What are some of the best tips you've taken on board from other writers whose work you love? Name the writers and their book that inspired you, and how it did so.
Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird? SS Van Dine's Twenty Principles? Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments? Elmore Leonard's Rules for Good Writing? Strunk and White?
Yeah, naw.
I've seen everything that all
these renowned style and composition gurus have to say, and who am I to
pooh-pooh the wisdom of the ages, but there's only one writing manual that I've
re-read and would recommend and that's Stephen King's On Writing. I
adore his novels so it's no surprise that I would drink in all the hot tips
about how he makes them.One bit in particular that I valued from the first time
I saw it, is something I was learning organically from Jane Austen anyway, but
King drove it home. In the back of On Writing, King reproduces a draft
of a short story with his handwritten notes and edits. One of his changes is
taking out the character name Ostermeyer and making it Olin instead. With his
typical lack of pomposity, he says it was annoying to type, would be more
annoying to read and absolutely unbearable to say in the audiobook.
I'm always trying to make sure my
names are just - but only just - noticeable enough to be remembered but
otherwise exactly the kind of names people of that age in that place would
have. Who was it who said: so many Tiffanys, so few Ednas? They were right.
Edna in one of my books would need to be accounted for. Mind you, so would
Tiffany.
Another thing, I've learned -
this time from Joy Fielding and Dorothy L Sayers working as a tag team - is the
importance of good dialogue. Fielding's dialogue in Kiss Mommy Goodbye
is a masterclass in how to make realistic speech reveal plot and character. It
gets so that every time the loathsome Victor clears his throat, you are as
ready for flight or flight as poor Donna in the novel. And every time Donna
fluffs and stumbles her way through an attempt to deal with what's happening,
you get that cold feeling that you wouldn't cope any better and thank God you
don't have to.
But Dorothy L Sayers? And
realism? Absolutely not. In - for instance - Clouds of Witness (but it
could be any of them) Peter Wimsey talks with an effortless articulateness, an
affability and unexamined noblesse oblige and he goes on for pages! Likewise,
the dowager duchess witters on up tangents and down rabbitholes without any
through line. And it doesn't matter. Their speech is so full of aphorisms and
allusions, so stuffed with tantalising titbits and so regularly subject to
hairpin bends of topic that you're hard-pressed not to say "Wheeeee!"
What have I learned then? That
dialogue is the writer's to do with what she will. There are no rules worth
sticking to.
Finally, I want to talk about a
differernt pair, Stewart Arnott and Simon Wood. Stewart is a retired West
End stage manager who has written a memoir of his decades on Miss Saigon and
Phantom of the Opera. Simon is a crimewriter who's written . . . well, tons,
but I want to talk about his Aidy Westlake mysteries about a professional
racing car driver.
Now, I'm not a musical theatre
fan. I don't know much about it and I've never felt the lack of that knowedge.
I've been to see musicals, mind you. So when I say I'm not a motor-racing fan,
I need to find a different way to say it. Never been, never watched it on the
telly, never not left the room if someone else was. Don't get it.
However, what these books taught
me is that if you write well about something you know and love, you can take
the reader with you regardless. National parks? Night markets? Cadaver dog
training school? I've been happily ensconsed in all these worlds for the length
of a novel and it's helped me stop worrying about my books finding an audience
beyond the pretty grim bit of Scotland where I'm drawn to set them.
Cx
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