The Writer's Way: A Complete Guide to Creative Writing with 40 Inspirational Projects

Introduction

You have opened this book and started reading it. I do not know why. I cannot know why – though I would like to say thank you.

It does not really matter whether I know why you are reading it, but it does matter that you should think a little bit about why you are reading it, or at least thinking about reading it.

Of course there are some possible reasons that are not very relevant to what happens next. Perhaps you are standing around in a bookshop waiting while your friend chooses a present for an aged aunt – and this happens to be the nearest book. Perhaps you are marooned on a desert island where, by chance, this book is the only one around. Perhaps you are just checking that the book is completely useless before you tear it up to light a fire. Perhaps you have been given the book by a totally mad relative, though in that case you might want to ask yourself why the mad relative chose to give you this book – insanity is often marked by acute perception: is there some method in the madness?

However, I am going to assume that you have picked up the book because somewhere, some part of you really wants to write – or because someone who knows you reasonably well believes that you really want to write and has given the book to you.

The first thing you may want to know is who I am and why I am writing this book. The words ‘author’ and ‘authority’, when you look at them, are obviously linked together in their meanings, and I could just say that I am the author of this book and that is my ‘licence’ or ‘authority’ but I still think you should like to know a little about the someone who is proposing to teach you something this important. This is not simply a textbook or a compilation of facts, it is an invitation to set out on an endeavour that has emotional as well as practical meaning: I’m sure you’ll agree that you should not really accept an invitation from someone you know nothing about.

I have to guess which questions you want answered, but basically I was born in 1950 and grew up in London and south west Scotland. I went to Oxford University in 1968 and did a BA in English Language and Literature. I had always wanted to be a writer and in 1974 my first short stories were published in an anthology of new writers. In 1978 my first novel, Daughter of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award – a well-known annual UK prize for young writers. Since then, using the opportunities that gave me, I have been a writer. I have published five more novels and five collections of short stories, but I have also branched out and written several non-fiction books, on various topics from the history of gardening to theology. I have written two radio plays and a number of other projects for the BBC. I was the last writer to work with Stanley Kubrick on his AI project, which is now a film of the same name directed by Stephen Spielberg; and I have written widely for magazines and anthologies. The point about all this is that I have worked with an unusually wide range of different sorts of writing.

Over the last ten or so years I have also taught creative writing to an improbable mixture of writers, ranging from prisoners to MA students, in a wide variety of ways: one-to-one mentoring, short residential courses, one-off work-shops, classes, groups and increasingly by distance learning, deploying the new technologies like email. During the 1970s I was a member of a very successful (in the sense that all the five members of the group went on to become professional writers) writers’ group, which I believe enabled me to finally become a ‘writer’. I started teaching in the absolute belief that we can help each other develop both our talent and our attitude and understanding of the job and this conviction has never really left me.

In the light of that I have sought out jobs where I can think about what writing means and some of the ways people might go about it. I worked as the Literature Programmer for The Midlands Arts Centre, where I arranged events and courses in the context of an inner city arts centre, and where of course I met people doing the same thing with other forms of art. Later I became the Course Leader in Creative Writing for The Open College of the Arts, which offers accredited courses by post. From there in 2003 I became part of a project called Crossing Borders, a really exciting initiative of the British Council and Lancaster University, where we deliver mentoring courses to new African writers in nine different African countries. I tutor on this course myself but I also co-ordinate, choose and facilitate the other mentors, so I have regular contact with lots of creative writing teachers, all of whom are writers themselves, and have the chance to discuss the ways we work and share our experiences.

Meanwhile I am also teaching on the Lancaster University distance learning MA, which is delivered through email and the Internet. I am a critical reader for The Literary Consultancy and a one-to-one mentor to writers chosen by The Arts Council for England regional offices in the North East, which means that I get to work with and help writers who are further along the writing way.

All this has meant that I have an extended opportunity to think about the whole business of ‘teaching’ creative writing. I began to feel that I would like to pull together some of this experience, and in particular look at the odd way in which creative writing is both an important part of many people’s identity – from their work they draw not just self-expression but also an inner sense of satisfaction and integrity – and a craft, which needs training, honing and working on. That is how I came to write this book and I hope it will offer a balance of these two perspectives.

In addition there is something else I want this book to do. I want it to excite you about language itself, the basic tool of our trade. This interest goes back beyond my own writing career, to my student days and even before. I believe we have to love language before we can use it fully for self-expression and communication. For me language is not just vocabulary – it is grammar and syntax and punctuation and etymology (the history of words) and a number of other things that too many people think are rather boring. For those of you who have forgotten or never learned about how mysterious and wonderful grammar itself is, I hope that this book will inspire you. To help those of you who find the whole subject either a turn off or something that makes them feel incompetent or afraid I have written a short appendix on p.232 which will explain the terms I use: just turn to it at any point if you find yourself uncertain about any technical detail of what I say.

Obviously a great deal of my thinking comes directly or indirectly from other people, and I would like to thank all my students, each of whom has probably taught me as much as I have taught them; all the other writers I have worked with and talked to over more than a quarter of a century; and especially Dr. Graham Mort, now of Lancaster University, who taught me more about creative writing and its teaching, especially within the area of new technology and distance learning, than I can begin to acknowledge. There is a great cloud of witnesses hovering within these pages.

For those of you who like to know more about the context in which someone works, I have two children, one of whom is an actress in New York and the other is studying photography in Liverpool. I now live alone joyfully in south west Scotland, and have a very rural lifestyle with a great deal of silence built into it. This is one of the best things for me about email and the opportunities it gives me both to teach and to be solitary; writing this book is an extension of that pleasure. At the moment I am working on a non-fiction book about silence and solitude and writing, and preparing some more short stories.

But that is enough about me. What about you?

I am going to assume that you are not yet very experienced as a writer. This really is a ‘beginner’s book’. There are lots of books for people who have already set out on the writer’s way and feel the need for more guidance or nourishment on the journey: I have listed some of the ones that I have found useful on my own adventures in the further reading section at the end of this book. I hope you will want to try some of them when you have finished with this one.

You know you want to write creatively, and you know you want to write so that other people will want to read what you have written. However you are not sure how to go about it at any of the three levels that matter at this point:

•  the emotional level

•  the practical level

•  the technical level

Or, to put this another way – you are not sure how to manage yourself as someone who is writing; how to manage the time and space and daily business of writing; and how to manage the writing itself. I hope that this book will help you with all three of these levels, and indeed they are quite closely related to each other. They are not really three totally separate things. I have been a professional writer for over a quarter of a century now and I am still continually moving from one level to another. I lose confidence in my ability to write, or I find I am mismanaging my writing time, or I am confronted with a new technical writing challenge that I cannot resolve – and too often it feels as though all three are happening at the same time. They are just three different ways of looking at the problem.

Why do you want to write?

You know you want to write, but before you set off on this frequently arduous and sometimes tedious journey it is worth pausing to think about why you want to write. There are lots of reasons why people want to write and some of them are better than others. Two of the best reasons are:

•  You have something important to say, or a story that has to be told – but you know you do not have the writing skills to communicate it as well as it deserves or needs.

•  You just really want to. You feel an urgent need to express something of yourself in language that goes beyond even the best conversation. This ‘something’ is too important to be expressed badly or clumsily.

However, some of the other reasons that people come up with are rather less good:

•  You want to get rich. Despite anything you may read or hear, writing is a very bad way to get rich. Although there are some novelists who write international bestsellers, get fabulous sums of money for film rights and even become millionaires – they are in a tiny minority; they usually did not plan on it; and they still have to work very hard indeed. A few gamblers also become very rich, but most don’t and there is always a large element of luck involved. In fact very few professional writers can survive on their genuinely creative writing alone: that is why they are always taking teaching posts, reviewing, working on community projects and doing all sorts of part-time work to subsidize their writing.

If it is hard for novelists it is even worse for other writers – no one gets rich being a poet. If you want to get rich get a proper job – one that at the very least comes with some security and a pension.

•  You think it looks easy. If this is your main reason for starting, you should probably forget the whole thing. Good writing, as most of the best writers down all the ages will freely acknowledge, is not easy. It is both hard and hard work.

•  You want to be a writer. This is a very different matter – lots of people want to be writers but do not really want to do the writing. They like the glamorous idea of being an artist and having an artistic, liberated, exotic lifestyle. They relish the thought of being famous or having a claim to immortality. They like the thought of jet setting around the world and attending chic literary parties, getting important phone calls from their agent and having their picture in the papers.

None of these things have anything much to do with writing, which is mostly a solitary and very unglamorous activity. Most serious writers will tell you that these sorts of things, although often good fun in themselves and well earned, are actually distractions from writing. In any case, before you can be a writer you have to do some good writing.

Of course, none of us is a hundred per cent pure-hearted. We have mixed motives even in areas like this. A fairly large dollop of ambition, or even greed, will sharpen your mind and pencil admirably; will help you through the slow difficult slog that is part of the business. An eye to what readers might like is part of the business of communicating. An awareness of what publishers might buy is particularly useful for keeping oneself focussed, especially in the later stages of self-editing, finishing and submitting one’s writing. There is no excitement in the world quite like getting the first finished, printed, bound copy of your own book with your own name on it – not just your first book either: it is a delight which continues and grows with each subsequent publication.

Having said that though, I also know that it is simply an ‘excitement’ – it cannot compare with the deep joy and sense of power and accomplishment and fulfilment that I get when the writing itself is going well. If it were not for this sense of doing well what I most want to do, it would not be worth it.

So think about it. If you commit yourself to writing – rather than merely thinking about writing or imagining yourself writing – you are committing yourself to a great deal of frustration and hard work; to disciplined training like a marathon runner; to an activity that will inevitably cut into your spare time and irritate your friends and family; to almost inevitable disappointments (whether you are successful or whether you aren’t); and to endless criticism (looked for or not), misunderstanding and straightforward rudeness from people who have, of course, never tried to do it themselves but are nonetheless the real experts because they are readers, critics or reviewers.

Exercise 1: Do I really want to write?

•  Put this book down and do something else for a while. Something that leaves your mind reasonably free – like taking a brisk walk.

•  Think about why you bought the book and whether or not you really do want to try and write creatively. Remember that you do not have to. No one has to write. There is no moral or legal code that requires you, or anyone else, to write.

And that is the end of the negative section. If you are still reading, I shall assume that you really do want to write – and that you want to reach the end of this book able to write more to your own satisfaction than you feel capable of now. From here onwards, although I shall try and look at some of the reasons why writing is hard and doesn’t go smoothly and feels hopeless and you want to quit and you hate language and yourself and your favourite brand of coffee, I shall not question your motivation or your desire.

Why are you reading this book?

You are a person who wants to write, and you have picked up this book because you hope it will help you achieve this. In itself this is quite curious because we are all aware that lots and lots of books, including many of the greatest works of literature and some of the most popular, long-lasting stories and poems were written by people who did not read this book – or any other book on the subject.

They did not go to creative writing workshops, or evening classes, or weekend courses. They did not study the craft of creative writing at school or university – they certainly did not get a degree in it. In a few cases, at least, when they wrote their first books, some now famous writers did not know any other writers or talk to any experts. They wrote under difficult circumstances – scribbling away without typewriters, word processors or even decent lighting, often at the end of long days of exhausting work. This is interesting because, although there are exceptions, this is not true of creative people using other art forms.

Painters expect to study; until the nineteenth century most of them went through long and demanding apprenticeships, and since then they have still expected to study their craft and build up their skills over a long period of time. (The word ‘studio’ originally meant the place where the artist studies.) In a similar way musicians – composers as much as performers – all have teachers, and look for formal training and years of hard graft and technical learning. Even Mozart, that infant prodigy, was formally taught by his father – no one thought that even that level of talent was ‘enough’. This is simply not true for writers. History, as well as the biographies of many of our contemporaries, proves that you do not necessarily need to study creative writing formally. Indeed there are lots of people who still believe that it cannot be taught.

The moral of this is that obviously you do not really need this book.

But you are reading it. There are a number of reasons why you might be reading it.

One of them is simply to save yourself time: this is a very proper motive I think. I am one of the writers who never did any formal creative writing training – although, as I’ve mentioned, I was in a truly wonderful, nourishing writers’ group in my twenties, which was certainly a major learning experience for me. But I know, from the actual business of writing; from working with some really excellent editors; from teaching creative writing; and from sharing all these experiences with other writers, that I could have saved myself a great deal of time, energy and grief if I had known then what I have learned the hard way since.

I hope that quite a lot of this book will be about just that: about the things I wish someone had taught me, both technical and psychological, thirty years ago. There are exercises, tactics, strategies and solid information that will make your journey smoother. It is a bit like getting decent boots if you want to take a serious long hike: well-fitting boots won’t make you fit, won’t stop you getting lost, won’t make the gradient of the long