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.

The Story Of Us Is About Us As Storytellers

In the BBC programme "Birth Of The British Novel" (for limited time on I-Player) Tom McCarthy (Man Booker shortlisted for "C") discusses Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy". Asked what defines a novel, McCarthy says "Shandy's" constant subverting of its own story, the digressions and discursiveness of the narrative, sly references to its own creation, suggests that the key is that any novel contains its own antithesis, it's own anti-novel.

I take this to mean that the novel constantly tugs the reader's attention to the fact that this is just a work of fiction. It is not real life, even if it has things to say about real life. It undermines itself so that the reader is returned to the fact that it is a book with a life and a world of its own between the covers, different and removed from actual life. It is not dissimilar to Bertolt Brecht's approach to theatre, to break down the imaginary fourth wall separating the audience from the staged action. Brecht doesn't want his audience to suspend their disbelief in order to enter the world of the play in its terms; at every turn he is reminding them that they are an audience, sat in a theatre watching actors enact a drama in all its artifice and remove.

In a rather wonderful debut novel by Ida Hattemer-Higgins which I'm currently reading, she gets to the very heart of fiction: "What is the difference between having a knife thrown at your head and reading a story about having a knife thrown at your head?" She goes on to list how in the story there is sentence after sentence of description, contextualising the room, the entry of the girl, the type of knife, the surface in which the blade lodges, its resonating judder. Pretty much a linear list in order of the sense experience as conceived by the author putting herself inside the scene. But the reality of actually having a knife unexpectedly launched at one, she reveals to only conjure up two things, confusion and fear.

Two emotions, almost instantaneous responses to the sense perception that a knife is winging its way towards you. Emotions that overlay, inform, catalyse and subvert one another, in most non-linear fashion. If as my contention is, that the novel must, must get to grips with emotions in an intelligent way, then how do we match the plodding, linear, sentence after sentence approach of the first, prosaic representation, with the actuality of complex, layered and trigger sped emotions?

Story-telling, plot, whatever you want to call it, is the prime artifice of human experience. Because it takes our human experiences and events and arranges them into patterns (the narrative) and groups things together that may not in fact bear true relationship to one another. It distorts cause and effect and consequence, when again things may not be the direct outcomes of what precedes them. (Quantum physics challenges all such notions of cause,effect and material reality itself). Even the human eye uses such short cuts and abbreviations. The rods and cones of the eye wrangle externalities into boundaried shapes, colours and depths and the brain's retinal template overlays its recognition patterns upon them to render them recognisable. But the brain is slightly cheating, rounding off the rough edges of things that don't quite measure up, in order to make them fit its templates. Language is the same with its naming and classification of everything; if you eat food off a slave's back, is the slave not performing the function of a dining table? But no one would ever think to call a human being a table.

So on the one hand is this artifice of ordering, arranging and patterning, without which we probably couldn't function in our lives. And on the other non-linear hand, is our emotions which at least colour everything we as humans do, if not actually determine them wholesale. So again, in order for a novelist to deal in emotional intelligence, to represent their complexity and dimensionality, he might just have to cut against his ordering and plotting of story. Or, as with "Tristram Shandy" and Brecht and others, tug the reader's sleeve periodically to remind them that this is fiction, though what is 24-carat reliable is the emotions being depicted.

So I write novels that are about storytelling, our relationship to it, our need for it, the function which it fulfils in us. Along the way I happen also to tell stories, but I make damn sure to investigate why I'm telling them.

Linear representation of emotions

Representation of non-linear.