Writing Post: Q & A

At work recently I made the mistake of letting slip that I write occasionally: normally I avoid having that conversation because it leads to awkward questions about whether I’ve been published or nor (“Yes, but not for a really long time,” because “I self-publish” does sound rather like an admission of uselessness or intense interest in collecting stamps), and because I’m in the process of writing something I would rather not discuss (“It’s a … story … about two men … who like each other … physically … often.”). This time, I was writing something innocuous and my co-worker specifically asked why I had the notebook with me, and it just popped out.

The ensuing conversation raised some useful questions, so I’m going to repeat an edited version of it here, this is more-or-less exactly what he asked and how I answered him.

What’re you writing at the moment?

A short story about a man who wakes up on a spaceship and everyone else is dead;  he is incredibly lonely, so he uses the computers there to create the perfect person to be his friend, but the computers are decaying as well as the ship, and what they end up making is actually more kind of an inhuman monster, and then he has this moral conundrum if he should kill this thing he has created or let it live or if he should end his own life. [Ed. This is how I talk in real life - in endless run-on sentences, like a five-year-old]

So do you mostly write sci-fi, then?

I write all sorts of things!

And what do you like, what do you like to read?

Again, all sorts of things, I don’t like to limit myself.

What have you read recently?

One of the books I read most recently was this, it was quite unusual, about a man who had been sent to a mental hospital as a teenager and he was trying to deal with it but instead of talking about it properly he was talking about Black Sabbath a lot, but kind of talking about how he felt at the same time – kind of using the music reviews as a sort of therapy. It was strange but really good, very sad to read. [Ed. Master of Reality by John Darnielle]

And now I’m reading a book by Forster, which is mostly about English manners and is all very twee and has a lot of people failing to tell each other how they feel about each other! [Ed. A Room With A View by E. M. Forster]. So I go about, I read a lot of different things.

Do you ever write about people you know?

In a way yeah, because you end up taking little bits and piece of the people around you and little events – I don’t write about specific people but sometimes someone says something you think is funny and you think “ah, I’m putting that in a book!”, I think sometimes my friends worry when they’re telling me things about their lives, “is she going to write about this?”, and I don’t, but you do overhear things and think “that is a very interesting argument you’re having there – you’re having your heart ripped out by your boyfriend this will make an excellent story”.

So when do you think you decided that you wanted to write, was it when you got published? [in reference to me mentioning I'd won a writing competition when I was 16 and been published in an anthology]

No, before that, I think – I was about seven or so.

Seven! What was it that made you interested in it?

I think I just liked the idea of being paid to make shit up, honestly.

Did you ever think about going into journalism?

Oh no, no. Journalism is about, mostly at least, trying to tell people the truth as much as you can, unless you write for the Sun. I like having the opportunity to make things up, and to take little bits from people to create something new – a lot of the things you have to write about as a journalist, I think, “how is that anyone’s business”, “so and so had an affair with someone else”, no, that’s no one’s business. Also, I don’t think I’m brave enough.

[digression on the subject of war photographers, Marie Colvin, addiction to trauma, bravery, the coverage of the Arab Spring, what motivates people to work in those situations]

So would you say it’s harder to make humour in person or in writing?

Definitely in writing – in person you can adjust what you’re doing because you can see how people react. I did a bit of stand-up, and you get used to kind of, you see what people like and you chase after that, you judge what you’re going to say on the audience, like you know what you can get away with saying and what you probably shouldn’t say, and there are some people you can just push and push and push it with… with writing you’re not in the same room, they’re distanced from you, the people performing it might never meet you, so it’s hard to judge where to push it. And you have to be very disciplined.

[digression on the subject of stand-up comedy, plagiarism, and comedy styles]

Do you think to be a writer you have to be a very creative person?

I think you have to be very observant, you have to be willing to watch people a lot, to see what they’re doing and what they want, so this — this job is good for that. How people interact. You can’t just pull things out of thin air. Your brain’s like a machine, you put in things, books and real-life experience, into it and then you kind of print out the results with our own specific colour of ink. I used to think, before I went on all those writing courses, that you could just cut yourself off and produce things out of nowhere but it turns out better if you have something real to put into it – it turns out more realistic.

Filed under: content: real life, content: tutorial or guide, advice, fiction, how to, interview, q&a, writing

Writing Post: How To Tell An Anecdote

This seems so intuitive that I wasn’t going to make a post about it at all, but a) Ruthi told me to and b) my own dear sweet mother cannot tell an anecdote to save her life. She is incapable of determining what makes a good story, of knowing when the story should end, and of knowing the difference between “important information that needs to be related to me immediately”, “an anecdote”, and “completely irrelevant prattle that no one in their right mind wants to hear.”

So here goes: things to keep in mind when telling an anecdote!

The subject should be something out of the ordinary

It doesn’t have to be mind-blowingly unusual, but it does have to be something out of the normal order of events. For example, “I thought I heard a car alarm but it was just someone’s phone ringing” is not an anecdote, and nor is, “I had pasta for lunch and had a talk with Brenda and she told me she’s going on holiday to Greece”; an ancedote is, “I packed the pasta into my lunchbox a bit too tightly this morning and Brenda was talking to me about her Greek holiday, so I wasn’t paying attention and I put the box down too hard on the counter and the lid just burst off and pasta flew out and that – that, Jonathan – is why there is penne in my hair. It’s not a fashion statement, it’s a culinary landmine.”

Spotting someone somewhere unexpected can be an anecdote if the reason for them being there is strange, rather than mundane: if an accident is to be the subject of the anecdote then it must contain some unusual cause or outcome, or at the very least some slapstick.

The pathos should not be excessive

If you’re telling an anecdote in which someone is injured physically or emotionally it’s very important that they’re either not badly injured or completely healed (and that this is evident in the story, otherwise what you’re telling is a sob story or a misery memoir instead, and those tend to make less entertaining pub-based listening.

Stick to the point

Provide just enough context that people know why to find it funny or surprising: often, if you can’t assume enough shared knowledge (“Lisa almost always wears black”; “The 123 is renowned for never being on time”; “fish can’t whistle”) to keep the explanatory prologue to a bare minimum, you probably aren’t telling your story to the right people. Unlike written fiction, anecdotes are there to be told to a specific audience, so you can always save it until the right one crops up.

Don’t go off on tangents, don’t include asides that aren’t relevant to the punchline/main point of the story.

Make yourself look bad

If you’re the protagonist of this anecdote – and this is usually the case – you really need to steer clear of turning it into a five year old’s “and then I punched him and he flew into the sun” fantasy where you are the hero. Clearly it’s going to be just as bad if you cast yourself as the pathetic downtrodden victim of a terrible catastrophe, but do, within reason, self-deprecate. Make yourself the butt of your own joke. No one likes a braggart, after all.

Don’t worry about the facts

If you’re wondering how to do all this while still telling the truth about your escapade, don’t. Truth has a certain place in ancedotes, in that your story sounds better if you start it on the foundation of reality and return to the events that occurred regularly enough, but let’s get one thing straight here: you’re not giving a lab report. This isn’t the faithful reproduction of the events as they went down, because real life very rarely hands you incidents which are perfectly paced and edited.

Don’t be afraid to chuck out things you said or did which don’t quite fit, or to include a better-written version of something someone said than what actually popped out of their mouth. Everyone does it: just massage the truth a little and you’ll have a much better story to tell people.

The golden ratio of truth-to-bullshit in my estimation is around 4:1 (or 75% truth, 25% bullshit out of the whole story), because full fabrication is harder to sell with conviction and more difficult to remember to repeat.

(I’m still not sure what the point was in this, but for more utterly helpful advice on storytelling, why not pick up the Kindle edition of How Not To Write for a whopping 77p?)

Filed under: content: tutorial or guide, advice, anecdotes, guide, how not to make friends, how to, how to make friends, how to tell anecdotes, hypocrisy, life skills, pub talk, writing

Writing Post: Stuck!

Oh, no. You’ve run into a writing wall and every sentence you try to put down makes you want to dropkick your laptop out of the window. Happens to the best of us, I’m afraid.

The next important question is “how the hell do I move past my enormous dose of STUCK?” and fortunately I know all sorts of exciting ways to unstick yourself.

1. Take a break.

It sounds logical but people forget to, quite often. When you’re slaving away at the coalface of literature and you run into a brick wall of no more thinks, sometimes it’s because you’ve overtaxed your brain and need to give it a chance to recover by doing something else.

But what else? Well, playing mindless computer games can often help you deal with a plot which is simmering on the back burner: I use my time making jewellery, and you would be surprised how useful taking exercise is. Overall, I’d say listen to your desires on this: what would you rather be doing? No, not toe-punting your laptop or melodramatic suicide, what would you honestly rather be doing?

Now go and do that for a few hours.

Even if it’s the middle of the night (and I know writers keep hours which verge between “unsociable” and “mental”), as long as the area you live in is relatively safe there’s no harm in tramping the streets to get your head into gear. Many’s the night I’ve stumbled through the park behind my house with massive headphones on, squelching about in the rain trying to work out why a scene won’t just write itself. Which, in retrospect, probably does sound mental, but I’m going to whip out my “I’m a WRITER” card and look smug.

2. Make sure you’ve planned adequately.

A lot of my “what the hell do these characters do now?” moments happen because I’ve not given myself an acceptably detailed plan of events that need to take place and how they’re going to take place. Given a suitably intensive plan, it’s easy enough to string a few scenes across to join up the more active areas and come back and edit them later (remember! This is only a first draft, and first drafts aren’t meant to be good!).

If you haven’t got a thick enough tangle of note for the section you’re up to, it’s a good idea to write them. Read ahead to where you’re supposed to be going, then try to extrapolate what needs to happen to get you from where you are to the next solid point you have written down.

Do not write it out properly yet, but give yourself more notes. If necessary, go back over your notes from earlier in the story, and check them. Do not give in to any urge to reread your prose from earlier because this is only going to despirit you and give you a case of the “why am I bothering”s.

3. Watch some TV.

Or films. Just get yourself in front of some narrative you can passively absorb, and examine for how they’re progressing the story. What are they leaving out? What can you reasonably leave out? What can you just put in a place-holder for, and move on to the next scene, without troubling yourself too badly?

4. Write something with the same characters that isn’t part of the story

Re-immersing yourself in the characters’ perspectives can be really useful in redirecting your energies; another good technique is to try writing the scene from the perspective of someone who isn’t the PoV character, to give you an idea of how things might be going down.

5. Let someone else look at it

You’re not omnipotent, and a fresh pair of eyes can often spot what you’ve missed when you’re wrapped up in your work. Your reader may ask a pertinent question which inspires you to answer it, or might be confused by something that needs explanation which will push the scene forward. Whatever else, reject the idea that writing is an ivory-tower exercise into which no mere mortal but the artist can be admitted. Get other opinions, writerly or otherwise, and get your work moving again.

Filed under: content: essay, content: tutorial or guide, advice, fiction, five things, guide, how to, writer's block, writing, writing tips

Writing Post: Passive, Impassive, or Apathetic?

Full disclosure: I hate writing about grammar, I don’t understand grammar, and these two things collided and lead to me whining at a friend who does understand grammar and trying to force her to explain in words short enough that I could understand them, and then possibly having a row with some people about something entirely unrelated in order to avoid writing it.

What I’m saying is, this post nearly didn’t happen. And probably shouldn’t have. I was asked by a friend after the “Show, Don’t Tell” and “What Is Litotes” posts if I could explain the “don’t write in the passive voice” advice meted out by the great and the good. Or the noisy and time-rich.

The problem was that at the time, I couldn’t. I know enough to avoid using it, but not enough to be able to adequately explain it, or even to explain what the “passive voice” is. This Language Log essay is doubtless very informative, but you do have to have a grip on the jargon of linguistics first. This post by Grammar Girl about the Active Versus Passive voice is easier to digest.

The Grammar Girl post says:

Another important point is that passive sentences aren’t incorrect; it’s just that they often aren’t the best way to phrase your thoughts. Sometimes passive voice is awkward and other times it’s vague. Also, passive voice is usually wordy, so you can tighten your writing if you replace passive sentences with active sentence.

which I think covers well what I would say: using the passive voice isn’t necessarily wrong, and in fact has a place in political speech-writing an awful lot (when someone wants to imply that no one was at fault. In other languages, where there has to be an actor in an action, it’s a little harder to do this. English at least allows for “the vase was smashed” without any suggestion that the smashing might have occurred as the result of someone doing something). It’s also useful in lab reports: “the solution was stirred vigorously”.

The passive voice also has a place in poetry, I think, and in certain situations in fiction. Perhaps what’s important is to use it when you know what you want to achieve with what you’re saying (or the passive, “with what’s being said”, which just removed the responsibility from you).

For example, the sentence people hate John.

Now, there are circumstances where this is the preferred form. If you want to make it sound as if John’s innocent in all this, for example, or that the hatred is the province of “people”, a group which can be inflated or contracted to avoid including the speaker, use this active sentence. People hate John. John is the one being done to. People are the ones doing the hating. There is action (hate), actor (people), and acted upon (John, who I’m sure isn’t that unpopular really!).

There are other circumstances where what you’re trying to communicate is different. Perhaps John’s kind of a bastard. Perhaps John inspires hatred so completely that it’s almost how you’d identify him. Perhaps there is a gravitas to his experience of others’ hatred that gets lost in the active clause. Perhaps you want to emphasise the degree to which he is hated by mirroring with first the passive clause and then the explanatory active: John is hated; people hate him.

John is hated takes away the actor and leaves John the sole inhabitant of the clause. What is important is John, and how he is hated. It doesn’t matter who hates him (and so we lose the weak, flexible “people”), only that he is hated. It becomes a title: John, the hated.

So there are circumstances even in fiction in which passivity is to be encouraged (voila!).

Why the injunction against it?

Because most of the time, in narrative, you want there to be an actor performing the actions you’re writing about. There should be someone or something doing something, as well as someone or something being done to. The active voice pins responsibility onto the actor, and makes sure that actions don’t occur devoid from a motive force.

But why should fiction be about that?

Because human minds are mad keen on intentionality. As observed by Dr VS Ramachandran and various others, the mind looks for actors in even actorless events. We ascribe intentions to inanimate objects and forces: the weather is against us, the trees are our friends today. There is a sound evolutionary suggestion for this, better-described in Phantoms in the Brain than I could ever hope to manage, as well-observed as the human tendency to look for faces in anything we see.

The active voice enforces a sense of personality and continuity, and strengthens the reader’s identification with the situation you’re describing.

The Grammar Girl post also notes:

A recent study suggests that less educated people–those who dropped out of school when they were 16–have a harder time understanding sentences written in the passive voice than those written in active voice. I only had access to the press release, not the original study, but the results made it seem as if you should stick with active voice if you’re writing for the general population.

So if you’re writing Young Adult or children’s fiction especially, it’s better to stick to the active voice at all times and not leave your readers potentially confused as to what’s going on and who is doing what to whom!

When the passive voice in fiction is pretty cool:

The passive voice is also, incidentally, useful in situations where an object with no internal life is the focus of the story, scene, sentence, or clause.

The passive voice, then, isn’t so much verboten as “not always appropriate”, like almost any optional element of writing. It’s useful for making the distinction between things you’d like the reader to believe happened by accident or without motivation, and things which you’d like the reader to believe were intentional. It’s not so much a “no-no” as a “know when to use it”.

Filed under: content: essay, content: tutorial or guide, active, advice, animate, evolution, fiction, grammar, guide, how to, inanimate, intentionality, neurology, passive, the active voice, the passive voice, tutorial, writing

Bric-a-Brac and Indolence Part 3: Paintingageddon

Continuing the strange, sad compulsion to proffer a little review of every free-entry museum gift shop/tourist attraction in London (until I get bored), I investigated the offerings of two attractions on Trafalgar Square, The National Gallery and its oft-ignored little sister, The National Portrait Gallery.

There is no need for a map of my route on this, because they are more or less in the same (vast) building.

The National Portrait Gallery

Number of gift shops: 2 (one general, one basement bookshop).

Perhaps overshadowed by its larger, more famous neighbour, the National Portrait Gallery’s is a small and unassuming gift shop following in the tradition of tat, mid-level gifts, more expensive jewellery, and postcards. It however also includes music, busts, and a surprisingly broad children’s selection. Many of the children’s items are diaspora from the Imperial War Museum and some look more at home at the Globe Theatre, but all in all it is good for what it is; I was taken with a Tudor-style fan, and the paper-play theatres for kids. There is a smattering of books, but the majority of the book offerings are downstairs in a separate bookshop.

The Bookshop.

This is apparently an independent bookseller, although styled very much after an upmarket Waterstones. Its sections are Art, Biography, History, Fashion, and Photography, and there is a rack of “music for book lovers”-type CDs apparently compiled by the Gallery. Quite what these comprise I didn’t check. The shop itself is narrow and not easy to manoeuvre and though it is served by a lift may not be wholly suitable if you have mobility issues that require external support.

The National Gallery

Number of gift shops: 2

Books and postcards line the walls: there is a print-your-own-poster machine from which deliveries to home can be ordered, and central stands featuring merchandise relating to more famous artists on display at the Gallery, notably: Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, and Claude Monet.

It boasts proportionally fewer children’s items them its small neighbour, but more items of interest, including the Heyland & Whittle hand cream (rose & neroli) which sent me on this weird review course in the first place; themed jewellery after various named artists (sunflower rings and the like, for Van Gogh); a model Vitruvian Man; a globe…

Disappointingly the shop also plays host to a rash of conspiracy hokum books drawing on the art of Leonardo da Vinci; masquerading as non-fiction too! But one supposes a sale is a sale, and they are at least related to the collection.

The basement/vaults shop.

This gives the impression of having much more child-oriented merchandise on display, and while the majority of wares are crossover or trickle-down from upstairs, there is more in the lower cost bracket than up there, and – obviously of huge importance to me - the Heyland & Whittle handcream is of different scent (olive & fig).

Downstairs has a modest selection of art supplies – including paints and an easel – and some more general ‘quality’ jewellery that is missing upstairs, along with pre-printed posters. These last used to be upstairs, if I remember correctly. But what really charmed and impressed me, and has led to a hearty thumbs up for the whole gallery shop, is the models of figures from Hieronymous Bosch’s ”Garden of Earthly Delights” (specifically the third panel)! Marvellous, humorous, and a wonderful idea which raised a real smile.

Service-wise, however, I could live without being stalked around both shops by black-clad students throughout my visits. They always look so intense.

Filed under: content: real life, content: review, content: tutorial or guide, art, galleries, gallery, gift shop, gift shops, gifts, hieronymous bosch, history, leonardo da vinci, monet, museums, national gallery, national portrait gallery, portraits, presents, review, reviews, shopping, van gogh

Bric-a-brac and Indolence Part 2: The Distractioning

What on earth possessed me to think reviewing museum gift shops was the act of a sane and reasonable adult? Boredom, I suspect, but now I am set into a course and so away I go again. This particular section is divided up between two days.

Day 1: The Museum of London, and then I went on a two and a half mile walk for some mad reason

I started at a museum at least...

The Museum of London

the carriage is alas not for sale

Number of gift shops: 1 (mixture of permanent and exhibition items, the exhibition items being close to the entrance and spilling out into the foyer of the museum itself.

The Museum of London‘s gift shop comes close to housing a baffling miscellany. Perhaps befitting the rule of the museum – to chronicle the extent of the history of London including the present – it gets away with the kind of awful tat one might find in any high street gift shop in the city (waving ER II statues and vile royal wedding mugs) nestled alongside the exhibition-specific wares of much higher standard (when I visited this was in relation to that iconic London writer, Charles Dickens, who has his own dedicated museum in Clerkenwell). The range, certainly, is as broad as London itself’s range; items run from fake Roman coins suitable for the very shallow pocket to Halcyon Days manufactured ornaments and jewellery inspired by the Cheapside Hoard.

A tidy swathe (although by no means all) of historical periods represented in the museum are also covered in the gift shop, along with more London-esque genera and tea-related items as the Museum and indeed the entire city strive to play up to our national stereotype. Household wares, trinkets, bags, branded rubbers and pens, miniature buses and comestibles (jam, for heaven’s sake!) all abound and – out of keeping with the other museums I have visited so far – the shop boasts a large children’s section with a good selection of books, educational and related toys as well as more general cheap toy-shop fare.

I applaud the Museum of London gift shop for their efforts in striking a balance between old and young, “posh” and “common”, as the city itself so often fails to!

Onto the bookshop: I have to offer the highest possible praise in that it is useful. I have returned to the bookshop at the Museum of London on several occasions in search of ideas of where to start looking for book titles to borrow from the library or order online, and the level of London-based specialisation is, as one would hope, commendable. I am especially impressed with the historical maps, map books, and map CD guides, even if they are rather pricey. 

I was planning on visiting the Tate Modern gift shop on the same day, as they’re quite close together, but as you can see from the map above, that didn’t happen…

Day 2: The Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre

This map is slightly inaccurate as Google Maps does not acknowledge the existence of St Paul's tube station

 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

and many a fine afternoon have I spent here

Number of gift shops: 1

This shop aims squarely at the mid-range in terms of price and quality – even the ‘artisan’ jewellery mandatory in these places does not top £40, not even the tiny scale model of the theatre itself, and indeed the only expensive items are the theatrical masks and the model skulls, and even they are under £100. There are little in the way of children’s toys (and those which there are were also on sale in the Museum of London) but as expected a range of children’s Shakespeare books are available; also book-wise there are tomes on theatre history, Elizabethan London, and some rather exquisite folio editions of various plays.

The majority of the shop is given over to memorabilia emblazoned with lines from various plays, which is disappointing: my hat is off to whomever designed the gloriously gruesome Macbeth section, though, and not least because I thoroughly enjoyed the production of The Scottish Play I saw at the venue in 2010.

The items of note at the Globe’s gift shop are, aside from fake blood and Globe beer of three different hues, almost certainly those which are very much unique to the place: DVDs of Globe performances, and rare books of period manufacture on display in a case on the way to the toilets, which are apparently “fore sale” to them as what can afford it. One assumes you’d have to be bloody minted, though.

The Tate Modern Gallery

It was for once sunnier than this

Number of gift shops: 3 (one small, one large, one exhibition-specific which I didn’t visit).

Small: Comparatively large section of children’s books, art-related toys, and some rather pleasantly cheap ‘mini-prints’ of various art works for impoverished art lovers (£6 each when I visited, and roughly A4 size). Obviously everything was if not well-designed then at least strikingly so, with an emphasis on clean line and clear colour.

The shop mostly comprises art and design books, although there are some teapots, some Tatty Devine jewellery (towards whom I feel irrationally fond for their connection to the rollerderby league I support even if their jewellery isn’t usually to my taste), and a central stand of Tate-branded art supplies, including artist’s mannequins and a display of wooden hands which all fell over the minute I went near them, giving me quite a shock! Unfortunately with art supplies I can never tell if they’re overpriced or not.

Stand-out item in the upstairs/small shop was an umbrella which changes colour when it is rained on (possibly just because I love clever umbrellas).

Large: More of the same, really, but with broader variety and more lines. It also includes mugs, some scarves and very nice bags by a particular designer who is slightly more expensive than I can countenance, a lot of t-shirts and geometric jewellery, “clever” toys for grown-ups, and an overwhelming and staggering variety of art books. The books cover history of modern art, biographies of artists, the neurology of art, coffee table art books, colouring books, how-to guides, and a very broad range of subjects.

There are a range of gifts for the impecunious including some branded pencils for 60p a pop, mini-crayon sets, and rather neat bouncy balls with glitter in them (which if I recall you can also buy from the Science Museum shop for exactly the same price and with which I annoyed an entire queue full of people outside the Drill Hall once), but overall the shop is geared to more money and – pleasantly – towards encouraging the creativity of its patrons with various activity packs and art games for both adults and children.

There are, naturally, also a lot of post cards, art prints/posters, and art film DVDs.

Filed under: content: review, content: tutorial or guide, art, barbican, drama, galleries, gift shops, history, london, london museum, marketing, museum of london, museums, performance, review, reviews, shakespeare, south bank, st james park, tate, tate modern, the globe, theaters, theatres, tourism, umbrella

Writing Post: What is Litotes?

As I had to explain this to a friend recently I thought I’d try to make a coherent post about it, as – no doubt to the detriment of my friend’s education – I was trying to explain the concept to him while half-cut and drowned out by a pub jukebox; not, I am sure most will agree, the ideal circumstances for education (especially from someone whose own education has been … underwhelming).

While preserving the privacy of our conversation, at this point we were haggling over acceptable use of hyperbole in everyday conversation, something which I delight in and which my friend reviles (fortunately the one thing we do both love is a good argument, and this one kept us going for a while); I asked if he had similar reservations about the use of litotes in everyday speech and on meeting with a blank face utterly failed to get the concept across. Drunk!Delilah scores nil points on literary education.

Litotes is usually credited originally to the sagas of the great frozen north (particularly in Icelandic and Old English), although as with anything to do with language and thought I suspect that it’s the kind of literary device that came about concurrently in a number of different linguistic civilisations and it’s only credited to the sagas because the people doing the crediting are European.

In the sagas, a phrase such as “not few were the men slain by his [insert adjective here] blade” would be used, under the assumption that cultural context would fill in the stoicism with accuracy; effectively, “not few were the men slain” translated to “he slaughtered his way through an entire army but frankly you wouldn’t believe how many people he killed so we’re going to go with the bald fact”.

Expressing an idea – usually one of extraordinary qualities, one which to describe “honestly” would require the use of terms that sound hyperbolic - through the denial of its opposite is not especially sophisticated in terms of rhetoric, and is in fact possibly a step below sarcasm or irony in terms of duplicity, but it and variants on the classic “not [adjective] = extremely [antonymic adjective]” structure are … well … not unpopular specifically with users of British English.

To be litotes, the rhetorical or literary device has to state and deny the opposite [strictly speaking the antonym] of the intended meaning in order to inflate or heighten the intended meaning by negation; this is most usually done through the use of antonymic adjective denial, for example, “her pustules were not pretty”, meaning “her pustules were repulsive”. The effect cannot be achieved with either an adjective that has no strongly-associated opposite, for example, “his foot was not purple” offers no immediate answer as to what colour his foot might actually be, whereas “his foot wasn’t exactly tiny” automatically creates the understanding (in the mind of a reader culturally attuned to use of litotes) that he has one massive hoof on him.

Even more so than the use of adjectives without direct antonym, litotes does not involve the negation of verbs or nouns; while the negation of a verb or noun can be used to make a rhetorical point (example: “What are you doing?” / “Not running?” in the case of someone walking very slowly), these fall under the aegis of irony or sarcasm.

To make it a little clearer:

Hyperbole: I ran so fast that I broke the sound barrier.

Simile: I ran like the wind.

Metaphor: I was lightning-quick on my feet.

Litotes: I wasn’t exactly dawdling.

Understatement: I was going quite fast.

Hyperbole takes the factual rendering and exaggerates it to ludicrous extent, sometimes for comic effect and sometimes (in an impressive and paradoxical display of implied irony) to diminish the known factual events themselves by comparison to the hyperbole. For example, after a mediocre weekend known by all to be a disappointment or, at best, averagely entertaining, one might state, “I’VE HAD THE TIME OF MY LIFE. THIS WEEKEND WAS THE NUTS”, clearly implying that the weekend in question was actually quite rubbish by comparison with the statement itself. This is ironic hyperbole.

Litotes takes the factual rendering and negates the opposition, in a manner similar to “drawing the negative space” in art. By taking a binary set of adjectives (or “graded opposites) and drawing attention to, then denying the antonym of the desired adjective, the binary is brought to mind by association. One might almost think of it as depressing one side of a see-saw in order to make the other rise.

Visual metaphor

This is, I feel, mildly more coherent than my belligerent shouting about Beowulf in the pub, and if nothing else it contains the words “antonymic adjective” to make me look like I have ever learnt anything in my life, and also a picture of a see-saw.

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Writing Post: “Show, Don’t Tell”

As I’ve mentioned before, I was daft enough to hurl myself into an apparently unending debt to the Student Loans Company in exchange for something masquerading as an education in writing, variant: creative. Most of what I learnt was commonsense advice which you can get from five minutes of conversation with a reasonably self-aware writer (and should), and the rest was exercises which one can reasonably make up for oneself.

One thing that was infuriatingly never explained on that course or at any other writing workshop I attended, but which is thrown out as a baseline piece of advice by almost everyone, was: “Show, don’t tell.” I had to figure out precisely what this was supposed to mean on my own, because once people have entrenched themselves in the business of throwing ideas onto paper, they tend to forget that not everything about their method is self-evident.

Well I have to tell, don’t I? I’m writing, not drawing a picture.

And anyone who responds to this question with “you need to paint a picture with words” is deserving of a slap for being such a tit.

The problem is that human brains love working shit out from the cues around them. They like to be stimulated, and they’re extremely good (sometimes a little over-active) in inferring motivations from actions, interiority from external clues, and thought-processes from facial expressions. They like evidence in their ears and eyes, and become a little bored with being fed assertions that come without support.

If you want to enthral or absorb your readers in a story (and I would hope that you do) or at the very least want them to go on reading it, they need to have a sense of what is going on, and then have some work to do for themselves.

Reportage is the business of handing over the facts in the quickest, most palatable selection of bite-sized brain chunks, fiction should, hopefully, given your brain a little more to play with in order to keep you invested in the story and the characters.

Alright then, smarty-pants, how? Because I’m not getting this.

Well, assume you have … I don’t know, some bloke called Gary. And in your story, Gary is pissed off. In real life when people are pissed off they don’t usually need to utter the words “I am pissed off” unless they are a champion-grade represser, because by the time it comes up you will have already noticed from hundreds of cues.

They might, for example, sigh aggressively, slam kitchen drawers, thump things about, and generally impose themselves physically on the world around them with more weight than usual. Our Gary might vibrate with tension, clench his jaw, or glare and fume. At this point there’s no need to tell people he’s angry, they’ve “seen” it. They’ll instead start working out why he’s angry.

“Show, don’t tell” requires you to have a good mental image or map of your characters and their reactions and personalities, and it requires that you have a good mental map of their surroundings. It takes a little more work than stating bald fact but it produces a much clearer and more engrossing effect.

Well what about people who miss all the clues?

People missing what’s being laid out for them is definitely a problem, but you can lay it on quite thick if you choose, and remember it’s always possible if you’re so minded to have a character make the observation based on the available facts (if you’re feeling sneaky you can of course have them be wrong in their assumption, which makes the reader feel cleverer than the character) and reinforce the impression left by the unspoken hints.

This can be done earnestly: for example, in the case of our Gary up there, someone might just ask him what the matter is; or it can be done ironically, in which case someone might very well dryly say, “I’m getting the impression you’re not altogether happy” (for an excellent example of this in TV, see Blackadder II, Episode 1: Bells‘s opening scene). In these circumstances the dialogue acts as a punchline or a bookend to the action, “telling” the reader what they either know or suspect, and confirming their suspicions for them, thus making them feel all the more clever for having got it “right”.

What you’re saying is that it amounts to manipulating the readers?

Oh god everything amounts to manipulating the readers! Fiction is just lying to people with more interesting words. I mean, you’re making stuff up. The trick is to make it believable and compelling stuff so that you con people into loving it as much as you love the story that’s already in your head, and caring as much as you already do about the characters you’ve invented.

And besides, laying down breadcrumb trails for people to follow is fun. Certainly more than drilling everything into them without room for reinterpretation; wriggle room like that is what gets people talking about what they’ve read, discussing their theories, and getting other people interested in your work, too. Not to mention – as I keep carping on about it – it is much more likely to hold people’s attention and immerse them properly in the story.

Do you really think it’s a difficult notion for me to grasp?

Not exactly, no, but the simplicity of it can be deceitful. The mantra of “show, don’t tell” is concise to help people remember it. It’s the kind of thing you jot down on a post-it by the monitor or scribble on the back of your hand (or growl at your past self when you come to edit your own work, like I do fairly often), but it is often hard to translate the mantra into action. It’s easier to write, “Gary was pissed off with Delilah for lecturing him about how to write,” but more satisfying to write, “once Gary had finished reading the post he left a comment reading ‘u r a dick who do u think u r,” and give the matter more realistic weight.

You are a terrible hypocrite and not a very good writer.

I know, I know. But promise you’ll at least try to keep it in mind.

---

Equally dictatorial writing advice, exercises, and essays can be found in How Not To Write By Someone Who Doesn’t.

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Writing Post: Research and Plot

Before I begin: I have a degree in Creative Writing. This isn’t so much to wave around a piece of paper which is effectively useless and which has left a £17k debt hanging over my head like a very expensive sword of Damocles, because I don’t want to pretend to anyone that I did anything other than drink, lie, and occasionally lie while drinking at university – all the noble pursuits of an educated young woman who has hauled herself to a former Polytechnic to study something meaningless to make up for the fact that she’s too bad at maths and too lazy to do anything worthwhile. No, it’s more to make it quite clear that even slumping through seminars, lectures, and endless workshops will not necessarily prepare one for having the faintest clue how to go about writing, and if anything to labour the point that there are fewer hard and fast rules than you’d expect.

The other point I want to bang on about to the point of irritation is that no one needs to listen to me; is “Delilah Des Anges” a household name? No. Is this because of the cronyism and neoptism and celebrity-worship culture in the publishing industry? No, though I’m told these are rife. Is it because my work is uncategorisably complex and arty? Probably not. It’s almost certainly more likely because I’m a self-published writer who still isn’t exactly at the top of her game yet.

With all those provisos aside, I wanted to ramble aimlessly (do I ever do anything else?) about methods of writing, because I’m always interested in the approach other people take.

This grew out of a conversation recently, when I lamented the realisation that I probably only have one full book in me a year, and wondered what the heck I was doing with the rest of the year (for reference, most of the writing itself takes place in one month, so that leaves 11 months unaccounted for); “Recovering?” suggested sycophantic boyfriend.

“But whyyyyyy?” whinged I. “It’s not like I do anything else.”

That of course turns out not to be the case. Stories do not fart forth fully-formed in a novel-length puff of flatulence from the writerly rear end, they have to be nurtured into being with – to stick to the supremely ill-advised guff analogy – the appropriate diet and digestive system. Diet and digestion vary from person to person and research and reverie vary from writer to writer, often with the same room-clearing end result (“I’ve written a poem about my feelings about my father, and I thought you might – guys?”).

Most of this advice can be directed squarely at the preening, arrogant little know-it-all I was when I was 19 or so and determined that I was a genius. I was apt not to listen a great deal to advice then, and I’m not overwhelmingly more likely to pay attention now, but maybe when I’m thirty-nine I’ll have assimilated a little more humility and motivation.

Research

This isn’t tireless poring over ancient dusty tomes in some wood-panelled libraries. The internet is also right there, and it is full of people who are willing to answer your questions or point you in the direction of people who can. Having conversations with people in the pub counts as research, if they’re the right conversations. People will tell you all kinds of things if your explanation is “I’m writing a book and I don’t want to screw it up.” Some really helpful information has come from near-total strangers being willing to share painful details of their personal lives to make sure that something I write represents that experience more accurately.

And yes, Delilah, you have to do the research first otherwise the plot will come apart. Currently, fairly important details of plot are being rewritten and redirected because I managed to pull my finger out sufficiently to find out which substances were legal during a particular time period. Almost anything can trip you up, whether you’re writing real-world fiction or fantasy (if you have ever sat next to a former pony-club member while watching some fantastical epic and heard them muttering angrily about what horses will and will not do, you’ll know there are pitfalls aplenty even when your protagonist has two heads). Research before you start writing saves the number of messy, butcher-like rewrites and edits later on.

Research will also help to flesh out characters, character dynamics, and the feel of the area in which you’re writing.

Plotting

I used not to do this before I started; indeed The Other Daughter was typical of my previous approach of meandering through a few thousand words of indiscriminate groping about for a sense of place and a plot to crib, and unfortunately that approach shows, and requires editing and rewrites later as new directions later in the plot lead to backmatter becoming unworkable.

For more recent writing longer than short fiction I’ve found it’s invaluable to work out at the very least what major events are going to occur in the course of the story,  and to whom. Then when. After that the motivations and effects should – given fleshed-out characters and a functioning world – take care of themselves. For heavily multi-threaded stories diagrams, spreadsheets, and all sorts of terribly impressive-looking rubbish has to be called into play, but even for single-threaded stories it’s important to keep track of what’s happening outside the field of the narrator’s vision because it may impact on them later.

As with research, the more you plot up front the easier the writing is and hopefully the less editing you’ll have to do afterwards. My entire approach is geared toward allowing the writing to happen as easily as possible (which means I can get the 2,000-8,000 words a day written for an extended period of time) and to cut down the amount of editing and rewrites necessary to tell a coherent story because I hate editing.

Plotting, and drawing out a day-by-day guide of what needs to be written and roughly how long it should be ensures that the actual business of writing is as stress-free as possible, which is good because I have all the self-discipline of a fox in a henhouse and will do almost anything to get out of writing (including starting a blog entry about writing).

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Making a dress, Des Anges-fashion.

Having had a fit of pique in John Lewis and purchased an unfeasible quantity of grey and black striped jersey at a knock-down price (I suspect the knock-down price was eventually what motivated me), with the intention of “making a dress” with it, I then unfortunately had to follow through.

I am far from the world’s most adept seamstress, in part because I was raised by a former pattern-cutter and diligent maker of clothes who wouldn’t let me anywhere near the industrial Singer whose hum still haunts my dreams, or the (left-handed and therefore impossible for me to use) extremely sharp and very heavy sewing shears whose snip snip also serenades my memories. Less poetically: easier for mummy to do it than me. I’ve thrown together the odd garment (and very odd they are too), and a pirate costume, but these were at least five years ago and after I sliced a lump out of my hand in the careless trimming of fleece I left the sewing machine alone aside from repairs.

And so it was that when I came to cobble together this frock that I’d forgotten the most important components of sewing:

• Procrastination
• Swearing
• Bloodshed
• Hanging threads
• Contempt for written instructions.

The pattern in question is V8280, a Vogue Easy Options wriggle dress which I had to buy in the size far too small for me a few years ago for reasons to tedious to go into here but which involve a flight to Sweden.

The intended garment

The first obstacle the debonair and dashing seamstress (that’s me, by the way) must face is figuring out where the glazed fuck she left her dress patterns in the post-firebombing Dresden tribute act that is her shoebox-sized flat. Appropriately enough they turned out to be on top of a box, on top of a wardrobe, in an actual shoebox. These were retrieved with the assistance of Tall Boyfriend, who stood on a chair.

I’d already decided that my previous method of pattern-cutting (clear the floor, pin fabric to the carpet, repeatedly stand on pins, knacker knees and back trying to cut something which is pinned to the floor, cry, cut chunk out of hand) was not going to be sufficient this time, and so I loaded everything I though I would need into a carrier bag and tramped off through the park to my dear friend Maud’s house, because she has a table. Technically I also have a table but it is about the size of a man’s palm and has three computers and a bookchair on it.

This led to special ingredient #1, procrastination. Laying out the fabric, lining up the stripes, and discovering that as I didn’t have sewing weights I would have to use coffee and sugar in jars all seemed very productive, so I then sat around having a chat about nothing in particular for rather longer than I should have. Then I repeatedly laid the paper pattern out the wrong way (this part is meant to go against the fold; this part is supposed to go this way to the grain of the fabric) because I was too busy having a charming and fruitless chitchat about fuck-all.

I was transported back to childhood by the sound of shear-snips, rolled up my cut pieces still pinned to their patterns, and slogged off in the dark through the park once more (stopping, because it was a clear night, to look up at the full moon and whichever stars the North London sky was prepared to let me see); when I got home, of course, I had another lengthy procrastination session because it was “too late”, and I decided I was going to watch Warrior instead.

I think I was justified

The following day I put Tom Hardy aside (temporarily) to move onto contempt for written instructions.

The dress I was constructing was made from jersey. This immediately rendered lining a pointless waste of time, energy, money, and my very limited patience, so I struck from the instructions any reference to lining. I also hate “ease stitching” because I’m never convinced I’m doing it entirely right, and therefore ignored most of that, too. Had I not made this dress once before I would probably have ignored the darts and ended up with a baggy mess, but not this time. Score one for diligence against my inherent laziness.

I then proceeded to sew one of the armhole caps the wrong way wrong and have to unpick it, leading to to the star (but by no means the finish) of swearing.

Swearing continued, accompanied with hanging threads, through the construction of the bodice, then the skirt. This culminated in a brief moment of giddy triumph when the instructions claimed I need a zip, and I didn’t have a zip, and I wasn’t fucking going to get a zip, and I realised that the material was probably stretchy enough to let me pull it on and off without any sort of fastening. So I displayed further contempt for written instructions, and forged ahead.

Bloodshed occurred when I had to rectify another mistake with the shoulder-pieces, twisting sections inside out to sew them down and succeeding primarily in stabbing myself repeatedly in all my fingers with sewing pins.

It was only while hemming that I realised my contempt for written instructions had perhaps been a touch misplaced, and that in order to stop the front of the bodice from flopping down over my breasts like a sad bloodhound’s jowls, I would need to sew up the bodice to the armholes a little higher. This would, however, result in no longer being able to pull the thing over my head, and then I’d need a zip after all because there was no way corset lacing (my go-to closure because banging grommets into cloth only requires a hammer) was going to work with unreinforced jersey!

In the end I opted not to sew the bodice to the sleeves but rather have strategically-placed poppers covered up with the lovely buttons I’d bought to be decorations down the front. This required swearing and bloodshed as my  needlework is not the most coordinated and it was getting on for 11pm by then.

Successfully rescuing my frock from hubris, I continued with my original plan of sewing on some lace ribbon I bought from Etsy.com around the waistline to cover for the fact I can’t line up stripes with any level of success break up the monotony and stop me looking so much like a blimp. This involved a multitude of hanging threads and swearing but was at least thankfully very light on the bloodshed as my fingers were starting to go numb by then.

the finished article

None too shabby, although I suppose there are those who might say that ladies of my not inconsiderable girth shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes (to whom I say “bugger you”). This was sized up from a UK14 to my size, a UK22, by guesswork alone, and the fact that I got such an entirely accurate fit from it amazes me no end! The hanging threads still need trimming, and I’ve a suspicion one of the buttons will escape at an awkward moment, but I think that’s gone a lot better than my adventures in cooking ever have done.

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