Miss Clavel turned on the light and said, “Something is not right!” – Madeleine

You’ve written a wonderful story and identified a publisher. The next step is the most important: wait! Don’t send it off; instead, hide your story for weeks or even months. When you pick it up again it will be like turning on the light –you’ll see with fresh eyes all the lame bits glaring at you. Not waiting has been my biggest mistake as a writer – I always find things I should’ve fixed. When re-reading I often get a Miss Clavel feeling that something is not right; a scene doesn’t fit; the dream is broken and I’m jerked out of the story. A ruthless edit is needed. Illustration from the timeless Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans.

 Nothing must be out of place. The reader must keep turning pages with no interruptions in the flow. – Darcy Pattison

Go over and over it…refusing to let anything stay if it looks awkward, phony, or forced.– John Gardner

More than any other book I read as a child, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster  gave me a love of words– it puns them, pushes them, and explodes their meaning. It’s overflowing with inventiveness: the man who is short, tall, thin and fat, at the same time; the orchestra that plays colours; the city that disappears because nobody cares. And I love the illustrations by Jules Feiffer, especially this faceless timewaster (pictured), The Trivium, who has a message for all writers:

What could be more important than doing unimportant things? … There’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing.

The Phantom Tollbooth is about a child’s quest to overcome boredom. It’s told with imagination, wit and wisdom — what more could you want in a children’s book?

•  New Yorker essay about the book
• Vintage covers
• Video interview with the author
• My Accidental Masterpiece by Norton Juster

 I had been an odd child: quiet, introverted and moody. Little was expected from me. Everyone left me alone to wander around inside my own head. When I grew up I still felt like that puzzled kid — my thoughts focused on him, and I began writing about his childhood.

Children are still the same as they’ve always been. They still get bored and confused, and still struggle to figure out the important questions of life. – Norton Juster

The only thing to withhold is what happens next.– Orson Scott Card

I made a basic mistake in the draft of my latest junior novel. I tried to create mystery and suspense by withholding information from the reader. Result: boredom, confusion and a plot that has no early grip. The Hitchcock Principle is that you create suspense by showing the audience as much as you can, as clearly as you can. He gives a movie example of two characters talking at a table for 15 rather dull minutes then a bomb blows them up – the scene provides a mere 15 seconds of surprise. But if we see the bomb under their table from the very start of the scene – it provides 15 minutes of suspense. I’ve now edited my opening chapters, clearly introducing the characters, setting and central problem in the first pages, and even promoting a ‘surprise’ (from late in the book) up to Chapter 1.

As soon as the character engages with the problem, narrative tension starts.  This tension is the dynamic of the story; it’s the energy that pushes the story on its journey. – Norman Bilborough

The worse drafts hide information, wrongly believing that just giving a hint here or there is the best strategy. Instead, the reader becomes confused and closes the book…– Darcy Pattison

A great final sentence can offer hope,  provoke a smile or a chill, be wise or witty. At its best, it encapsulates the whole work. Where are these brilliant last lines from?

“Hey, Boo.”  (novel)

“Nobody’s perfect!” (movie)

“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.” (short story)

“There is a crack in everything, it’s where the light gets in.” (song)

“All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe.” (poem)

 

Picture: Tenniel’s borogroves (Victorian Web).

Choosing a title is the fun stage of writing a book. The hard work over, I spend hours happily test-driving pithy, bizarre or lyrical titles. The great children’s titles describe some aspect of the book (plot, setting, character, etc) in utterly striking language. My favourites titles are: A Swiftly Tilting Planet; The Stupid’s Die; and of my own, a book of cautionary rhymes titled, Global Norman. Here are some classic titles of children’s literature:

* Character: Oliver Twist, Shrek, The Halfmen of O, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Flat Stanley

* Plot: Millions of Cats,  Journey To The Centre of the Earth, The Shrinking of Treehorn

*Setting:  Outside Over There, The Horror of Hickory Bay, The Black Island

*Theme: To Kill A Mockingbird, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry

* Joke: War and Peas, Squids Will Be Squids, Green Eggs and Ham

The first step towards being a writer is to hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.– Dorothea Brande

The 1934 classic Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, is a practical book which is remarkably in tune with current brain science. Brande believes the writer’s unconscious mind should ‘flow freely and richly, bringing at demand all the treasures of memory’, while the conscious mind does the hard word work to  ‘control, combine and discriminate’.

Photo: Moria cave, Karamea

Writing is will and imagination; it depends both on unbidden impulses and on careful, considered dedication to the tools of language. Malcolm Bradbury

But the unconscious can be a reluctant creature, resisting the discipline that writing requires. Brande has some intriguing exercises to achieve the interaction between will and imagination. Here are three exercises designed to ‘tap’ the unconscious:

• Writing immediately after you wake up  before any associations invade the mind (I feel the resistance already).
• Writing at a prearranged time every day.
• Meditation to improve clarity (this fits with current neuroscience ideas).

Brande  also suggests our unconscious is the source of our most original stories, and most importantly, that every writer has something unique to offer:

There is just one contribution which every  one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.

Photo: morning, Lake Alexandrina.

Anyone can write but editing must be learned. One of the masters of the finely wrought story was P.G. Wodehouse; a relentless editor, he polished his manuscripts to comic perfection. Douglas Adams (in The Salmon of Doubt) described Wodehouse’s unique system:

‘When he was writing a book he used to pin pages in undulating waves around the wall. Pages he thought were working well would be pinned high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall.’

The aim was to get the whole story up to the ceiling level. What ever your system, a little ‘ruthless efficiency’ is required. Here are 3 books that have helped me:

Self Editing For Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King: Teaches the mechanics of style: dialogue, point of view, ‘show not tell’, character, beats etc. Best of all it gives examples, checklists and a self-test at the end of each topic.

The writer must be as God in his universe — present everywhere and visible nowhere. -Flaubert

The Art of Writing by John Gardner: A more stringent book but motivating. Gardner talks about maintaining the ‘dream’ of the story – but when the writing draws attention to itself (in a bad way) then the dream is broken for the reader.

Go over and over it…refusing to let anything stay if it looks awkward, phony, or forced.– John Gardner

On Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande (1934) is based on the idea that that the writer is both artist and self-critic. Brande believes we should begin with the unconscious mind ‘bringing at demand all the treasures of memory’, while the conscious mind ‘must control, combine and discriminate’.

But in the end don’t be too hard on yourself. The writer Jacob Needleman thanked his editor for going his book ‘with a flaming sword in one hand and a sweet-sounding bell in the other.’

I was introduced to the wonderful Gimmal by the poet, Zireaux. He invented this Thurberesque term to describe a rhyming pair, such as hero and zero. What makes the Gimmal so rare? There are no other English words to rhyme with the pair, and the words are related in meaning.

Like two siblings, or twins who’ve been separated at birth and who, reunited again, cast new light upon the other’s existence. – Zireaux

Here are a few more specimens that Zireaux has netted:

summit – plummet; tortured – orchard;

eager – meager; cupid – stupid

I met the Gimmal by chance, rhyming minister with sinister in a poem. It’s the meaning of Gimmals that’s so intriguing – one word is somehow the subversive opposite of the other. Where do these entwined twins come from? If you find a Gimmal, send it to Zireaux, who will give it a home in the collection (a zickering of Gimmals perhaps?).

But I’m convinced the greatest gimmal match is

the violence that one’s silence hatches.– Zireaux

Tortured Orchard (Pont Aven)

White wrote only three children’s books and two are the most popular of all time in the US (Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little). What was his secret? Imagination, yes, but he also took his time and revised a lot. Charlotte is short but it took two years to write the first draft, then another year to rewrite it. It has the best opening line of any children’s book I’ve read (“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”); and perhaps the greatest, most heart-rending ending. (And those rustic Garth Williams illustrations).

It has taken 25 years for me to be able to contemplate this book with relative equanimity. I see now that the ending is as beautiful, bold and full of integrity as Charlotte herself.– Lucy Mangan

In a fine interview (Paris Review) White puts a delightful spin on writers’ procrastination :

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.

Never open a book with weather.– Elmore Leonard

The best openings begin with a character and take the reader captive almost immediately. My examples come from children’s books, the very best being the opening of Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White which deftly introduces character, setting, and tension to grab the imagination.

“Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

“Out to the hoghouse…”

Test Yourself

Match these classic opening sentences with the titles below.

1. All children, except one, grow up.

2. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

3.The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff.

4. Here I am, Ralph William Mountfield, banished to my bedroom on Christmas Day.

5. Keith the boy in the rumpled shorts and shirt, did not know he was being watched as he entered Room 215 of the Mountain View Inn.

6. My father is put in the stocks again! Oh! the injustice of it!

7. When Old Tip lost his bark, Uncle Trev had to teach his horse to bark and chase the cows up to the shed for milking.

8. It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

Titles: The Iron Man, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Devil-in-the-Fog, Matilda, The More the Merrier, Uncle Trev, Peter Pan

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on … that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.– Kurt Vonnegut

The imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, and bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers [are] great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering. Nietzsche

Imagine, a new book by Jonah Lehrer – author of Proust was a Neuroscientist – is about creativity and the brain. Lehrer believes that creativity is our natural state and, like Neitzsche, he stresses the role of synthesising:

The synthesizing mind takes information from disparate sources, understands and evaluates that information objectively, and puts it together in ways that make sense… the capacity to synthesize becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates.

Perhaps synthesising is another word for the endless mulling, rewriting and editing that writers go through. David Ogilvy was one of the original 1960s ‘ad men’ referenced in TV’s Mad Men. He described the creative process of writing advertising copy as ‘a slow and laborious business’ of redrafting and editing (read his full letter here).

Does the ‘dizzying’ internet make us more creative? In a fascinating essay about the brain and computers, Jim Holt argues that while the internet sharpens many cognitive skills, it may be the enemy of creativity. The problem is that the web can be distracting (rather than reflective) for the brain and it barely engages with deeper levels of thought. Holt calls Google a ‘memory prosthesis’. That might be true but it does make synthesising a blog a lot of fun.

Talent develops in tranquility. Goethe

More: editing; and writing and computers

Once you have decided which aspect of your story is care about most then it’s a good idea to signal this from the very beginning. Orson Scott Card suggests beginning with a question for the reader. A question does two things: it creates tension and it creates a desire to know the answer.

The beginning must make the reader ask questions that are answered by the stories ending. – Orson Scott Card

Examples from different aspects of story:

• Milieu: Begin with the arrival of a stranger who asks “What makes this place tick?”
• Idea: Begin with a mystery, such as ‘Whodunnit?’ or ‘Why is weird stuff happening?’
• Character: Begin with a character asking ‘How can I change?’
• Event:  Begin with a character asking ‘How can I survive this/save the world?’.

Ray Bradbury is good at posing questions in the opening of his short stories. A Sound of Thunder begins with an explorer asking “Does this [time] safari guarantee I come back alive?”. The ending provides a satisying answer– ‘you will come back alive but you’ll wish you hadn’t.’

In his wonderful book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (p.76), novelist Orson Scott Card says all stories contain 4 basic aspects: Milieu, Idea, Character and Event (MICE!). Here are some sci-fi examples (YA):

• Milieu: about a world or a society. Eg. Running Out of Time by Margaret Haddix about time travel to a past society.
• Idea: begins with a mystery to answer. Eg. Protus Rising by Ken Catran, murder mystery in space.
• Character: about character transformation. Eg.The House of Scorpion by Nancy Farmer about a clone who develops values.
• Event: when something goes wrong in the world. Eg. Box by Penelope Todd about an epidemic that strikes New Zealand.

Which aspect of the story matters most to you? That is the aspect that will give you the story’s structure. – Orson Scott Card

You must marry the wind of inspiration with the bone of graphic clarity.– Chang Chong-Jen.

The Adventures of Herge is a must for Tintin geeks although not for children. It’s a Hergé (George Remi) biography done in the ‘clear line’ style of a Tintin comic book. Hergé fell in love with drawing in 1914 when his mother gave him some pencils to ‘calm him down’. The book is a fascinating insight into the influences on Hergé and the political and emotional difficulties he faced, especially during wartime working under the Nazis. Most moving of all is the story of his friendship with Chang Chong-Jen (which inspired Tintin in Tibet). Chang helped him refine his beliefs and drawing style. Before reading this book it might help to know a bit about Hergé, or to read the appendix first. Download a 5 page sample of the comic book here.

I’m writing a sci-fi novel and falling into two traps: Infodump and Unobtainium. Infodump is a when a character gives a mini lecture — telling instead of showing — usually in reply to “Tell me, Professor, how does your invention work?” Infodump can be reduced by editing out techno-babble; and by using characters to give brief explanations only when plot demands it.

Unobtainium is a plot device such as an alien substance or a future technology. Most sci-fi has them but too often they’re used to magic away a plot problem, as in ‘Lucky I brought my sonic screwdriver to do this impossible task.’ (see also ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’– Arthur C Clarke). Possible solutions: make your ‘Unobtainium’ central to the plot (give it a cool back-story); or reduce it to a playful veneer of science. The characters in TV’s Fringe play nimbly with real science:

Thoughts from The Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang (1938), Chinese writer and inventor.

Writing is good or bad depending on its charm and flavour, or lack of them. For this charm there can be no rules. Charm rises from one’s writing as a cloud rises from a hill-top…

Every word has a life and a personality. A writer always has an instinctive interest in words.

There is a period of gestation of ideas before writing… when a writer rushes into print before his ideas go through this gestation, that is diarrhoea, mistaken for birth-pains.

Writing is but the expression of one’s own nature or character… style is not a method, a system or even a decoration; it is but the total impression that the reader gets of the quality of the writer’s mind.

A writer in the ‘familiar’ style speaks in an unbuttoned mood. He completely exposes his weaknesses, and is therefore disarming.

The great scholar, Ouyang Hsiu, confessed to ‘three ons’ for doing his best writing: on the pillow, on horseback and on the toilet.

A literary masterpiece is like a stretch of nature itself, well-formed in its formlessness, and its charm and beauty come by accident.

Every writer I know has trouble writing. – Joseph Heller

Confession: I play 1960s TV themes while I write. Mission Impossible is the best:

A pale car stops alongside a dingy desk. A writer gets out, unlocks the desk and takes out a laptop. His mission, should he decide to accept, is to release a novel from captivity. Should the plot fail, he will disavow any knowledge of the effort and his career will self-destruct in five rejections. The writer opens a file and selects likely characters: a trickster, a tough guy, a feisty female. After a planning session the plot is all action. The set-up is smooth, tension rises, but everything falls apart near the end. A contrived twist saves the novel (endings are difficult).

The dynamic theme to Mission Impossible is by Argentine composer, Lalo Schiffrin. This artful video commercial portrays Schiffrin in the composing process.

The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher is a classic picture book that almost didn’t make it. It took Molly Bang years to create it and was repeatedly rejected by publishers. They said it was ‘peculiar-looking’ and that ‘children won’t relate to an old woman as a protagonist’. The manuscript sat in a drawer for years then was re-worked. When it was finally published the reviews were pretty bad writes Molly Bang: ‘The New York Times that said that the weird-looking characters and flashy colors were an indication that I was part of the drug culture and the detailed pictures told no real story but were merely an excuse to show off.’ Then it won a Caldecott award and everything changed. Why? Because it’s a one-of-a-kind, off-the-wall book. And very creepy! I love the tiny fungi that grow where the Catcher has trod.

I watch Thurber wrap his story tightly in words, while at the same time juggling fabulous words that glitter and gleam, tossing them out like a happy madman, all the time explaining and revealing and baffling with words. It is a miracle. Neil Gaiman

The Thirteen Clocks, by James Thurber, is 60 years old and remains fresh and sparkling. A teacher read it to the class when I was 10 and re-reading it now I was amazed that I could recall whole sentences. It’s a fairy tale parody about a prince who must perform impossible tasks to save a princess from an evil duke. The language is a riot of every device in the English language, plus many invented words (eg. ‘squtch’ and ‘the zickering of bats’). Look for the Ronald Searle illustrated version which has a brilliant bonus story, The Wonderful O, about a pirate who tries to ban the letter ‘o’ (because he had to push his mother out a porthole). Some choice Thurber sentences:

Thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets.

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.

A peasant in a purple smock stalked the smoking furrows, sowing seeds.

The four fundamental forces of writing – Imagine, Write, Edit, Hope –  harmonize with nicely with the four known forces of nature:

1. Electromagnetism: gives us our world of molecules; and like Imagination it has infinite range.

2.  Weak force: is confined to nuclei of atoms; like a Writer confined with a story.

3.  Strong force: holds atomic nuclei together; as Editing gives a story strength.

4. Gravity: like Hope, it keeps us anchored and also has infinite range.

I find physics challenging but I enjoyed The Edge of Physics by  Anil Ananthaswamy – it illuminates tricky ideas and amazes with a tour of grand physics experiments in the uttermost parts of the world.

The Four Fundamental Forces of writing are, I think:

Imagination: ‘Open your mind’ (P.D. James)

Writing: ‘Put one word after another’ (Neil Gaiman)

Editing: ‘Omit needless words’ (William Strunk)

Hope: ‘Outrun the self-doubt’ (Stephen King)

(photo: Mont St-Michel)

Writer Dorothy Sayers (in The Mind of the Maker, 1941) suggested every creative act has three elements: Idea, Energy and Power. The Idea remains intangible until the story writing begins. The Energy is the activity of writing the book. The Power is the response the book produces in the reader – ‘The thing that flows back to the writer’.

I’m amazed when starting a new story how a shapeless idea in my head generates a story. As the characters are given energy they help me create the story; and by the end it’s as if they always existed. Then each reader has a unique response to the book.

There is just one contribution which every  one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us.

Dorothea Brande (in the fascinating Becoming a Writer) suggests our unconscious is the source of our most original stories — but it’s a reluctant creature, resisting the discipline that writing requires. She describes two exercises designed to ‘tap’ the unconscious: 1. Writing immediately after you wake up (I feel the resistance already) before any associations invade the mind. 2. Writing at a prearranged time every day. Brande also recommends meditation to improve clarity (which fits with current neuroscience ideas). Photo: morning, Lake Alexandrina.

Emma Neale’s new novel Fosterling, is about a yeti living in Dunedin. No, it’s not a children’s book or a fantasy but a realistic, compassionate treatment of what it’s like to be an outsider. The writing is elegant. Original similes abound: one confused young man looks like ‘a 16 year old whose name has been called in class when he’d been happily thinking about the pie he’d ordered for lunch; and subtle feelings are described with precision. I  wanted a more upbeat ending, but that’s my bent (and one reason I like writing for children). The yeti, Bu, is a sensitive soul – a reminder of that other misunderstood Boo in To Kill a Mockingbird. And I thought of my favourite yeti tale, Tintin in Tibet , in which the creature also shows his ‘humanity’, but is treated as a beast. Fosterling reminded me that there are Bu’s in every city, often hidden in ‘half-way’ houses.  I can see this multi-character story being made into an Altman-style movie.

I was writing a story on an iPad near Christchurch last week. Writing tools such as computers have become flexible, but perhaps less intimate, and I wonder if it affects my writing.  When Ted Hughes began writing on a typewriter he noticed he became less concise. Writing by hand had made him invest more in each word:

every year of your life is right there, wired into the communication between your brain and your writing hand… things become automatically more compressed, and, perhaps, psychologically denser.

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, brilliantly examines how our brains react to computer use ( read a great essay about the book here). He says that working on computers can be distracting (rather than reflective) for the brain — so it stays in the shallows, barely engaging with the myriad connections at deeper levels. In that case the iPad might be okay for writing because you can fade out all but the sentence you’re on. But my iPad trial was interrupted by the earthquake — which came from the shallows with terrifying force.

Photo: Allen Carbon