It’s hard to avoid thinking of sport at the moment, so why not use this Olympic fortnight as an opportunity to think about your character’s relationship with sport. Do they play any sport? Work out at the gym? Support a team or player? Or are they one of those people who just can’t stand sport of any kind? Think back to your character’s schooldays – were they good at sport or did they hate it? Or like some sports but not others?
Your task this week is to write a scene which shows your character either playing, watching, or talking about sport. Then write a scene of a memory of taking part in some sporting activity as a child. How do these two scenes relate to one another? Think about how you can reveal different aspects of your character through the sport they play or don’t play, and how this can reveal, for example, the ambitions of parents, the rivalry between friends, the fear of failure.
Think, too, of all the unusual sports we’ve seen in action during the Olympic Games – you don’t have to choose the more obvious sports such as football or tennis or swimming, your character could play hockey or have taken up archery or canooing – this could give them some real individuality. And if you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy, why not have fun making up your own sport for your characters, with its own rules and language.
Drought and rain
A few days ago, as the rain bucketed down and drenched people ran across the pavements for shelter, a bus drove past with a big poster on its side: ‘We are in drought.’ Newspapers have made much of the ‘wettest drought in history’ and this contradiction made me reflect on the use of paradox in poetry and prose – paradox being defined as ‘two opposing or contradictory statements made at the same time.’ Some phrases came to mind: Henry Vaughan’s ‘deep and dazzling darkness’ in his poem ‘The Night,’ Milton’s ‘Darkness Visible,’ and the wonderful use of paradox in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet IX: ‘for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.’
Paradox is an immensely powerful tool which can give great poetic effect and also help you to find hidden depths in your characters. There is something paradoxical in all human behaviour. A character wants to be rich but turns down an opportunity to make money for some reason they don’t understand. Or they reject the person they love. They spend the whole novel trying to achieve something only to throw it away at the end. They appear happy and secure but are really concealing an explosive secret which will blow several lives apart.
Think of some paradoxes and contradictions in your own story, and really make them work for you.
Goodbye and Hello
After nearly five years teaching on the CCWC, Shaun Levin is sadly leaving us. Shaun’s teaching has been nothing short of inspirational and both the teaching team and the students will miss his knowledge, dedication, and his constructive and sensitive feedback. We wish Shaun all the very best for the future.
We are lucky to have joining us Naomi Wood, author of debut novel The Godless Boys (Picador, 2011). Naomi’s first steps into fiction writing were taken on our original course in April 2006 and she was so inspired she went on to take the famous Creative Writing Masters at the University of East Anglia, where she now teaches and is working for a PhD. Naomi will be teaching an advanced workshop on Monday evenings from the autumn and also on our original course on Saturday afternoons.
New writing anthology for 2012
Following on from the success of our last Complete Creative Writing Course anthology, “Words Made Flesh, “we have decided to produce a new one for 2012. The deadline for entries by people who have taken at least one of our courses is 31 March. Pieces should be short stories or excerpts which work as a stand-alone piece, of between 2,000 and 3,000 words.
Our last anthology, “Words Made Flesh”, was distributed to 100 independent publishers and literary agents, and has sold nearly 400 copies. The authors all experienced what it was like to be professionally edited, and had the pleasure of seeing their work in print in book form.
Shaun and I are looking forward very much to reading the submissions and to choosing a title for the new anthology.
Favourite Things and a New Short Story Course
It’s been a busy term and, I’m ashamed to say, almost three months since the last post. Not that we weren’t devising exercises and coming up with writing ideas! But you get so caught up in one thing (teaching), that other things get a bit neglected. That’s often what happens with writing in general… with all our good intentions, something (life!) gets in the way and we land up forgetting about one of the things we love doing. It was nice to suddenly remember… ah, it’s time to put up a new post, think up a new exercise.
Our characters, too, will have things that they love doing. Have you character rediscover something that they used to love doing more often. Fishing, perhaps. Or just reading a book in a cafe in the middle of the day. It might be a good boogie that they haven’t had in a long time. Write about them rediscovering and doing this thing that they love. They might have come across it by accident, or perhaps someone encouraged them to do it. Think about how this thing – hiking, playing the guitar, baking bread – is also linked to a memory from another time in their life. Surprise yourself. Discover something new about your character.
And talking about new things… we’ll be running a Short Story Course this coming term. It’ll be on Monday evenings, and we’ll be exploring traditional and experimental stories, as well as looking at where best to send your stories.
In the meantime, have a wonderful festive season. Eat. Write. Rest.
Thinking Back, Linking Back
We’ve just come to the end of two summer intensive workshops. A week of focused writing and thinking about writing, exploring character and dialogue and metaphors and the more abstract questions of “Why I Write”. (Cue George Orwell’s brilliant essay.) Often during an intense time of work, we don’t get the opportunity to figure out what we’ve learnt, or even how we feel about the experience, and it can take weeks for the experience to be absorbed into our system.
Put your character at the end of a concentrated time of work, maybe a painter at the end of a painting, a host at the end of a dinner party. Or if you’re writing memoir, think about a time when you completed a period of focused work – a project, a relationship, a course, a trip. Then have your character looking back at what they did, what they learnt, what they remember.
Even if your story is told in the present tense, your character will also be looking back now and then. If this is the case, such an exercise would be a way to move out of the present tense, to create more variety, more movement in time in the narrative. This may also be a more interesting way to tell the story of the dinner party, the retreat, the painting. A character reviewing an experience when it is still fresh in their mind, not necessarily with too much hindsight. The emotional impact will still be fresh, the different people involved in the experience still very much present in the character’s thoughts.
You could also write about how this experience triggers a memory of a similar experience in the character’s past (or your past), or evokes a similar feeling in the character, maybe something they’ve forgotten until now. A narrative likes layers, so thinking about how one experience links to others, can only be a good thing!
Make a Speech
Join us for a launch party to celebrate Gerda Pearce’s debut novel Long Lies the Shadow. Drinks and nibbles from 5.30pm at The New Cavendish Club on Tuesday, 28th June.
Gerda is a long-standing CCWC writer and will be reading from the novel, and talking about what it’s like to finally be published!
We know Gerda well and we know she’s not one for speaking in public, but having your book out there pretty much demands that of one. This article says it all.
As an exercise, think about a situation in which your main character has to make a speech. It could be a wedding, a funeral, a book launch, a prizegiving, a motivational speech, a graduation speech. It could be a speech that they’re remembering or that they’re planning to give. Write that speech. Read it out loud to someone. See what they think. Use their feedback as part of the story. (500 words)
Challenging You and Your Characters
A few days ago some of the participants on our courses, past and present, whose work features in the Words Made Flesh anthology, read from their work at Woolfson & Tay, a new and exciting bookshop in Bermondsey, South London. And what a great turnout! For quite a few of the readers, this was the first time they’ve read their work in public. People were nervous in the days building up to the event – you could tell from various status updates on Facebook – as well as during the readings. But once it was over, the was a great sense of triumph, and relief.
Doing something you’ve never done before tests your capabilities, takes you to new places, and can terrify as well as surprise (and liberate) you. Whatever happens, you’ll learn something new along the way. Get your main character to do something they’ve never done before, but make it something they’ve always wanted to do, something they’ve fantasized about, or even talked about, but never had the means or the courage to do it. Make them do it. See what happens. Make them do something that you’ll find a challenge to write about. Make it something you’ve never written about before. Challenge your character, but also challenge yourself at the same time.
And if you prefer to writing autobiographically, then do something you’ve never done before, something you’ve dreamt about doing. Then write about it… and tell us what happened.
Reading and Writing (no Arithmetic)
The “simple” exercise would be: Pick up a book you love, the kind of book you’d like to write, and copy it down by hand, word for word. Feel what it’s like, through your body, to write a great book. And once you’ve finished writing out all those Chekhov stories, or that novel by Toni Morrison, or the book of Anne Carson poems, begin your own novel. Reading and imitation is how we form and strengthen our writing voices. Okay, copying out the whole of Beloved might be a bit excessive, so just do a couple of pages. See what happens to your own writing when you go back to it.
A remedy for writer’s block (even though I don’t believe there is such a thing, but that’s for another post): Feeling stuck? Look closely at the opening line of a story or a novel you like. See how the sentence is structured. Start a sentence in the same way, use the same construction to say what you want to say. The opening lines of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place are: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by airplane…” Do the same for your character’s town… If you go to Portsmouth… If you go to Damascus, this is what you will see… If you go to Rome, to Reykjavik… What will you see if you arrive by plane? Or by boat? Or on foot. Starting the way Kincaid does, using her exact sentence structure, will give you a new perpective, new insight into the world of your story.
We’ll be doing a lot of that close-reading and experimentation in the workshop I’ll be running (fortnightly) from 11 May, 2011. You can see more details by clicking here.
To read more about the importance of reading, check out Italo Calvino’s essay “Why Read the Classics?” in his book of the same title.
Reading To Write – a workshop
What does it mean to read as a writer? This six-week course with Shaun Levin will focus on how close reading, imitation and experimentation can expand and strengthen your writing voice. The workshop is devised for writers of all levels who are willing to try out new ways of writing and thinking about writing. Please go to www.shaunlevin.com for more information and to book.