Tag Archives: writing process

Communication, baby.

Christoph Niemann, the designer behind the Abstract City blog for The New York Times (and a plethora of New Yorker covers) discusses the necessity for anxiety in the creative process in this excellent interview with Gestalten.tv:

While he is obviously talking from a designer’s perspective, the following resonates with anyone engaged in creative work:

‘A certain amount of insecurity is a very helpful trait for and kind of designer because it really gives you the openness to relate to a reader.’

As he rightly points out, the reader/audience is what it’s all about. Without them we’re just shouting into a vacuum, pissing in the wind, tickling our own parts and nothing else:

‘It’s all about the audience, it’s not about fulfilling your own creativity, even though that’s always a part of it, but it’s about the reader understanding what you do.’

And his comment on the importance of communication between client and designer could be equally well applied to the beta reader or editors relationship to the writer:

‘It’s about communication and communication cannot really happen within one person so I think for most jobs you really need somebody to bounce things off, somebody who comes in with a suggestion, someone who has a larger view.’

After watching this I considered my own peculiar slice of anxiety. Looking back at my emails to beta reading friends I discovered one consistent question that I ask, in one form or another, again and again. It seems that my own particular anxiety tightrope, one that I tread with varying degrees of anxiousness with each individual story, is the one that crosses the chasm between giving the reader too much information and giving them too little.

Pretty much all of my emails to my beta reading friends feature some variation on  the following question:

Is there enough (insert informational detail relevant to the individual story here) for the reader to understand what is going on without wondering wtf?

It pleases me no end that the answer to my concerns about communicating to the reader just enough information to allow them to piece together the story without tripping into over-telling, lets call it my communication anxiety, is best dealt with through communication with (beta) readers. Seems fitting.*

On the noticeboard above my desk have pinned a whole host of 3 x 5 index cards, each one with a little bit of writing advice targeting a feature of the craft I feel I still have yet to fully grasp. One of the cards that has been up longest contains a little gem from Ray Robinson:

‘Writing is about what you DON’T say. It isn’t about expression, it’s communication.’

It appears I have been struggling with this particular anxiety, whether consciously or unconsciously, for some time.

What’s your individual flavour of creative anxiety?

*(I’d like to thank all my beta-reading writer friends for the time and keen criticism they’ve all been kind enough to gift me over the last five years. Without you I’d have fallen from that tight-rope far too often).

Ingredients of a Work in Progress

The idea for this post comes from Jessica Patient by way of Suzanne Joinson who have both posted the ingredients for their own current works-in-progress, a short story and a novel respectively. Inspired by their own excellent insights into the writing process, here is my own. With my MA novel currently on sabbatical while I plow through this term’s Contemporary Novels II course reading list, my current WIP is a short story composed/cobbled together from the following inspirations and elements:

  • Highcliffe in Dorset:

  • Coastal erosion and the defences put in place to combat it

  • The best setting descriptions from an old story of my own set there that never quite worked well enough for me, pulled out and repurposed:

  • Dramatic coastal cliff-slides:

  • Fossilised gastropods:

  • A cliff-top car park:

  • An amateur fossil hunter:

  • Frontotemporal degeneration

  • & finally, this latest, epic track from Villagers, The Waves:

Anyone else care to share the bits and bobs that make up their current WIP?

Struggling with Structure

It has been quiet here for a few weeks due to my being on holiday here:

My ideal writing desk – Tarup Strand, Denmark.

That’s not the only reason I have had little time for blogging though. I have, after all been back for over a week now, and the schools reopened last week, giving me my writing mornings back. So why haven’t I been posting? Because I have been using my writing mornings for just that, writing. Or more precisely, editing.

Anticipating the impact starting my MA might have on my short fiction writing, I wrote a whole clutch of stories at full pelt in the summer and autumn of 2011, the plan being to give them time to sit in a draw before editing them whenever I might have a sliver of time to devote to one. This last week or so I’ve been doing just that. Editing. Though, right now, in the midst of the Nth draft of a story that continues to bedevil me, it feels more like wrestling.

My story starts back in early August when, lucky enough to have some writing time, I nipped off to my wife’s classroom for some piece and quiet. I finished a first draft of a story in the morning. In the afternoon I pulled up a story on my laptop whose first draft I wrote back in October 2011 and whose structure has yet to feel quite right, despite much of the writing within the sections feeling mostly complete. The words themselves seemed in the right order, they seemed the best words, but the organising structure for the sections just wasn’t clicking. I tried shoving the stuff around on Scrivener’s cork board (more on this later) but had little joy. Sitting alone in the classroom I looked around in desperation, certain that I would never get it right, and my eye caught on a pile of coloured paper. And a tray of scissors. And a tub of Pritt Sticks. And pot of marker pens.

Pretty soon I had this:

Each scene from Demand Feeding in an easy to maneuver slips.

Then this:

Some time later: all the scenes stuck in place.

Having used the analogue method for shifting scenes I went back and moved them round on the cork board of my Scrivener file for the story, compiled it and (back at home) printed out the new story structure in full to see how it read. I then left the story and the structure sheet in a folder, to be dealt with once back from holiday.

Problem is, once I got back and had chance to read the story through, look at the structure again and read through the detailed comments made by Jodi in her insightful beta read of the old draft, I realised this new structure wasn’t working either. So it was back to the drawing board. Or rather, back to the carpet.

Yesterday, inspired by Adam Marek’s post showing how he always lays out a short story on the floor to see the structure at a glance, I thought I would give that a go. Here’s what mine looked like:

Demand Feeding laid out on the floor. You might make out the labels Past and Present in highlighter for each section.

Truth be told this is not a million miles away from one of the ways I use Garageband when I record my stories to listen back for errors or clunky bits. I record each section of a story separately so that you can see how long each section is in relation to all the others in a glance at the voice track I am using. One advantage of laying the pages of the story out like this though is the fact you can zoom in on, by which I really mean lean over and peer at, the text to take in the transitions. You can of course easily zoom out, or lean back, to take in the text as a whole again.

Happy that I had it pretty much sorted I put it away again until this morning. At this point I had a new scene to write in draft so cracked on with that. Once it was done I read the whole thing out and recorded it to hear each section in isolation. What I heard while recording didn’t sound too bad, but the proof will be in the listening back tomorrow. I also tweaked the odd scene around (merging three scenes into one long one at one point) to keep things moving at a lick.

So as of now, the story looks like this in Garageband:

Each scene of Demand Feeding as an audio recording.  A glance at the top track line tells you where the longer scenes come in the story.

Before finishing today I went back and tweaked my Scrivener file’s cork board to ensure the correct order:

In Scrivener each scene becomes an index card on a cork board. Click on a card and you zip into the text of the scene. It’s like magic.

So that’s where I’ve been and that’s where I am with this story. I have been working on this one for almost twelve months now, on and off. I hope to have it finished soon. I thought a year sounded like a long time, but Tania Hershman’s recent post about the writing of her story Under The Tree put my toil on this story into perspective. She worked on Under The Tree for three years before it was right (and it is now very, very right – read it here). Here’s hoping I haven’t got another two years to go. I’ll have some idea of what else needs work after I give it a listen and read through the compiled manuscript from Scrivener.

So, that was my much longer than intended post about wrestling with my current WIP’s structure. What works for you when you’re trying to whip a story into shape?

2011: My Writing Year

2011 has been a busy year. I applied for and secured a place on a Creative writing MA and am now at the end of the first term of the first of three years. Since March I’ve been a regular contributor to Write Anything, a wonderful writing site staffed by a host of talented people. Unfortunately my MA commitments, amongst other things, have meant I am no longer able to be a regular voice on the site, though I hope to return for a guest slot or two.

In January, Ether books published five of my short stories on the Ether app; including my prize-winning story Half-mown Lawn.

Over the year I published these fictions online: Third Party, Fire & Theft @ Neon, Medushair @ The Red Asylum; Catchin’ Out @ Monkeybicycle’s One Sentence Stories; Things I No Longer Wish To Possess @ Staccato; Jump Start @ Spilling Ink Review; Heaven in 00 Scale @ The Pygmy Giant; The Leaving of What’s Left @ Metazen.

I published my first piece of creative non-fiction: A Father’s Arms @ Spilling Ink

I also had two stories accepted  for print magazines:

Dirty Bristow Issue Two, available to buy here, featured my short story ‘The John School.’

The View From Here Issue 35, available to buy here. featured my short story ‘Connecting.’

The biggest thing 2011 taught me about writing was the importance of perserverance. I’ve had a number of stories rejected this year, from both online journals and print mags, but I stuck to it and either found the story a home with another, better fit, or redrafted the story and found it a home once it was improved. I was particularly pleased to land stories over on Neon, Staccato and Spilling Ink Review as these were two places I’d had my eye on for a while. And my virtual sticky notes are full of places I plan to try next.

The other thing I focused on this year was redrafting. Over the first six months of the year I wrote six short stories and placed them in my first draft folder for tackling later. I left each story for at least a month, sometimes as many as eight, coming back to them with fresh eyes. This was massively helpful as it provided an experience as close to reading someone else’s work as you can get when reading your own. So far I am redrafting story three, but each one has been much improved because of the increased distance I had coming back to the stories after a longer time than I would have previously left. It pays to be patient.

The key addition to my writing process this year has been the step of recording a draft to listen back to like an audiobook. This was something Nik Perring advised way back which I really used this year. It has helped improve my last two pieces of short fiction no end; those little errors and breaks in rhythm just can’t hide when a piece is read aloud. I went so far as to buy a decent microphone to record with, to get a better quality playback of my reading and even started to dislike the sound of my own voice a little less.

Looking to 2012, I already have two short stories set to appear in the early part of the year, and will hopefully be able to share some truly great news with you soon, just waiting on the final nod from an editor before I start babbling like a fool about it.

Here’s hoping your writing year was a good one. What was your key achievement of the year? What was the most important addition to your writing process this year? Did this year’s writing teach you any crucial lessons?