The seven-week course is almost over now. I’ve been taking it since the beginning of October. I learned the term MOOC – massive open online course. I have no idea how many students there were – hundreds certainly. We’ve had video lectures from 15 writers about their craft, read nine pieces of writing, engaged in discussions moderated by six teaching staff, and done seven writing exercises.

Of course you don’t get in a massive free course what you get if you pay – namely critique and mentoring from a successful writer. But nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed it. There have been times when I’ve been cross and frustrated, most particularly by the apparent emphasis on the literary to the exclusion of other genres, and on the rubric of “trusting the writing”. This seems to privilege the subconscious over the conscious, the observational over the analytic, character over plot, and the inspirational over the perspirational. Ironic perhaps in the US which is the home to so many writing toolkits and methods.

It’s hard to say yet whether the course has made me a better writer. My wife says she can’t see any difference in my writing. But that would need time to ferment and bed-in. It’s certainly made me more fluent in what I can say about writing, and therefore probably a better critic.

I thought I’d share with you what have been the most important insights (for me) of the course.

Character

• Characters should be interesting, not necessarily likeable
• Characters change over time

Dialogue

• Dialogue should appear lifelike but isn’t – the reader suspends disbelief
• Don’t overdo dialect – a little goes a long way
• Vary the size of speeches
• Dialogue is about showing what can’t be told. Dialogue enables the writer to convey information, emotional information, psychological information, of which neither the characters nor the narrator are yet fully aware

Voice

• Voice is an ambiguous term. It can mean authorial voice (i.e. style), narratorial voice, and character voice. Don’t worry about “finding your voice” – it’s natural, it’s just your own style.
• Different characters will see the same setting in different ways
• Voice is about mentality. Characters can be the embodiment of ideas, to keep the reader engaged with the idea
• If voice is a mentality, rather than just diction, then building a character is building a world

Story, plot and structure

• A storyline should achieve the quality of being surprising yet inevitable
• Some writers are “planners” and other are “pantsers”. Neither is superior, they’re just how different brains work. Both merge at rewrite stage.
• A story is the events that happen. A plot is the sequence of causality that makes these events happen (“plot” is the name for the events seen in the light of their endings) Structure is the decisions we make about how to deploy the plot to tell the story in its most compelling form. The storytelling may be better than the story
• In literary fiction, which may be character-driven rather than plot-driven, narratorial or character voice is a major determinant of structure. In other genres, the author’s decisions about voice are relatively independent of decisions about structure
• As well as point of view (POV), consider point of telling (POT), and point of entry (POE). POT is the point in time from which the events are being narrated. POE is the moment at which you enter the beginning of the story or some specific part of the narrative. There may also be a consideration of Point of Exit – when you decide to leave the story.

Setting, description and world-building

• Description can show how the two worlds – physical world and emotional world of the story – interact. It should show us a singularity – a world we’ve never seen before and will never see again. Not necessarily a bizarre world, but one which overlays the physical wold with an emotional world. The external world becomes an extension of character
• Vivid description is a portrait of a mind thinking its way through the world.
• When you’re describing a landscape, you’re trying to describe it comprehensively and precisely but not necessarily exhaustively
• Images can function in a work as powerful hinges, ways to transition between places and times and they can be powerful tools for transitioning within fiction. They give us access to the associative nature of memory, allowing us to suspend the linear movement of plot and plunge into the past.
• Worlds, whether they are imaginary or real, not only have things in them, but relationships between those things which are governed by rules that often differ from those in the everyday world. So as well as observing, world-building involves analysis.

Some of these insights came from the lectures, some from dialogue with staff and other students. The final class of the course deals with the dreaded topic of revision. Since I’m still in the middle of that, I’ll leave sharing what I’ve learned from that until the next post.

There’s any amount of advice out there to writers about how to write good beginnings. Beginnings are important, because if you don’t capture your reader’s attention in the first few pages, even the first few sentences, they obviously won’t read on. But there’s much less advice on writing endings, and they’re important too. If your reader isn’t satisfied by your ending, they probably won’t read anything else by you.

I stumbled on this question while doing the coursework for a fiction writers’ class that I’m taking with the University of Iowa. It had never consciously occurred to me before. Of course I already knew about plotting rubrics like Freytag’s triangle. I knew stories needed to have beginnings, middles and ends. But I guess what made me think about this anew was a discussion in the course about point of entry. Point of entry means the decision you make in a chain of events about where to start telling the story. It needn’t be the beginning of the chain, it can be the middle, or even the end. The choice of point of entry, like that of point of view, radically changes the way the story is told.

I began to wonder if there were similar choices about what you might call point of exit. And, of course, there are. The ending is the most important part of the story. Everything that happens has been leading up to the ending. Unlike real life, it’s the ending that determines everything that happens. It may take several attempts to find the right point of exit. Sometimes you stop too early, other times you stop too late. Or sometimes it’s even the wrong ending, which can involve you in going back and restructuring much of the story. John Irving, author of The Cider House Rules, famously writes his last line first.

I’ve mentioned before a story I wrote which had a beginning and a middle but no end. It deals with a character who begins to have memories that are not his. This is Zhuang Zhu’s Dream, which has just been published by Gold Dust. The lack of an ending was intentional. I mean, what would you do if you had memories that weren’t yours? You’d just get on with your life, there would be nothing else you could do. I sent it to Gold Dust, and the editor understandably rejected it. He wanted to know why the character was having these memories.

So, I wrote an ending. The protagonist goes to his doctor and is referred to a specialist. The specialist tells him that he’s probably confusing imagination and reality, not least because he lacks a particular structure in his brain which helps to keep the two apart. But then he is enrolled in a brain study in which he meets another subject who may, or may not, be the person whose memory he is sharing. I still left it open-ended. The reader could choose which explanation they preferred – the rational one that he was confusing imagination and reality, or the spookier one that he really was sharing memories with this other subject. The editor asked for a rewrite again. He still wanted to know what happened. So I added a clincher, and it got published.

The basic rule of endings is probably best expressed by Anthony Vicino who argues you have to keep your promises to the reader. He says:

“To write a good ending, you have to go back to the beginning and figure out what promises you actually made to the reader. If you’re writing a murder mystery, you’ve promised to reveal the bad guy. If you’re writing a light-hearted romance, you’re promising the main characters will get together, or at least have a happy ever after ending. If you’re writing a Narnia’esque portal story, you’re promising to return the reader to the regular world when it’s all done.”

But endings are about providing a satisfying close, not necessarily about resolution. You don’t have to tie up all the loose ends. Indeed, you shouldn’t or the reader will reject it as too neat, too engineered. A good ending should surprise, but also, in retrospect, seem inevitable. But it should also leave the reader with questions about what might be in store next for the characters they’ve come to know so well.

So there are probably five ways you can end a story well:

1. Closure. The main dilemmas have reached a satisfying conclusion. This is the expected ending with many genre works. You can ask, has all the adversity and hazard you’ve heaped on your protagonist played out fully? This doesn’t have to mean that the protagonist has overcome the challenges – they may have failed. But ask: Is the conflict concluded? Has your protagonist come to terms with whatever flaws you’ve etched into their ever-suffering soul? If you’re writing a series, you won’t want to resolve or close all the dilemmas. Or you may resolve one mystery, only to tee-up another one.
2. The plot twist. This works a bit like a joke. You trick your reader into thinking they understand the logic that drives the story, and then at the last moment flip it into another logic. This kind of ending is more appropriate to short stories than to novels.
3. Mirroring the opening. This might be simply a return to square one, indicating that everything the protagonist has tried to do has failed. Generally it’s more satisfying if the mirroring takes the opening to a new level. You have to drop in hints during the beginning and the middle that lead up to this ending. This creates a sense of balance and completeness and is particularly appropriate for stories with a philosophical focus
4. The open-ending. This is intended to leave your reader with questions, persuading them to think about possible answers. This is what I failed to do in the example I gave of my own story about the man with memories that were not his. It was an every-day ending, but readers don’t read in order to see a representation of the every-day. They read to escape or transcend the every-day. It’s hard to do this kind of ending well. Though the characters’ fates may not be extraordinary, they must continue to live their lives with new-found insight from what they have been through. This ending generally works best with character-driven tales.
5. The revisit. After the ending, generally at the moment of climax, you revisit the characters in a final scene, often written as an epilogue. This is remote from the setting and timeframe of the main story, and may happen days, years or even generations after the main action. It gives your characters the opportunity to look back at what they have learned and what has happened since.

Whatever you do, the ending has emotionally involve the reader, and leave him or her feeling satisfied that you’ve reached some kind of conclusion or that lessons have been learned.

Imagine you wake up one morning with a memory that isn’t yours. This is what happens to Farley Brent in my story Zhuang Zhu’s Dream. I’m thrilled that the story, after much revision, has been published by Gold Dust magazine. You can find the winter issue of Gold Dust containing the story here.

My plan was to make 2015 the year I got published in literary magazines. Magazines allow you to place yourself on a spectrum as a writer, because you can look up their acceptance rates. Gold Dust has an acceptance rate of 6.86%. So, I’m pretty happy with this. Zhuang Zhu’s Dream is the green blob at the left hand side of this chart of all my short story submissions in 2015. You can see what a fine collection of rejections I also have (the red blobs).

I hope those few green blobs among the sea of red may give some of you courage as well. If you research the market and decide where to place yourself, then read the magazines, and submit to the ones that are publishing stories that seem a bit like yours, it works out in the end.

A U Latif offers good advice to a writer – read, read with an author’s eye, study how the writers you enjoy achieve their effects.

I’ve been re-reading Michel Tournier’s The Ogre. His character, Abel Tiffauges, is a monster, a French prisoner of war who finds his vocation in Nazi Germany, carrying off on horseback Prussian children for a Nazi military school. I was powerfully struck by it when it was first published, almost half a century ago in a Europe still struggling to come to terms with the horrors of the Second World War. In an epoch when we are coming to terms with the magnitude of child abuse, the book resonates with new horrors.

This reading I made with an author’s eye. I wanted to understand how Tournier makes such a repellent character so fascinating. What is it about Tiffauges’ voice that arrests us? The basic answer is that Tournier meticulously creates his character’s world. At the core of that world is Tiffauges’ discovery of his obsession with portophoria – the ecstasy of carrying a child in his arms. A whole world view is built up around this, a philosophy, even a theology.

The curious thing about this authentic and utterly engrossing voice, is we know it to be false. I don’t mean that his belief system is a false belief. I mean we know that the erudition with which this world view is constructed is Tournier’s, not his character’s. Tiffauges, by his own admission, was an inattentive student at school and before the war liberates him to pursue his perversion, he works as a garage mechanic in Paris. Yet without demur, we suspend our disbelief concerning his grasp of philosophy.

The discovery of that suspension of disbelief was really interesting to me. We do it, of course, in the theatre, where the audience imagines a “fourth wall” through which they see the action on the stage. But I hadn’t realised that we do it as readers.

John Crowley, writing in Harpers, points to an even more surprising suspension of disbelief, where fiction is a simulation of reality rather than a real portrait of it. For us in the real world, time goes forward, with the ending of our stories unknown. Fictional characters inhabit worlds whose plots are events seen in the light of their endings. In our world, Crowley says, “causes produce effects; in novels, effects bring about causes.”

What are the limits of this collusion between writer and actor? Were Tiffauges to speak with a voice that was not of his time, if he were to say, for example, “whatever”, we would instantly detect something wrong. If a character has a heavy use of dialect or slang, or pauses and says “umm” or “like” too often, or speaks in the rambling and disconnected structure of real speech, the reader quickly lose interest and patience. Dialogue in fiction is more precise and polished than real speech. It is a simulation, not a copy, of how people really speak to each other. We don’t just accept the “fourth wall”, we insist on it. The odd slang word is enough to create in our minds the whole cadence of a voice. A few hesitations here and there allow us to form a picture of a character who speaks haltingly. A little goes a long way.

Equally, in stories written in the first person, we accept and expect that the narration may have an eloquence and flow that is absent when the character speaks.

So how do we, as writers, avoid a character’s voice becoming our voice? It’s a common problem, which I share, that our characters can all end up being us. The trick, for me at least, is getting to know your characters well. They’re not just ciphers for the author’s project. Of course, they’re all our creations, but they have their own lives, their own needs and obsessions, their own limits and strengths. You can’t make a character do something that doesn’t come naturally to them. Some are kinder than us, others are more skilful than us, and some are wholly alien.

A few tricks can create the illusion in the reader’s mind of an authentic voice. Verbal tics and mannerisms for example, remind the reader whose consciousness they are in. The opening lines of Catcher in the Rye are a good example:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

We instantly get a clear sense of voice. The rhythm of the speech is one long opening burst, sixty three words long, one tumbling over the other. Once Holden Caulfield has launched in, he slows down. The next sentences are shorter and more measured. We also hear the adolescent bravado in the dismissive adjectives “lousy” and “crap”, while the “if you want to know the truth” mannerism offers truculent placation.

Recurring physical mannerisms also reinforce our awareness of character. If the character twists her wedding ring around her finger, we wonder if she really wants to take it off. In my novel A Prize of Sovereigns, Byrom, the “bad” king persistently strokes the battle scar across his face that twists his smile into a macabre grin. He likes the scar because men fear it and it hides his youth.

What brings a character to life for us is entering their mind, understanding how he or she sees the world and interacts with it. That is what makes us forget the fourth wall.

The writer E L Doctorow famously said that writing was “like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way”.

This quote featured in two separate presentations this week in a creative writing course I’m doing with the University of Iowa. The presentations talked about “trusting the writing” to reveal the plot to you. One of the presenters, Boris Fishman, acknowledged that there are two types of writers, which he called conceptualists and experimentalists. Conceptualists plan the whole story and then execute it. Experimentalists discover the plot through writing it. But he is an avowed experimentalist and didn’t spend any time exploring the conceptualist approach.

The underlying and unstated assumption was that experimentalists are more artistic, while conceptualists are more mechanical. I’d like to suggest that one is not better than the other, they’re just two different kinds of brains. They’re probably two extremes of a spectrum on which all writers exist. In my local writing group we have members at both extremes. Derek can’t start writing until he’s plotted out the beginning, middle and end. Mary often doesn’t know what her story means even when she’s finished it. My message is that writers should write in the way that makes most sense to them. I want to offer a defence of the conceptualist approach.

Though I have written in both styles, I’m probably more of a “conceptualist”. I usually start with an idea that tickles me. That’s how my brain works. And I usually rough out, at least in broad terms, how the idea will develop before I start to write. For example, my second novel, which was something of “conceptualist”/”experimentalist” hybrid, was triggered by a curiosity about traditional Micronesian sailors, who navigate by means of imaginary islands. By the time I’d finished researching which Micronesian island to set it on, my main character, an eccentric school caretaker, had started whispering his story in my ear. The story was becoming a journey of self-discovery for the caretaker, a confrontation between British and Micronesian cultures. I had more fun writing this book than any other. I trusted the writing and looked forward to my daily journeys to Micronesia to see what my characters would do and discover.

Ultimately though, the book was a failure, and I’ve set it aside to be returned to in some remote future. Can trusting the writing lead to a confused mess? Sure. Does it have to? No. Can having a plan lead to mechanical writing? Sure. Does is have to? No.

A plan isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a template. There’s an old military adage that “no plan survives the first engagement.” Plans aren’t roadmaps of a fixed journey. They’re imaginings of the journey. Things happen, and you meet people on the journey that fundamentally alter what you thought would be your route of travel. A plan doesn’t tell you where you’re going, but it makes you sensitive to when reality starts to diverge from your imagining. Since we can’t adjust reality, we have to adjust our plans. The same, at least for me, is true of writing plans.

My hunch is that “experimentalists” have a plan too, but their conscious brains don’t know what the plan is until they start following it. “Trusting the writing” means letting your subconscious find the path. Being a “conceptualist” means letting your conscious brain find the path.

As an experiment, for this week’s assignment in the course, I’m trying to follow a purely “experimentalist” path. I wrote a sentence “X had run out of time.” Rapidly, X told me his name was Spuggy, an ex-soldier. Pretty soon after that I knew this was about a soldier’s return from war to a world that was no longer the one he had been born into. I still don’t know how it will end, but I can see that my mind is making and following patterns, even when I don’t decide them consciously.

In the end, at revision stages, both approaches merge. The “experimentalist” now knows what the plan is, and the “conceptualist” can work on where the writing has taken them.