Every writer who admits to friends or strangers that they write soon learns to expect the question:
“What are you writing now?”

We writers have an answer, prepared for this moment.  In my case, my answer is either “A comedy thriller, very silly but great fun” or “A murder mystery, set in the Peak District” depending which of my current works in progress I’ve been battling with most recently.  And, for most people, this is enough.  They don’t really care that much.  They’re being polite and are now free to talk about subjects which interest them (almost never anything to do with the proud writer’s output!)  I know, I have these conversations and I hear other writers have them too.

But, sometimes, I am thrown by a further question.
“Why do you write?”

This one is unexpected.  For one thing, it usually comes from someone who evidently thinks I’m not up to the task of writing a novel and the underlying subtext is:
Why waste your time ‘writing’?

But it is a good question.  Why do I write?  I could do other things.  I have a small business to run, a house and garden needing my attention, pets to walk, feed and care for.  I have family duties and mortgages to pay.  Why waste hours of my time writing?  I may never get paid for it and, let’s face it, in our society worth is usually measured in hard currency.  Isn’t writing speculative fiction merely a peculiar form of OCD? 

I’ve puzzled over this for some time and here is the answer, my answer, to why I write.

I write to free myself from the constraints of ‘real life’.  In my imagination, I can go anywhere, be anyone, do anything.  Life, alas, is more constraining.

I write because I crave drama but am also a realist.  Adventures are great to write and read about - but to live them, not so much.  I have no desire to scale Everest or plunge the abyss of the deepest ocean.  Too cold, too dangerous.  But I can write about them and experience the thrill of danger - safely.

I write because I love answers and reality rarely gives me satisfactory ones.  In a story, things have to make sense.  There has to be cause and effect, a daisy chain of events which lead to the satisfying conclusion.  Where life is chaotic and random, fiction has order and purpose.

I write to find out what is going to happen next.  I start with a character and a situation and write to discover where that takes me.  My characters seem to have their own ideas about their stories, sometimes to such an extent that I feel I have no control over the plot.  Things happen.  Characters say things.  I just get pulled along in their wake.  It is exhilarating.  And frustrating.  And it is very hard to explain to anyone who has never written.

So, finally, I write to be honest.  To reveal something about the inner depths of my creative mind.  To put myself on the page for anyone to see.  Yes, I hide behind my characters (I am an introvert after all).  But I am there, on every page.  All those hidden facets of me - writing gives them the chance to sparkle.
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Which leaves one question:
“Why do you write?’

I posted the start of this on 29/12/2015 as "Opener for First Chance" & invited comments.  So far, I've had no luck with that but hey, I know you're busy.  Here's the next part and, if you have any comments you wish to share, please feel free...

I’m Will, by the way.  William Alexander Peyton to be formal.  Most people know me as Will but Megan has always called me ‘Red’, for reasons which are obvious unless I’m wearing a hat.  I’m thirty-four, around six foot one and I can handle myself in a fight.  You can probably chalk that up to long years in the school playground, learning to defend myself from evil bastards who saw my red hair as a red flag until I convinced them they’d picked a fight they couldn’t win.  My nose ended up a bit crooked but it suffered less damage than most of the ginger bashers did.  I guess I’ve got a temper to go with the hair.

Megan... well, Megan is a whole other thing.   If you saw her, you’d say she was beautiful and she is, she really is, but that’s not her defining feature.  That would be her complete and utter lack of fear.  Where you or I might hesitate, Megan jumps right in.  Now, you could say that’s a good thing - life belongs to the brave and all that.  But we hesitate for a reason.  It’s a survival skill.  A sensible amount of caution allows us to regroup, withdraw and fight another day.  At the very least, it gives us a chance to weigh up the odds.  With Megan, the odds are firmly stacked against you at the start and your main priority is to prevent her getting herself killed before she reaches her target.  Hanging on to your own skin is also a major concern.  Make no mistake - between Megan and a heat-seeking missile there’s not a whole lot of difference and God help anyone who’s around when the explosion happens.

You might say Megan is her father’s daughter.   I’ve said it myself but I’m not sure it’s the whole truth.  Eliot Chance is, without doubt, the coldest hearted bastard you are likely to meet this side of Christmas and, believe me, I’ve met a few.  He founded Chance Associates, a high-end security firm based in Mayfair and that location pretty much defines his clientele.  They are loaded.  Whatever they want, they have the means to buy it or to pay someone to get it for them.  Which is where Eliot’s firm comes in.  Protection, kidnap negotiation, blackmailing employee or abusive spouse - whatever the problem, Chance Associates can provide a solution.  For a price.  Megan has learned a lot from her father and she’s being groomed to inherit the family business.  If she survives him, that is.  And that is really my problem with Eliot Chance.  He’ll protect any deadbeat member of some billionaire’s family but he doesn’t protect his own daughter.  Just as he failed to protect his own wife.

I don’t know the details.  I guess, in his business, it pays not to advertise failure.  I heard Megan’s mother died in some botched kidnap switch when Megan was sixteen.  I didn’t know her when her mother was alive but I’m guessing that Miranda Chance’s death might have something to do with Megan’s kamikaze attitude to life.  You sure as hell can feel Death standing at Megan’s shoulder when you get involved in one of her hair-brained ventures.  Maybe she just doesn’t care if she survives or not.  My problem is - I do care.  I care a lot.  Which is why I needed to hand off my caffeine deficient commuters to another barista and scoot after Megan.

The only problem with that was Rachel, my business partner and actual boss of the coffee shop, Impresso, who had spotted Megan and was shooting me a look guaranteed to sizzle small insects.
‘Don’t you dare, Will’ she hissed, between customers.  ‘There will not be a job to come back to if you follow that evil bitch.’
Which I knew was an empty threat.  You see, I part own the coffee shop, although, I’ve got to admit, Rachel does all the serious work: ordering supplies, serving commuters from 7am to 7 pm and hiring and firing.  But she couldn’t actually fire me.  I hoped.
‘Sorry, Rache... You know how it is... I’ve got to...’

I tried a conciliatory smile which just earned me a more intense glare combined with a scowl which would have made Medusa proud.  It didn’t matter.  Whatever Megan was up to, I couldn’t leave her to it.  Those green eyes had looked more than serious.  They’d looked scared.  Which was a first.  I have never once seen Megan look frightened, even at moments when I was reduced to babbling terror.  Whatever this was about, Megan needed back up.
​
Several customers took a step back as Rachel’s glare scythed through the crowd and I could feel it burning into the small of my back as I left the coffee shop and hurried after Megan, out into the street.  I knew I was being an idiot.  I knew I was going to regret it.  But I also knew Megan was in serious trouble and I might be able to help.

​It’s the end of the first Matrix film and Neo has reached a new level of being.  Instead of seeing the manufactured ‘reality’ around him, he can see the endless lines of computer code which create that reality.  He has evolved to read the structure which underpins his reality.

We’re not Neo, nor are we living in a computer simulation (no matter what the conspiracy theorists would have us believe).  But, as writers, we must start to see the ‘code’ which underlies every successful story so that we can make use of it to improve our own writing.

By code, I do not mean computer code but the structural elements which make stories work.  For stories are not just a random series of events.  Stories have shape and purpose and meaning so that they create a convincing and ultimately satisfying alternative reality for the reader.  Without this, the reader drifts, grows bored and, inevitably, stops reading.  A writer’s worst nightmare!

To enthral and engage, a story requires elements which will reach out and grab the reader so that s/he does not want to stop reading.  Any storyteller needs an armoury of such devices and must be ready to employ them at intervals throughout the story.  But, if they are too obvious, the magic is broken.  The reader sneers and turns away.  No, like Neo’s computer code, these elements must be integrated into the story so seamlessly that an inattentive reader may not even notice they are there.  But you, the writer, must learn to recognise when and how and why these elements are employed.

What are these magical elements?  These hooks which will bind the reader to your story?  Every genre has its own particular favourites.  Unrequited love in a romance.  Who murdered X? in a crime novel.  The race against time in a thriller.  All setting up an anxiety in the reader’s mind and the desire to know how things turn out.

There are other elements, less genre specific.  A favourite across many genres is: The Reversal.  The reader is led to suppose that one thing is true and then the opposite is revealed as the truth.  Agatha Christie uses this one all the time.  Possible spoiler alert: In the interests of not spoiling things too much, I will not be specific about which books she uses these devices in but, if you don’t want to know, please hop on to the next paragraph!  Agatha writes of the sequence of murders which actually conceal one, specific murder; of the murder not done by one but many killers; of the sidekick to the detective who is actually the murderer.

But reversals are just as useful in other genres.  Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, sets up a brilliant one when she makes her two protagonists dislike each other before revealing that, in fact, they are a perfect match.  This works particularly well because she is not simply fooling the reader.  She makes her characters believe that they dislike one another.  They, too, are fooled into believing one thing and then have to switch mindset when they discover that the opposite is true.  Even better, several characters (Lizzie’s own father among them) are resistant to believing the new truth.  How true to life that is.  How clever the reader is made to feel because they now have a superior insight into the truth!  If you have ever flicked back through the pages of a book to reread passages in the light of a later discovery, chances are you’ve been hooked by a clever reversal.

A ‘ticking clock’ is another element of story telling which can transcend genres.  I have already mentioned its use in a thriller but any story can be energised with a simple time critical element.  Cinderella’s midnight chimes is a classic example.  The time limit in the film High Noon is another.  Back to Pride and Prejudice and we find a ticking clock in the race to find Lydia and Wickham after their unfortunate elopement - will the couple be found before the scandal breaks?  Can they be made to marry and so save her good name?

The classic ‘ticking clock’ is the countdown we see on screen as the bomb is discovered.  In reality, bomb makers do not feel a need to add a literal ticking clock but, in film, it is now a requirement.  James Bond films depend upon it for their box office takings.  Mission Impossible even incorporated a ‘ticking clock’ into its credits with the lit fuse searing its way across the screen.  And who can forget ‘This tape will self-destruct in 10 seconds’?

American episodic TV is particularly good at demonstrating these kind of story elements which hook a viewer.  They have to be good at it because in the USA ratings are all.  My favourite reversal is in the first ever episode of Scrubs, the medical sitcom, where the nervous new medical students discover that the ‘nice’ doctor is absolutely not interested in teaching them anything.  It’s the grumpy, angry doctor who is doing his best to make them understand what they have to do and be and become if they’re going to make it as doctors.  The one they’re all terrified off turns out to be the one who cares that they succeed.

 So, the next time you think you’ll give up on writing and try a little recreational TV - look out for the ways in which the episode lures you in and keeps you watching.  And, once you’ve spotted the ‘code’, have a think about how you could use it to add that magic element of ‘must keep reading’ to your writing.  And, like Neo, you will start to manipulate your fictional reality to suit your own purposes.

​Good luck and happy writing!
 

Being a writer is an odd business.  For one thing, most of the rest of the world do not see writing as any kind of work at all.  A hobby, maybe.  Or a trivial pursuit to pass the time.  But not work.  After all, how hard can it be?  Writing is simply putting words on a page.  It does not take any kind of effort to do that.  Also, nobody is forcing the writer to write.  It is not like having a boss who expects you to turn up each day and put in the hours.  Writing is fun.  Why else would anybody do it?

How little they know!  Writing is fun.  Sometimes.  Those are the times which keep a writer going.  Because, when writing is going well everything is OK in the writer’s world.  Life is beautiful when the words flow and characters take on a life of their own.  There is no feeling in the world like it.  Unfortunately, it does not happen often.  Most of the time writing is not like that.  Most of the time writing is sheer hard slog.  Work and then some.

It turns out writing is something more than putting words on a page.  Writing is about burrowing deep into those hidden depths that most people are happy to keep hidden.  Writing can hurt.  If I want to create a damaged character in my novel, then I must seek out the damage within me.  Otherwise, my character will never come to life but sit, a cardboard cut-out, on the page.  As a writer, I must breathe a little of my own life into each character, my thoughts, my fears, my hopes.  By the end of a writing day, I feel exhausted with the effort.

Nobody makes me write, you might say.  True.  Nobody makes me write.  But something forces me to keep coming back to the page.  Who knows what?  There are days when I dread turning on my computer.  The story is going nowhere or my characters appear to have lost interest in their story.  Some days, I struggle to find a single word to write.  But I still turn up.  Try something new.  Write something, anything, in a bid to get the ideas to flow.  It feels painful.  Dispiriting and exhausting in a different way.

Writing is more than putting words on a page.  It requires effort and a great deal of thought.  At times, the writer’s brain can feel as if it has run the mental equivalent of a marathon.  At times, the writer just wants to give up and go and do something easier.  Like a proper job, where all you have to do is turn up and put in the hours.  Sometimes, writing feels like the hardest job in the world.
​
But when the characters start to live, to do unexpected things, have their own opinions, then the job is easy.  All I have to do then is write as fast as I can, try to keep up.  On those days I would not swap writing for any other job in the world.
I just wish those days came around a little more often...
 

There is no right way to write but there are plenty of wrong ways.  I know.  I use some of them.

Let me explain.

Writing comes relatively easily to me.  That’s not a boast.  Putting words on a page is something I’ve always enjoyed and always done, long before I ever thought of writing to be published.  I was “good” at writing at school.  In some sense, it came naturally to me.

I find writing a thousand times easier than speaking.  For one thing, I have time to think when I write.  Speech is so immediate and, afterwards, I always think I could have said something better, explained something more clearly.  With writing, I can do that, write down my immediate thought then come back and improve it, change it, delete it... I suppose I’m trying to say that I feel more honest when I’m writing and less inclined to hide.  I certainly feel more eloquent.

So, how does that relate to writing a novel?

A novel is a peculiar kind of writing.  It takes time, anything from weeks to months to years.  The writer may change quite a bit over the course of writing a novel, which invites the danger that what they started with is no longer what they’re interested in.  That means rewrites, possibly on a massive scale.  But it is hard to make major changes to something which has grown as big as a novel, akin to reshaping an elephant into a flock of doves.

So, wise writers start with a plan.  They plot their story.  They define their character arcs.  They research their backgrounds.  They do a lot of work before even attempting to write “Chapter One”.

Only I am not a wise writer and I can’t do that.  I have tried.  But, for me, the quickest way to induce writer’s block is to tell me I have to produce bullet points, a list, any shorthand form of writing.  Because that’s not how my mind works and not how I can get things done.

I start writing “Chapter One”.

I have no plan, no idea where I’m going.  I always start with a character who interests me and I write to find out who they are, what they’re like, what they are going to do.  Things happen.  Unexpected things because I had no plan.  I’m as surprised as my character at what turns up.  Other characters appear.  They are not planned either.  They seem to pop into being as if they already existed and were simply waiting for a chance to show up in somebody’s story.  I love this part.

This part can usually propel me into the middle of a book.  I find things out.  I start to make connections.  A story begins to evolve.  But that’s when I hit a block.  Because starting hares is easy.  I can create problems, twists and cliff hangers happily.  The difficulty is in bringing all these promising ideas to a satisfactory conclusion.  Now, after 40 to 45 thousand words, I have to stop and decide how it is all going to end.

That’s the hard part.  Agonising!  And that’s the point where I have to stop writing by the seat of my pants and start doing the bit I really, really hate.  Plans.  Bullet points.  A beat sheet.  Sensible stuff, that will get my novel finished.  That’s when the work starts.

I look at what I’ve got and I start to try and find the story which is buried in there somewhere.  I imagine it is a process similar to a sculptor modelling clay.  The first 45 thousand words of my story is my clay.  I can’t do my planning in advance of starting to write because I need that “clay” to work with.  Without it, my imagination is barren.

So, I begin a strange process of finding out what I’m writing about.  And one of the most helpful tools I have found to help me with this is to interrogate my characters.  I open a new file, call it “Character Interviews”, and think of questions I want to ask them.  The answers are written from the character’s point of view because I find they usually seem to know more about what is going on than I do!

A brief example.  In my work in progress “First Chance” which is full of twists and people who are not what they seem I needed to tunnel down into the plot to discover where it was going.  So, I asked a couple of characters for their thoughts:

Q: Scott, why do you approach Will at Waterloo?
A: I needed to get a tracker put back on the bastard once he & Ellie had given us the slip.

(I didn’t know that at all as it happens but it made sense in terms of the plot and helped me define Scott’s role in the book, not least by revealing an antipathy which I didn’t realise Scott had for Will)

Q: Lara, why do you need to get Will involved?
A: Will is an outsider - he has more chance of operating under the radar of the informant hidden within our company.

(I had no idea there was an informant until that point but it helped make sense of a lot of problems I was having justifying the complications I had created for my characters)

I used to worry about this split personality approach until I discovered it is a device which actors often use to tunnel down into their character.  If you haven’t tried it, I would say give it a go and see what you think.  I absolutely do not know (in my conscious mind) the answers to the questions I ask but the unconscious mind is a wonderful resource and this interrogation technique allows me to access the hidden parts of my writer’s mind.

Once I’ve straightened out some of the mysteries, it is time to do a beat sheet.  Sensible writers start with this but to me it would feel like a strait jacket if I tried to do this before starting my story.  It has to be sorted out at some stage, though and this is where I find it comes into its own.

For those who don’t know: a “beat sheet” is a sequence of the main scenes in the story.  To start with, these are likely to be merely a collection of scenes.  I must stress - this will not magically give you a plot.  The key to making the beat sheet (and plot) work is to CONNECT the scenes.

Scenes are connected if one thing causes the next.  The way to find out if you have made a causation is to find out whether you can write “but” or “so” between the scenes.[i]

For example: we’re often told that “The king died and then the queen died” is not a story.  But “The king died so the queen died of grief” is.  One thing causes the other.  If scenes are not prompting the next scene then you simply have a collection of scenes which are not forming a story.  The reader will lose interest.  Probably you, the writer, will lose interest.  Because we all want to know why.  Why has this happened?  And what are the characters going to do about it?  We are programmed to try and discover cause and effect and proper stories allow us that satisfaction.  These questions will keep a reader reading. 

Doing the beat sheet is deeply depressing for me, as a writer.  Because it is then that I discover that I do, in fact, simply have a collection of scenes.  No plot!  The hard bit, the blood, sweat and tears bit, is turning these unconnected scenes into a fluent and engaging story.  The beat sheet is a shorthand piece where I can clearly see where the gaps are.  I can rearrange scenes, delete scenes, create new scenes in note form until I’m satisfied the story hangs together.

Then, my only problem is discovering what to do to fill those gaps.  Oh, and rewriting the entire thing so that every scene follows naturally from what has gone before.

Simple!


[i] (my thanks to Janice Hardy at http://blog.janicehardy.com/2012/05/best-advice-on-plotting-ive-ever-heard.html for this simple & clear advice on how to create plot)

The seed for 'Dark Peak' was a nebulous idea that I would like to set a novel in the Derbyshire Peak, where I grew up.  Originally, I thought I would write something set in the past - the sixties, maybe, when policewomen were still struggling to force progress in a male dominated profession.

That notion was lurking at the back of my mind when I went to a Crime Writing weekend at West Dean College, Sussex, hosted by two crime writers:  Elly Griffiths & Lesley Thomson.  I met some great people and had a wonderful weekend writing.  During one exercise Ellie Grey sprang out of my head and onto the page and suddenly I knew I had the seed I needed to get the story started.

Ellie Grey came out complicated.  For one thing, she refused to be a policewoman from the sixties.  She was here and now.  For another, it turned out she had had to leave the police, following a terrible encounter with a drug addict and an iron bar.  This didn't feel like something I made up - Ellie was already like that.  One of the many mysteries of writing.  Characters refuse to be told to do what the writer thinks they should do.  They definitely have minds of their own!

So, Ellie and I started our adventure on Monday 26 October, when I wrote the words 'Dark Peak' and opened a new file on my laptop.  Then, Chapter One.

Most days I write 1,000 words, although life keeps getting in the way.  Today I've reached Chapter Ten, 12,700 words in and counting.

Ellie has developed a family: sister, father, absent mother.  She has also found a body on the moors.  But I think I always knew that was going to happen.  The question is - where does she go from here?

I used to think - if only there were an ideas tree.

But then it dawned on me that I was missing the point.  Ideas are everywhere.  The problem is setting your mind into a mode where you can receive them.  For me that means getting active.  Sit at the keyboard, start writing, see what turns up.  It's usually surprising and almost invariably interesting.

Failing that, grab the dog and take her for a walk.  Nothing like exercise to get the mind into a receptive state.