Horatio Palmer's 1st Level 2 assignment
More General Writing Tips
On Characterization: The advice given on keeping a cheat sheet is a very handy tip. I started out Level 1 assignments by keeping a character cheat sheet close by, with physical characteristics and background details. After the second assignment, I gave up keeping such things. I decided that the character description in my head would suffice. This theory came back to bite me on my fourth assignment. After allowing a friend to read my work, he said that my physical descriptions of the characters weren’t vivid enough and he found them difficult to imagine. After hearing that feedback and reading this thread, I’ve decided that I’m definitely going to keep character profiles close at hand from now on.
On Dialogue: Realistic but interesting dialogue is a difficult task to accomplish. I tend to try keep my dialogue to a minimum (in real life as well as in my stories) because I reckon that what goes unsaid can tell us far more than meaningless chatter about the weather or some such fill-in-the-silence drivel. I don’t believe in wasting words. Actions speak far louder. If I find it necessary to write a long narrative, I’ll try keep it brief and exciting from now on as, having recently read Jane Eyre, I’ve come to realise that long narratives where nothing much happens, can be painfully dull. The master of using sharp dialogue to tell us about his characters is Quentin Tarantino. The dialogue in his films is amusing and lively and really lets us know about character background and so forth. In future, I’ll take a leaf out of his book as opposed to Charlotte Bronte’s.
On Conflict: This seems logical enough. If the internal and external conflicts don’t feed off each other, you have a disjointed and stunted story. I reckon one of my weaknesses is that I sometimes don’t give strong enough reasoning behind my conflicts, which might make my characters look like petty psychos who need to get a life and maybe some help to combat their psychosis. After all, isn’t the cause of a conflict sometimes as interesting as the results? Maybe that’s why we find TV programmes like [I]Inside The Mind Of A Serial Killer[I] so interesting.
On Scene and Sequel: This is an interesting one. Very important to the flow of a story is to keep useless scenes to a minimum. The reader won’t want to read a long, boring scene after a tense, exciting one, so it’s important to keep things moving along nicely so the story won’t get stagnant. Jumping from scene to scene can be a great way to keep the reader interested. If the next scene doesn’t immediately come to mind, leave it. Go to a later scene and write that. The missing scene will eventually come as a direct result of the later scenes. In essence, the story will fill itself in. The “So, now what are you going to do about it?” question is an excellent one to ask. If you care enough and empathise enough with your characters, the answer will come quickly as your characters should do what you think you would do in their situation. That’s my take on it anyway.
Burn the “Deadwood”: There are few more important things than this. If you write too many words, you’re only making your story unnecessarily long. It’s often more difficult to achieve brevity than to lengthen in a story, yet it’s a task of doing so is of paramount importance. You should always try to think of a better way of saying something. Less wording usually means a greater rather than smaller vocabulary. It’s not just a word or two here and there that can be omitted. Sometimes it may be necessary to remove whole scenes if they don’t advance the plot. Filmmakers do this all the time which explains the deleted scenes in the special features section of your DVD’s.
Let Your Characters Lead You to Your Plot: Though this seems like basic common sense, it can be a new and interesting way to go about writing a story. If you ask yourself the basic questions, any number of interesting situations and plots can arise. I’ve often come up with some really great characters but I’ve never found a story that they fit into. Characters sometimes walk into my head fully formed before the story arrives and they certainly make it easier to form a plot if they’re ready to go once the basic storyline comes along.
Dialect: This hasn’t been a problem for me yet, since all of my characters speak English natively and without a particular accent. I’ve already begun planning my next story which I’m going to set in London. It’s surprising how stereotyped dialogue is already influencing the story. I’ll have to carefully watch what my characters say in order for them not to appear like hackneyed stereotypes. The dialect should be colloquial but shouldn’t seem like an outsiders view of how typical Cockneys speak. I’ll have to start watching London soaps like EastEnders just to get my characters to speak proper! Non native English dialect will be a different story should I ever need to use it. The advice given to create non native dialect is simple and very effective and is advice that I’ll be using if and when the time comes to do so.
The Pros and Cons of Outlining: Usually, a plot comes to me, fully formed. When it arrives, I type an outline as fast as I can and keep the sheet beside me when I write. I reckon this is important as it provides a guide for the writer so they don’t go off course or away on a tangent to the plot. Sometimes, it is necessary to veer off, just to tell a character’s backstory or something similar, but having an outline makes sure you don’t stay off course for too long. When I stopped keeping character cheat sheets, I still kept outline sheets as I reckon they’re hugely important.
How can I become a better writer?
The tip about keeping an ideas journal seems a very clever and useful one. A seemingly useless idea might drift into your head only to be replaced by another one a minute later. Every idea could matter. Maybe not now, or in the near future, but some day an idea that drifted by twenty years ago could be the plot twist that you need to finish your twelfth novel.
“Widening your pool of subjects certainly makes you a better writer.” This is so true. The more you know, the more varied and interesting your stories will seem. I set most of my stories in faraway places that I know little about. If I were to set my stories in familiar settings, nothing would happen. So, it’s up to me to broaden my horizons. I learn about the places in my stories before I start writing so I have a vision of what I’m writing about. I use tourist guides, maps, aerial photos etc. My research is nothing if not arduous and it can take more than a week or so to get together all the information I want. Essentially, the more you know about your subject, the more convincing you’ll sound to your readers.
The more I write, the more accustomed I become to the rules for better writing. Editing must be a brutal process. “Burn the “Deadwood” is the most important mantra when it comes to writing. Cut, slash and burn until you achieve a lean story with no excess. I’ve always found spelling and grammatical errors distracting and, when abundant, annoying. This is why editing is so important and, the more I write, the more I come to realise this.
I’m not necessarily saying that the views presented here in my piece are the correct ones. They are simply my ramblings on a topic that I’m learning more about each day. Most of the opinions here may change as my experience of writing grows. That, I suppose, is the beauty of writing- it’s a discipline that changes as quickly as the minds of its purveyors.
