We notice only a fraction of the things that happen around us. But we see everything. And the things we see, but don’t consciously notice, affect our responses. That is the idea behind subliminal messaging. It’s also the idea behind literary motifs.

Ad-men, con-men and illusionists use subliminal stimuli. In a now-famous stunt, illusionist Derren Brown used the technique on two ad-men, manipulating what they had believed was their free creative choice.

Writers deploy a version of this too: motifs. Motifs are recurring elements in a story. The recurrence may be of images, words, sounds, ideas or phrases. They are often used to underline a theme, recurring like an “aura” before a migraine attack. We are not necessarily consciously aware of the repetitive pattern. But, so runs the theory, our subconscious mind takes it in and invests the scene with special meaning.

Take, for example, the green light in Fiztzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

The light gets five mentions in the book. In Chapter 1, the light is mysterious, something Gatsby reaches towards. It next reappears in Chapter 5, shorn of mystery, when Gatsby understands it is the warning light that burns at the end of Daisy’s dock. At the end of the book, the narrator reflects “ Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

The green light is the symbolic manifestation of what Gatsby craves and cannot have: acceptance into old-monied society. If you have read the book, did you notice the recurrence of the light? If so, did you spot all the other mentions of green? And of blue, yellow and other colours?

The whole novel is colour-coded[1]. Green is the colour of the American Dream, of envy and of renewal. The sad colour, blue, is the hue of Gatsby’s lawn and of the giant watching eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. Yellow, an aspirational colour, near gold, symbolises old money. Gatsby’s car is yellow.

You may not have noticed all these colour motifs (I didn’t). But, arguably, your brain did. If it didn’t, Fitzgerald went to a lot of construction trouble for nothing save to provide material for literary criticism theses.

Why would an author use motifs?

• To create a deeper layer, underscoring themes. The green light in Gatsby, is pointing to the unachievability and emptiness American Dream. Or, the mockingbird in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a recurring symbol of innocence that underscores the theme of the loss of innocence.
• To provide a marker that summons a mood. In the same way that Derren Brown uses conditioned “anchors” to precipitate his subjects into particular mental states, the author may use a motif to trigger a state in the reader. For example, in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, the refrain “the only way is through it” summons up the characters’ pain and resolve.
• To provide a ready memory jog to the reader for an infrequently occurring character. If the character dresses in an unusual way, or has an unusual tic or distinctive speech patterns, it helps the reader place who they are. For example, Captain Carrot in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, being a person of some purity, smells of armour polish and soap, while Corporal Nobbs has a unique aroma of cigarettes, skin cream and old cabbage. This use of motif has no symbolic connection with theme. In contrast, the smell of cold possessed by the Others in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, underscores the theme of existential threat.

How to add motifs to your story

First, consider what the themes of your story are. Themes are the issues the story addresses, like, for instance, goodness is its own reward, or why does the toast always land butter side down? Then think about a symbol that would stand for that theme: for instance, a lamb for goodness. Then find several appropriate moments in the story to layer in the symbol. Voila! You now have a motif.

[1]  Vera Palawska, Colour Symbolism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsbt https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1636853/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The skin of a writer is an extraordinary thing: hard enough to stand up to criticism, but soft enough to let good advice through.

But how do you know the advice is good? There is a difference between good advice and what we want to hear. And there is a balance to be struck between listening and ignoring.

Tip: Get yourself in the right mindset

It can be difficult, even wounding to hear criticism of our darlings. If you are wounded, it pays to take some time to let emotions settle before you assess the advice. Remember, all criticism is opinion. Your critic may be right, but they may also be wrong.  OK, now you’re settled, loins girded. I’ll share with you the process I go through

Step 1: Listen to yourself

Even if  I don’t like a criticism, there is sometimes a small nagging feeling of recognition. Even though it may be a monumental pain, to which I’m instinctively resistant, to restructure the first third of the work, is there an inner voice whispering that this may be a good idea? If there is no such voice, the criticism could still be valid: I may just be in denial.

Step 2: Is this actionable?

Not all criticism is useful. For example, “I didn’t like this” is completely useless: there’s no change I’m being recommended to make. Whereas, “If you prefigured her fear of the dark, this scene would have much more impact” is useful: it’s actionable. I may still decide I don’t want to take the recommended action, but that’s a different matter.

Step 3: How many?

How many critics have made the same comment? If one critic dislikes something you’ve written, that can be readily dismissed as opinion. If several people have the same criticism they are more likely to be onto something.

Step 4: Who are they?

Does the criticism come from someone whose opinion I respect and trust? Does the criticism come from people who read or write in the genre I’m writing? The response of romance readers to a thriller may be less relevant than that of thriller readers. There’s little point in telling a fantasy writer that dragons don’t exist and their inclusion spoiled the story for you.

Step 5: Does it fit?

Individuals are, well, individual. Some people will comment on the lack of, for example, olfactory description, others will comment on an overabundance. Advice to improve the pace by adding conflict scenes may not help a work whose aim is reflective. The question for me is “does this advice fit with and enhance my intention?” To take a concrete example, a critic recently pointed out in a chapter the lack of interaction between the protagonist and many other people. For this critic, it made the character less three-dimensional. But my character is deeply introverted and, in my view, it’s the lack of interaction that makes him three-dimensional.  

Step 6: Whose voice?

Ideally, a critic is examining how well I’m achieving my intent. But this is not always the case. Often, criticism is of the “if I was writing this” type. It’s almost always best to ignore this advice, however seductive. You can only ever write in your own voice.

Step 7: Sequence

If a critic says (especially if several say) they didn’t follow something, I pay close attention. I’m the author so I know exactly what’s going on. But I may well have omitted to write a step in the sequence, or to signal a change of place or time.

Whether or not to use present tense is ultimately a stylistic choice. Despite what I say below, there is nothing that a gifted writer can do in one tense that they can’t accomplish in another.

The present tense is often said to add “immediacy”, a sense of being in the narrator’s present moment , like a movie. This can help to keep the reader on the edge of their seat.

Younger readers, brought up reading novels like The Hunger Games, may come to expect the present as the normal tense for writing. Older readers, brought up on a tradition that used to favour past tense, may find the present tense irritating or contrived. An analysis of submissions to #pitchwars found use of the present tense was more common in YA writing.

For those who think the use of present tense is an annoying modern fashion, it’s worth remembering that Charles Dickens Bleak House, published in 1852, is written in present tense.  Neither past nor present tense are inherently right or wrong. But there are consequences to the choice of present tense:

• Apart from flashbacks, the use of present tense constrains you to follow the flow of events. This need not be a problem but structures that play with time become harder or impossible. You’re prevented from anticipating and making use of the future (since you’re carried along on the stream of the present) and it’s more difficult to make use of non-linear time, breaking up the sequence of events. The inability to manipulate time can lead to characters who are simpler than they need to be, because the reader has less sense of the past which determines choices and actions in the present. HOWEVER, like all writing strictures, a gifted author need not be limited by this, as shown by the discussion of Sally Rooney’s writing below.
• Creating suspense becomes more difficult, because the narration can’t take into account things that have not yet happened or are outside of the characters’ current awareness. The “little did he know” device is unavailable.
• Unless you’re careful, you can feel forced to overload the present moment with trivial events and sensations that have no real bearing on the story, just because such events would happen in the natural flow of time.

I would suggest that, apart from impulses of fashion, you let your characters’ situation determine the choice of tense.

• Does your character live in the present moment? Joyce Carey’s novel Mr Johnson is written in the present tense because the central character lives in the present moment.
• Does the past fill the present for your character? Have you ever noticed historians have a habit of talking about the past in the present tense? (“Churchill is now facing his defining moment as Germany prepares for invasion.”) If the past fills the present for your character in this way, then present tense may suit you.  Matt Bell talks about the reflective present tense, as being “the way in which memory and trauma often work.”
• Are you using an unreliable narrator? Unreliable narrators deny the reader full information by reporting incorrectly or missing out key details. Present tense can work well here and intensify the surprise when the truth is revealed.
• Are reflection and insight important aspects of your story? Past tense may be better suited here because it allows the story to be told from the distance of time.
• Does your character have a complex and important backstory? To avoid lots of jumpy flashbacks, past tense may provide a better choice.

And yet. Sally Rooney explained in a 2019 interview that her choice of present tense was driven by a grammatical preference: her characters’ frequent reflections on the past would have had to be written in past perfect if she’d been writing in past tense. and she found past perfect ugly.

He feels his ears get hot. She’s probably just being glib and not suggestive, but if she is being suggestive it’s only to degrade him by association, since she is considered an object of disgust. She wears ugly thick-soled shoes and doesn’t put makeup on her face. People have said she doesn’t shave her legs or anything.  Connell once heard that she spilled chocolate ice cream on herself in the school lunchroom, and she went to the girls’ bathrooms and took her blouse off to wash it in the sink.

Sally Rooney, Normal People

Writing sex is hard, as I said in a previous post, because the palette of actions is so limited. But writing attraction (the emotions and behaviours that precede sex) is easy because you have a wide range of choices, most of which allow you to fill out the reader’s sense of the character and push the plot forward.

• Naïve or unreliable responses. Your character may be unaware of what is happening to her, though you can make the reader aware. Other characters may also clearly see the attraction, including jealous partners.
• Fighting the attraction. Related to the first, your character may fight the sensations and thoughts that come with her attraction. She may deny or be disgusted by the attraction (attraction needn’t be experienced by a character as a positive thing).
• Dangerous things threaten. Again, related to the point before, there may be strong plot consequences of the attraction that lead your characters to fight against it
• Fast or slow. The attraction may be something that builds slowly during the course of the story or it may become a tension that threatens to  boil over.

So how do you write it?

Attraction manifests both physically and mentally:

• Physical sensations may include a heightened awareness of the other person, including eyes lingering on them (especially on mouth and lips, as well as breasts and pecs, buttocks and bulges) and responses to their scent. There will also be a strong reaction to any physical contact. There will be wetness and erections. And, of course, the old standby of romantic fiction, the palpitating heart
• Mental and emotional responses include day-dreaming about the other person, a sense of being intensely in the present when with the desired one (time stops), and bringing up the other person in conversation without any appropriate reason (obsession). Your characters may feel a sense of having always known each other. They may feel a sense of being perfectly matched. In the fighting the attraction scenario, there may also be anxiety or fear.

Here are some tricks:

• Make the attraction immediate and powerful when the characters first meet.
• Tease your reader. Vary the tension
• Make the chemistry stronger each time the characters are together.
• Use descriptive details (such as awareness of the texture of things touched) that show the character’s heightened awareness
• You can have one or both characters deny and fight the attraction, especially where there are dangerous consequences.
• The old romantic trope of something tearing the characters apart before consummation always works well.
• Ensure your characters behave differently with each other than they do with other people

How do you know when a scene begins and ends, how many scenes make a book, and what the difference is between a scene, a beat, and a chapter? Never fear, all the answers are here.

What is a scene?

A scene is the basic unit of a story. It’s not just stuff happening—in a scene, something has to change. This may be a conflict, a discovery, a realisation. It’s like a mini-story with a beginning, middle, and end. Tension rises, reaches a climax and then falls again.

These are the elements of a scene. Much of this comes from Ali Luke.

• A change
• Involves at least one character wanting something and taking action to achieve this (even if that action is largely internal such as thinking).
• If you have more than one character, there should be interaction and/or dialogue between them. The dialogue should advance the action, reveal character, or ideally both.
• An unbroken flow of action from incident to incident
• A description of surroundings. Almost always, a scene will have a single location or small set of connected locations. If you switch location, you’re generally switching scenes
• A definable duration, usually short. If you switch time, you’re generally switching scenes
• A single point of view. If you switch point of view, you’re generally switching scenes.
• Conflict or complications (even if the conflict is with something inanimate, like struggling through a rainstorm)
• Rising emotion or tension.
• A strong ending
• A link to the next scene

Relationship with other story units

Other terms you’ll come across are beat, scene-sequence, chapter, act, and arc. The language here is not very precise and different people use the words differently and sometimes interchangeably. You may not find it useful to use any other concepts than scene and story.

The fundamental idea is to understand a story as a series of changes.

Chapter is not quite like these units. All the rest are elements of the story structure, but a chapter is essentially a navigational device to break the words up into chunks for the reader’s convenience. It is, of course, possible for chapters to coincide with one of the other units. Some writers arrange each scene as a chapter. Others may end the chapter mid-scene to create a cliff-hanger.  Think about starting a new chapter when the character’s goal or direction of the story changes.

Beginning and ending scenes

How do you know when a scene begins and ends?

• A scene begins with establishing what the character wants
• Progresses through the attempt to achieve that goal
• Ends with a critical point, usually a set-back but sometimes a triumph

Since a scene has the same characteristics (beginning, middle, and end) as a story, it has many similarities in the way you begin and end it. Much of this comes from the Now Novel blog.

• “Hook” the reader’s interest at the beginning. You might do this with an explosive entry into action, or vivid description of the setting, or the posing of an intriguing question. The main characters should clearly want something.
• End a scene
  • With a cliff-hanger, mid-action
  • With a character epiphany
  • With the discovery of a major obstacle
  • With the promise of more to come (turmoil, future revelations)

Scenes and sequels

One particular writing tradition is based on a distinction between scenes and sequels, which means essentially action followed by reaction. The originator of the tradition is Dwight Swain. Many writers would consider both action and reaction to be distinct scenes and many others consider them to be halves of a single scene.

A guide to editing scenes

When you edit, you’ll find that some of your scenes don’t work. In which case, they need to be either fixed or deleted. Here’s a 12-point checklist of questions you can ask about a scene, largely borrowed from Ali Luke.

A plot twist is a story development that the reader does not expect and in which something surprising happens or something surprising is revealed. Generally, the storyteller will set up expectations and then “twist” those expectations by revealing new information.

A plot twist:

• must be narratively sound,
• must be unexpected, and
• might be foreshadowed.

If it occurs at the end, it’s referred to as a twist in the tail. Aristotle, in his Poetics, argued that a good plot ending must be “surprising yet inevitable”.

Types of plot twists

1. I Am Your Father, or Anagnoresis

The discovery of another character’s true identity

1. • Oedipus Rex marries his mother in ignorance
   • Also Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back and The Kite Runner

2. Flashback or Analepsis

A sudden reversion to an earlier event reveals characters or events in a different light

• The pensieve in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

3. Banquo’s Revenge or Peripeteia

A sudden reversal of fortune arising from the character’s circumstances

• Banquo urging Fleance to take revenge in Macbeth

4. It Was Me All Along or Unreliable Narrator

A character is revealed to be other than who we thought they were, throwing preceding events into doubt

• In Fight Club the narrator is revealed to be Tyler Durdon himself

5. Will the Real Villain Please Stand Up

• The villain in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is revealed to have been at his side all along

6. Gasp or False Protagonist

Death of Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones

Twist endings to avoid

1. It Was All A Dream

This is usually thought to be cheating when it’s used as an ending

• The events of A Beautiful Mind are revealed to be hallucinations

2. The Lost Will or Deus ex Machina

The opposite of Banquo’s Revenge in that the reversal is not motivated by prior events.  An unexpected, artificial or improbable character, device or event is introduced suddenly to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. It was a favourite in Victorian times where it was attributed to fate and frequently took the form of the discovery of a lost will.

Nowadays this device is generally deemed unacceptable.

• Jane Eyre where Jane leaves Mr. Rochester and ends up on the doorstep of a long-lost relative

There are many articles about winning writing competitions. Just do a web search to see them. This piece will take most of that advice as read, and concentrate on things that may be less obvious. These flow from my experience as creator and administrator of a writing contest and as reader for a literary magazine. I’ve also won a couple of competitions.

A brief summary of the obvious

• Read the rules. If there’s a prompt or theme, use it. If there’s a maximum word length, don’t exceed it. If judging is anonymous, don’t put your name on it. If there’s a required format, follow it. If no format is specified, use something standard and easy-to-read like Times New Roman 12 pt., double-spaced.
• Proofread. Nothing will annoy a judge more than spelling and grammar mistakes, poor punctuation, and uncorrected typos. They may well decide, if you can’t be bothered to proof the thing, they can’t be bothered to read it.
• Write well. Use active voice and strong verbs. Avoid clichés, strings of adjectives, and overlong sentences. Read it aloud to yourself so you can hear the rhythm of the prose. Leave yourself plenty of time to edit.

The less obvious stuff

• Devote time to researching the interests of the judges, if you can find out who they are. Look at previous winners to get a sense of what the judges like. Craft your story, if possible, to fit this brief.
• Select your competition. Again, research counts. Your chances of winning or placing in a competition vary widely from contest to contest. The most prestigious competitions like the Bridport have thousands of entries, while smaller competitions like the Yeovil have hundreds. Accordingly, your chances of placing in the Bridport are 0.22%, while in the Yeovil your chances rise to 4.9%. I’ve researched the stats for some major competitions and you can find them here.
• Understand the contest. Is it a “literary” competition or a “fiction” competition? “Literary” is likely to mean they’re looking for character-driven stories with depth, subtext, and beautiful language. “Fiction” or “Writing” is likely to mean that popular fiction will do well, and here, plot is central.
• Make sure you have a beginning, middle, and end. Sounds obvious doesn’t it? But somewhere between 40% and 50% of the stories submitted to my competition and to the magazine I read for are not full stories. Often, this is because they lack a proper ending. If you have a full story, you’ve already reached the top half of the pile.
• Write something unusual. By the time the judges have a short list of, perhaps, twenty entries all the stories will be good. But they won’t all be winners. And they’ll begin to merge into each other in the judges’ minds. Make sure your story has something unusual and memorable about it. Maybe this will be the character, or perhaps the setting. Don’t go with the first idea you think of—other people will generally have written something similar, particularly if there’s a prompt.
• Pay attention to cast and point of view. If you’re writing a short story, don’t overburden it with too many characters and shifts in point of view. These will just confuse the reader. Unless you’re feeling very brave, stick to one point of view character and keep the cast list down to two or three other characters.

The final secrets

• Submit early. Why? Most entries will come in as a rush at the end. In our case, about half the entries arrive in the last week. So, the judging will take place in a rush at the end too, If you submit early, you’ll be read more thoroughly and perhaps more sympathetically.
• But don’t rush it. After you’ve written and edited a draft you’re satisfied with, let it settle for a few days. When you read it over again, you may notice mistakes or opportunities for changes you didn’t see before.
• Writing tricks. Readers really like stories that loop back on themselves or where the ending echoes the beginning. Recurrent motifs may also help to make a story stand out.
• Think like a judge. Understand what’s happening in their minds. Judges are not looking for reasons to accept your story—they’re looking for reasons to reject it. Don’t give them a reason.
• Understand what judges are looking for. Many competitions don’t have standardized judging formats, but my competition developed one to make the assessment fairer. This is what our judges are looking for:

• Judging is still a subjective process. The winning story will usually be one that lingers in the judges’ minds hours or days after they’ve read it. You can enhance your chances that this one will be yours by choosing an unusual character, location or theme and by using the writing tricks noted here. As an example, I’ve been a reader for a magazine for a year and a half. In that time, I’ve read around 1,500 submissions. I selected 45 of them. I can still remember one. That one stands out for its superb atmosphere and characterization.

Has your creative well run dry?  Don’t worry. Writing isn’t a mysterious process that depends on random visits from the muse. It’s a craft, and there are craft techniques for generating ideas when none come on the aether. I should confess neither of these techniques is mine.

Random meetings

The first workaround comes, I think, from Boris Fishman but I may be wrong. Putting together things that aren’t related is the basis of metaphor, that mainstay of poetic creation. So, if you’re stuck, just give yourself two unrelated random things and then create a story that links them. Say you choose swan and company. Here’s my example of a story that links swan and company.

Quadrants

I love the mechanical simplicity of this workaround. You can create a story idea in five minutes. It comes from Dan Harmon.

Step 1. Your mind is blank.

Step 2. Start with a random idea, anything that interests you, anything at all. Harmon explains his technique with “racoons”. I’m going to be more pedestrian and use “quest” because that’s what a lot of writers write.  Draw a circle as the world of the quest.

Step 3. Now draw a line horizontally through the circle, dividing it into upper and lower halves. As yourself what those halves might be. Maybe the upper half is the everyday, known world, and the bottom half is the special, unknown world of the quest. Label these halves.

Step 4. Now divide the circle again with a vertical line dividing it into left and right halves. Decide what this division is and label it. Maybe it’s fearful and brave.

You now have four quadrants. Going clockwise around the circle from the top, your protagonist will start in the known world and fearful. S/he will travel to the unknown world, where terrifying trials await. In the course of these challenges s/he will discover courage and then return changed to the known world. As you can see, this is the Hero’s Journey.

In Harmon’s example, the divisions are biological/ storybook racoons and honest/ dishonest racoons. Pick divisions that have resonance for you and which you feel excited to explore.

You never need suffer writer’s block again.