Monkeys with Typewriters

groups can behave in very mysterious ways. I have witnessed a lot of writing workshops in my time, and there are two particular experiences that haunt me. The first was when a young woman read out a scene that was probably the best thing I’ve ever seen a student write. It was delicate, subtle and, well, it was art. Immediately the other students started questioning it. Someone didn’t understand the way the scene ended. Someone else thought it should take place in a different location. Someone else said they found the dialogue stilted.295 Barely anyone said they liked it. When I said it was excellent, a little wave of resentment went around the room. It took hours of tutorials to convince the student that the others were mistaken, and that the scene should remain exactly as she’d written it.
The other experience was quite the reverse. The weakest student in the room put up a piece of writing that she had obviously struggled with a great deal. There were many errors in spelling and grammar, partly because English was not her first language. As well as this, the writing was abstract, long-winded and boring. It would have failed, had it been handed in for assessment. The responses from the other students? ‘That’s brilliant,’ they all said. ‘Wow! I really want to read more.’ No one had anything bad to say about it at all. So I started pointing out the numerous errors as kindly as I could. I was very worried that this poor student would go off thinking that her writing was a complete success when it was in fact the reverse. What happened then? The other students began defending the work, as if I was being very mean about it. I was so confused by this that I immediately went and asked a colleague whether anything similar had ever happened to her. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it weird?’ This colleague and I have often since pondered what makes a group act like this, and all we can come up with is that they are trying to be kind and protect the weakest student from ‘getting into trouble’, but we don’t really know. Another interesting theory is that beginners in a subject often believe that anything they can’t understand must be of high quality and anything they find easy to comprehend must be of low quality.

What about writing groups? Unless you value them for social reasons, or unless you are lucky enough to have access to one in which people are working at an extremely high level, and are completely sympathetic to what you’re doing, I would avoid them. All too often the writing group can become more like a focus group in which a product is tested rather than a work of art produced.

When you’ve finished a first draft, what do you do next? The best thing is to leave it a few weeks (six is ideal) and then print it out and read it through thoroughly with a pencil in your hand, crossing out words, adding words and noting in the margins any new ideas or substantial changes you’d like to make. There will be a lot. At this stage you will think one of two things. If you have left it long enough, revisiting your work might make you feel like a genius, or at least quite good about yourself. Yes, I managed to do all this and I think it really works! But a much more common feeling is: This is fucking rubbish and I hate myself for writing it. There’s not much that you can do about this apart from hold your nerve and realise that everyone feels like this about their own work at some point. It’s normal.

It’s worth asking yourself at every stage how much you do care if your novel is lost in a fire, or a computing accident. I always ask my students the following question: If the only copy of your novel was stuck at the top of a mountain, would you go up and rescue it? I tell them that if the answer is ‘no’ then they need to re-think what they are doing. If the mountain example makes no practical sense to you then make up your own scenario in which it would be possible, but very, very difficult, to get your novel back. How far would you go to rescue it? If you did somehow manage to leave the only copy of it on a bus, how devastated would you really be? The answers to these questions tell you how important the novel is to you, and therefore how important it is likely to be to other people.

Writing means looking deeply into ourselves and being very, very honest about why we do things, in order that we can create honest and authentic characters.

We can express the basic act of storytelling, therefore, as follows: taking a character in a state of equilibrium, messing it all up to create disequilibrium, and then resolving this into a new state of equilibrium.

A simple example of how story and plot differ from one another can be found in the Harry Potter series of novels. The chronological story being narrated begins before Harry is born, with the rise of Voldemort and the Death Eaters, or even before that, with the birth of Dumbledore and the founding of Hogwarts School. However, the first scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is set much later than this, and we meet Harry as an older child living with his uncle and aunt. The plot begins when Harry finds he is going to attend Hogwarts school, and elements from the chronological story are revealed later. Most narratives do not begin at ‘the beginning’, as we will see.

Change is one of the most important aspects of fiction. And it helps us to understand what distinguishes a basic chronological story from a sequence of statements. Change occurs because of something. And because of that something else happens, and then something else. So let’s begin by properly exploring the difference between this kind of chronological story (which Russian formalists call ‘fabula’), where change happens on a simple timeline, and plot (which you might come across as ‘sujet’ or ‘sjužet’). As Boris Tomashevsky says, ‘Plot is distinct from story. Both include the same events, but in the plot the events are arranged.’

Something happens, and then because of that, something else happens. That’s a story. When we tell it, it becomes a narrative. Although we could spend many hours talking about terminology, and how to break down all the parts of narrative, we can say for now that basic narrative comprises a story, often arranged into a plot. Very basic narrative may not have imagery, theme, characterisation and all the other elements we’ll be looking at in this book, and the story and the plot might be the same thing. So what is the most basic possible narrative? ‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not a narrative, because it tells no story: nothing happens and no change occurs. It is a statement. ‘The cat sat on the mat and then went outside to look at birds’ is two statements, and although something happens, it doesn’t happen because of something that has happened before. In other words, it doesn’t work according to cause and effect. ‘The cat was shooed off the mat and so decided to go outside and look at birds’ is a narrative because it tells a story based on cause and effect. The cat is outside now partly because she was on the mat before. This narrative is a simple chronological story that has not been plotted. ‘The cat was outside watching birds. She had been comfortable on her mat before Rachel came and shooed her away’ is now a plotted narrative, because it is not simply chronological. In the narration, the past happens after the present, not before.

I feel passionate about all the material in this book. It is not just for students; it is for anyone who wants to study fiction in order to become a better writer or a better reader. The main focus is on novel-writing, but you don’t have to want to write a novel, or any kind of fiction, to get something out of it. But once you have read it, you will, I hope, know how to construct a good sentence, a good metaphor, a good scene, a good plot and a good character. At no point in this book do I pretend that writing a novel (or even reading one deeply) is easy. It isn’t easy. But it is a lot easier when you know how to work with your own special material, and when you have considered how other novels are constructed. It’s also useful to realise how much of a novel’s construction can be accidental, and everyone learns that when they begin writing one.