Agents of Change

I've already talked about apostolic fiction on this blog, whereby the hero must have someone to tell his story. In this post I discuss the idea of the playmaker, someone who makes things happen for the hero.

It's a common belief that not only must a protagonist have a desire, but that he must also have the means within himself to satisfy that desire. He may think he wants something but actually needs something else, he may not even know what he wants – but still, there must be a goal that the reader wants for him.

When watching a recent re-telling of the Romeo and Juliet story, it struck me that although the main characters have bags of desire, they lack the means to do anything about it. They rely on two characters to do it for them – the nurse and the friar – to arrange meetings, marriages, subterfuge, potions. Interestingly, this reliance ends up having fatal consequences.

It's not necessary for the hero to have the capacity to satisfy his desire, providing he has someone who can do it for him. This creates an interesting dynamic within a story – it's hard to imagine sympathy for someone who completely relies on someone else. Historically this relationship has been interpreted as a master-servant one – an amusing/ignorant/clever/poor but practical person of the lower orders assists their social superior in attaining their wants – this is a relationship that Shakespeare explores many times in his plays. P.G. Wodehouse subverted this with Jeeves and Wooster to great comic effect.

So the lesson for fiction writers is that it's quite possible that someone else will make the hero's dreams come true, but I wouldn't recommend it as a life strategy.

Mortality Bites

Last week I had three exciting social events lined up, I was offered the opportunity to present at a creative writing course, two recruitment agents tried to contact me about a day-job, and an old friend emailed me about the potential of an interesting and low-stress opportunity that would facilitate my writing. A week of opportunity and excitement – except instead of pursuing all this I spent it thrashing about in bed with influenza – and she's not a nice girl.

Needless to say what my writing output was.

That's the thing about writing – real-life does tend to get in the way. The best laid plans can be laid low at a blow. We all know how fragile a writing regime can be if you have any kind of life to go alongside with it, but sometimes, you just have to let it go while you deal with being human.

James Scott Bell talks about writing as an act of war, and in this case, the comparison stands up. Those writers who have water-tight timetables and produce a fixed number of words a day without fail all the time have two effects on me: 1 – they make me sick, and 2, they make me wonder if they actually have lives to write about. Anthony Trollope is frequently held up as a paragon of the writer writing everyday, the same amount of words without fail, before going off to his day job. Well, hats off – but read some of his work, and the production-line approach shows – pedestrian and, in the main, uninteresting.

I don't believe in waiting for inspiration. I believe in dragging it to the keyboard everyday and wrestling some sense out of it – but sometimes it can take three hours of fighting to produce 3 words of fair-copy, sometimes 10,000, and sometimes you get flu.

It's easy to produce 10,000 words of drivel – but we're not in the business of typing, we're in the business of writing – there's a difference. I don't think you're any less a writer if you don't make the word count.

The point being, don't beat yourself up if you get wiped out by some illness – all you can do is retreat, regroup, re-plan, and re-attack. Let's not go to work, people – let's go to war.

Time is Time Enough

Writing is a bad habit – especially if you have a job, a relationship, a family, a social life, or a fitness regime – you may even have all five. Here's the bad news – if you are serious about writing then your time spent doing these things will be lessened. Putting it more bluntly, all these things will suffer if you want to be a writer.

So, before sacrificing your livelihood, sex-life, children's future, ability to socially interact and health, take my test to see if you've got what it takes to go the distance – it might just save you from throwing your life down the toilet.

1. Do you frequently think about your characters and story while you should be focusing on work issues? Time you should be closing deals or pouring creativity into presentations and technical documents?


2. Have you ever stayed up late writing when you could have gone to bed early with your partner, watched a film together, had a meal, or even a conversation?


3. Have you ever locked yourself in a room to write when you could have spent that time interacting with your kids?


4. Perhaps given an excuse for not attending a social event so you can crack on with your editing?


5. Has your thrice weekly gym visit/run/squash session depleted to one or even zero?

If you've answered 'yes' to any of these questions then you really are some distance toward being a committed writer. Whether you think that is a good thing only you can know.

Me, I'm going to start a Writers' Anonymous group. My name is James Killick, and I'm a writer.

Achieving Critical Distance from your Work

Time to Investigate

This, for me, is the Holy Grail of writing. We can all tell if someone else's writing isn't working; we can all tell when we love a piece, but turn our critical faculties to our own work, and we're either blinded by emotional involvement and love it, hate it completely, or perhaps worse, can't tell either way. It's not so much about murdering your darlings, but learning to look at them with the same appraising eye you look at other peoples'.

Just think, if you really could look at your work with genuine critical distance you really would be the best writer you could possibly be – you'd always know when it works and when it doesn't, what to fix and what to cut, what to refine, what to elaborate on and what to pare down.

You can learn to write better, you can learn to read like a writer – two skills that all the critical distance in the world will be no use without -but gaining critical distance - that's alchemy, right?

Mostly, yes – but here's a few tricks that can make it come a little easier.

Change the font

Crazy idea, but believe me it works – change the font to something else (sensible mind, dingbats is probably one defamiliarisation too far), reformat the paragraphs and line spacing – even use a different word processor – these techniques will really throw you out of a familiar space and make you look at what's behind the words i.e. the subject and meaning, rather than the words themselves.

Read it out loud

Or even better, record yourself doing it – and you probably want to do it in the most monotonous voice possible – this will really test your story, the cadence of your words – if they shine through that, you know you're onto something.

Reading out loud will also highlight ugly rhythm, clumsy phrasing, unpronounceable sentences etc. by the act of just doing it - this coupled with listening to your own voice massacring your text will have even the most purblind of authors scurrying to the edit table.

Invite criticism

I can't tell you the amount of times I've written something that burns with Prometheus's fire, that sparkles like rain, that cuts to the very heart of the universal human condition, only for it to be universally panned by everybody who reads it. Oh yes, it hurts, but believe me, you look again at that piece of work with a lot more distance that you did previously.

Put the manuscript away and live some life

Yes I know, the last thing you want to hear after spending five years on a manuscript it to put it away for some time and not think about it for (anything from 1 week to 6 months) , only to then have to work another five years on fixing it, but time really is the most effective way of gaining critical distance.

Abandon all hope or marry a genius

You could of course entirely rely on someone else's opinion - someone you completely trust - and make every change they recommend, every cut they suggest. I'm sure there's a few writers out there who use their spouses for just such a thing. I'm fairly confident that Percy Shelley used to pay attention to Mary's editorial suggestions, and I'm sure she did the same with his.

Cries and Whispers - how to write a compelling opening

We all want to write a compelling opening to our stories – something that hooks the reader, makes them not want to put the book down, makes them walk over to the cash-till and hand over their money. The how-to wizards know what to do – start with a bang, use action, start in media-res, have conflict - but how often have you read a story opening where the author has clearly tried to write a 'grabber' scene and ticked all the wizards' boxes, but it still doesn't work?

A dialogue between unknown characters?

An action sequence where there's clearly a lot at stake, we just don't know what it is?

A thriller opening with an unknown antagonist performing a hideous act of violence on an unnamed and soon to be deceased victim?

The truth is, you can make the opening as spectacular as you like, but if there's nothing to make the reader care, they won't. It's not easy involving a reader with characters/events right from the start, but nobody ever said it was. Here are some ideas for writing engrossing beginnings.

Don't start too late

Generally, starting in the middle of things is a good device, but starting too late can ruin a good opening. I've seen authors immediately having to follow a startling opening with a flash-back to explain the significance, or sapping all drama out of a potentially great opening because they are rushing to the action. If the reader knows something is going to happen, he'll read on, and while he's doing that, you can get him caring about the characters. The promise of action is enough to propel the narrative.

Prefer drama to action

Drama is conflict, emotion, tension - while action is just stuff happening. Drama implies that stuff will happen and is utterly compelling – a good way of engrossing a reader without punching them in the face with a gratuitous action-fest.

Whisper rather than shout

You're more likely to listen to someone who beckons you over to whisper in your ear than some boor bellowing at you from across the room – a lesson from life that can be applied to story openings – an intimate, intriguing voice can be more effective that a shocking 'grabber'.

Bring it closer to home

Or rather, make the reader care about your characters – if you apply some of the techniques above you can keep the reader around long enough to get to know your characters, so when you do put them in danger, place them in conflict, or have them talking to other characters – it will have some meaning and significance.

Sympathy for the Devil

I'm getting a little tired of hearing that protagonists must be 'sympathetic', that if the MC is not likeable, then readers won't buy the book, won't read it – they want to be able to project themselves onto the MC – if a writer doesn't do that, then the book will fail.

So that would rule out Humbert Humbert, Macbeth, Milton's Satan, Dorian Gray, Patrick Bateman – it's easy to go on and on. Do we really want a literary world where these guys don't exist?

Sympathy is one way of engaging a reader with a character, but it is only one way, and the most obvious way. I sometimes wonder if these commentators that insist on sympathy for protagonists actually mean empathy, which is a far more interesting reader response as it allows for a far greater range of characters that people can relate to - they can understand the character, without feeling compassion for them, which is what sympathy, a rather more patronising response, implies.

What is most important for a story is that characters achieve some kind of balance – the way I see it, a long running character that doesn't go through a character arc (this is typically the case with series detectives) need a balance of both admirable qualities and flaws – Poirot's vanity, Morse's moroseness etc. More traditional MCs that are bad, or unlikeable, need to attain some kind of balance, either by getting their comeuppance in the story, or realising their errors and changing. This is far more important than making a character 'sympathetic' – the need to provide a satisfying re-establishment of stasis.

It is lack of depth in a character, not lack of sympathy, that will cause readers to lose interest. The key to producing characters that readers engage with, or empathise with, is to drill down to their core humanity. We don't like to admit it, but we've all thought about killing someone. In the heart of us all, a bad man lies dormant.

It's also worth remember that in the world of a bad person, their actions are the right ones – they just play by different rules - if you lay those rules out, they are ones anyone can understand.