The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Turn that blank page into a bestseller
Joanne Harris, author of the international hit ‘Chocolat’, shares her rules for starting – and finishing – your first novel
GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO WRITE
You can do it. It’s allowed. No one’s going to laugh at you or say you’re not a proper writer – not anyone who matters, anyway. Stop thinking in terms of “proper” writers and the rest of the world. You’re not an “aspiring” writer, or an “emerging” writer, or a “budding” writer. If you write, you’re a writer. So write!
READ AS MUCH AS YOU CAN
To be a writer, you must be a reader. Comics, games, fan fiction, literary fiction, commercial fiction, children’s books, ebooks, magazines, non-fiction – it’s all part of your training. All reading teaches you something. Read aloud. Words are like music; they have their own rhythms and beats. Reading aloud helps you understand the ebb and flow of the language.
KEEP A NOTEBOOK
Carry it with you at all times. In it, record anything you see or hear that you find interesting, new, striking, shocking, funny, singular. Dreams and daydreams; thoughts and ideas. You never know what might fit into a story one day.
GET INTO THE GROOVE
However much or little time you have, try to write something every day. Even if it’s only a sentence, it helps you stay in the world you’re creating. Once you’re in that world, your mind will be quietly working on your plot and characters throughout the day.
GET HEAD SPACE
Many writers don’t have the luxury of a room of their own – they may sometimes have to write in airports, hotel rooms, railway stations. (I spent several years writing on the floor of my living room, surrounded by my daughter’s toys, and with my husband watching football on
TV.) So make a portable desk. Choose two objects – for 15 years I used a candlestick and a paperweight, but they can be anything at all – put them in front of your laptop as you sit at your desk, or your kitchen table, or on your chosen piece of floor.
Handle them whenever you settle down to write – and only then.
What you’re doing is creating a psychological trigger, telling yourself: this is your writing space. It’s amazing how well this works. Try it. You may surprise yourself.
DON’T WORRY IF YOU END UP TRASHING SOME OR ALL OF WHAT YOU’VE WRITTEN
Nothing you write is ever wasted. Remember that every word you write is part of your ongoing training, and that anything you discard now may one day be reused, reimagined or rebooted. For now, don’t look back. You have work to do.
Inspiration is a mysterious concept, and one over which people too often feel they have no control. This is quite untrue; the search for ideas is an active, not a passive process. The idea that we must wait for the Muse to inspire us was invented by effete young Victorians who wanted an excuse to sit around doing nothing all day. Most of us don’t have that luxury, which means forgetting about the Muse and doing some actual footwork instead.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO FAR TO FIND IDEAS
There are stories all around us; the trick is learning how to see them. Train yourself to question all that you see, and to imagine the stories behind the people you meet.
DON’T FORGET THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE A LIBRARY OF MEMORIES
Draw from your experiences; your childhood, the key events of your own life. Not only will these give you ideas, they will also add to the emotional realism of your writing.
GIVE YOURSELF A STORY PROMPT EVERY DAY
Base it on the things you see on the way to work, or in the street outside your window. An abandoned shoe by the side of the road – what’s its story? How did it get there? A woman running for a bus – where is she going? Who is she? It’s surprising how often these small things can grow into something bigger.
REMEMBER TO USE ALL YOUR SENSES
Imagine describing (for instance) rain in terms of sound, texture, temperature, light and scent. Have a look at the following, from Angela Carter’s 1995 Burning Your Boats:
The lucidity, the clarity of light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles.
The main sweep of your plot may be fluid, but the nuts and bolts of your reality – be it the French court of Louis XV or a village in rural Kashmir – need to be as solid as possible. That means vocabulary, clothing, food, historical or geographical fact-checking. You’re bound to make the odd mistake, but try to avoid the obvious ones.
Art galleries can be an excellent resource: sometimes they’re the best way of researching things such as food and clothing.
Even if you’re writing pure fantasy, the rules of plausibility still apply. There’s no excuse for unbelievable, lazy, or clichéd work. Your audience owes you nothing: it’s up to you to earn their trust. That’s why even your medieval space-lizard epic can benefit from some solid research on weapons, battles, the rural economy and medieval social structures.
BEWARE OF WHAT CREATIVEWRITING TUTORS REFER TO AS ‘HOOKS’.
Sure, it’s important to grab your
reader’s attention as quickly as you can, but it’s important to do it in a way that doesn’t end up with the reader feeling cheated. I’m all for an arresting opening sentence, but make sure you consider tone. An over-flashy or overdramatic opening can sometimes end up sounding like a cheap device to attract attention, and may ultimately alienate your reader.
INTRODUCE THE READER TO A CHARACTER THEY’RE LIKELY TO FIND INTERESTING OR RELATABLE
That doesn’t mean a massive info-dump: a well-chosen detail or two might be enough to intrigue them and make them want to read on.
PRESENT YOUR READER WITH AN INTERESTING THOUGHT, UNANSWERED QUESTION OR PIECE OF INFORMATION THAT THEY MAY NEVER HAVE CONSIDERED BEFORE
They’ll read on to find out its significance, after which it’s up to you to reel them in with well-drawn characters and an engaging story.
OR YOU CAN START OFF WITH A BANG
Iain Banks does this very well – he often surprises his audience into the story with a series of startling, sometimes shocking opening sentences that hook the reader immediately. But this bravura method only works if the whole novel is in a similar register. If you’re writing a quiet, reflective story, you’ll have to start it off in a quiet, reflective way. That doesn’t mean sacrificing tension or mystery. It means you’ll have to be more subtle. There’s a reason Jane Eyre begins with the line: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” rather than, “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
YOU DON’T HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE PERFECT OPENING SCENE TO COME TO YOU BEFORE BEGINNING YOUR STORY
Lots of writers work on later scenes as they wait for their opening scene to find them. It could be that the best way for you is simply to write your way into
Slavish adherence to writers’ rules is as bad as pretending that there are none
your story. Don’t worry too much about the quality of what you’re writing, or the story you’re telling: just write about your protagonist, their thoughts, their comings and goings. I think of this as the scaffolding stage: support for the thing you’re building. At some point you’ll find your opening scene, and with it, your first line. When you reach it, just get rid of everything you wrote previously – take down the scaffolding – and you’re off!
Beats in fiction, as in music, are what we use to keep the pace or tempo of a story going. In storytelling, as in dancing, keeping time is essential. In a novel, your beats are the main plot points that drive your story. You should be able to write each one down as a one-line summary. For example: A stranger arrives in town. Mr Bingley invites the girls to a dance at his home.
Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy for the first time.
These driving beats are normally followed by reactions from characters, development, suspense, dialogue and all the other ingredients that help to build your story.
EXAMPLES
Beat: A stranger arrives in town. Reaction: The Bennet girls are excited, because the stranger is a wealthy single man. Development: We learn more about the Bennet family. Mr Bennet seems disinclined to get to know the interesting stranger.
Beat: Mr Bingley invites the girls to a dance at his home.
Reaction: The Bennet girls and their mother are very excited. Elizabeth remains aloof. Development: We see the girls at the party, and learn more about them. Elizabeth, especially, has strong ideas about the kind of man she’s looking for.
Beat: Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy for the first time. Reaction: He is rude: she is unimpressed.
Try drawing a diagram of your story, marking the beats and reactions along the way. It should become very clear if there’s a point at which too many things all happen at once, or if the story slows down longer than it should. Or think of your beats as stepping stones across a river. For obvious reasons, don’t leave it too long before dropping the next one.
You may have heard the term “second-act slump”. This applies mostly to films, but is equally true of some novels. It refers to the saggy bit in the middle of a story, where the plot can lose momentum. This is usually either because the author is juggling too many sub-plots, or because they have failed to manage the tension correctly. If you think your plot is suffering from second-act slump, go back to your story diagram. Make sure the beats are in the right place. Make sure that each beat shows the tension mounting.
Slavish adherence to writers’ rules is as bad as pretending that there are none; and it’s up to you, as you develop, to decide what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few of the commonest, and why you shouldn’t necessarily take them at face value.
‘WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’
This isn’t a rule designed to limit what you write, but an invitation to encourage you to expand your knowledge. If we all restricted our writing solely to our own experience, books would be very dull indeed, and all crime writers would be in jail.
‘DON’T BREAK THE FOURTH WALL’
Otherwise known as the “Dear Reader” technique, this relates to those moments at which a character looks out from the pages and addresses the reader directly – a tricky technique, which, used clumsily, can break the spell you’re trying to weave. On the other hand, it worked just fine for Charlotte Brontë.
‘SHOW, DON’T TELL’
There’s a reason we tell stories, rather than showing the reader: a good writer will know when to do both. Too much showing
(in terms of description, etc) can sometimes lead to overwritten, pretentious prose; too little can lead to the reader never being invested enough to connect with the fictional world. You need to be able to do both, at the right time and in the right place.
‘NEVER USE A VERB OTHER THAN “SAID” TO REPORT DIALOGUE’
This is reasonable advice in the main, except that I think the only real rule is never to say “never”. Just bear in mind that what a character says is usually more important than how they say it, and therefore needs more emphasis.
‘DON’T START A BOOK WITH THE WEATHER’
This is now often seen as a bit of a cliché, but there are plenty of good ways of using the weather in fiction. Perhaps, “Don’t use clichés” is a better way to put it.
Ten Things About Writing by Joanne Harris is published by September (ebook, £5.99, out now; hardback out Dec 10)