Good writers are like hen’s teeth. It’s relatively easy to report or relay information on a subject the writer has a background in. It’s much harder to take any subject matter and serve it up in a way that is both entertaining and informative. Good writing, unlike grammar, punctuation and spelling cannot be taught. Sure, creative writing courses are filled to the gunnels with wannabe wordsmiths convinced they’ll be the next J.K Rowling or Phillip Pullman. I should know I’ve attended the good, the bad and the downright appalling. Good writing should appear effortless to the reader when in reality the author has spent hours ruthlessly editing and tinkering with his or her work to make it the best it can be. It should be concise, immediate and pull the reader in.
I also believe good writing should take risks.
The English language is constantly evolving and growing as more words in common
usage make their way into the OED. Writers are no longer constrained by
traditional sentence structure or punctuation and the best of new writing
illustrates this. Poets are literary ‘test pilots’ who are constantly pushing
the envelope by challenging the status quo.
Great poets lead us through an unfamiliar, almost alien landscape where
we don’t have a clue what’s around the next stanza. They are in effect striving
to produce ‘The Lorenzo’s Oil’ of Literature. This is distilled into being by a fair amount of
nail-hitting, atom-splitting and advanced rabbit-out-of-the-hat-ology. It usually
begins with a rendering of pain, joy or poignancy by trimming off fatty
irrelevance and scratching out insipid detail.
At some point that
will-o-the-wisp ‘The Muse’ usually helps out, but this relies on the conscious
and subconscious getting along and we writers know they have a reputation for
caprice and ephemerally bad behaviour. Finally, and most importantly you need
to imagine your poem trying to describe to some heartless alien how your first
kiss felt, not forgetting to be beautifully vague and leave curious voids on
the page.
It can also be
difficult to pace one’s writing correctly. Cadence and rhythm are vital in
carrying a story forward. If a writer runs hell for leather through the first
few paragraphs it soon collapses in a wheezing heap after only a few pages.
Conversely, if they choose to wade through treacle with long leaden sentences
then readers tend to extricate themselves before the end of the first chapter.
It’s all about balance. Readers relish the quiet calm interludes just as much
as the frenetic action scenes. The best books make us walk, jog and race along
with them giving our minds a comprehensive workout as we travel towards the
last page.
Finally, and in my
mind most importantly, all good short stories and novels need big believable
characters in order to exist and to thrive. I operate on the principle of
character first, story second. Victoria Wood once said “Great characters can be
lifted and placed in any situation
without any loss of impact or plot deterioration” I know she was referring to
situation comedy, but the rules still apply to both short and longer works of
fiction. If you can nail a character in the first page then the reader will want
to stay with them till the last sentence. You only need to look at the works of
Dickens to appreciate the sheer beauty of perfectly crafted characters that
burn brightly in our memory long after the story has faded away
