Put the hero through hell, not the reader

Presumably, like me, you write in the hope that somebody somewhere will read and enjoy what you've written. Preferably a handful. More preferably a multitude who'll pay for the privilege.

Spend any time reading advice on writing and it won't be long before you're told to put your characters through hell; define the most precious thing they have and take it away from them; devastate them mentally, physically and emotional – this will make your story visceral, emotive and gripping.

Except it takes a little more than that. If you do these things without purpose, reason or effect your reader will end up going somewhere else. Why? Because it's narrative progression that grips readers, not watching characters get persecuted. Without movement or change repeated hellish scenes are just that – repeated hellish scenes. It's like making a point, then making it again, and again, and then shouting it just to make sure. Trust me, we got it the first time.

But I want my reader to really understand what my character is suffering, says the bone-headed writer. Sorry, buddy, which reader is that exactly?

You see, it's not the physical, sexual or emotional hell that makes the story interesting, it's what the character does about it that's interesting – it's the dramatic question that such scenes generate that create the propulsion, the urge in the reader to read on. How will she cope with that? How will he get out of this hell-hole? If the reader turns over to find those questions not answered, just more hell, then unless he's a sicko, he'll move on.

But if you're determined to make your story a hell-trail, here's how to do it - there must be some hope, some suggestion that this can change or stop. Either the hero must be able to help themselves or someone else can.

Progress the hero from one hellish scene to another – think of the character Butch played by Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction – a masterclass in story-telling as a character tries to get himself out of a situation only to find himself in repeatedly worse ones, culminating in a dramatic turn-around between protagonist and antagonist.

Torture or abuse a character by all means – make the reader understand the jeopardy they are in – remind us throughout the narrative – but continue it without narrative movement, hope, or redemption and I'll go wake up the gimp.

How to write when you've got nothing to say

I was never prolific. I used to spend hours staring at a blank screen bleeding words like blood from a stone which I would end up deleting the next day. Why? Because I made the mistake of thinking that writing was all about producing words.

Well, it is about producing words, but only in so much as that's the medium we've chosen in which to convey our ideas. Words with nothing behind them are meaningless.

Now when I sit down to write I never have enough time to get down what I need to. Every minute I spend at the keyboard I've got words coming out as fast as I can type them, and that's not because I'm producing pantsesque stream of consciousness stuff, it's because I've got a conveyor belt of ideas shunting stuff forward.

But it wasn't always so. Here's what I learnt the hard way.

Ground work

You need to start working that story before you sit down to write it. You know you've got a big scene to start when you get home from your job, so spend lunchtime thinking about it. Questions are a good way to activate your imagination. What is going to happen in this scene? Why is it going to happen? What do my characters think about it and how will they react?

Go crazy with your thinking

Ideas are cheap, especially when you're not doing 'proper writing' – by which I mean staring at your manuscript. So when you're sitting there at lunch with your chosen recording tool, give free rein to your ideas – you can always delete them afterwards, but that crazy idea just might be the one thing that will raise your story from the mediocre to the magnificent.

Have an ideas notebook

In which you write everything down. Not just ideas for the current WIP, but anything that comes to you. Goes without saying, right?

Have at least two projects on the go

Then if you've dried up on the one, you can go to work on the other.

There's always something else to do

Writing involves a whole heap of stuff – creating ideas, capturing them, crafting, editing, critiquing, researching agencies and publishers, learning about the craft – there's always something to do if your imagination goes AWOL. There's really no excuse not to write, and chances are when you start editing that other story that's been in the drawer for a while, you'll start activating ideas for the WIP too.

Let's get to it.

Cultivating your Imagination

An active imagination breeds ideas for a writer and is the hotbed on which stories grow. So why is nobody talking about it?

It's easy to talk about the things a writer needs to be able to do (there's only three of them). It's easy to talk about achieving critical distance, the craft of writing, about capturing ideas without stifling them, about recording them at any time. All that's easy, because that's practical stuff you can learn.

But imagination? That's personal and deep and far from practical and you just can't learn it, right?

Well, yes and no – you're born with imagination the same way you're born with a head, and you can choose to use it or not. But it's an organic thing, and like anything organic it will wither and die if you don't treat it right. Think of imagination as a pot-plant – with the right light, food and space it will pretty much take care of itself, but neglect it and it will fade away to nothing before you even notice.

So how do we go about ensuring a healthy imagination? Here's how:

Encourage, don't deride

It can be clever, witty and amusing to mock peoples' ideas - many successful writers make a career of it - but it's a parasitical form of creativity and relies on other people having the guts to try something in the first place. A mocking attitude is anathema to genuine creative thinking - you must look for the possibilities in everything you see. Sure, there's going to be stuff you don't like, but rather than dismiss it, be constructive and imagine how you would do it better.

Take yourself seriously

By which I mean, give credence to every stupid idea you have. Ideas breed ideas - to create brilliant ones you have to allow yourself to have hopeless ones. Jot everything down, no matter how ridiculous, and put it on the back-burner – given some time that ridiculous idea just might evolve into something amazing.

Stimulate yourself

This is the fun part, read, watch, listen, observe – books, films, music, settings, people. Anything that gets your creative juices flowing – here are some more ideas.

Don't always think within the context of your WIP

Because you're planning on writing something after it, right? And who's to say you can't include that crazy idea in the current work anyway? The bottom line is, you don't want to lose one single idea – you never know when you might need it, so:

Record, record, record

Ideas need to be remembered, so record them as soon as you can, because you will forget them like dreams. But the most important thing of all is:

Never, ever, block

You ever find yourself going off on tangents? Roll with it. You ever find yourself in conversations pushing an idea until people are looking at you like you're from space? Good. You need to push the boundaries – that's your job. Don't be the person who laughs at someone's foolish idea, be the person who pushes that idea to the limits until it's exhausted or it's a master-work.

Never dismiss, never deride, and never lose a good idea for fear of a bad one. Before you know it, you won't be able to stop yourself.

Believe.

Knowing when to cut or fix a crap scene, and how to do it

Do you have scenes that aren't working? Where the dialogue is flat and unconvincing and there's no compulsive quality? Where you know it deserves to be cut from the story but you need that character to meet that other character at that particular point and it would be great if you could only just make it work?

We all have them – seemingly essential scenes that read like dogs' dinners. So what the hell can we do about it?

The first thing we have to understand is what the dramatic purpose of the scene is, what's the reason we made that scene selection – if it's anything other than to reveal character or progress the story then the scene is a genuine candidate for cutting. Here are a few likely reasons a scene choice was made:

1. to progress the story

2. to reveal some aspect of character

3. to introduce a character

4. for expositional purposes

If your scene makes any of the top three of these then it's worth considering keeping. If the scene is only expositional (or god forbid, you've no idea why you wrote it), then it's likely that's the reason it's failing – exposition needs to be combined with story progression or character exposure to be interesting.

So our scene has one of the top three elements, or even better, more than one, but still, is it necessary? Is the story compromised without that scene; is that character not fully understood if it goes – in other words, is this scene essential?

It is? Well then, we have to fix it. And having worked out what the dramatic purpose of the scene really is, there's no reason why we can't. The next question we need to ask is this – is the scene achieving its dramatic purpose?

A scene will fail either because it's not portraying the characters or story clearly enough OR because those characters or story aren't up to much in the first place. Knowing why the scene is failing is the first step to fixing it. In essence - get your story straight, and tell it well; fully develop your characters and reveal them. Good story-telling principles apply as much to scenes as they do anywhere else.

Scenes are not about what characters are saying, but what's going on while they're saying it – either subtextually or through action. It's easy to forget this. Therefore it's easy to find yourself telling through what the characters say, rather than showing through action or subtext. If you know what the dramatic purpose of the scene is, then consider what the best way to show this is.

For example – you want to demonstrate that character B has violent tendencies, you could do tell it this way:

Character A – You remember the time you kicked the shit out of that guy for borrowing your pencil without asking?

Character B – Yeah, I do. Can you pass the salt?

Or show it this way:

Stranger C – Hey mister, I think you took my chair.

Character B – Really? So why don't you try come get it, buddy?

Character A – Hey, B – take it easy - the guy only wants his chair back.

Character B – In fact, he can have it, wrapped round his head.

A lot's being said in scene 1, but nothing is actually happening, while it's the opposite in scene 2.

So, in summary – to figure out if your crappy scene makes the cut:

1. Understand its dramatic purpose and if that purpose justifies its inclusion.

2. Understand if the scene is essential.

3. Understand if the failing is due to weak story, undeveloped or uninteresting character, or technique.

4. If the scene is still here, you know it's worth fixing, and you should know what needs fixing.

And if you remember that scenes are about what's happening, not what's being said, you can't go far wrong.

Get others to make your writing mistakes for you

You can often learn more from bad writing than you can from good. Reading (or watching) something excellent will make you forget the mechanics and get swept away with the story and at the end think to yourself – wow, how the hell did they do that? You probably find this happens less and less the more you write – as you learn the science some of the magic is bound to get lost. The upside is that you can start to get value from badly written stories – which means less wasted time.

Doing this requires honing three core skills – the ability to ascertain what is wrong with a piece, the ability to understand why it is wrong, and lastly how to fix it – and those things get harder to do in that order. The best way to develop these skills is to join a critique group. Hell, join several. One of the real advantages here is that it's far easier to see other peoples mistakes than it is your own, and so often through the prism of critiquing you'll start to recognise in others the mistakes you make yourself.

Once you've developed those critical faculties, you can then apply them to all the cultural product you consume on the radio, music, tv or theatre – any medium that has a narrative. Before you know it you won't be able to help yourself.

Here are some mistakes I recently learned from people who actually got paid for it.

The true meaning behind dialogue should be subtextual

Nobody, not even in fiction, says exactly what they mean or think. Quite often characters don't even know what they mean or think. This isn't a call for verisimilitude – it's just that characters talking 'on the nose' makes for flat, unrealistic, undramatic scenes. The key to this is having fully realised characters – if you know your characters well, then you'll know what they want and how they will articulate that when confronted with your other fully-realised characters.

If your characters are all so well-adjusted that they know exactly what they want, and are confident enough to articulate it to the relevant characters, then you're not going to have much of a story.

Character 1: Wow, I so fancy you.

Character 2: Really? Gee, I fancy you too – shall we get married?

Character 1: Let's do it.

Character 2: You don't think we should have been more oblique and uncertain and prolonged this for a few more pages?

Character 1: No, that would require us to have some real hang-ups and be far too interesting.

Characters shouldn't just speak to facilitate another character's speech

i.e. to say – really? And then what? No, I…, Yes, but…

Dialogue is not monologue – if it was, it would be called monologue.

The revealing of back-story is not story

No one cares about the back-story if the front-story is shit. If the back-story is where the interest lies, tell that story. That doesn't mean that previously un-revealed back-story can't be earth-shattering, but only because it throws an already great front-story into relief. Luke Skywalker discovering who Dad is is a great example of this.

Characters must be contextually convincing

So you thought you'd have an Eton educated man working in McDonalds? Interesting, but only if you address why he ended up there. Throwing up a dramatic question is only interesting if you attempt to answer it - not doing so can make your interesting situation just plain irritating.

Meaningless events in an attempt to make things interesting aren't interesting enough

Things should happen because putting those characters in that situation will have inevitable consequences. Incidental events can happen, but they are interesting because of the effect they have on the characters, not because of the events themselves. True character is revealed at moments of crisis.

You see, that's the sort of stuff you can learn before you make the same mistakes.