Like many aspiring writers, I’ve been busily entering my writing into competitions over the last couple of years. There are pros and cons, of course, with some arguing that it’s a good way to build your reputation as a writer (if you win) and to develop your skills (even if you don’t). While I agree with both these arguments, for me there are even more practical reasons to enter.
A focus for my writing
The focus of a particular competition allows me to minimise the distractions of another idea or another story. Such distractions look much easier to write at the very same moment that the work in-hand starts getting harder. With the competition in sight, I can tell myself ‘later’.
A deadline
There’s nothing like a deadline to make you finish something. Inevitably, I can see ways to improve what I’ve written in the minutes, hours, days after submitting it.However, then I console myself with the thought that just means it’ll be available for revision on another occasion.
And, drum roll . . .
In 2017, I submitted work to two local competitions without success. But in 2018, I ramped up my productivity and submitted to five national competitions and one international competition.
Holding my copy of Seniors’ Stories, Volume 4
One of these, the Seniors Card Short Story Competition, doesn’t declare a winner, but they do publish the top 100 in book—and in 2018,my story ‘The Upside of Funerals’ made it into the book. As a government-sponsored competition, they make a lovely fuss so, with the other senior writers, I got to have lunch at NSW Parliament House in Sydney, listen to speeches and have my hand shaken with our local MP. The book, Seniors’ Stories Volume 4, will be available in hard copy in libraries through NSW and online.
2018 Scarlet Stiletto Awards (…must have missed the dress code memo!)
I also made it onto the Shortlist for the Scarlet Stiletto Awards for 2018. This is an exceptionally entertaining competition run by Sisters In Crime, to encourage and promote women crime writers. They also hosted a stellar Awards night in Melbourne at the Thornbury Theatre at which I received a ‘Special Commendation’ certificate for my story ‘Fragments of Meaning’. The nine top Award winners’ stories are available in ebook, ‘Scarlet Stiletto: The Tenth Cut’, from Clandestine Press.
It was a great way to finish the year and an inspiration to start thinking about what ‘crimes’ I can commit to paper next year!
The issues around structure are anathema for some writers and an obsession for others. I’ve written in this blog before (March, 2017) about how people who write ‘by the seat of their pants’ (pantsers) often see structure as a straitjacket, constraining the flow of ideas and creative development. People who prepare detailed plot outlines and character arcs (planners) see structure as a way to corral and harness their stampeding ideas. However, planners can find that the exhaustive world-building and development of character background stories can take years (I’m looking at you, George R.R. Martin) and run the risk of the creative spark fizzling out before they pen their first paragraph. On the other hand, for pantsers, the upside of understanding structure is that it can provide an invaluable diagnostic tool when revising that first unwieldy draft.
(Cartoonist: Tom Gauld, https://www.tomgauld.com)
By nature, I’m a planner but I treasure those moments of flow when the story and the characters take over and write themselves. However, most of all, I love revising (yes, strange, I know). That hankering to revise is often what motivates me to push past my writer’s blocks since, without text, there’s no diagnostic problem-solving. When getting that first draft out, one of my frustrations is that my default structure is ‘And then … and then … and then’, which makes for dull reading. To try move past this, I’ve been reading a range of books about writing structure that are often recommended by other writers.
The following books are interesting and inspiring, so I’ve given a brief snapshot review of each of them.
The central messages in this book relate to what Brooks describes as the ‘Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling’.
Concept—‘what if?’ idea that sparks your story and which your story answers
Character—who are we rooting for?
Theme—what take-home message will we take from your story?
Structure—what comes first, second and so on?
Scene execution—how does each step play out?
Writing voice—who is telling the story?
Interestingly, Brooks suggests that there is no particular order in which you might work on each aspect of the story. However, when it comes to structure, knowing something about each of the other aspects helps ‘engineer’ your way through each pivotal plot point and the key stages of set-up, response, attack and resolution.
Larry Brooks is a successful author who is very experienced in running masterclasses on writing. He also hosts a useful website http://storyfix.com/ which is full of information and resources. ‘Story Engineering’ is very accessible. The experience of reading each chapter is like doing a mini-workshop. As I read, my mind was flooded with ideas about work-in-progress. For a taster, you might enjoy a video interview with him that is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGq84WOQfqM
McKee’s book first came out in 1997 and is quoted by just about all the other authors who followed him into this topic. The information and ideas have a wide application beyond screenplay writing. There is an extended interview with McKee on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_s8wIOMAU0 .
Punchy and inspiring, Pierre urges us to ‘write in a fever, rewrite in a cardigan‘. Pierre is a highly successful satirical novelist (Man Booker prize winner). His book is more memoir than a writing manual, but his incisive wit skewers many of the myths about writing. In essence, this book is a call to action—just write! There is a serious (though lengthy) interview with him on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYt-KCLtnU4 , and some lighter moments at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtqNwhMlcG4 .
Truby’s book is, paradoxically, formulaic as well as subversive. Truby is, like Brooks (above), an experienced workshop provider and so the book leads you through 22 specific steps to developing your story. However, at the same time, Truby explodes the idea of the traditional three-act structure and explores multiple examples from film and literature to show how master storytellers exploit or defy traditional story structures to surprise and intrigue. Truby emphasises how structure is intrinsically driven by the themes and characters.
The book is very easy to read and highly entertaining because of the frequent use of familiar examples. I found myself mapping out ways that I could radically alter the way I had conceptualised my work-in-progress as I read it. For a short taster, see the YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5-9cOZps44 .
John Yorke has a wealth of experience in British television (BBC) and writes insightfully about how structure works and why it warrants study beyond the ‘how to’ approach. Like Truby (above), he integrates examples from many familiar stories from literature, television and film into his discussion of what works and why. Yorke provides a fascinating analysis of the Russian-doll nature of story structure. Within the overarching story structure, there is a nested structure of each act, and within each act there is a structure within each scene, and within each scene there is a micro-structure. In particular, there is a mirroring of scenes between the first and last acts that brings the story to a satisfying resolution. One of the examples he provides of this will be familiar to those who enjoyed the film, Strictly Ballroom.
(from Yorke, 2014, ch.10)
First Act
Scott dances his own steps selfishly.
He refuses to dance with Fran.
He chooses to dance with Fran.
(other intervening Acts)
Last Act
He chooses to dance with Fran.
He dances with Fran.
He dances with Fran to the rhythm of his own heart.
Whether writing structure is a helpful tool to identify where our stories flag or whether it informs our first jottings in a story outline, it is of some comfort that others have struggled before us. At the same time, perhaps it is salutary to consider Yorke’s warning (Introduction):
‘Is this therefore the magic key to storytelling? Such hubris requires caution — the compulsion to order, to explain, to catalogue, is also the tendency of the train-spotter. In denying the rich variety and extraordinary multifaceted nature of narrative, one risks becoming no better than Casaubon, the desiccated husk from Middlemarch, who turned his back on life while seeking to explain it. It’s all too tempting to reduce wonder to a scientific formula and unweave the rainbow.’
Yorke, 2014
I am busily writing historical fiction but reading an alarming amount of science fiction/fantasy. However, it strikes me that they share many issues related to the notion of ‘genre’.
The complexities of written genres provide fiery debate among critics and readers alike. The greatest heat is generated by those who pit literary fiction against ‘genre fiction’—no prizes for guessing which holds the greater cachet. Literary fiction is typified by the depth of its thematic concerns (e.g., loss, love, humanity) and the quality of the writing style. In contrast, genre fiction is marked by its content matter (e.g., scientific possibilities, historical events, espionage, crime) and the writing structure associated with each sub-genre (e.g., first person narration for hard-boiled detective fiction). Of course, within every type of writing there are opportunities for the writer to subvert the genre (e.g., fun ‘mashups’ such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, as well as more serious works such as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Of course, the reason that it is possible to play with genre in this way depends crucially on the assumptions around the structures of types of novels.
Even in the recent obituaries for the redoubtable Ursula Le Guin I was surprised to see that the authors felt they had to defend her literary standing against the slur of being labelled as science fiction/fantasy. Le Guin herself argued against the dichotomy, calling instead for the recognition of the literary merit of any work, regardless of genre. One of the obituaries alerted me to her essay—the delightfully titled, ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’ (1973), which I tracked down in a collection, The Language of the Night (Berkley, 1979).
In this essay, she writes, ‘Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to “get away to”?’
Le Guin throws down the gauntlet to genre writers to share the ambitions of the writers of literary fiction—i.e., to not only engage readers but also open them to opportunities to transform their understanding of themselves and others. The fundamental themes of such works, she suggests, involve shifting focus from ‘daydream’ to ‘dream’ through exploring the far reaches of the society’s shared unconscious workings. The acceptance of genre and cross-genre writing is greater today, perhaps in part because of her own brilliant demonstration of literary fantasy in books such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).
Le Guin raises another issue which, I think, is less sustainable. She argues that the journalistic style that is often employed within the ‘Poughkeepsie style of fantasy’ is inappropriate as, in its objective stance, it fails to evoke the depth of imaginative writing needed for fantasy. She is not arguing against clear writing—for example, she holds Tolkien up as a writer of plain, yet evocative, English—but rather she suggests that adopting a journalistic style is ‘a refusal to admit what you’re in for when you set off with only an ax and a box of matches into Elfland’. Surely a similar argument can be put in relation to styles of writing as she puts for the themes—that the demarcation lines between genres need not limit the choices of the writer about what they are saying and how they say it?
Perhaps questions of genre all boil down to the comments made by currently acclaimed author of Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell:
‘It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not.’ (The Guardian, 2015)
So, from this practical viewpoint, the genre of a novel may be roughly where you’re most likely to look for it on the shelves of a bookshop.
There I was — frozen — staring down a course requirement to produce a 30,000 word collection of short stories. The keyboard stared right back, as keyboards do, the indifferent sods. As the days till deadline diminished, my calculations generated predictions of having to generate 1,000 words a day, then 2,000 words, then 3,000. When the target of 5,000 was on the horizon, I panicked. I raced to find my lecturer. He wasn’t in his office, nor in the coffee queue. Peering through the small window set in the door of the lecture room, I spied him. As he paused for breath, he glanced in my direction — perhaps it was something to do with the wild gesticulations of distress.
He came to the door and, opening it a crack, snapped, ‘What?’
I began to gabble about my plight.
‘Stop,’ he hissed. ‘Listen carefully. You will type the word the over and over again. I don’t care if there are 30,000 thes. If, perchance, you start to find the word the becomes boring, then do feel free to use some other words as they occur to you.’ He closed the door and turned back to his class.
It was novel advice and, desperate as I was, I followed it. It only took a paragraph of thes before I was so bored that I began to write.
I’ve never heard anyone else prescribe similar measures but the experience meant that I am intrigued by the distinction that is often drawn between pantsers and planners. Both terms describe ways in which writers tend to go about the writing process.
The term pantsers is said to come from the expression ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ which originally arose to describe a pilot flying without instruments. Pantsers write their first draft in a flow of ideas, possibly guided by some overarching theme or end-point. Pantsers are open to following new thoughts and directions as they arise during the writing process. Stephen King, in his fascinating book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, describes a similar drafting process he calls ‘writing with the door closed’, i.e. getting the ideas down while leaving your inner critic outside (the inner critic is allowed inside the door when re-drafting). The advantages of this approach include that it’s a faster way to get the ideas out from between the ears and on the page.
Planners (or plotters) prepare detailed outlines for the overall structure and individual sections of the work ahead before they begin. Planners tend to build their first draft in layers, i.e. outline, more detailed outline, even more detailed outline, and then the writing within each section. The advantages of this approach include that you know what’s ahead. When planners get a new idea, they down tools and test the potential new direction by revising their outline before they proceed.
Public Domain CC0 http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Leave-Hand-Marker-Mark-Production-Planning-Control-516278
Both pantsers and planners extoll the virtues of their processes in reducing anxiety in facing down the blank page, which probably tells you more about the mental health challenges of writing than the relative efficacy of either approach. However, as for most false dichotomies, there need be no opposition between the two approaches. No doubt, many of us adopt these processes at different stages and for different works. For example, author, Victoria Strauss, describes her transition toward a hybrid approach in her blog — ‘Pantser to Planner: How I changed my writing style’.
Luckily for me, while I’m by nature closer at the planner end of the continuum, so far I haven’t had to resort to the the strategy again.
