A Writer's Craft

The word craft deliciously has three shades of meaning that work against and undercut one another.

1) A skill or ability, especially when applied to a creative art involves an attention to the detail of aspects of the work
2) A skill or ability used for deceit, acting with guile
3) An occupation, trade or guild of a group of workers with special, defined skills. Often such membership is exclusive and used to keep others out

All writers and all artists pursue their craft. Honed by long practise and learning from experience, sometimes augmented by formal teaching of elements of the craft. Books and other sources of advice abound on the craft of writing. The craft is deconstructed and laid bare and the student can take which elements they will and forge them into their own individualised method of writing.

When you try and encapsulate the elements that make up the craft of writing, you are normally offered the axions of plot, character, conflict, arcs, setting, relationship. story development, transitions, point of view, dialogue, themes, metaphors, language, endings and so on.

Now these are all worthwhile elements to consider, but what the writer must remember is that they are only organising principles. They form the armatures around which their material moulds and shapes itself to form the whole. As soon as one regards these elements as a hierarchy, that say character or plot is at the apex of the pyramid and everything else issues from there, I think a great deal is lost to the work. Privileging any one aspect over any other risks exposing the craft's mechanics instead of the work emerging organically and all of a piece.

For example, if you the author is sat there contemplating the nature of the conflict at the heart of the book, or what the conflict is at the heart of every significant relationship the book deals with, then the book veers towards a central axis of conflict. Of course conflict in relationship is both important and an every day reality, but it does not define all relationship. The peril of ensuring that there is conflict in every relationship is that is becomes a device, it reads artificial and formulaic.

Or what could be more fundamental to a novel than its story? The story it's telling and how that unfurls over the pages to the reader. Well nothing of course and yet... Any novel plunges its reader into a world that is initially unknown and the opening pages help orient the reader in this strange new world, or maybe locate them within the familiarity of a world they do in fact recognise from their own knowledge and experiences. Beginnings are important, because they help hook the reader, but they are all in a sense random, until the reader finds their feet. The reader is pitched into one specific environment out of an almost infinite array of possibilities. As the reader progresses through the chapters, we have the bulk of the novel lumpishly described as 'the middle'. Even if there are lots of swooping changes of direction and wild arcs for the reader to follow, this is still just the meat of the book as a largely undifferentiated block. Why? because it all is leading up the the end. The payoff, the twist, the redemption, the tragedy, the denouement, or whatever the author has in store for the reader. Now there are books that eschew beginning, middle and ends for their story structure, but these are few and far between.

Ah but you may cavil, it's plot that allows the gradations of story structure. Character development, themes and metaphors all break up the monolithic blocks of print. And indeed they do, but one mustn't just regard them as spacers dividing up elements of the story in the same way as the human skeleton acts as armatures and spacers for our muscle and tissue. Each is a rich facet of fiction that brings much to the reading table in its own right. Additionally this is perhaps the point where you begin to see how some of theses elements overlap with one another so that it is not possible to say where say character ends and language, metaphor, dialogue begin, since each of these does more than merely feed in to how the character expresses themselves, they ARE character.

I don't privilege any aspect over any other in my writing. By doing so I think I avoid formulaic writing. Rather the novel emerges more organically. Do my novels tell stories? Of course they do, but it isn't necessarily their primary purpose. Do they contain characters? Well save for a couple of my flash fictions which contain no characters at all, yes my books have characters. Well actually I'd say they have Voices, for character is beset with predetermined theories of how we are constructed (to wit the psychology canon) and Voice embodies the elements of speech, metaphor, point of view, language, value system and the like, all through the words provided by the author for how the voice expresses itself. Do my characters embody conflict? Probably, though it's never anything I consciously think about while I write and certainly it's not something I ever use to drive a scene. If the character organically is beset with some conflict, be it with others, or with themselves, then that is a situation I have arrived at, not one I have set up from the beginning as a destination point I have to reach within the writing.

Perhaps all this is merely a slightly different emphasis and shade. A variant position on amy spectrum that contains all of these fundamental building blocks of the craft. But that I think is my divergence, I don't see them as fundamental. Yes they are all or mostly all present, but not highlighted, not in the foreground of my thinking when I sit down to write. I think ultimately craft is whatever the individual artist has arrived at for what works for them. For me, approaching writing with these elements as a hierarchy is both exclusive and also artificial in the sense of guile or archness in the craft.

My writing Debt To Theatre

In a strange way, theatre probably fired me into picking up my own pen (as the technology then was!) But only out of irritation with what I had seen up on stage.

Late 1970, early 80s Britain, new plays were dominated by a fistful of Marxist and Left-Wing dramatists such as David Hare, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Trevor Griffiths. The politics tended to come first, the characters lagging behind a poor second, as each one represented a 'position'. It was Hare's "A Map Of The World" which so provoked my ire as to make me credit I could do better at the tender age of 19.

Playwriting seemed like a decent career to try and get into, since in the late 1970s drama was flourishing and vital, both in the theatre and on television where Dennis Potter and Stephen Poliakoff were writing challenging stuff and bringing it into people's living rooms and new writers were getting exposure on BBC's "Play For Today" slot. Plays were contributing to the political debate of the time, Potter's "Brimstone And Treacle" provoking fevered national debate as to both its taste and its actual meaning.

But while I was at University from 1983 onwards and availing myself of student thespians and free stage spaces trying to learn my craft, something happened to British theatre. The Left-Wing playwrights tried to do battle with the prevailing Conservative politics of Mrs Thatcher's government and lost; both artistically where they never managed to successfully counter her ideas and economically as Mrs Thatcher had the last laugh by demanding that the Arts had to be financially self-sufficient and severely cut the funding across the board of theatres. The BBC stopped producing "Play For Today" as the mass appeal of the soap opera began to dominate TV drama output. Playwrights didn't hang around the theatres very long, partly because it no longer offered decent rewards. Any playwright with a minor hit under their belt, soon jumped ship to TV or film screenplay writing where the money was.

I wrote stage plays for ten years after college. Not with any commercial success I have to say. Mainly produced in pub fringe theatres. But what I learned in doing so has been formative in my novel writing today. Firstly and least surprisingly, you learn how to write dialogue. Since that's pretty much all you have to play with as a playwright, Directors not liking their hands tied by too much suggested stage direction from the writer. But playwriting also asks the writer to think visually, with a limited tableau of stage scenery and props, so that you develop an ability to conjure images through the interplay of the spoken word and what has gone before. A key word that becomes motif, such as Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" or the Christmas tree in "The Doll's House".

Actors too shape the space they move and work in with their bodies and gestural language. I was privileged to attend all the rehearsals of my work and see actors doing just this. Shaping an empty space gives the writer a real insight into making images out of thin air, the relationship of a physical body in space to the emotions and the words the actor utters. This can only help a writer literally conjure images out of thin air, by thinking about the interplay of these four elements. I also got to see the creative powers of directors and set designers at work.

But watching actors rehearse, particularly in the early part of the process, opens your eyes up to another key element, that of relationship. Unless the play is a monologue, it is full of relationships being portrayed on stage. Relationships that have to be established in rehearsals; between actors who may never have met one another until they first step into the rehearsal space; relationships to their own character as they try and 'find' that character, as written by the author and to be interpreted by them and then further rolled out to find the relationships between the character and to realise them from the page of the script. There is nothing quite as fascinating as seeing these processes at work. And key to relationship in acting and I think to writing them in prose, is to think about power and status. A common acting exercise is to ask a pair of actors improvise a simple given scenario and then throughout to change their relative statuses to one another by barking out a number, where 10 is the highest status and 1 the lowest. Watch how the same scenario takes on countless different forms just by changing the power balance between the two characters. I find this an invaluable tool for when I'm writing a prose scene with two or more characters. Which character can't hold the gaze of the other, or which is flexing their fingers subconsciously... the possibilities are endless.

So theatre writing armed me with several tools for prose writing, because you always had to consider the characters on stage at any and every moment. You were forced to write fully rounded characters and how they related to one another. You were also made to think about how to construct layered images and motifs. All things at the core of writing prose.

My new novel "Time After Time" actually begun life as a stage play I'd written. The same man, the same woman, the same opening chat-up line and a myriad of different outcomes from this scenario. Tiny fluctuations in body language, a word heard in one version, but not in the next, each can contribute to a different outcome of the seduction scenario. Not dissimilar I suppose from the status impro games actors use to find their characters. But I wanted to use such a mechanism to look at how emotions can produce different responses to the same set of events and circumstances.

Dialogue - You Don't Say!

Whither dialogue in the novel?

I mean just what do tranches of conversation bring to the prose table? In stage plays, any dialogue is layered and given subtext through the performance of the actors. All verbal communication in normal life takes place through the spoken word being augmented by facial expression, inflection, other physical gesture and the context of it being said.

The novel cannot offer sustained versions of all these buttresses, without the text grinding to a halt. You simply can't ascribe description of a facial expression or a hand gesture to every line of dialogue you write. As a form of shorthand, you could append 'he said acidily' or 'she averted her gaze as she said', but too much he said/she said grates pretty quickly.

I find where you get swathes of unmediated dialogue in novels, it is usually the writer trying to lever in back story. It's clumsy and more importantly, people don't spend swathes of time filling in events and describing incidents, at least not without commentary and judgement, which rarely gets a look in since the writer is only concerned with back story issues. Conversation is not the right medium to transmit such information.

Where conversation is important, is in allowing the reader to hear the character's voice. IE, its an adjunct of any physical description the author may have given, to enable the reader to picture the character more fully in their mind's eye. But in this way, you only need a modest snatch of conversation to convey how the character talks and how that reflects back on their personality. So for me, conversation is impressionistic and no more. Don't overload your dialogue with points to get across. And please save the reader from unmediated pages of dialogue, which always has me wondering what a character is doing with their hands and where their eyes are really focussing in the room.

I say all this having had a background as a playwright of 15 years. I can write dialogue. But I don't find it terribly germane to prose fiction. If you ever get the opportunity, see if you can eavesdrop or bear witness to a real life social situation such as someone being asked to explain their actions to a superior. Concentrate very hard on what is said, how the person describes their actions and tries to justify it or apologise for it. I promise you, if you had tried to write a pre-emptive version of it for prose purposes, your version would bear no resemblance to the actual version. You may claim that this is merely a shortcoming in the writer's craft, that they need more work. But it's for all the reasons I give above, about a playwright's ability to render just such a social scene, because he is assisted by flesh and blood actors, whereas the prose writer only has linear sentences flat on a page. The reader has to play both parts in any dialogue. Already that is limiting.

In one of my novels I played with these problems. The second third of the book was 'set' in cyberspace forums and messaging. This allowed me to tweak some of the restrictions. For example, by giving the time of each MSN post, the reader can gauge what lies behind the response - was it immediate, or did the poster give it some thought before replying? (The equivalent of a meaningful 'pause' in a playscript). Then there was the random element of posts that cross, thus fissuring the logic further. (I had great fun with this when recreating imaginary forum exchanges, where narrative logic was completely fractured as different voices cut across each other and responded asynchronously).

Yet the thing that really surprised me in the writing of these sections, was that my main character's voice necessarily changed. Prior to that in the first third of the novel, he expressed his thoughts and the odd fleeting verbal banter with his cronies, in his thick Yorkshire dialect. I wrote that section in his vernacular tongue. But in the second third where he was communicationg online, he didn't write in dialect. As a reasonably well educated bloke, he typed full words, not the bastardised prefixes and suffixes of local dialect. Since he was a character who was hiding his true identity from the reader anyway, this slippery quality between his morphing in and out of different voices suited the story rather well, but was one I had not forseen until it revealed itself. But it does suggest that people do formulate their thoughts in slightly different language than they speak in. And certainly different to how they write.