ILB Writing Club

i feel like i wrote about solo characters for about two years. also loads of stories of illness and stuff, i suppose cos of having chronic illness.

like i'm not for a second saying you can't write something great from whatever approach you take, my experience is hardly universal, but i do know personally i am having a lot more fun with my stories in the last few months since i started daring myself into more dialogue and relationships between characters. i hated dialogue but i actually enjoy it now. for some reason it is v cringe-inducing in a first draft but i think that's illusory. a thing i wrote recently i had to bully myself to write the dialogue, 15 minutes at a time and getting angry and frustrated and stopping. when i showed it to my class people thought the dialogue was fine, a lot of the anxiety is illusory i guess.

i've had a few epiphanies lately where a story with characters that began with some sort of point of view or question in my mind about something in the world has gone on to change my mind, or make me realise there's more depth to the initial pov i began exploring. i find that really exciting - like "it turns out what i think is actually this, based on what i found out via those characters"

xpost to emily. all rules in anything are made to be broken, but in finding out "does this work" or "why doesn't it work" i don't think the rules are a bad place to start...

(trad workshop exercises can feel incredibly stupid but I find that I'm more ok with using them if I hit a sticking point, then I can treat it as a kind of fun break and not beat myself up for not moving forward... and possibly something will come out of it)

(xp to self)

btw not trying to claim to know much here or that anything i say has any weight for anyone else.

also xpost...

xpost to emily. all rules in anything are made to be broken, but in finding out "does this work" or "why doesn't it work" i don't think the rules are a bad place to start...

this was to lj btw, i meant the previous bit was xpost to emily.

nothing wrong with trad workshop exercises, writing to template etc. constriction is the force from which coiled creativity can leap. ty for suggesting it! if a chapter is stuck then writing something very exercise-y will probably be for the best

and obviously yeah a working knowledge of 'the rules', or at least 'how it's been done before', is u&k

Imago - I think it depends on how self-involved your central character is. If they are (and a lot of central characters tend to be) then the characters only matter in how they interact with that one character. You can use dialogue and little character details to hint at richer interior lives, things that the reader will pick up on but your character may not notice or care about.

Just started the Kevin Barry stuff, very good

which one did you get? his two collections are p interesting, the second one won loads of awards etc, the first was well-received but imo is not as good, though still some great stuff there.

Showing is pretty much just talking around (rather than about) a thing, yeah? It's the notes you don't play.

"Dan went to the store."

vs

"Dan's phone rang. 'Yeah?' he said. 'To the Piggly Wiggly. You need anything?'"

There will be little kingdoms

Hi emil.y, I would miss the ivy (doesn't have to have "green" in front) covering the high window entirely, ditto the ancient elm in the garden, leaning against the side of the house as if drunk. If I had to choose onel I'd choose the elm, but they convey different things. Of course you might not need any of this, depending on what happens after she stares, but having read this far, I would miss those phrases.

i can't really say what i'd lose given it's just an example and i don't know what else is in it, but as someone who edits and shortens all day for a living i have to say i take a totally different approach with writing. rhythm and imagery are more important than almost anything else to me. if the rhythm/imagery/character dictates a long description of the house then that's what's needed. when i've edited my stuff for length or anything like that it just murders it.

sometimes what happens next is what sounds or looks nice, i guess.

Of course you might not need any of this, depending on what happens after she stares

This is the entirety of my point. Depending on how you write, depending on what you're writing about, sometimes you want the ivy and the elm and sometimes that's just self-indulgence b/c you think you're writing something so evocative, but honestly you don't need it and it shouldn't be there. But look at all of my posts, I'm not saying you never need it, I'm saying SOMETIMES. DEPENDING. Find your voice, find your subject, work out if you need it or not.

i don't think he's saying you should always write in that way, it's not advice in isolation but the second part of an example which begins with someone trying to evoke memories in a character, and he suggests offhand a way to do that that isn't "her head was full of memories", but by showing the house with some subtext, which obv is pretty average considering he just banged it together for an article.

Sometimes purple prose is texture and sometimes it's blather.

for sure.

but in that excerpt the two propositions on offer are not "she looked at the house" v "she looked at the house and the ivy etc" in that quoted text.

the two proposed bits are "she looked at the house, her head was filled with memories" v an example of describing the house in an "evocative" way which yes is crap, but serves it's purpose to illustrate the point. show the house, rather than telling the reader there are vague thoughts happening inside of someone's head

and avoid green grocer's apostrophes

Yes, I know. I'm not disagreeing with you, though I am on the side of soda in that the rules have been more annoyingly wielded in my experience than they seem to have been in yours. Btw, a few of your posts feel like they're saying that there's something there that I'm not understanding, when you're not actually telling me anything I haven't already understood. It feels quite patronising but I'm not sure that's the intent? Sorry if I'm just being massively oversensitive.

xxxp to LG

i guess i just disagreed a bit that the point of that excerpt is about writing more, or writing floridly, if that was your point. sorry if it appeared patronising.

euwww not "her head was filled with memories", just show a *bit* of evocative imagery (maybe, but def no head)sez this reader

i think of description the same way as a close-up in a movie. hitchcock will show you an "insert" i.e. a close-up of a hand turning a key if that's an important part of the story for a particular character. but if it's just a character coming home like they do every day and there's nothing important about the key or the lock you'd never switch to close-up.

this is all good stuff, really helpful. especially the warning to avoid "little or no dialogue, a passive character who never interacts with other characters, and no scenes." I'll keep that in mind

what about routines? do people find themselves trying to write everyday, at least a little? just when inspiration strikes? do you have a set time in the diary? etc etc I know most of the answers to these things is just 'whatever works', but I'm interested in others' experiences.

Currently I write when inspiration strikes, but I also have a monthly meet-up with friends who write and we do prompt exercises, sometimes just 20 minute ones, other times things to write over the month. It is best to try to do something every day, though. Habit is a good way of forming/replacing self-discipline.

Also, LG, I think I was being overly sensitive before, I'm in the middle of moving and super-stressed. Sorry again.

No worries! Sometimes in my enthusiasm I can prob go on a bit :)

what about routines? do people find themselves trying to write everyday, at least a little? just when inspiration strikes? do you have a set time in the diary? etc etc I know most of the answers to these things is just 'whatever works', but I'm interested in others' experiences.

I write most days but I don't beat myself up if life gets in the way. A thing I've noticed recently but never seen properly explained is that (and obv ymmv) it's nearly impossible to experience a real flow with a first draft. Whereas I can edit/rewrite a first draft and hours pass by. I don't feel like I learn much about writing in first drafts, and the things I feel when I'm doing them are untrustworthy.

The other huge thing for me lately is buying a printer and printing second or third drafts then reading over them with a pen. I don't think editing at a computer, the place you use for writing/rewriting, a tool on which it's incredibly easy to delete things, is good at all, ime.

I did this for ages and I couldn't edit properly, I'd get bogged down editing the first three pars instead of reading the whole thing. Whereas printing a thing out adds to the feeling that it's like I'm reading someone else's work. I find now I'm making huge additions down the margin of paragraphs and scenes that I can tell are improving the piece when I add them. It also compartmentalises the tasks nicely - it's good for laziness. Like the part where I just add in the edits I made on the paper to the computer feels a really easy and generous task to let myself do while still feeling good that I wrote that day.

I think a few people spoke upthread about keeping notes on your phone or trying to write down ideas or scenes when they come to you.

I write like clockwork almost every day (every weekday, at least), whether I have a starting point in mind or not. The process of just throwing words down usually prods an idea or two into existence. I personally need the rigidity, as it's often the only way I'm able to perform a task with any consistency (thanks, ADD!).

More specifically, I write on the long commute home, and if I'm on a good tear I'll detour to a nearby cafe to continue before heading home to my myriad of distractions.

yeah i get scared that if i stop i will never have another idea again! so even after progress on a thing that feels good, if i put it in a drawer i tend to have to start something else.

Definitely think that using both computer and longhand/hard copy is the best route to go - the mix that works best for me is writing out sketched ideas on paper, typing up & outlining structure & fleshing out on computer, doing some editing (e.g. individual words, adding bits, rearranging order) on computer, editing as LG describes on paper and then going back to the computer (repeat as necessary). It might sound a bit arduous but honestly I feel like it keeps things fresh.

Mind you, if you're worried about deleting stuff you should try Scrivener and you can either use 'track changes' or the 'snapshot' function. I prefer the latter, it's basically keeping a separate save file of your work but it'll be in the same project folder and easy to find. Track changes is probably preferred by most, though. Honestly, I recommend Scrivener for any writers, it's got so many useful functions.

Via the routine I detailed, I've filled maybe one and a half 200-pg. notebooks in the past year. If I at some point develop a skill for editing my mountains of unwieldy prose, I'll be unstoppable. But you'll be surprised at the volume you can accrue if you stick with it.

I want to hire someone on Craigslist or something to transcribe all of my longhand stuff so I can more easily edit. But christ knows I do not want to type out all of that shit myself.

this probably sounds eccentric but i also print stuff out in different fonts (cochin, geneva and courier are the three i use most) for rereads and mark-ups -- i want to read and reread at different speeds if possible, because you see and hear different things

Okay, wait, this is actually the first time I've done any explicit accounting of my output in a while and it's only now sinking in that I've written something like 600 pages in twelve months. BRB, gotta go call some book agents or whatever it is that people who write for a living do.

that's an interesting idea, must try that, xpost.

i bought scrivener about a month ago but still haven't used it or watched a tutorial :/

i can't really do much by hand, it makes me feel hamstrung by how slowly i write.

I did transcription work a long time ago for a guy who advertised in my local post office. His writing was THE WORST. It was hilariously bad, and as such, wound up being a pretty good job. (Not saying anything about OL's work, obviously!)

i know it's mean to criticise but i did a class at faber about two years ago and this one person who was particularly rude/unpleasant about everyone else's work was so bad that i almost thought it was like a practical or performative joke.

we had to do a piece where we scribbled down some stuff we saw on our journey home, the first night, and hers began "a gay-looking man gets on at oxford circus", at which point you think "hmm, not such a pc way of putting it" - then a few lines later it was "a woman is wearing a leopard print scarf - does she think we are in africa?" - alarm bells close to ringing now.

finally it ended with a huge islamophobic rant about someone wearing a headscarf needing to obey the laws of this country. i was surprised the teacher didn't intervene in a way, but i suppose it would have been awkward.

Man, it would be so weirdly comforting to find out that I'm actually a terrible writer. No need to waste any more energy on that pursuit!

For three of the last four years, I’d write from 4:15 to 6:15 every Monday to Friday morning, and for a longer chunk on Sundays. Since I work 65+ hours each week (teaching writing, and editing with private clients) that time of day was the only chunk of time available to me. But keeping those hours lead to a bunch of health problems, including a fairly severe concussion, and I found that my weight/exhaustion/illness needed addressing before I could return to writing. So I’m not writing very much right now, and going to the gym before work. But in a typical morning of work I’d manage 750 - 1000 words. I have always written slowly. I usually have one main novel in progress and one piece of creative non-fiction. My last novel, 95K words in its last reading, collapsed into itself in a way that doesn’t encourage me to continue with long projects.

Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda)
Posted: December 7, 2017 at 18:30:56
i know it's mean to criticise but i did a class at faber about two years ago and this one person who was particularly rude/unpleasant about everyone else's work was so bad that i almost thought it was like a practical or performative joke.

we had to do a piece where we scribbled down some stuff we saw on our journey home, the first night, and hers began "a gay-looking man gets on at oxford circus", at which point you think "hmm, not such a pc way of putting it" - then a few lines later it was "a woman is wearing a leopard print scarf - does she think we are in africa?" - alarm bells close to ringing now.

finally it ended with a huge islamophobic rant about someone wearing a headscarf needing to obey the laws of this country. i was surprised the teacher didn't intervene in a way, but i suppose it would have been awkward.

One of the workshops in which I participated last year had a super macho Serious Writer Type whose manuscript frequently talked about wanting to destroy “betta males” and “screw their women on the pavement in front of their dying eyes.” It became clear to many of us, by late in the workshop series, that this was a barely-veiled biographical stance and not a character voice. The writer running the workshop, who is famed for his vulnerability and sensitivity, clearly felt implicated as a “betta” and praised and fawned over the macho writer’s pose in this really sycophantic way, while a few of the other participants tried to gently suggest that the narrative read as ... damned creepy.

All of this came to a head when, egged on the sycophantic sensitive writer running the workshop, the Serious Writer Type submitted a graphic revenge rape that would’ve caused Bret Easton Ellis to puke. It was horribly uncomfortable watching the workshop leader desperately back-peddling. It was also kind of fun to glance around the room and share a knowing gloat with the co-participants.

No doubt not uncommon enough (anymore?), and also reminds me of a somewhat similar student who went on to do what most such only write about, before killing himself as well: see Nikki Giovanni's account of her and her class's experience with him at Virginia Tech (she and they were terrified when he read this stuff aloud; she told her supervisor, "Either he goes or I do"---the supervisor said that she herself would teach the guy,in her office).
Uh, originally meant to say I've use an outtakes file on gdocs, c&p from the manuscript. But may try Scrivener.

(In the outtakes file, I precede the paste with a brief indication of where it came from, and why I removed it.)

ronan if you're around on sun i can pop over --- or you can come to mine -- and i can talk you through the basics-that-you-need of scrivener (which i love)

the tutorials and how-to that they provide spend a *lot* of time on the many many little bells and whistles you won't need from day to day, and don't make it at all obvious which these might be

yes that'd be good! also good to catch up.

cool

having deplayed the cliche i now faintly want a version of scrivener with actual bells and whistles, to celebrate when i complete a thing and think it's actually any good 🎉

I used to write 500 words a day, just engrained into my daily routine, because there was always a 2hr window before my wife would come home from work and it was just perfect for it. That doesn't really happen any more, but one of the things that made it possible was just not caring whether I was writing complete shit or not, just getting something down and moving forward was the point. If it's shit you at least know why it's shit and can deal with it later, editing is so much easier than writing for me, rather than sitting there and spending hours trying to get the perfect sentence first off.

Like, just the little voice inside your head that reads over a sentence or a paragraph and goes 'hmmm, not sure about this' is just incredibly useful and should probably be obeyed. But if you're working on something longer you tend to hit structural problems as you go along so I'm trying to find the balance between planning something out and just letting it flow and that's incredibly hard.

If we're on a 'terrible writers you have known' kick then I once encountered someone at a writing group who had rewritten Jerusalem as a poem about Nigel Farage. It was only after we had spent several minutes critiquing it that we realised from his face that this wasn't actually a work of hilarious satire and was in fact delivered in deadly earnest. Virtually everything he read after that would trade in dubious racial caricatures of one type or another.

A few of us are starting a group for writers in our immediate local area and I'm really not sure how to go about filtering out people who want to write Islamophobic rants or violent rape fantasies or whatever. The prospect of willingly inviting weirdos into your life is not especially appealing.

does that mean i'm not invited ;)

have been part of various meetup dot com affiliated writing circles over the years. most recently one in woolwich. my gf even came along! the quality of the writing was not high (with a couple of possible exceptions) and the round-table crit was sort of nauseating and we left early. it always seems like a good idea to join a writing circle but as you say, it's very hard to legislate for the members being on your wavelength. we've tried to start our own more discerning group on meetup as well, but only like 4 people have joined and there's never been a meeting - in being selective about membership we've sacrificed there being any kind of momentum to meet

Something something committee something Sistine

^ will clean that up later

it's incredibly difficult to find a good writing group, mostly i found them frustrating, offensive or painful at worst.

it's annoying because a group of readers commenting on something is invaluable. my masters has a really good environment like this but i'm already thinking of what i'll do when it ends in about two years. i want to start a writing group at that stage but i don't know how to screen people. it's hard because i don't want to put up a wall and exclude people, i think commitment is the most important thing, but equally you want a certain standard. i'm sort of hoping maybe i'll just do this with people from my class.

xpost