Find a long piece of music or an album, preferably instrumentalist. Ideally, it has highs and lows - parts where the music is upbeat, parts where it's dark, sections of tension, melancholia, light relief. Classical music works well as do movie soundtracks (if you skip out any pop songs), or (my personal favourites) albums by Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre or Enigma.

Sit down, put the album on, and start writing whatever scene the music makes you think of. A tense, underworld exploration? A happy couple? A chaotic storm of dreams? Go with the music, shifting the tone and pace of the story to match as you listen.

If you're someone who types slowly, you may find you have only time for a sentence or two before the tone changes - that's okay. Treat it as an outline exercise, in that case - you can flesh out the sentence into a paragraph or so later.

 

No writing games this week - too frantic preparing for Paris. But I do have two great posts for you (okay, one's a podcast, but it's still a "post".)

One - on your author-voice(s) and your character's voice(s): what they are, how to find it (or cheat at it, if you're struggling), how to know you've got one, and how to protect it once you have one.

Two - a podcast on "the Hollywood Formula" over at Writing Excuses (a great running series about all manner of writing, especially spec. fic). Don't cring at the word "formula", this is actually a great breakdown of how the major emotional arc works between characters in a story, and it's a great tool for getting to the crux of creating an emotionally satisfying arc.

 

This game is actually some paraphrased advice my mother (also a writer) gave me about a draft I was summarising for her. I'd written what should probably be a 5-10,000 word story inside of 2000 words, and achieved this largely through 'telling' most of the story instead of showing.

Now, telling isn't always evil. Sometimes it's necessary to summarize information that might be tedious to show, or show a long transition of time, etc. There are many (valid) reasons for telling, and some solely-told stories can still be entertaining if the character's voice is strong and interesting. That (probably) isn't the case, here. It was just me being impatient to get the story 'out'. As a result, entire subplots are largely lost, and the viewpoint character (it's in first person) is essentially a set of reader-goggles, with no discernable personality of his own. Not good.

The game is two-fold: take a piece of text and separate all the sentences. Basically, open it up in Word / Open Office and insert a page break after every full stop. I'll explain why in a moment.

Now, take each sentence and flesh it out - turn it into entire paragraphs, explore it thoroughly. Take a page or so per sentence. Don't try to join it up wo thte preceding sentence, or segue into the next; treat each as an individual piece of writing (that's why you put page breaks, so you can't necessarily see what the next sentence is). When you're done, you'll end up with story-swamp, a giant mess of 'stuff' about the story that you're trying to write.

After a fortnight or so, you can come back to it, read through your swamp and pull together what you want out of it - but the important part is to let your brain fill in all the possible nooks and crannies of the story - you may find that the story you're trying to tell isnt the one that that idea needs. Or even that you're trying to fit two mutually exclusive stories in one (or that you only have half a story there). 

So we've created our treatment, our logline, and made notes on what isn't working with the plot and character lines. Now we have our novel in miniature (treatment), complete with mission statement (logline) and a note on all the ways and places it isn't fulfilling said mission statement. But we're not done, yet. Remember when I said we'd get to pacing and drama? Well, yes.

Tension is how you tell the reader something is important, how you draw them in to caring about this particular moment more than what's come before. It's not just a matter of making the monster bigger or the reward greater, it's in the writing itself - the rhythm of sentences, the character and narrator focus, the sound and the impression of words. You can make a scene about someone tying their shoes inordinately tense, if you want to. Controlling tension through your novel is a lot of work, but absolutely essential.

Tension, pacing, drama - whatever you'd like to call it - is essential to a novel, but it's not like chocolate topping. You can't just pour some over and make things tasty. Tension in the wrong place is perhaps worse than no tension at all.

I nabbed this with glee from the bookshop some time ago, and it gradually filtered up through my giant To Read interdimensional-bookshelf-portal. I knew of (though have not yet located and read) Black Juice, her most famous work of short stories (though I didn't know she's actually produced a fair number of books, most of which are largely unheard of by even the literati, it seems) but she's held a special place in my author-repository ever since a judge somewhere compared my writing encouragingly with hers nearly a decade ago. Ego is a powerful thing.

She became something of an unknown-role-model (interestingly, she also resorts to technical writing 'when the money runs low'), without my ever taking the time to go and research or, you know, actually read her work. 

 

 But - Tender Morsels, her much acclaimed novel released mid-to-late last year, did not disappoint. Except for the parts where it did, but the rest of it was so strong that I didn't mind - ney, I even expected and was happy to receive - disappointment.

Three of the books I read (or, in one case, tried to read and gave up on) last year were what's usually termed 'slow writing'. It's writing that doesn't provide continuous story development. We're never sure if what we're reading is actually progressing the main plot, or just an aside or a character moment. In extreme cases, we're not even sure what the plot is. Not, at least, until we're most of the way through the book, by which point a lot of readers have probably picked up something more immediately compelling.