Four lies the internet tells you about writing

Yes it's true – the internet lies to you. It poses as an oracle but spouts vacuities. It promises knowledge and delivers platitudes. It offers an audience but gives nothing but loneliness. It hints at success but smacks you with despair. But worst than all that, it can make you believe the following.

You are a brand

You thought you were a person, a unique snowflake with a distinct and idiosyncratic view on the world. In actuality you're just a brand - like a roll-on deodorant. It doesn't matter about quality; it doesn't matter about vision or voice or art or craft. No passion. No love. No wrestling with demons of doubt and truth. No late nights staring at empty pages, words bleeding from your fingertips like sweated blood. No carving through inanities with the broadsword of truth. None of that. You just need to be a powerful and recognisable brand that suggests all those things. Then you'll have a career.

Right.

Your writing is a product

Like toilet-cleaner or cat-litter – your writing is just a product. Utilitarian. No need to aspire to greatness, to delve deep into yourself to discover empathetic and universal insights into the human condition. Your work is just a unit-shifter, a money-maker – standardised, compartmentalised, marketed. An agent or editor hasn't got time to judge your work by its merit, they need to be able to quickly label it in the context of the current market – are you the next Larsson? The next Rowling? The next King? If not, fuck off.

Right.

Your audience is a platform

Not individuals, but a mob – in fact not even a mob – a group of people dehumanised to the point where they are no more that just a stage from which you can propel your career. How engaging. How understanding. How perceptive. A platform? That's right, a lump of concrete that will recognise your brand and buy your product by the truck-load.

Social media is essential

So you can connect with other tossers who tell you that you are a brand, that your work is product to be sold to your platform.

That's enough of that - get out there and mix it up with the real big, bad, ugly human-race.

Oh yeah, and you're all snowflakes to me.

Five ways to banish drama from your scenes

In case you ever find yourself writing a scene that's breathtakingly dramatic, here are five ways to ensure you bring it back down to earth and wash it clean of anything remotely compelling.

Drama is not debate

Come on, admit it – the real reason you became a writer is because you have so much to say but no-one ever listens. It's ok, it's understandable. Writing provides a way of ramming your opinions down your readers' throats with no chance of a comeback. Cunningly get your characters to talk about the issues you wish to educate the reader about - even better than that, use your characters as mouth-pieces for your own opinions. Character is secondary to the things you want to say. It's called your distinct voice - use it.

Drama is not then but now

Drama is not what has happened but what is happening. Remember that and you're in danger of entertaining – stop right there – it's not about them, the readers, it's about you, the writer. Crafting an immediate scene takes time and effort and life is too short for all that. Better to get your characters to statically discuss traumatic events from your own life thereby exorcising your demons as if they were the character's own. Genius. This also means you won't have to spend countless hours inventing backgrounds and providing motivations for your characters.

And what's the point of showing when you can tell? Telling allows you to interpret for the reader and prevents them using their own imagination. You don't want them sullying your intended purpose with their own interpretations.

Drama is not what is being said but what is happening

Yep there is a difference, and it can get confusing - therefore remove all action from your scene. Some writers are masterful at a sub-textual drama lurking beneath the words the characters are saying – the characters' words belying their wants. Subtle, and deeply pretentious. Why waste an opportunity to directly express the issues you, the author, have to express? This is about educating the reader with your superior and refined opinions, not entertaining them with complex chicanery.

Drama is not scenery

...but scene – a subtle distinction the self-obsessed writer can happily ignore. Here's an opportunity to really practice your purple prose with pages and pages of pointless description. Be careful to avoid heightening the drama by describing relevant details - focus on the irrelevant – this ensures that you highlight for the reader your exquisite wordsmithery without letting anything (like drama or story) get in the way. With exhilarating drama people don't notice the words used to convey it – and that's the last thing you want.

Drama is not exposition

You go to the trouble of thinking a little about your characters background – you have to make sure you include all that material otherwise you're just wasting your time. You want the reader to know how much effort you've put into this thing. Why show the tip of the iceberg when you can drag the whole thing up and dump it on the page? If you've got the material you'd be a fool not to use it.

The three phases of creativity

Coming up with enough ideas to drive a novel, play or even a short-story can be daunting – doing it often enough to establish a career can seem an impossibility. The good news is, having ideas is habit forming. Once you start doing it and keep doing it, you won't be able to stop. The key is not to kill an idea before it even starts – if you try to accelerate or collapse the process you'll dismiss good ideas that don't seem immediately relevant to your work. Your imagination is like a sensitive soul at a dinner party – if it keeps getting shouted down eventually it will stop saying anything – what you want is for her to keep babbling away without a care in the world. The secret to achieving this is to allow space for each phase of the creative process.

Creation (of ideas)

Allowing yourself time to just create and capture ideas without forcing them into a story framework allows you to have the craziest ideas. If you're not having to force them you'll find they will grow and develop into pretty amazing things, particularly if you tease and prod them into unexpected areas by asking the simple 'what if?' question. You will know best what stimulates ideas for you – for me it's music – but it's not just the creation of the ideas, it's the capturing of them that's important too. For me a notebook (the analogue kind) is ideal for this – the fact that I'm scribbling away in a book I know no-one will ever read gives me a freedom and security that the cold, hard page of Microsoft Word just doesn't have. The very act of writing these ideas down can also encourage other ideas.

You may have ideas for scenes, characters, emotions, themes or snippets of dialogue or prose – even single phrases. All of them must go in the notebook.

Construction

If you've got a good reservoir of ideas building, you'll start to see connections and possible relationships forming between these ideas. This is the next key phase in building a story (or any creative work) – constructing ideas into a cohesive form. You need to have a certain amount of room to experiment in this phase too – this is why so many writers uses index cards, because it provides a flexible way to try out different relationships and sequences. Allowing yourself room to cheaply and quickly try out different connections will also drive new ideas and push the story into interesting new areas. Allow yourself room to experiment here – you're still not committing to anything – you already have your bag of ideas, all your doing here is trying out connections – nothing is undoable. Even the craziest tangential story-thread may yield something you can pull into whatever or wherever your story eventually takes you. You'll find that particular sequences or connections will resonate – and your story will start to form.

Realisation

If you've done the creation and construction phase then this bit is the fun bit – bringing your creation to life in your chosen medium. This will really be the icing on the cake, bringing all the skeletal elements you've been working on, combining them with voice and style and further nuances – but knowing there's a good solid structure and a strong foundation of ideas to build on.

Any work of any magnitude needs a fertile bed of ideas to grow from. A great piece of advice I once read was 'put every great idea you have into your current work in progress'. A mistake I used to make in my early writing was to have ideas but 'save' them for other projects – with the effect that my WIP was devoid of ideas and appeared sparse and shallow. Don't ration your ideas, use them like a glutton – have faith that you will have more – there's no point worrying about WIP2 if WIP1 is going to be sterile and unimaginative.

Three little words that will save your story

Like all the hardest things, stories are simple at their core. Most non-writers think that ideas are the most difficult thing about writing - we've all heard people say that they've got a great idea for a novel as if that's the hard work done - but the truth is, ideas are cheap. They lie around for the taking; they can be borrowed, stolen or simply observed – failing that, they can even be made up.

A child makes up story events with infinite ease – this happened, then this happened, then this happened. It's a piece of cake. What's really hard is tying up those things together to make an enthralling story - relating those easy-to-come-up-with story elements into something meaningful.

The good news is, while the story elements can be infinitely various, the relationships between them can be distilled into three words.

And

Not to be confused with 'and then' which puts us in the realm of childlike plotting and simply tells us what happens next. 'And' defines a relationship between story elements and is used to supply background to the story. Plenty of story elements related by 'and' will provide fertile ground from which a story can grow.

For example – Mitch is desperate to have children AND he is frustrated in his work AND he is being inattentive to his wife AND had an affair many years ago AND he has a son he doesn't know about.

Plenty of scope for a story to unfold here – we could continue to add all sorts of complications to Mitch's life to give us further scope for development.

Therefore

This is what will ensure story elements (or events) are consequential i.e. that one will naturally (and inevitably) be the consequence of what has happened before. It is usually a result of characters' needs or wants driving them to achieve their aims.

For example – Mitch wants to be rich THEREFORE he robs a bank. Mitch wants to cross the river THEREFORE he builds a bridge. Mitch wants to seduce the girl THEREFORE he buys some flowers.

'Therefore' supposes a forward driven plot evolution – but you may have a great ending but you're not sure how to get there – this is when 'because' comes in handy. So you want your heroine to be emotionally desolate and stranded in the jungle? Why did she get there? BECAUSE she followed her explorer lover out there who left her for an iguana. BECAUSE is simply THEREFORE reversed.

But

This is how to add complications to your story. Mitch wants to cross the river THEREFORE he builds a bridge BUT it falls down as he's halfway across it BECAUSE he used cheap materials. See what I did there?

Remembering that these three relationships are what tie story events together means we can take all those ideas we've begged, borrowed or stolen and start stringing them together into coherent plots, or we can take one idea and start driving a plot forwards (or backwards) from it using these three magic words.

Give it a go.