Writing Skill: Prove It's You

Ahead of the GETTING ROMANTIC online weekend workshop, I've got a brace of free Writing Skills lined up for you, to get your pen moving and inspire you with the story possibilities of a soupçon of romance. The workshop explores writing both new and established love, so last week's Deluded Diary played with new love, and this week we're diving into the riches of established love: Prove It's You.

For this, you need two characters who're already in a romantic relationship, whether that's months, years, or decades. You can pick two characters from your work in progress, if you have one and it has suitable characters. Alternately, you can whisk two characters into existence with this very handy generator.

One of the characters is going to send the other a message – maybe a text from an unknown number, or an email from a new address, or a physical letter, or through a messenger, whatever suits your story or your preferences for setting and time period. But they need to prove it's them who's sending the message. That it's not a scam, a trick, a sinister ploy, etc.

So what can they say in the message, as something only the two of them would know? That someone else couldn't take a chance on making up and getting right? For example...

    “He said it’s safe to come down. And that he’s alright. And he said to tell you…” The voice sounded puzzled. “Sardines and beans?”
    She gulped. He was alive. By the seas, he was alive.

If you're using a work in progress, you can brainstorm ideas from your existing writing. Flip back through it, if you need to refresh your memory: what are the moments that are pivotal and unique to them? What unique details are in those moments? What in-jokes would only they understand? What memories would both treasure? Try to find at least five options. Don't worry if you can't find much, though: this is also an opportunity to invent it, and dramatically enrich their relationship, so if you don't have enough, skip instead to inventing it from scratch.

If you're inventing from scratch, think of your own close relationships – not necessarily romantic; it could be siblings, friends, or any longstanding warm relationship. Think of how many in-jokes and shared memories you have. Food, places, repeated sayings, specific sights; moments that were terrifying, surprising, dreadful, hilarious, dreadful but hilarious in retrospect... And look for the unique details within those. Picking thorns out of someone's head. A blow-up sofa. Saying "It's a little bit nice" and falling about laughing. Gargling a song. That's the kind of wealth you want for your characters.

To keep this a ten-minuter, spend five minutes brainstorming as many possible details as you can. You don't need the backstory here: just throw down phrases, places, sights, names of birds, anything at all. As you scribble, ideas for back stories for some of them might pop into your head. After that, for the next five minutes, pick 2–3 of the details you jotted down, whichever most appeal to you. What's the story behind that detail? What makes that such a treasured and pivotal moment between them?

Have fun, and relish the richness of discovery!

Why this Skill?

The specific details of what only each other would know are the idiosyncracies that make a fictional relationship close and unique, rather than a generic Love Interest. A genuinely close relationship will always create its own rich history, filled with these sorts of details. Making the character prove it's them is a great test for whether the relationship's invented details are standard-issue (rose petals and champagne; a sunrise; a wedding day) or unique to them. And if the story doesn't have enough of that detail yet, this is a lovely way to invent it!

The GETTING ROMANTIC workshop is two half-days on 26-27 October 2024: live, online, and open to bookings from anywhere in the world. Through games, discussion, and quick-fire writing, you'll explore how to create convincing romantic relationships in any genre, which matter to the plot and to the reader. All in fabulous company with a lovely bunch of creative people. Click here for more details and to book.

Writing Skill: Deluded Diary

To launch the online GETTING ROMANTIC workshop, I've got a brace of free Writing Skills lined up for you, to get your pen moving and inspire you with the story possibilities of a soupcon of romance.

The giggling trembling agonising bewilderment of new love is a riotous joy to remember and write, however lurchy and nauseating it may feel at the time when you've no idea how things will play out. It's also a brilliant way to delve deep into characters, because so much of that new love is about discovering the other person, and the fascinated attention to their every whim and habit. The GETTING ROMANTIC workshop explores the story possibilities of both new and established love, so the first of your two new skills is Deluded Diary: a delightful exercise playing with new love, character, and voice.

Your character is freshly, staggeringly in love. Proper, giddy, even-the-trees-look-different love. It's completely sincere, completely heartfelt, nothing to be mocked here, though we might smile and giggle alongside them. They're writing about this in their diary, and about the person they're so dizzyingly in love with. 

All the while, though, they are completely oblivious that the other person fancies them right back, just as fiercely. We can tell, though. It's blindingly gloriously obvious, from the diary, but your character genuinely has no idea. And while we're completely sympathetic to the passionate sincerity of their love, we've got one hand clasped across our mouth to suppress the giggles that they don't realise.

So that's what you're going to do: write their diary entry! Just one entry, if you like; more, if you get enraptured in it. Give yourself ten minutes, and then if you need to get about the rest of your day, you've dipped in enough to get a sense of it; if you want to keep scribbling away, do.

For the character, you can use an existing character if you have one handy. If you'd rather grab a brand-new character, this character-cameo generator is delightful. It gives you enough info to dive straight in, without overwhelming you with detail. And of course, feel free to change any of the details it offers you. 

So choose your character or whisk one up with the generator, set a timer if you want to do it as a time-limited exercise, and start writing their diary!

Why this Skill?

Strong characterisation is essential to writing a compelling romance or romantic subthread, and through the diary, you get a two-for-one on characters. Firstly, the character writing reveals their personality, through what they say and their voice. Secondly, the description of their beloved gives some insight into the other character. Writing a diary entry also allows you as the writer to indulge in all sorts of flights of feeling: it's the character writing, not you, and they're writing for their own eyes only, so there's no need for Polished Restrained Prose – which leaves you free to explore the full range of their feelings. 

The GETTING ROMANTIC workshop is two half-days on 26-27 October 2024: live, online, and open to bookings from anywhere in the world. Through games, discussion, and quick-fire writing, you'll explore how to create convincing romantic relationships in any genre, which matter to the plot and to the reader. All in fabulous company with a lovely bunch of creative people. Click here for more details and to book.

Writing Skill: Register Mismatch

 

To whet your appetite for the Writing in Style course, I've got a brace of delicious quickie Writing Skills for you: ten-minute activities to hone different aspects of your writing. The first was a crafty technique for spookification; with the second, we're playing for laughs instead of fear, with Register Mismatch.

"Register", in language, is how formally or casually we speak, in different situations and to different people – for example, the way we speak at work is different to how we chat with friends to how we address a cat. Playing around with register is a great tool for humour, whether you're writing comedy or just want to include some lighter moments. One of the ways of doing that is to mis-match the register with the situation.

So, first off, spend a couple of minutes brainstorming a) very sophisticated actions, and b) very crass actions. For example, sophisticated actions might be…

• sweeping up to the red carpet at a glamourous award, greeting the crowd and fellow red-carpeters
• meeting the king at a Buckingham Palace garden party
• graciously hosting an elegant meal
• waltzing around a ballroom with the cream of society

And very crass actions – I'm thinking of that New Year's mayhem in Manchester photo for inspiration, to start with. So that might be…

• being absolutely hammered and trying to ask someone on a date while fighting the police off with a bin lid
• dumpster-diving in your dressing gown and slippers for something important you lost, and trying to explain it away to a passerby
• taking the wrong route home, climbing through a hedge, tearing your clothes to distressingly revealing degrees, walking through a bog, losing one shoe to it, and also falling faceforward into it at one point (only some of which I've done making my way across Port Meadow in winter!)

Once you've brainstormed both lists, pick one item from each list, to describe in the most opposite way possible. Start with the "crass" action: describe it in the most elegant, formal, and sophisticated language possible: "Enamoured by his charm, I once more thrust my distressing shield, still fragrant with kitchen discards, at the officer of the law, thus buying me time to beseech..." etc. And then for the elegant action, describe it in the most casual, slangiest, vernacular way possible: "I ponced my way up the long rug, with a proper arse wiggle for the gawkers, grinning at my chums in their penguin get-up..." etc. If you'd like to keep this to a 10-minuter, spend 4 minutes on each.

Then reread, share with your writing buddies if you can, and have a good giggle!

Writing Skill: Dark Beauty

To whet your appetite for the Writing in Style course, I've got a brace of delicious quickie Writing Skills for you: ten-minute activities to hone different aspects of your writing. The first, with the nights drawing in and the time of ghoulies 'n ghosties approaching, is a fab technique for the spookification of absolutely anything: Dark Beauty.

First off, choose a location that you think is just stunningly beautiful. Not creepy at all: gorgeous, soothing, filling your soul with beauty. Somewhere you've been on holiday perhaps or somewhere you've recently visited – a picturesque village, beautiful gardens, the inside of a college if you went to Oxford Open Doors. It can be just one building, if you like: standing at the bus stop one evening, I was blown away by how picture-perfect the Royal Oak on Woodstock Road looked. Anywhere, wild, rural, suburban, or urban, that you think is unequivocally beautiful.

Next, you're going to describe its beauty – but with the most menacing verbs you can find. Let things loom, creep, snake, throttle, seep… (Verb: a doing word. Test it by putting "to" in front of it: to loom, to creep, to snake, etc.) I suggest you spend ten minutes on this, though you could do more if you fancy a longer writing session. And have fun with it!

When you’re done, type it up and schedule an email to yourself for a week’s time – without specifying that you were practising using creepy verbs. When you reread it with fresh eyes, you’ll be surprised at how effective your verb choices are and how much subtler it feels to read than to write.

What you're doing in this prompt is called writing around a semantic field: your semantic field is "danger" and the verbs you're choosing all reflect that. The actual thing you're writing about isn't dangerous – it's beautiful! – but the way you're writing about it creates that sense of danger. We all know how powerful description and sense of place can be for creating a mood in a story. That doesn't limit you to places that echo that mood exactly, though: by playing around with your semantic field like this, you can make any place reflect any mood that you want it to! That gives you a lot more freedom to choose more original and exciting locations, which itself helps the story live on in the reader's mind.

Finding Your Own Style

When you think about your writing style, it’s easy to feel caught between an amorphous blue cloud – a sense of self, unrealised or indefinable, an elusive mystery – and a bristling red pen, scratching things out and dictating schoolish rules.

Like most writers, I started with no idea what My Style was, beyond a vague hope that I must have one (surely?) and an iron conviction that I was a Good Writer. I wrote my entire first novel like that. Looking back, it was mostly transparent prose in literary register, with some of Angela Carter’s influence on immersive description, and some of AS Byatt’s influence to pare that back. It did work out as a decent style, because I had good models, but it wasn’t mine.

In fact, I’d written an entire novel without using one of the most powerful tools available to me: its style. I was like an artist whose composition and perspective are coming along nicely, but who hasn’t yet discovered colour. To take the metaphor further – there’s nothing wrong with using just black and white; monochrome artwork has a fantastic tradition. But to stick to that just because I didn’t know about colour, or know how to use it – that was missing a trick.

Almost 13 novels later, I still can’t tell you what My Style is – not because it’s stayed amorphous and mysterious, but because I have many. It depends what I’m writing. Our writing styles are always plural: our own voices change and grow continuously, just as we do, and shift like a ventriloquist with different genres, stories, and character voices. I have many colour palettes at my disposal now. And I know when to choose monochrome.

So how do you go about finding your style – or indeed, styles? Will working on your style spoil its authenticity, pruning back the very things that make it yours? And won’t a course on style just teach you to write like someone else?

How you do you find your style?

Most of us start by copying other people’s styles, as I did – and that’s fine. It’s a great way to learn. The writers you copy can be a useful indicator of your own taste in style, too: who do you want to write like? Who do you want to influence you? Who do you not want to influence you, even though you like their stories? Having a sense of your own tastes and working with good models is a great start.

From there, you want to strike out further – “breaking the rules”, writing the way you’re “not supposed to”, giddy with a sense of daring, playful and perverse. It feels naughty and wrong, because you’re no longer copying something you’ve seen before. You’re writing your way.

Don’t worry about overdoing it. You can always trim it back in an edit, if you need to, but it might turn out that you don’t need to. You might become even more daring.

It’s about permission to write “improperly”: again, in ways you haven’t seen before. So here’s your permission: write improperly. Go wild, do whatever the hell you want, and see how it turns out.

Will working on my style spoil its authenticity?

It’s tempting to see our first drafts as a pure untouchable thing, the original expression of self, and to think that tampering with a word would sully it. But your self is as much there in the editing process as in the writing, and we’re always developing as writers, even across a single piece. The you that’s finished the short story has more writing experience and more knowledge of that story than the you who was writing it.

Our first drafts, if we’re really writing freely, are often a patchwork of several things. Our most unusual and original phrasing leaps out, because we didn’t censor it: hurrah! The most familiar copy-paste phrases (the clichés, the collocations) flood the page too, because they’re right there, at your fingertips, on the shelf, on tap, easy as pie: that’s fine. When we’re making things up, we often need to grab whatever language is to hand, to capture our ideas.

Some odd things happen, too. The –ing words that felt so lively and energetic in the writing feel limp and flimsy on a reread. Those unstoppable tumultuous sentences that seemed to gallop through the action are now slowing it down. That slew of vivid emotive adjectives now feels syrupy. And so on. Some of our choices are about the process of writing, not the final effect we want.

So, we start tinkering. We consult our own tastes, for what to keep, We consider the experience of reading it, not just of writing it, for the effect we want. We wash away some of the mud, so the bits we want to keep sparkle, and we add some flourishes.

Your thoughtful assessing mind is just as authentically you: this is simply another, equally authentic, part of the process.

Will a course on style just teach me to write like someone else?

Not if I’m running it! I actually held off teaching anything about writing style for the first 8 years of running courses and workshops, because I was concerned about exactly the same thing. I did not want to create some School of Megan! Over those years, I gained a lot more experience in varying my own styles, in noticing and appreciating the different strengths of various styles, and in helping my students refine their own styles through individual feedback. Then I felt ready to teach style, in all its glorious possibilities.

That's why the Writing in Style course isn’t about The Correct Way To Write: it’s about the many various ways and why we might choose each. There are some common principle of good writing across styles, which we’ll also explore, and you’ll look at how to use those for the style you’re working on, for the piece you’re working on – and when to ignore that principle, because you want a particular effect.

Above all, the course is about finding freedom: the freedom to be you on the page and the freedom to experiment with new approaches. You'll explore a wild range of styles in your writing, build your confidence in writing first draft, and develop a repertoire of techniques to refine and enliven every page – all through imaginative adventures in language and storytelling. This is your chance to experiment, to discover all the ways you can experiment, so you can choose the colour palette you want when you’re writing.

Autumn writing food: Roast Butternut

 

 

Roast Butternut with chorizo or halloumi, goats cheese, toasted walnuts, and mint on a bed of greens

As always, perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself. 

Roast butternut is wonderfully easy to prepare in bulk – if anything, it's quite hard not to do in bulk, with the size of some butternuts. And it's easy because you don't have to peel it. That's so important that I'll shout it:

You don't have to peel butternut!

It's actually better if you don't peel it! So if you've been labouring away at an orange rock with a peeler, or you've gone off butternut because it's "mushy", let me set you free. LEAVE THE SKIN ON. It roasts beautifully, with lovely texture, and if you're boiling your butternut for soup, the skin softens enough to blend up smoothly.

In this recipe, we're roasting it in chunks, so we get lovely caramelised textured butternut, with the rich umami and chewiness of either chorizo pieces or halloumi tossed in smoked paprika, offset by the creamy tang of goats cheese, plus fresh mint to add a lively zing, and all served on a bed of fresh green spinach which softens deliciously under the roasted heat without quite collapsing. Amazing treat food for an autumnal day, and the roasted ingredients (butternut, chorizo/halloumi, walnuts) freeze beautifully for future writing sessions. 

This is one where I make lots for that evening's cooking, and portion up the extra for writing days. For this recipe, that means the full quantity of butternut, chorizo/halloumi, and walnut, which is the part I'll freeze. And then just enough goats cheese, mint, and baby spinach for what we'll eat that night, with any extra saved for that week's writing day(s) and work-lunches for my beloved. For future writing days where I want this dish, I'll get more goats cheese, mint, and baby spinach. And any of those I don't use will make a great goats' cheese and spinach frittata.

I've tinkered with this recipe for years, varying timings and toppings, and bloody love it. I've got both omnivore and vegetarian versions for it, colour-coded below. I don't have a vegan version; I tried to work one out and realised anyone who's actually vegan will be more skilled than I am at what to use in place of the chewy protein (chorizo / halloumi) and the creamy tang (in this version, goats cheese). If you come up with a vegan variation, please let me know! But whichever version, the recipe starts with this:

You don't have to peel butternut!

So before the recipe, here's how to disassemble a butternut without peeling it or risking limbs:

• Wash the butternut well, as you'll be eating the skin.
  
• Lay it flat on the board and cut it in half widthways just above the bulge. The top end has no seeds. (Make sure to hold your non-cutting hand above the knife, pressing on top of the knife.)
  
• Top end: Cut the stalk off the top. Cut the rest in circles about an inch wide. Lay the circles flat and cut each one into 6 segments, the way you'd divide a pizza, so they each have skin attached.
  
• Bottom end: Stand the bottom end up and cut it in half vertically. Scrape out the seeds with a spoon. Lay each half face down on the chopping board and cut it into half-circles about an inch wide. Lay each half-circle flat and cut each one into 4 even pieces, again each with skin. The final round end will have a hard stem bit in the middle that you need to cut out.
  

Voila! Stress-free butternut chunks. 

Scroll on for the recipe or download it as a PDF here. 

To use the PDF as a scrollable on your phone, download Adobe Acrobat Reader free from Google Play or the Apple Store. When you open your PDF in the Adobe Acrobat Reader app, tap the Liquid Mode icon at the top for easy scrolling. The method repeats the quantities so you don't have to scroll back and forth.

Roast Butternut

Serving and times

• Prep: 10–20 mins
• Cooking: 1h10
• Serves: 4–6

Ingredients

• 1 very large / 2 small butternut (2kg +) chopped into 1-inch / 1.5 inch at widest chunks, skin on
• 2 teaspoons chilli flakes (or 1 tsp if you don’t want it too hot)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 6–9 Tablespoons olive oil
• 100g walnuts
• Small handful mint (approx 5g), finely chopped
• 125g goats cheese (more if you’re feeling generous)
• 260g approx baby spinach (or a mix of baby spinach and peppery greens eg watercress, rocket, etc)

Plus: omnivore version

• 1 ring chorizo (225g), sliced into ½ cm rings

OR

Vegetarian version

• 225g halloumi, sliced in 5mm slices, tossed with 1 teaspoon smoked paprika

Method

• Set the oven to 180 C fan.
• Chop the butternut with skin on and toss it in the 6–9 Tablespoons olive oil, 1-2 teaspoons chilli flakes, and 1 teaspoon salt.
• Spread the butternut in a large roasting tray so the pieces aren’t on top of each other
• Put in the heated oven and set a timer for 25 mins.

OMNIVORE VERSION:

• After 25 mins, toss the butternut and set a timer for another 25 mins.
• Meanwhile, chop the 225g chorizo.
• When the butternut’s had 50 mins total, scatter the chorizo on top and set a timer for 15 mins.

VEGETARIAN VERSION:

• After 25 mins, toss the butternut and set a timer for another 30 mins.
• Meanwhile, slice the 225g halloumi and toss it in 1 teaspoon smoked paprika.
• When the butternut’s had 55 mins total, scatter the halloumi on top and set a timer for 10 mins.

BOTH VERSIONS CONTINUE HERE:

• Meanwhile, chop the small handful mint and get the goats’ cheese ready to serve. Divide the greens evenly between the plates.
• When the timer goes, scatter the walnuts on top of the roasting butternut and chorizo / halloumi. The walnuts will take 3–5 mins depending on your oven – keep a watchful eye on them so they don’t burn!
• Dish the roasted butternut, chorizo/ halloumi, and walnuts onto the plates, on top of the greens. Divide the goats cheese between them, in scattered bits. Sprinkle over the mint and serve.

To freeze:

Freeze just the roasted part (butternut, chorizo/halloumi, and walnuts) in portions. Take note how much you actually eat: it often looks too small, without the other ingredients. To reheat it, defrost fully, roast for 10 mins at 180, then serve with greens, goats cheese, and mint.

Enjoy, happy writing, and spread the word: you don't need to peel butternut!

 

Coming Next:

WRITING IN STYLE
COURSE

Live online OR in person
OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 2024

Explore a wild range of styles in your writing with new adventures.

BOOK BY 1 OCTOBER

AUTUMN AND WINTER WORKSHOPS

Online weekend workshops in October & December

Choose which workshops run, from 25 possible topics.

VOTE BY 29 SEPTEMBER

Should I Just Give Up Writing My Novel?

It’s a fair question. Writing a novel takes a lot of time and dedication. Some people will rush in to say “Nooo! Never give up!” But if you’re asking, it deserves consideration. Maybe that specific novel is something you’re ready to ditch; maybe it’s become an albatross around your neck. You don’t have to carry on if you don’t want to. It doesn’t make you a quitter.

Or maybe you’re having a standard creative crisis point, the ones every writer and creative gets, but you don’t know about those yet. And if you ditch this one, the next project will reach the same crisis points – precisely because they are standard.

It’s not a question I can answer for you. But I can pose the questions which will help you decide and I can tour you through the standard crisis points you might be having.

The Characters that Let Your Stories Fly

When I started writing more keenly, I thought what I needed most was to plot better. I worked on that, hard, and my stories grew wings… but somehow they didn’t take flight. They felt like planes circling the airport, even with their immaculate flight plans.

What I actually needed to learn took me much longer, because I didn’t realise I needed that: to write characters unlike myself. Not just the wrong ‘uns, all of them. Especially the main characters.

Again and again, in my teaching, I’ve seen other writers hobbled by the same thing. It’s not a glaring lack, like plot, but it stops stories flying. And you don’t know why – because our selves are a blind spot to us. How we are, that’s just normal, right? But other people are different. And until all our characters can be too, including our main characters, we’re clipping our stories’ wings.

It is a blind spot, because our selves are our normal. So before we launch into why it's important, here are two quick tests of whether you’re stuck in characters like you:

• The Three-Traits Test: Can you (and your writing group / buddy if you have one) quickly and easily write three separate personality traits for them? If you can’t, they’re not fully characterised, and likely a diluted version of you.
• The Reaction Test: When your character reacts to something big (a heartbreak, discovery, thrill, frustration), can you say why they specifically react like that? Or is their reaction just “normal” to you? Because them being just normal might be them being just you.

If, in your writing so far, your characters are mostly you, especially the main characters, you have a wealth of discovery and joy ahead of you. Because this is what characters unlike you – again, especially the main characters – will give you.

You get more vivid characters

We don’t see ourselves as clearly as we see other people. Like fish not noticing water, we live inside our own traits without realising how much is specific to us, rather than standard-issue human, so we don’t describe those characters well. Without that clarity, our characters-like-us stay vague, undifferentiated. Worse still, to make the character “not us”, we often strip away what is unique and interesting, leaving the character not only blurry but bland. When your character’s not you, they become crisply drawn with distinct personality.

You vary your characters across stories

Even if your stories are wildly different, having much the same person at the centre of each gives them a sameyness. That gets boring for the readership you want to grow and boring for you as a writer. Different central characters bring fresh sparkle and variety to both your stories and the writing process.

You vary your cast within stories

The disjuncture between different types of people is a rich narrative seam. It increases your story’s depth, intensifies the point of view, and offers wonderful narrative tension as your disparate characters connect and clash. For that to work, all your characters need to be different, not just the “villains” of the piece. That also means learning to see the value in traits very different from your own.

You get wider scope for stories

As your characters open up in variety, so too do your storytelling possibilities. There are stories I’ll never be able to tell about a Meganesque character, even if I dress her up as an astronaut, a religious peasant, or a cursed child in a desert land. As soon as it’s not me, though, I can write about a Machiavellian commitment to social change, a status-driven ambition, a rigid adherence to minutiae, or a stone-cold indifference to others’ opinions, and how those traits play out to the good. When your characters aren’t you, your stories open up in exciting new ways.

You get more consistent characters

Once a character isn’t you, they start shaping their story themselves, because they have a distinct personality, which you can identify, and they act according to it. When your characters are still “basically you” and you’re trying to write a specific story, the events and character are often at odds. A Meganesque character doesn’t make sense as an astronaut: yes, she has the maths skills; sure, I can give her the fitness levels; but an astronaut needs the easy equanimity and (to me) near-bland resilience she simply doesn’t have. That clash will show in the writing. When your characters aren’t you, they stay in character – their character, not yours.

It’s easier to write about autobiographical events

The big things that have happened to you, which you want to approach in fiction or auto-fiction: surely, given they happened to you, perhaps even shaped you, this is where the character should be most like you? Counterintuitively, no. To make fiction about that, or even the thinly veiled memoir that is auto-fiction, you need artistic distance. That’s hard to get about something you feel so vulnerable, pained, or raging about. Putting clear blue water between you and the character – making them distinctly not you, or unlike you, in a few significant ways – helps hugely. It lets you write about it in a way that does draw on your experience, with all the insight that gives, and also with the objectivity that makes it the stuff of story.

You get to step through the magic doorway, regardless

There are times when writing seems impossible: when you’re so stressed it feels like you can’t breathe; when you’re crying so hard you can’t see the words. If you can step through the magic doorway into your story’s world, it’s transformative. You enter a flow state and your breathing returns to normal. Your tears dry and you rediscover a part of your life that doesn’t hurt. I’ve done both, but it’s only ever been possible when my characters weren’t basically versions of me. Having characters that aren’t you lets you step into your story world, whatever’s happening with you.

*

All your characters will always, in some way, be you: after all, you’re writing them. But instead of having mini-yous or bonsaied-yous enact every story, you get to act out being all those different people. Your stories’ freedom becomes your freedom.

And you do have the skills to do it. You live in a world brimming with people who’re very different to you. You socialise with them, work with them, and make a dozen accurate predications a day on how they’ll behave, without even noticing. That’s part of being human. That’s the same skill you can bring to your writing, to create characters unlike you and set your stories free.

If you want a rocket-booster to get your stories airborne, the Characters Unlike You workshop is on 17 August 2024, 10am–4pm, in Oxford. You’ll explore 8 personality analyses (encompassing types, spectrums, and shifts) to heighten your awareness of your own traits and create characters unlike that. Across the workshop, you’ll also try out 7 different tools to develop those characters. You’ll leave with 3 new characters, totally different from you, whose strengths you admire, and an ongoing toolbox for creating characters who make new stories fly. See all the details and book your place here: bookings close Thurs 15 August 2024.

Summer writing food: Roast Mediterranean Veg

 

As always, perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself. 

Roast Mediterranean veg is quick to prepare, easy to make lots of, and freezes well. You can play around with the exact ingredients and quantities, add extra protein for omnivore / veggie / vegan eating, and get creative with herbs and spices to change it about. 

It's also ideal for whatever extreme of summer we end up getting. In a heatwave, cooked food is less physical work for your body to digest than raw salads, so roast vegetables that are delicious at room temperature is perfect. As soon as a heatwave is forecast, I prep trays of roast veg for the week ahead. In veils of rain, you can serve it hot or reheat it, and enjoy all the flavours of summer while admiring how very green everything is, through the rain-streaked window. Possibly with a summer-themed blanket wrapped round you. I'll keep any further witter to after the recipe!

Scroll on for the recipe or download it as a PDF here. 

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Roast Mediterranean Veg

Serving and times

• Active time: 15 mins
• Oven time: 40 mins
• Serves: 4–6 (easily doubled or more)

Ingredients

• Approx 1.5 kg of mixed Mediterranean veg, eg
  1 aubergine
  2 courgettes
  3 peppers, any colour or a combination
  300g mushrooms
  2 small red onions
• ½ head of garlic (about 6–9 cloves)
• 4–6 Tbsp olive oil
• ½ – 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp pepper
• Optional: 4–6 whole mild chillies

Optional extras: protein

We often serve it as is, or with grilled chicken or sausages. You can also add more protein to the dish, partway through cooking or at the end:

• Chorizo: 5mm slices, 20 mins before end
• Halloumi: ¾ cm slices, 10 mins before end
• Walnuts: 5 mins before end
• Cheese (goats, camembert, brie) when serving

Optional extras: additional flavours

You can add whatever herbs, citrus, and spices you fancy, to vary it. Eg rosemary, thyme, sage, mint, basil, tarragon, chives, parsley, lemon, lime, chilli, cumin – though perhaps not all at once! My favourite combos are: mint and goats cheese; rosemary and lemon; chilli flakes and lime; cumin, leaf coriander, and lemon.

Method

• Heat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan).
• Chop the aubergine, courgettes, and peppers into chunks about an inch / 2.5cm big – err bigger than smaller.
• Rub the mushrooms clean of dirt and trim the stalk ends if necessary.
• Halve the onions, peel them, and trim the ends leaving as much on as possible. Chop each half into quarters or thirds lengthways.
• Break the garlic into cloves, the skin still on.
• Get an oven tray large enough to hold all the vegetables in a single layer. (The oven’s own tray does well, lined with foil if necc.)
• Toss all the vegetables in the olive oil, salt, and pepper.
• Put the tray of veg in the oven for 40 mins.

Optional Extras

• Before roasting: Toss any lemon zest, chilli, and whole spices (eg cumin) with the veg. Tuck any woody herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage) under the veg, stalks and all.
• While roasting: Set an extra timer for when to add your chorizo, halloumi, or walnuts.
• After roasting: Add any chopped soft herbs (eg mint, basil, tarragon, chives, parsley, coriander), any citrus juice (eg lemon, lime), and any cheese.

Notes

Avoid dishes with high sides for roasting: A metal tray with low-ish sides is ideal. Higher sides keep more of the moisture trapped, even when the dish is open at the top, making the veg boil in its juice more than roast.

Fridging, freezing, re-eating

• Keep for up to 5 days in the fridge. 
• To freeze, portion into tupperwares (don’t squish it down) & label with masking tape & a sharpie. Defrost overnight in the fridge for maximum food safety.
  
• For hot days, take it out the fridge an hour before to eat at room temperature, with a dash of extra olive oil and balsamic or citrus juice.
• For colder days, reheat for 10–15 mins in a 160°C oven. Add a splash of lemon or lime to brighten it.

Further witter on roast veg, chillies, and variable summers

In 2022, with the Summer of Writing workshops finally set to happen in person again, a massive heatwave was forecast. I leapt into action. For me and my partner, I roasted heroic quantities of Mediterranean veg, throwing in some of my freshly homegrown jalapeños: the perfect chilli-heat to add some zing but still eat whole without blinking. For everyone coming to the workshops, I laid in extra ice, double quantities of iced teas, two electric fans, an extra large garden umbrella for lunchtime, and a water-mister and hand fan to pass round. The front room, where the workshops are held, is north-facing and always the coolest, but even so I pinned thick white cloth on the conservatory side and the stair windows to block any heat from the south side of the house. The roast veg was delicious, and everyone at the workshops was kept as cool as humanly possible. 

After two weeks of heatwave, I made another batch of roast veg, with the new jalapeños that had grown. I ate one, and... I didn't even get the laughing chilli high. Just straight to crying with pain, half a pint of milk, brushing my teeth (while crying), more milk (still crying), and then collapsed into a pain-induced nap on my partner's lap. I couldn't even finish my dinner. Heatwaves, it turns out, make chillies hotter as well as people.

In 2023, I was even better prepared to keep everyone cool. Everything as before plus a second even bigger umbrella for the garden, more bottles for iced tea, cream black-out blinds installed on the south side instead of cloth... and we had the other kind of summer. Cue piles of towels to dry people who arrived soaking, coathangers for sopping coats to dry off, hot chocolate alongside the teas and coffees. All the veg I'd bought to roast made cosy warming dinners for wet evenings and welcome hot lunches for writing days. And the chillies, even the superhots, offered the humblest zing of heat, right at the bottom of their respective Scoville scales.

So, whatever kind of summer we get this year, beware of heatwave chillies, happy eating and happy writing!

Mapping Out Mist

The Chaos of Art

The thing we’re creating doesn’t yet exist.
We’re sat in the mud pit, banging our rocks
and shouting at flowers. Suddenly adult, insist
on a Timeframe of Output, firm, at a desk,
mapping out… mist. We can’t yet exist
in such untrammelled time. Thought-barges collide,
now huge in the fog, already. A list?
We detail the tips of our icebergs and teeter,
the swaying unseen bulk dismissed,
placating the busying Protestant mind
while we grow things that don’t yet exist.

I wrote that in 2023, while I was planning a new novel and also the Planning A Novel workshop. It’s a strange business, planning things that don’t exist, which also can’t exist without a bit of planning. You might have an exciting heap of ideas (as I did with the workshop) or reams of first draft (as I did with the novel). It has a definite existence in potentia, but… well, it doesn’t exist.

I plan a lot of things that don’t exist. Novels, courses, workshops. Every year, when I find out the two new Summer of Writing workshops, I set about writing the workshop descriptions: a line or two introducing the topic, fine; a paragraph of what we’ll cover, cool; and then a paragraph beginning “By the end of this workshop, you’ll have…” My brain skids to a halt so fast it leaves tyre tracks.

How can I possibly say that? I don’t know! The workshop doesn’t exist yet! I haven’t made it! I frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk. At some point, in the next day or two, my brain will leap forward confidently and declare, “Come on, it’s easy. If you went on a workshop described like that, what would you expect to have done by the end? Cos that’s probably what that bit should be? Duh.” And I briskly scribble that final line.

I’ve tried writing down that sage impatient advice, for future years, but it doesn’t work. I still need the “frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk” routine. Somewhere in that process, I’m working it out: mapping out mist.

Fog

Fires, canal-side grey. The
faint sparks drown in air. Light
fades and swells, ballooning
flimsy round a lost lamp.
Follow the path – but it’s gone.
Feel for barbed, bare hawthorn:
find where escaped thoughts hide.

The frown-scribble-crossing-out bit is feeding your brain all the puzzles you want it to solve. The moments that you’re walking, or staring out the window, thinking you’re not thinking but actually thinking very hard, are often the most productive. But you also need to capture all those mist-emerging thoughts, and order them so you can find them again. But how do you order something which has no order, because, again, it doesn’t exist yet? And you can’t have too much order, too soon: you need to keep the possibilities open.

Focus

Fixed stare – at nothing – I
float: the brambles have spread…
folding origami
flowers with unseen hands…
Focus! But as my dreams
flit, I see their work: they
fix what I’m not watching.

That’s wild mental work. During this work, I often painstakingly devise the exact thing I need to help me capture ideas. To draw these felt-tip rectangles, it would help to have a straight edge – a piece of cardboard, perhaps? I could mark the length and height of the rectangles on the cardboard, so they’d all be the same. Something firm enough to press a felt-tip against, with regular units of measurement I’d have to create… Oh, look, I’ve invented the ruler. Well done, me.

These pieces of paper: they belong together. But their order might change: I can’t staple them. I need something like a staple, but which I can easily put on and take off. Something that slides on, instead of piercing the paper. Perhaps, with a longer length of thin metal than a staple, I could twist it to fashion some kind of… Oh. I’ve invented paperclips. Again. I’m the Elon Musk of stationery.

When your mind is that full of half-seen story, you become simultaneously absolutely brilliant and very stupid. It helps to have stationery, for a start. A lot of stationery, if only to save yourself the trouble of inventing it from first principles. I’ve gradually learnt to add all the relevant stationery to my writing bag. For the first Planning A Novel workshop, I put in my biggest ever order, to create what we variously termed the “stationery villages” or “non-stationary stationery”:

And alongside the stationery, techniques. Over the years, and some eleven or so novels, I've worked out principles and processes, strategies that now seem as simple as paperclips. I lay my notes on those next to me, alongside the paperclips, the post-its, the slide-binders and felt-tips. I know that even though I haven't yet mapped out this mist, I have the tools of my creative cartography right there: the approaches for how to map out mist.

Esoteric problems often have deliciously simple solutions. "This is how you join pieces of paper you'll later re-order." "This is how you turn a series of brick story walls into things you can explore." "This is how you free your mind to work on one piece of the puzzle, without the whole Jenga-tower of thought falling down." Because if you can sort out the practicalities, the rest of your head is free for the esoteric. We need both: the simple solutions, and the respect for the esoteric, the seemingly-invisible work we’re doing.

And as you veer between the mapping and the mist, in strange ways, with a lot of apparently mindless staring at starlings and some seemingly pre-school-style Busyness With Felt-Tips, you’re conjuring up something that will, and increasingly does, exist.

Lapse

Light slips, between soft sounds:
loose as humming, it’s a
lilt of a moment, mind,
life – a caesura in
liturgy: we forget
lists, briefly, slide into
liquid thoughts, lipid ways.

The Planning A Novel workshop is running again this August in Oxford, alongside the two new workshops, Story Poems and Multiple Viewpoints, whose final lines I have now written. And that non-existent novel is now a couple chapters away from the end. You can see the complete list of workshops, past reviews, and how to book here.

Why Can't They Remember?!

It’s one of the most maddening things. You excitedly present the next instalment of your story to your writing group, your writing buddy, your friend who’s eagerly reading alongside your writing. You can’t wait for their reaction: their shock at your Dramatic Reveal, their thrill at the plot twist, their emotion at the most moving thing you’ve ever written…

Instead, they’re drawing a blank. They can’t remember who the character even is or confuse them with someone completely different. They’ve forgotten that plot thread, so your carefully constructed Dramatic Reveal lands with all the impact of a wet dish cloth. They’re asking “Is this about X character?” when it’s clearly five hundred years before: for crying out loud, it even says so on the page, right there, in the middle of that paragraph, see? “Five hundred years”. And that character: there was a whole scene about her, in chapter four! And that Dramatic Reveal: you have your notes from before; one of them spotted your foreshadowing and guessed what was coming! Are they even bothering to read your writing? How can they not remember?!

Sometimes, in writing group, we’ve discussed whether it’s because we’re not reading like “real” readers. “Real” readers don’t have to wait a week or a fortnight for the next instalment; they can just turn the page. “Real” readers aren’t following the story over a couple of years; they might finish the book in a month, a week, or even a single day of holiday.

It’s true, we’re not reading like “real” readers. We’re reading with our pens out, underling favourite bits, spotting repetitions, scribbling notes in the margin. We’re going back over the whole section in group, discussing it at length. Sometimes we’re reading the same scene again, rewritten with its previous issues ironed out. We’re paying incredibly close attention.

And those “real” readers, with the complete book in their hand? They’re reading in the bath. On the bus or the tube. In bed with their eyes drooping. On the sofa, curled up with a head full of flu. They’re listening while they chop vegetables for dinner or while they navigate the traffic on their way to and from work.

Every time, the group comes to the same conclusion: the gaps in time are more than balanced out by the incredibly close attention we’re paying to each other’s work. So if we can’t remember those details, the “real” readers don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.

Of course it’s frustrating and disappointing. Of course we’re tempted to pull up the exact passages that our writing buddies seem to have not even read or had wiped from their minds. But if they can’t remember, that’s a problem in the writing, which needs fixing in the writing.

As a teacher, I have a mantra: if a student doesn’t understand, that’s my fault, not theirs. It’s literally my job to help them understand. The same is true for us as writers: if readers don’t remember, that’s on us and it’s our job to help them. If two people in my group remember and one doesn’t, it still needs fixing. That’s a third of my readers confused, so why not make it clearer?

There are lots of things we want our readers to be wondering about. What’s going to happen next. If X is a bad ’un or is going to turn out trustworthy. Whether Y and Z will end up together. If that’s a clue or a red herring. We want to save the reader’s headspace for all of that, not squander it with them trying to work out the basics of who characters are, what happened before, and when even is this.

Frustrating as it may be to encounter the problem, fixing it is blissfully rewarding. It’s not like ironing a bug out of some code or correcting a spelling error, a dutiful necessary task. It is rich with discovery and delight. As you go back to make those characters more memorable and find ways to sneak in reminders, they leap to fuller life than they ever did before. As you seed memory-hooks into that past scene and weave them in to the new one, both turn thick with vivid detail and new story possibilities. When the phrase “five hundred years before” isn’t registering and you make everything look, feel, smell like it’s five hundred years ago, you discover astonishing new depths to draw on.

And even if you had to bite your tongue so hard it hurt, when you were getting feedback, now you can loosen it to thank them – because by flagging up the problem for you, they’ve helped you discover all this.

Then the next time you’re writing, you remember to create and seed those details in from the start, which embeds them even deeper in the story and opens up richer story possibilities. And then, when you’re asking the group if they remember X, they’re saying “Of course, how could I forget her? She’s the one…” and “Yes, absolutely! That was the bit where…”

Writing Skill: A Fond Farewell

In the run-up to the Story Elements course, I'm posting a trio of Writing Skills, one a week, to get you exploring the different ingredients that go into story creation: premise • characters • place • time • plot layering • tension & stakes • plot point of view • beginnings • themes & symbols • subplots • detail & dialogue • endings.

Bookings close in just three days!

This week's Writing Skill is A FOND FAREWELL, to play with the final four topics of the course: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. It's also a delightful way of using epistolary fiction (stories told through documents) to make a short story, with a side-helping of exploring subtext, reveals, and voice.

Your character is writing a farewell letter – in which they are (rather badly) hiding that they're in love with the person they're writing to. Their badly-hidden love becomes increasingly clear to the reader, but they remain convinced that they're managing to hide it.

If you prefer writing to discover, you can just leap straight in and find out the rest through writing. Start "Dear H—," and just keep writing. If you get stuck at any point, then have a glance at the suggestions for planning below, to feed in further ideas.

If you prefer to plan a bit first, then take a few minutes to brainstorm / jot down notes around these three things:

• How they're leaving (eg ship, train, plane, etc: whatever appeals to you for vibe / time period)
• Why contact will be difficult once they're gone
• How they know each other (eg visited town, holiday, friend of a friend, roommate, working together on something, went through some hardship together, etc)

I suggest you start writing once you have those bits of info, and let more details emerge through the writing. Planning can be useful to give us enough of a springboard to start writing, but never plan so much that you don't get to make discoveries through the process of the writing itself. Discovering through writing is part of the joy, and what we come up with that way is often more organic. Don't worry if your letter seems to go "off topic": follow it and see where it goes.

If you need more ideas of what to write about, then you could include... 

• their supposed purpose in writing (eg to thank the person, clear something up, info they forgot to pass on when saying goodbye)
• reminiscences of particular moments, objects, etc that they treasured
• things they discussed together before leaving
  
• references to people they both know
  
• their current surroundings and the contrast of that with where they've left
  

Sometimes we can find a story's end through pure writing-to-discover; sometimes we need to step back a moment and do a bit more planning. So...

Towards the end: To make it a short story, you need some sort of pithy ending. Some possible endings you might consider are:

• a reveal (to the reader) that the other person loves them too, though the character writing the letter remains unaware (SO TRAGIC 😭)
• a postscript of how / when / where the letter is found, and by whom (that could be tragic, untragic, or anything in between)
• a factual detail that gives the reader foresight (eg if the ship they're catching is The Titanic) – that could be a date, a place, a specific transport with a famously disastrous end, etc (the delicious chill of prescience)

or anything else that occurs to you!

Why this skill?

This Skill is a lovely organic way to explore the final four elements of stories: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. A letter written by someone in love immediately gives you its theme, whichever approach you take to it, and the intense focus of love, how it latches onto and treasures the smallest objects, will spoil you for choice with symbols. That same focus also allows you to explore detail & dialogue, because every texture of every moment and every word of the beloved's means so much, when a character is smitten – and, of course, the letter itself means you're using the character's voice. Making it a short-story of a letter also lets you explore the possible endings. And through that ending, the letter itself can become a subplot of a larger context: of the person who finds the letter, or the factual detail that tells us the inevitable end.

These are the final four elements we explore in the Story Elements course, starting at the end of April / start of May, as live online classes OR in person in Oxford, your choice.

Bookings close 23 April, in just three days' time. Read more about the course and heaps of reviews, and book your place here.

Writing Skill: Scene Bookends

In the run-up to the Story Elements course, I'm posting a trio of Writing Skills, one a week, to get you exploring the different ingredients that go into story creation: premise • characters • place • time • plot layering • tension & stakes • plot point of view • beginnings • themes & symbols • subplots • detail & dialogue • endings.

This week's Writing Skill is SCENE BOOKENDS, to play with the middle four topics of the course: plot layering, tension & stakes, plot point of view, and beginnings. Scene Bookends are those first and last lines of scenes that drive the tension leading into the scene and create DA-DA-DAAAA! moments at the ends of scenes. What's the question that's driving the scene? What changes as a result of what happens? What does the reader hope or fear will happen next? That's what the starts and ends of your scenes should flag up, and here's how to make that happen.

For this, you need a story to work with, so you have a couple of options:

• Grab a chapter or two of your work in progress, if you have one,
  OR
• Pick a fairytale whose shape you know pretty well and jot down five key scenes. For example, for Cinderella: 1) Weepily cleaning while sisters plan ball, 2) Day of ball and Fairy Godmother does her thing, 3) Ball itself from arrival, 4) Fleeing at midnight, 5) The next day's true-love-by-shoe-size discovery.

Now you're going to write the first and last lines for those five scenes. Don't worry if you don't have the rest of the scene written, that's absolutely fine! You just want to make your first and last lines as dramatic as possible. You can do this completely by instinct or, if you prefer, use some of the tricks and techniques below – up to you. Sometimes it's helpful to go by instinct first, then compare with the tricks and techniques, to see what you can refine.

Tricks and techniques

If you're using a work in progress, look near the starts and ends of your scenes: what are your most dramatic lines? Could you move those up/down to bookend the scene? Could you start the scene a bit further down, with that dramatic line, and end it a bit sooner, with a dramatic line? Some writers (me included) tend to have a bit of "throat-clearing" at the starts of scenes, and carry on writing a bit longer than necessary.

For the first lines, think, What's the narrative question that's driving that scene? In the first scene of Cinderella, maybe that's Will anything nice ever happen to her? or Why are the stepsisters so awful to her? or Will she survive their brutality? Most of the time, you want the first line to flag up that question. For example,"Cinderalla edged into the kitchen, hoping the stepsisters wouldn't notice her this time." 

Alternately, you can play a little guess-who/what game with the first line: "A foreign princess approached her, dripping with diamante, more elegant than Cinderalla could ever dream of being." And then it turns out, a few lines into the scene, that she's seeing her reflection.

For the last lines, think, What's changed as a result of what's just happened? What does the reader hope or fear will happen next? You want your last line to flag that up like a giant arrow pointing to continuing the story. You have a bunch of different techniques you can draw on here:

• cliff-hanger (end at most dramatic point) eg The clock clock strikes 12 and Cinderella's gown starts to fade into rags
• dramatic irony (we know something the character doesn't) eg "Behind Cinderella, unseen, the clock stood at one minute to twelve."
• false dawn: ("What could possibly go wrong!?”) eg The Fairy Godmother sending Cinderella off, confident everything will go exacty as planned 
• near miss: (“Whew, that was close!”) eg Cinderella panicking about time as the clock chimes – no it's okay, it's only 11. If she then relaxes, that can also become more dramatic irony: as readers, we know she mustn't relax, because she'll forget the time again! We know how the story goes; she doesn't.
  
• straight-up plot plan: Use the last line to set up what the character's planning to do next. eg a dirty tired Cinderella, just finished cleaning the kitchen, resolves that whatever happens, she will go to the ball.

Have fun!

Why this skill?

This Skill plunges you right into the middle four elements of stories: plot layering, tension & stakes, plot point-of-view, and beginnings. By separating out your scenes and working on the first and last lines of each, you're paying close attention to the plot purpose of that specific scene: that's part of your  plot layering,. And by creating strong narrative drama in those lines, you're highlighting the tension & stakes of each scene. 

Some of those techniques also highlight the plot point-of-view vividly: dramatic irony, for instance, can jump outside the character's point of view (us seeing the clock that Cinderalla doesn't) or can rely on the character's restricted point of view, compared to the reader's knowledge (her relaxing when it's only 11, not knowing the story because she's in it). And plot plan explicitly centers their point of view as protagonist.

These hooky lines to start and end also build the skills we need for beginnings of stories: ways to draw the reader in, before they know what the story's all about or what's going to happen.

These four are the middle four elements we explore in the Story Elements course, starting at the end of April / start of May, as live online classes OR in person in Oxford, your choice. Read more about the course and heaps of reviews, and book your place here. Bookings close on 23 April, just ten days' time.

I'll be posting another Writing Skill next week, so if you want it delivered to your inbox, you can also subscribe to the mailing list below / on the side of this post.