Open Thread 4

Hi All,

I'm starting this thread to facilitate the short story we were working on today.

I'm going to investigate the possibility of other people being able to blog here. In other words, you won't have to wait for me to start a thread but simply start one whenever you feel like it.

In meantime, this is for Meabh, who very kindly volunteered to write up the story and post it here.

Let's see where it goes when Mr Byrne enters the pet shop....


Update
Okay, I've worked it out. I can invite up to 100 people to blog! I've added six names so far: Aisling, Cian, Gráinne, Holly, Katie Irwin and Meabh.

Why those six, you may ask? Because theirs were the only email addresses I had on file. If you want to be included feel free to mail me.

Don't for heaven's sake post your email addy to this blog! If you do, you risk being spammed :0(

Update 2
I'm posting this on Meabh's behalf. She mailed me to say she had difficulty posting.

Feel free to copy/paste what follows and add your own line or lines to it!

We need a title too, perhaps something with "dogs" or "pets". I've suggested "Going to the Dogs".

* * *

Going to the Dogs

"What would you like for your birthday?"

"A puppy!" Tom and Jackie exclaimed as one.

"What kind of puppy?" their Dad asked.

"A flying puppy," Tom said hopefully.

It was a warm summer's day. Their birthday was approaching. Despite the fact that their births were a year apart, their birthday fell on the same day. Tom was eight now and Jackie was nine.

Their faces resembled each other's: cinnamon eyes, long eyelashes and hair the colour of Sumatran teak.

Mr. Byrne laughed.

"Don't be silly, Tom, dogs can't fly."

"Ah, that's where you're wrong, Dad," piped up Jackie. "We saw one in the pet shop on O'Niels Street."

Mr. Byrne scratched his beard in puzzlement. As far as he knew, no pet shop existed in this town. He walked up O'Niels Street every day on his way to the office, and he could not recall ever seeing a pet shop.

"We'll see," he said, preparing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

"We'll ask Mam then," they said.

* * *

Mr. Byrne turned into O'Niels Street, taking his usual route to work.

There was an alley halfway down the street. He happened to glance into it. Two doors down he saw a sign: "Zarcalambar's Exotic Pets". He stopped in his tracks.

"That's odd," he said to himself. "The kids were right: there is a pet shop here."

Mr. Byrne looked at his watch. He was early. He decided he had enough time to investigate.

He ventured down to the shop. To his mild surprise, there was no window display, but a thick red velvet curtain completely drawn. He pressed it. Somewhere inside, an old-fashioned bell tolled...

Open Thread 3

Hi all,

I considered writing an article on what we were doing last week: the ghost story. But I couldn't think of a single thing to add!

I thought an open thread would be more interesting. There are only two more sessions to go, so how about raising topics or issues here?

You'll see by the "syllabus" that I've left the final sessions a little vague, and with plenty of room for debate. This Saturday, 7 November, is all about improving your work.

Let's say you wish to write seriously, that you wish to enter writing competitions and the like. How do you ensure that your stuff gets noticed above somebody else's?

Why not discuss that right here, in preparation for Saturday?

Open Thread 2

Hi all,

A couple of people were talking about WordPad last time. It doesn't have its own spell-check facility.

Well, the good news is that you can add a free one. It's called tinySpell and you can find it right here.

Simply download, instal, and restart your PC. You'll see the tinySpell icon in the system tray (below right).

Open a WordPad file and start typing. If you mispell a word you'll hear a beep and the tinySpell icon will turn yellow. Right click on it and it brings up a list of words. Click on the one you want – and you're good to go!

It works in other applications too.

If anyone finds another accessory that's better than this one (and it's free!) please let us know.

Automatic Writing

I said it at the beginning and I’ll say it again: writers are born, not made.

No one can teach you to write, not even a writer like myself. At best I can suggest ways of channelling your creativity. As a writer you write because you’re driven to write, just as a musician must make music. Both are a means of self-expression.

Art or Skill?

Keeping with the music theme, I’ll remind you again of the girl I met in Holland who played superb piano. She was nearly 17 and her parents were immensely proud of her. We were treated to her rendition of one of Liszt’s sonatas, a very difficult piece to play.

But the girl’s playing, while incredibly confident, lacked soul. I felt she was treating the piano keys as a typist would work a keyboard. She’d practised for days if not weeks to get it right. A real musician when playing from the heart can make me weep with emotion. This is art.

When something is written from the heart I believe it shows too. And your reader will remember it for a long time to come.

Writing skills can be taught. These are the nuts and bolts of language: the rules if you like. Anybody can learn them and apply them. But the real writer uses more than mere skill.

Your subconscious

A teacher of mine used to give people the following advice. When you sit down to an exam paper, he said, read all the questions before you begin. Don’t simply answer the easy ones first.

He was right. He knew that the subconscious mind is one of the greatest tools an author has. He meant that when you’d finished reading through the examination questions, your subconscious would immediately start working on them. Meaning that by the time you reached the most difficult questions, a part of your brain had already figured them out – to an extent of course.

Your subconscious is a hidden ally. You can compare it to the iceberg pictured: the parts you don't see are what keep the iceberg afloat.

You can apply this principle using “automatic writing”. Say you’re suffering from the dreaded writer’s block and you’re staring at a blank screen or a blank page. Start writing! It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, as long as you keep up a flow of words.

Nine times out of ten you’ll find that new ideas will come to you during the automatic writing. Your subconscious will have been working on the story. And it will surprise you.

Here’s what happened to me recently with my own writing. I’m working on a paranormal novel with a highly complex plot. Some months ago I introduced two manor houses, one built of light-coloured bricks, the other black. My heroine visits one of the houses by moonlight and sees it reflected in a dark lake. I didn’t know at the time what this meant; it simply came to me and I liked the idea.

Last week I had my heroine find a spread of tarot cards. She sees that the final card is the one called The Moon. It shows a black tower and a white tower with the moon between them, and there’s a dark lake in the foreground.

At last I understood why my subconscious suggested those things to me. It all made sense and helped the plot along. Amazing.

Observing

Looking at things and describing them.

This is one of the most difficult aspects of writing. And it seems so easy. We all have eyes, right? We look, we see, right?

Yep, but do we actually observe? Simple answer: some of us do; some of us don’t. Here’s an interesting test you can do online. I’ll give you the link in a moment but in the meantime I’ll explain what’s required of you.

Okay, you’ll see a vid of six people: three boys and three girls, in a gym. They’re passing basketballs between them.

Keep your eye on the people dressed in the white tee-shirts. I want you to count the NUMBER OF TIMES the ball is passed between them.

I counted 14 when I did the test. Perhaps your score is above mine.

Got that? Okay, go here:

http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php

---------------------------

Done that? Okay, now replay the video and DON’T COUNT ANYTHING! Simply look at the vid.

---------------------------

Were you surprised? I’ll bet you were.

What that vid is showing you is that we tend to focus on stuff that interests us, and block out everything else. This is no bad thing. We’re (smallish) mammals and we evolved in a dangerous environment full of predators that demanded our attention. We could eat, or be eaten. Consequently, we focused on the important things, the things that meant the difference between life and death.

But this is no use to you as a writer. You have to observe the things others do not, whether they are life-threatening or not. Your function is to look at the world and explain it to those who are less gifted than you are. You must be able to examine a tree or a leaf or an insect, and be able to describe them in such a way that your reader will see them as clearly as you do.

Not everyone can do this. In fact, very few human beings are capable of this. You are among the lucky ones. You have a rare gift.

Going into nature

You saw today how easy it is to stroll beneath a tree and not know the name of that tree. There are thousands of species of tree but only a handful are native to Ireland: elm, ash, beech, oak, yew. Each tree has its own distinctive bark and leaf. Look at them next time you’re passing. When you describe a tree in your writing, your reader will trust you so much more if you’re able to tell her something beyond what she already knows. People look up to writers! Don’t let your readers down. They expect you to guide them through this confusing universe.

Learn the names of things. Know what stuff is called. Once again: your readers will only take you seriously when you show that you’re an authority. In other words, you have to show your readers that you know more than they do. And one of the best ways of doing that is by finding out the names of everyday things, plants and shrubs, man-made objects – in short, everything that actually has a name.

Your own expertise

Everybody is an expert on something. Very often that “something” is an area that few people wish to visit. You have people who are experts on slugs, spiders and snakes. Are we bothered? Probably not. And why do they all begin with “s”? :0)

But often a writer has an expertise, a certain knowledge, that he or she wishes to share with the reader. Do it. Share it. I’m looking at Kate Kenwright here when I say that there is expertise such as the knowledge of horses that few others share. Kate is an expert, and her writing shows that she’s an authority. Anything she writes about horses and horse-riding will have – and does have – the feel of authenticity. Her reader knows that this is the real deal. The reader is confident.

This is what you should aim for. Give your readers that beautiful, warm feeling that they can place their trust in you. That you can, with your well-chosen words, transport them to places that only you can imagine, but places in which they can share your dreams.

Words

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. Anaïs Nin

Aisling McCabe told us today that a teacher pulled her up about her overuse of “he said”, “she said”.

Was the teacher correct in doing this? It’s an interesting question. On the one hand I can see where the teacher was going: she wished to encourage Aisling to vary her choice of words. Nothing wrong with that.

But personally I’ve always believed that your reader won’t even notice the words “she said”. They become like non-words among the other, more interesting, words that make up your writing. If you asked me how many times I used the word “the” so far I would not be able to tell you, yet I distinctly recall using the words “overuse” and “encourage”. The first rings alarm bells in me; the second is very positive; therefore I remember those words because they’re important.

This is not to say that repetition is good. Often it isn’t, and you should avoid it whenever you can. Notice the way I’ve alternated “recall” and “remember” in the previous paragraph. It’s lazy to use the one too often, and your writing will be more interesting if you vary your vocabulary.

Bear in mind too that very few words have an exact equivalent. There are situations that call for the word “remember” and others where “recall” is more appropriate. The word “recollect” also has a subtly different meaning. You could even experiment with a phrase such as “bring to mind”. Sometimes you’ll encounter a situation in your writing where a phrase is stronger than a single word: “She knew the sort of man he was; he brought to mind an uncle she particularly loathed.” You could have written “he reminded her of” but the first phrase is perhaps more powerful.

There are of course words that have no alternatives and it’s just plain silly to try frantically to find alternatives. “Grass” is one. So is “roof”. So is “hotel”. So is “street”. You can’t in all conscience write “verdure” or “ceiling” or “guesthouse” or “thoroughfare”. The first sounds like something from the 18th century; a ceiling comes under a roof; a guesthouse is in a different class from a hotel, and a thoroughfare is a busy street (it originally meant a “through street”). Similarly if you’re writing about a dog you should avoid alternating words like “cur” and “hound”. They have other meanings. “Dog” is perfectly fine and if it becomes too repetitious you can resort to “the animal” or the dog's name. But never go for awkward constructs such as “her four-footed friend”.

Ten-dollar words
An American friend of mine calls big words $10 words. (This obviously dates from a time long ago when $10 could buy you a lot in the USA.) He generally takes that to mean words your readers would be unfamiliar with – and he doesn’t like them. The words, not the readers :0)

He’s probably right. You want your stuff to be read and enjoyed. You want your book or short story to be a page-turner – and how are you going to achieve that when your readers have to consult the dictionary every so often?

At the same time you wish to leave your readers with the idea that you've given them something new. How else are they going to remember you or your work? Very often it’s a beautifully crafted simile or a fine turn of phrase that will leave a lasting impression. Or, as Katie Irwin pointed out today, it’s an unfamiliar word like “melancholy”. Sometimes words can stir echoes in us. They seem to reach places we weren’t aware of. Truth be told, we know about five times the number of words we actually use, in speech or in writing.

A trick I use quite often works something like this. I’ll introduce a $10 word, then supply a clue to its meaning in the sentence that follows. I’ll write: “Jenny was astonished to come face to face with a real-life griffin. She’d always assumed that a creature which was half eagle and half lion was the stuff of legend.”

Out-Rowling Rowling
There are innumerable ways of telling the same story. There are an unlimited number of words that can be used to say more or less the same thing. Take the Bible: in the English language alone there are at least TWENTY different versions. Essentially the message is the same, yet the choice of words renders each one slightly different. Here’s a line from St Luke as it appears in the New International Version:

Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering why he stayed so long in the temple.

And the same line in the older, King James, version of the Bible:

And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he lingered so long in the temple.

In short, if even the Bible (the greatest bestseller of all time) can produce so many variations, isn’t every piece of writing open to improvement? Of course it is. Today you saw how you can improve on JK Rowling’s work. You saw that there are any number of ways of saying the same things she said – and better! If you wish to extend your vocabulary you break out the thesaurus.

Unhappy with the word “happy”? Let’s try:

Cheerful, cheery, merry, joyful, jovial, jolly, jocular, gleeful, carefree, untroubled, delighted, smiling, beaming, grinning, joyous, beatific, thrilled, elated, exhilarated, ecstatic, blissful, euphoric, overjoyed, exultant, rapturous, lighthearted, pleased, contented, content, satisfied, gratified, buoyant, radiant, sunny, blithe, jubilant, chirpy.

And if a single word isn’t enough, you can go for a phrase:

In good spirits, in a good mood, in seventh heaven, on cloud nine, walking on air, jumping for joy, over the moon, on top of the world, tickled pink, on a high.

Plenty more where they came from. We are talking here about the richest language in the world. My "shorter" Oxford Dictionary contains over 500,000 words. Why leave them unused?

P.S. Has anyone come up with a better simile for those bubbles? The goldfishes didn't really work for me....

Open Thread 1

We'll be having a number of threads like this one. Use it to make your views known to the others.

Want to try out something you're working on and get feedback? Post it here.

Lots of writers began their career by writing for the net. Online publishing is fast becoming an entry into print journalism, books, film, TV and more. So have a go right here, right now.

You never know what might come of it!

Conflict and how to resolve it

Hi all, as promised this is the first of the backup articles I'll be posting. Each one will be a summary of the theme we cover each week. Today's deals with conflict.

Briefly, there are two kinds of conflict, outer and inner – often called external and internal.

External conflict
This deals with tricky situations your character has to contend with. He or she may be under attack, from one or more persons (or entities). The conflict may even involve natural phenomena: an earthquake, a storm, a tsunami, a cosmic upheaval, a plague. Whatever the cause, your character has to battle it. The external conflict prevents your character from having an easy life.

But an easy life does not an exciting story make.

Internal conflict
This takes place in the mind of your character. He or she is torn by great emotions: fear, love, hatred, jealousy, envy, a thirst for vengeance, bitterness. Anything that makes the heart beat faster.

The heart is the strongest muscle in the body: it has to pump blood to every extremity and do it 24/7.

By tradition we believe the heart is the seat of the emotions. If your story doesn't have a heart it won't tug at the heartstrings of your reader.

What's more powerful, external or internal conflict?
Internal wins out every time. All the great people of history were driven by strong emotion: the Roman emperors, the great painters, the philosophers, the great writers, the great physicists and biologists, the saints, the soldiers, the good and the bad.

Want, the most powerful emotion of all
Look at every man, woman and child on the planet and note what all have in common. We all want something; it's what keeps us going. The hungry child wants food. The lonely man and woman want love. The poor boy wants a job, money, prospects. The rich man wants even more money. The party girl with 150 pairs of shoes wants 300 pairs.

We all want (wish for, desire, yearn for, long for) something we haven't got. It's what makes us human.

That's why you can't go wrong when you create a great need for your character. What does he or she want from life? What are the chances of getting or achieving that something?

Something gets in the way
Every ambition can be thwarted. There's always the possibility that something will get in the way of your character's need or desire. In every great story something will always go wrong.

Fantasy Writing in Ravensdale

Welcome to the Anaverna fantasy writing blog.

This is the place where you can speak your mind. You can post stuff you're working on and share it with others.

I'll be visiting the blog several times a day, so if you need help with a writing project feel free to ask for it here. I want this to be a truly open forum where people can learn from one another. Writing is by its very nature a solitary craft. It need not be. A blog like this will connect you to others.

Trying out new ideas? This is the place to be.