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I welcome thee, Katherine!
Here are my Ten Commandments, my writing credo, my passionate ‘I Believe’. Others may have other ideas, but imho you will not get very far without signing up to these.
1. THOU SHALT READ
- A LOT of contemporary fiction. And I mean a LOT. Not just in the genre you want to write, either – be adventurous, or how will you know what else is out there? You wouldn’t expect to succeed as a doctor or scientist if your training was years out of date; and you won’t succeed as a children’s author or a fantasy author, or any other kind, if the last children’s book or YA fantasy novel you read was twenty years ago when you were twelve. It’s surprising how many people don’t believe this. Are they sustained by an inner conviction that the books they read years ago were the golden standard from which writing has since declined? Who knows? They are deluded.
2. THOU SHALT NOT WRITE TRACTS.
Of course there are many influential books in the world. But the story is king. I don’t care whether you want to save the the Amazon rainforest, or stop bullying, or prevent date rape, or merely get children to pick up after themselves and turn out the lights when they leave a room: if your reason for writing is to preach some message, no matter how important or wonderful it may be, your ulterior motive will show up like a tarantula on a slice of angel-food, as Philip Marlowe once said. Books are not ‘messages’. They are about people – your characters – and what happens to them. The only way to make us care about your message is to make us care deeply about your characters, and paradoxically that means you, the writer, must care for your characters even more than you care for your beloved cause. Only in this way will there be even a chance of you writing another ‘Black Beauty’ or ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. In a modern idiom, of course.
3 THOU SHALT RESEARCH THY SUBJECT.
‘Write about what you know’ is a bit limiting. So do the research. You want to write about teenagers in a modern school… do you really know how they talk and behave, or are you relying on personal memories of school, long out of date? You want to set a book in America, but you’re not American… your two-week holiday in Maine or Miami is not going to cut it, no matter how many times you’ve watched the reruns of Friends. I don’t wish to sound like Donald Rumsfeld, but there is stuff you don’t know, that you don’t even know you don’t know. I read a fantastic book recently, a sci-fi time-travel novel set partly in Tudor England. The author had done masses of research into the period, most of which really paid off. But she was Californian, and so she put a full-grown, fruit-bearing orange tree into an English orchard, which bumped me right out of the story for a few pages. Her ‘normal’ was not my ‘normal’; but she didn’t know. I still loved the book, but it would have been better without the orange tree.
4. THOU SHALT USE NONE OTHER VERB THAN ‘SAID’ ...
... to indicate speech – at least 95% of the time. If I open a book at random and my eye falls upon ‘“No way!” he smirked,’ or ‘“That’s the wrong colour,” she opined,’ or ‘“I was too late,” he sighed,” – I generally close the book and put it back. It’s even worse when an adverb is tagged on: ‘“I love you,” he murmured thickly’. Yick! And while I’m on the subject of adverbs…
5. THOU SHALT HUNT DOWN AND ELIMINATE ADVERBS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS
I swear they multiply. Go after them. Get yourself down to – say – no more than two adverbs to a page and an exclamation mark only once every three pages. Leave it a few days, go back, and you’ll find more.
6. THOU SHALT SLAY THY DARLINGS.
This is the one we all try and wriggle out of, because it hurts so much and anyway surely it can’t apply to this beautiful piece of scene-painting, possibly the best descriptive writing you’ve ever done? And what about the chapter where you finally managed to work in that really hilarious anecdote you’ve wanted to use for ages? Well, unless the descriptive passage and the humorous anecdote are truly relevant, I’m afraid it does, and moreover…
7. THOU SHALT MURDER THINE UNNECESSARY CHARACTERS.
Your characters are your workforce, and you should be their ruthless capitalist boss. If they work, cherish them, but if they aren’t pulling their weight, get rid of them. If five characters are in a room but only three of them are talking, chances are you don’t need the silent two. Don’t burden yourself with more characters than you and the reader can easily distinguish. Don’t duplicate effort: don’t give a child two best friends unless the fact that he has two (different) friends is going to be significant. And finally, don’t waste energy on creating wonderfully crafted characters with no role and nothing to do.
8. THY CRAFT IS A JEALOUS CRAFT: THOU SHALT HAVE NO PEACE OF MIND EITHER BY NIGHT OR BY DAY UNTIL THY WORK IS DONE
This is more of a description than a command because seriously, writing is more than work, it’s a sort of obsession. When I’m writing a book I often feel as though I’ve become a kind of computer running a continuous programme on the virtual world that is my book. I go to bed, wake up, walk the dog, drive to the supermarket, cook, wash, etc, and all the time the programme is running, turning up small bits and pieces of information I didn’t know I knew about my characters’ lives and where the plot is heading. It’s actually exhausting. Which is why…
9. THOU SHALT CUT THYSELF SOME SLACK AND TAKE TIME OFF TO THINK.
Thinking is just as much part of creating a novel as actually setting the words down. Don’t feel pressured to start too early, and don’t feel guilty if you’re not hammering out those two thousand words a day. (Me? I sometimes don’t write more than fifty. Or I end up with fewer words at the end of the day, because I’ve been cutting and unpicking.) Often, if you get stuck, it’s a sign that you’re veering off course with the book – maybe trying to force a character to do something they wouldn’t. Give yourself time out. Go off and do something different and let your subconscious mind come up with the answers.
10. LASTLY, HAVE FAITH.
If you’re trying to be a writer (and believe me all writers are only trying to be writers; we’re all afraid that this time the flame will have departed and the deity moved on) – the odds are you’re one already. You can’t stop. Sometimes you love it, sometimes you hate it, but you can’t stop. You’re always thinking up phrases to describe things you see. Stories come to you – bits of plot and character drift into your mind and won’t go away. You get feverish if you can’t find a pen and a bit of paper to scribble it all down. All right then, keep going. Keep writing. Keep learning your craft. Get feedback. Accept criticism even if it hurts, and take praise with humility and the understanding that if you’ve done something well, you can probably still learn to do it better… and have fun!
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There you go - take note of these and you might just get to finishing your novel! Thanks so much to Katherine for being patient with me and for being here to share this today.
For more information about Katherine, the blog tour schedule and West of the Moon, click on the tour poster above!
