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Morgen Bailey returns with some invaluable advice about writing and writing essentials. Welcome back, Morgen. Your posts are always captiva...
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Friday, May 17, 2013
WRITING ESSENTIALS BY MORGEN BAILEY
Blog
post: ‘Writing essentials’
In my experience too many novice
writers worry about finding their ‘voice’ and understanding their ‘craft’ early
on. It can be a long journey but providing you write regularly (daily is the
ideal but when does life afford that luxury, although 300 words equates to
100,000 words a year so a great incentive) you’ll get there… and here are a few
basics to put in your suitcase:
·
Probably
the most used phrase is ‘show don’t tell’. If you have a character who is angry
for some reason, saying ‘Andy was angry’ is a classic example of ‘tell’. Simply
put, you’re not showing us how. If you wrote ‘Andy slammed his fist onto the
table’ you are.
·
Dialogue
tags – it’s recommended that you can only go up to six pieces of dialogue
(between no more than two people) without attributing it to someone. And
there's nothing wrong with ‘said’. Don’t be tempted to look at your thesaurus
and say ‘Andy postulated’. You could also avoid tags by another character
saying “Oh Andy, that’s…” or in the description; ‘Andy laughed. “That’s…”
·
Character
names are important as we often get a sense of their personality by what
they’re called. A Mavis is likely to be older than a Britney and would,
usually, act differently. Avoid having names starting with the same letter; if
you have a Todd talking to a Ted, the reader can easily get confused. Bill and
Ted would be fine and as we know, they had a wonderful time back in the late
1980s.
·
I’m
a big fan of repetition… of not doing it. Unless it’s ‘the’, ‘and’ etc, a word should
only be repeated if the second instance is to emphasise or clarify the first.
For example, ‘Andy sat in the car. He beeped the horn of the car.’ You don’t
need ‘of the car’ because we already know he’s in the car. If you said ‘Andy
sat in the car. He beeped the horn and the car shook’ that would be fine
because you’re clarifying that it’s the car and not the horn (because it’s the
last object you mentioned) that’s shaking.
·
Stephen
King’s writing guide / autobiography ‘On writing’ has been the most suggested book
in the interviews I’ve conducted. Amongst other things he’s notoriously against
adverbs (‘ly’) and fair enough – in ‘completely dead’ you wouldn’t need the
completely because dead says it all, and a character doesn’t need to be
‘sighing wearily’ because the sighing tells us enough, but adverbs are
necessary in the right context. Again it’s all about clarification and fine-tuning.
·
Every
word has to count; does it move the story along or tell us about your
characters? If not, the chances are it can be chopped.
·
If
you’re having trouble with a passage move on or leave it and return later with
‘fresh eyes’.
·
Read.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s your genre or not (one of my Monday nighters
writes amazing sci-fi but has never read a word of it) but reading will help
you see how a story is structured and balanced between dialogue and
description; short sentences speed the pace, long passages slow it down.
·
Join
a writing group, get your work critiqued. Read your work out loud. It’s amazing
what you’ll pick up when you hear it outside your head.
·
Subscribe
to writing magazines, go to workshops, literary festivals. If you really want
to write immerse yourself in all things literary.
There are many more
examples I could give you but all you need to remember is that it’s not about
clever words (because that ends up becoming ‘purple prose’) but just getting
pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard and having fun. When your characters take
over (and they will) you’ll have the time of your life!
Morgen Bailey
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Nicely said, Morgen!
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