Musing on writing

No promotional puffery today...

(Okay I lied, go buy my book!!)

No, seriously, I thought it would be fun to use the blog to describe some of the process that goes into actually writing a story - be it a short story or a full length novel. I am not sure this is how other people do it - actually I would be somewhat surprised if they did work in the same way I do. So this is certainly not a set of rules about how you should proceed if you fancy turning your hand to the discipline of writing. Indeed part of the issue for me is that I lack discipline when it comes to writing. But I think that is probably something I do share with many other people. So if, like me, you are a lazy writer who has a life filled with other priorities, then this may well be of use to you.

First and foremost you need to write stuff. Now I know that comes under the heading of 'stating the bleeding obvious' but I know how many people I have spoken to who have said they would love to write but don't know what to write about.

So Rule Number one, - and please don't look back at the first paragraph where I said this was not a set of rules - rule number one is write anything. Unless you have the most boring life on earth, unless your day consists of sitting in a chair staring at a wall (and apologies at this point to all those readers currently sat in a prison or an asylum), then you will have something to write about. Pick a person you like. Better still, pick a person you really hate. Describe them. Start with the factual bits and then once you have the basics move on to just making stuff up about them. The wilder the better. Give them a back story. Make it nasty. Give them a really nasty personal habit. Something that makes people gag when they think about it. Describe their voice, the way they walk and the way they eat their food. Now you have the basis for your first character. You can refine it, dampen down the more extreme bits or accentuate the bits that you like. Make them real. Make them live in the m id of the reader. And then when you are happy with it, pick another person and do it all over again. Before you know it you have written 500 words and you have a couple of characters sat on your laptop ready for use when the right time and the right story come along.  

And this leads on to the next rule.... again no peeking back at that first paragraph please.

Rule number two. Don't start by trying to write a story. Too many writers fail because they pick up a pen and try to start at the beginning. And even if they do manage to start at the beginning they will inevitably get to a point where they get stuck. They lose track of where the story is going or they are unhappy with a paragraph they have written and they spend hours trying to push the thing forward. Unless you are incredibly focused or incredibly skilled (and I am neither), the only thing you get out of trying to write in a linear fashion is bad writing and disillusionment. Of course at some point you have to have an idea in your head of how the story will start, develop and end. But none of that is necessary for you to actually start writing. Descriptive passages, conversations and narrative sequences can all be written as independent, self contained bobbles of words which, as long as they  have an internal and external consistency (they work as passages on their own and also fit into the eventual story narrative) can be slotted into the larger work at a later date. Remember that life is not linear. It only appears to be so. events and people slip into our perception and then drift off again. The trick of good writing is to reflect this randomness within an internally consistent story. Too many stories sacrifice the randomness - the bit that makes life interesting - for the sake of linearity.

I began writing seriously back in the late 1980s when I was working in the Middle East. Working deep in the desert in some fairly dodgy countries it was better not to spend too much time flashing a camera around. So I started to write descriptive passages which I used to help me remember some of the amazing places I had visited. It was only years later that some of these passages would form the kernel of my novel "The Winds of the World" which will hopefully be published later this year (Oops more promotion, sorry!). The point is that, as long as it is of a reasonable quality, there is no such thing as wasted writing. It may take many years but eventually any well written passage will find a home for itself.

So go and write. And if you get stuck just go and write something else.

As for me? Well I have just written this which I think is good enough for the day. So as it is Friday afternoon I think it is about time for a snifter of something.

Pass me the bottle someone...