a very visual writer I have to remember that readers aren’t always going to picture things in quite the same way.

Kings mentions ‘making every word count’ and the importance of editing your work. If you find you often ‘over-write’ a tip from me is to try writing flash fiction. Limiting yourself to 100 words or 500 words is the best exercise in making every word count, and I think it’s a great way to build your confidence as a writer. I’ll do a blog post about writing flash fiction at a later date.

Characters – digging deep

With echoes to last week’s post, both Lamott and and King talk about the importance of characters and Lamott in Bird by Bird talks about ‘writing towards vulnerability’. She really emphasises the point about writing in a ‘directly emotional way.’ This made me think of a quote I see popping up online often ( I’m not sure it can be attributed to anyone in particular): ‘What people remember is not what you’ve done, but how you made them feel’. I think that’s true of books. The ones that stayed with me over the years made me feel something, and that’s because of the characters. They’ve taken me along on their journeys and made me feel all of the emotions.

Lamott says, ‘Plot grows out of character’. King says, ‘I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.‘

Obviously you need your characters to do something interesting to be interesting and that’s where the plot comes in. Like we covered in last week’s blog post, your character needs to want something, and then go on some kind of journey. But often you won’t know what they want or what the journey actually looks like, until your characters take shape, and become three-dimensional and believable.

They will probably start to surprise you, just like people in your life often surprise you (in good ways, and bad ways). They might annoy you (especially if they start to take over a bit). In my second YA book, Promise Me, one character started to take over so much that I had to completely change the relationship dynamic I had originally intended. I also had to re-write the ending because the original didn’t ring true to what one of my character’s would have done. A similar thing happened for the ending of Follow Me. This is why I always say you can plot out your novel step by step, but never be scared to deviate from the plan. Humans are unpredictable and if you story becomes unpredictable, that’s when it shows you it’s working, and you get to experience it almost like you are the reader, as well as the writer.

There are loads of books out there about learning your craft. If you’re reading this and thinking of your own favourite, please leave a recommendation in the comments.

I also subscribe to The Writing Magazine which is always packed full of helpful advice and articles. There’s also a great section with call-outs for submissions to competitions, journals, publishers etc.

So now I’ve got you thinking about your craft, what if you’re finding it hard starting on a project.

Next time I’ll be talking about inspiration, and will tell you more about how some of my ideas formed, as well as the importance of allowing yourself to have fun.

Happy writing