Week Thirty-Eight: On Staying Energised as a Writer

Sometimes being a writer feels like the hardest thing in the world.

'What chance have I got among all these?'

It isn't, of course.

But that doesn't mean we don't become tired, getting up in the morning and seeing either that nothing has changed or life just got a little harder than the day before.

This isn't Novel Avoidance Syndrome, though it shares symptoms with that condition.

This isn't fear of success, though others may dismiss it as such.

This isn't even fear of failure. It can strike long-established writers as much as newbies. Perhaps more so, as we no longer have that starry-eyed 'anything could happen' vision to fuel our dreams.

It's about feeling swamped in an overcrowded marketplace teeming with other talented writers. Thrown in with your heavy books to sink or swim, while publishers mostly keep their dainty toes out of the water and direct from the poolside instead.

'Backstroke now. That's the spirit. No resting!'

It's about having great ideas and not being able to act on them. Like we're all on some vast synchronised swimming team.

'I said, backstroke! Not butterfly. Same as everyone else, please.'

It's about not having the publisher that's right for you, or not having a publisher at all and having to carve out your own path as an independent. How to rise above the crowd as an indie? How to successfully promote a book on your own while not spamming people with links and alongside so many hundreds of thousands of other, possibly similar books?

It's about not being able to get reviews without crawling through mud and barbed wire for them. Or increasingly getting clusters of one star reviews, often for reasons that hurt the soul. 'Didn't download properly.' 'I hate romcoms but this one was free.' 'Haven't read it yet.'

It's about things that ought to be simple going wrong, often insanely wrong, and not feeling able to complain or say anything about it in public, in case we lose our jobs.

'Another thirty lengths, please!'

It's about approaching other writers covertly for advice, and getting the door slammed in our faces for the same reasons as above.

'Stay at the correct distance! No whispering in the ranks!'

Sometimes it seems as though all the joy and excitement and the sheer drama of writing and publishing a novel is being sucked out of the process, to be replaced by emptiness and the steady creaking of some invisible conveyor-belt.

Factory Hen Novelists

So how do we get past this feeling of being jaded or washed-up, as professional novelists? How do we recapture our enthusiasm not only powerfully enough to finish our novels, but to write bestsellers, and to keep on writing bestsellers?

Here are a few thoughts:

1. SHUT YOURSELF OFF FROM THE INTERNET

If the world out there is getting you down, if your reviews are crap or non-existent, or your ranking is in the toilet, or that wet-behind-the-ears new MA course writer gets asked for her 'expert' opinion on how-to-pen-a-novel while nobody gives a flying crap what you, veteran of dozens of bloody published novels, think about writing, if you're beginning to hate everything about this process ... try not to look up quite so often from your keyboard.

In days of yore, before the internet made us all so paranoid, novelists wrote books and had very little feedback - except for scattered reviews at publication and the occasional letter. They didn't have to worry about rankings outside the top few writers on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Publishers took much longer to dump new writers, so that fear too was less extreme.

Nowadays, you can get dumped almost as soon as your first book is out, if initial sales aren't strong enough. (They just won't tell you until you start innocently asking about your next title.) Meanwhile you still have to write. Because you're a writer and that's what you do. Because however shit things are for writers, everything else is shittier. Or words to that effect.

So if the noise and the trumpeting and the sheer BLAH of the publishing world is driving you crazy, pretend like you've been spirited back to the 1950s. Shut off from the internet and trade magazines as far as possible and do nothing but write, write, write.

Put your fingers in your ears and just write ...

2. STAY FLEXIBLE AND OPEN TO CHANGE

As writers, we need to stop making career assumptions based on what used to work in publishing or what used to be the norm for authors in our position, whatever that happens to be. The world is moving so rapidly, what is the case now may already have changed in six months, and many situations we took for granted, say, five or ten years ago, may soon look like something from the Dark Ages.

Why is this? Well, much of the current instability seems to date back to the demise of the Net Book Agreement in the mid-late 90s. It was trumpeted as a time of free marketeering, but the lack of protection over retail prices means books have gradually become cheaper while midlist authors have earned less and less every year. Add to that the rise of the ebook market, where many traditionally published bestsellers are only 99p and some indie authors can't even give away their books for free, and you have a very volatile, uncertain industry.

So there's no point trying to second guess where we're heading or to control that trajectory in any meaningful way. This means developing a flexible approach to writing. Perhaps accepting that some books will need to be self-published, perhaps under a new name, or that you may need to move from one publisher to another with little warning. Only the biggest brand names are insulated from such shifts these days, it seems to me.

Though such challenges can feel like the end of the world, they can also be liberating for writers. They can provide opportunities to learn new skills as a self-publisher or experiment with new genres in a way that might not have been possible on a traditional writing path. This freedom to experiment can reinvigorate a tired or depressed author, demonstrating that her writing career is only limited by her own ambition.

Old writer, new tricks

3. SEEK REINITIATION AS A WRITER

If all else fails, reconnect with your primary impulse to write. The excitement that drove you to become a writer in the first place, that had you rushing to your book every morning. Sounds great, huh? Reinitiation as a writer, especially when you're older and have been round the block so many times you're dizzy, is what every true creative seeks.

But how to achieve it?

Well, in my opinion, there are two key paths to reinitiation. To recapturing your original drive, inspiration and creative vision as a writer before reality painted your world grey.

For the first way, you need a muse or mentor who will act as a guide back to your creative impulse. A Virgil to your Dante, in other words. (Best to seek that muse in artistic terms though, not run off with the milkman/woman, though many great writers have restarted their creative engines through sex!) For this way, look for another writer whose work you always read with the greatest possible excitement - living or dead, either should work fine - and study them, emulate them, be inspired by them, and write with them in mind until you've regained enough momentum to trundle off on your own again. Like bump-starting a car with a dead battery!

What would Hemingway have written here?

The second way to achieve reinitiation is to do something hugely dangerous as a writer, for instance by scaring yourself into a new dynamic approach. Hugely dangerous things for a novelist include suddenly starting to write a book in a style or genre or on a topic you know nothing about and/or have never attempted before. Or changing your pseudonym and writing as that person, i.e. in a completely new way. Like being a method actor, you do everything in that new idiom until every cell of your creative being has been renewed and is stamped with this fresh style.

But don't do any of this reinitiation process secretly. Do it openly so that you burn your bridges. Tell people what you're attempting. Even boast about it. This will be so frightening, especially if you're already established in one particular genre or style, that you will hopefully end up feeling - and writing - like an entirely new author, with increased vigour and commitment.

That's the theory anyway. Good luck!

Oh, and if doing something reckless with your career, be sure not to spend your last advance too quickly. You'll need it soon enough to pay your tax bill.

Week Fifteen: Writing Scenes

Cut the waffle, and make something happen ...

This may seem obvious, but novels are made up out of scenes. Yet one of the problems even established writers can face is moving their characters in and out of scenes cleanly.

You've probably read examples of this yourself in published novels: the characters are talking, but nothing changes. Nothing happens. The reader is forced to gnaw her own arm off out of sheer frustration.

So what's gone wrong? The writer is 'between scenes' here, unsure how to manoeuvre her characters out of one situation and into another. So what you get first is an introduction scene - rather like a green room at a festival - where the characters wait before going on stage. Later you will have a debriefing scene where characters discuss the events of the preceding scene. The writer tells you what is going to happen; then shows it happening; then reminds you what just happened.

If you find yourself caught in this trap, the thing to do is take a leaf out of a scriptwriter's book and start writing in scenes.

Essentially, this entails imagining your story as a film. You create a 'storyboard' made up of scenes - the encounter scene, the kidnap scene, the campfire scene, the sex scene, the rescue scene - and then write straight in and out of them. No long intros, no faffing about with mundanities, no scenes of exposition afterwards that may leave your reader squirming with boredom. You cut to the chase, as they used to say in movie-making.

In media res ...

Most good writers know to start a scene in media res: in the middle of things. But I've seen this taken to extremes: no introduction at all, no scene setting, just a line of dialogue and bang, we're away. That's not the answer either. In film, there is usually an 'establishing shot' - the outside of a hospital or house, to let us know where this scene is set - and you need that in your novel too.

The establishing intro does not need to be elaborate. A simple one-liner like, 'Charlotte Street was empty and dark, except for a sickly pool of light under the one street lamp still working' may be all you need. Or if retelling Little Red Riding Hood, a neat jump cut from a terrifying encounter with Mr Wolf might be, 'Grandma's house is on the other side of the wood, and a good fifteen minute walk; today I reach it in eight minutes flat, my face hot with exertion. "Grandma?" I knock, but there's no reply.'

Then write your action scene.

A scene should be like a kernel, a seed that contains all the information - the DNA, if you like - about your story, but in miniature. If you can write individual scenes that mimic, in some way, the overarching action of your plot, you will be doing well. This should happen naturally when you are on top form, and struggling for it will not improve your novel, so don't worry too much. But if you see it happening, learn from that and see where else you can draw comparisons with other parts of your story or echo your theme in a scene's backdrop or action.

Gustave Dore's portrayal of the poet Dante, lost in a dark wood in the Inferno - this happens to us all!

To help with this, stay visual in your writing. Your creative brain is much cleverer than your conscious mind, so trust yourself to reach for a strong visual metaphor when setting your scene. Landscape and specific objects may seem to have arrived in a random manner, but if you're writing well, you may find they click perfectly with your story. The scary dark wood in Little Red Riding Hood is a common visual metaphor for when characters have lost their way or are faced with the unknown - see Dante for more details. Henry James knew about visual metaphor when he called his novel about broken relationships The Golden Bowl, as did Dashiell Hammett with The Maltese Falcon.

Objects like this may be brilliant visual metaphors, or they may be McGuffins, unimportant except in their value to the plot. Either way they provide a hook for the reader that makes a story truly memorable. In particular, they provide a pivotal point around which an action scene can swing, giving it added momentum on the way out.

Keep scenes as short as possible. Short scenes avoid the loose ramblings of a writer who is mentally on her way to the kettle, and they increase the pace and tension. Books can sag, especially in the middle. A series of short scenes, sharp in, even swifter out, can tauten your structure until it sings with tension.

Anything that goes over more than, say, six or seven pages, is edging into long scene territory and will slow your novel and lose you tension. If you can't avoid that, it's probably quite a complex scene, in which case, see if you can break the big scene into smaller units of action. This works best when there are multiple characters and you can switch between them, as a camera lens might do during a fight or confrontation.

For inspiration, see this classic scene below - using a musical pocket watch as a focal and auditory point for the scene - from For A Few Dollars More.



In general, avoid lengthy scenes - these easily slip out of your control and into unnecessary dialogue you did not intend to happen - especially those that remain in one location, like the interior of a car. Road trip stories are an exception, but even then, find a way to break up the monotony of a claustrophobic setting: force your characters into bars, up mountains, down holes in the road - anywhere but the passenger seat!

QUESTION: Have you ever found your characters talking aimlessly - maybe over a pot of tea - and been unsure how to move them on? What tips do you have for maintaining scene tension?