Chapter 1

Preparing to Create Your Written Masterpiece

In This Chapter

Starting your creative writing

Thinking about the process

Embracing confusion

The saying goes that all people have a book inside them. Certainly, all people have their own life stories and many want to write theirs down; everybody has dreams, ideas, hopes and fears, as well as a certain amount of imagination. All that most people lack is the courage and know-how to turn their chosen idea into a story that others want to read.

Many people think that if you want to be a writer, you have to leave your job (or never start one!) and sit all day in a freezing garret. In fact, most writers have other jobs as well – because they have to! Writers write in bed in the mornings before anyone else is awake, they stay up late writing when everyone else has gone to bed, they write on their commute to work, they write in their lunch hours, they write in any small bit of time they have. They write because they want to and because they have something unique to say – while still paying the bills in other ways.

Being passionate about what you write is important, because otherwise you’re highly unlikely to find the energy and commitment to finish. A story needs to be burning inside you, wanting to escape. You should love your characters, be fascinated by your themes and want to find out how your story ends.

But good writing is more than just a passion – it’s also a craft. You need to discover the techniques and tips of the trade and then practise them to help you make the project you have in mind as good as it can possibly be – which is where this book and this introductory chapter come in! I lead you through some things to consider before you start writing and discuss the basics of creative writing and creative thinking.

Planning for the Writing Journey

Before you physically start writing, a little preparation is a good idea to get the best out of the valuable time you devote to your writing. In this section I discuss helpful ideas such as setting targets and staying confident, as well as how much you do or don’t need to think about genre, scope and the title of your work before you start writing.

Setting your writing goals

One of the most helpful things you can do when starting any writing project is to set yourself some simple, realistic and achievable goals and targets. Here are a few examples:

• Task targets: Such as developing a character, finishing a chapter or planning a scene.
• Time targets: A certain number of writing sessions of fixed length, such as three half-hour sessions a week.
• Word targets: A certain number of words or pages, such as 500 words or three pages per week.

None of these targets sounds like much, but you may be surprised how much you achieve if you keep going with them week after week.

If you set writing goals that are too optimistic, you’re likely to fail, which undermines your writing instead of supporting it. The good thing about modest targets, especially at the beginning of a project, is that when you exceed them and replace them with slightly more ambitious ones, you can see that you’re making real progress. If you do find that you’re struggling with the targets you’ve set, revise them downwards until you have something that you feel is appropriate for you.

Write down an overall long-term goal as well, such as ‘I’ll have a first draft by this date next year’; it really helps to keep you on track.

Update your goals at regular intervals to keep them relevant and so that you always have something to aim for. Your goals inevitably change as the work develops.

People differ in their strengths and weaknesses: some are planners and others prefer to plunge in and get started. If you’re a planner, plunging in probably makes you feel completely overwhelmed and all at sea, and your story’s likely to peter out quite quickly. Therefore, you’ll find that working out a rough plan or timeline for your story is beneficial, and perhaps even mapping out key scenes before you begin (see Chapters 3 and 19). If you’re a more instinctive writer, and planning is a barrier rather than an aid to progress, just jump in and write every day, and watch your story gradually take shape.

Locating the appropriate genre

Books are defined principally by their genre. Go into any bookshop or library and you’ll find books listed under headings such as action/adventure, children’s, crime, fantasy, historical, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, thriller, women’s and young adult.

Literary fiction is usually listed under general fiction but is sometimes considered a genre on its own. Literary fiction is hard to define, but the term is often used to describe books that are original or innovative in form, show deep psychological insight and act metaphorically as well as literally – meaning that you can dip beneath the surface of the story and characters to examine themes or issues or to extract multiple meanings. I cover these sorts of issues and techniques in Chapters 15 and 16.

Before you start writing, a good idea is to consider what genre your story will fall into. Also, read some of the most successful examples of this genre to see how they work. Ask yourself the following types of question:

• What’s the rough length of books in your chosen genre?
• Do they tend to be written from a first-person or a third-person viewpoint and do they contain one or several points of view? (Check out Chapter 8 for more details on point of view.)
• Are they primarily plot driven (that is, the story is the most important element, and the characters mainly exist to fulfil a role within it) with lots of action (see Chapter 12), or character driven (the characters’ choices and actions drive the story) with lots of internal reflection?
• Is the language simple and direct with relatively short sentences and paragraphs, or are the sentences more complex with more detailed description, including similes and metaphors? (Chapter 15 has loads of info on these figures of speech and Chapter 11 covers using all the senses for intense descriptions.)

Literary fiction tends to be character driven and commercial fiction plot driven, although this isn’t always the case. Many popular and successful novels have well-drawn characters who seem real and that readers can identify with, as well as a well-structured and compelling plot. Thrillers, detective stories and adventure novels tend to fall into the plot-driven category. (The chapters in Part IV have lots of useful information on plot and structure.)

Sometimes people say to me that they don’t want to read other novels in their genre, because they don’t want to be influenced by them. Unfortunately, this often means that they inadvertently write something that’s already been done or that completely fails to match the expectations that readers have when they buy a book in this genre. My mantra is read, read, read! (See the nearby sidebar ‘Taking lessons from other writers’.)

Taking lessons from other writers

You can discover an enormous amount about writing from reading books, novels and stories of all kinds. When you read, think consciously about the way the book is written. Look to see whether it’s divided into sections, parts and chapters. If so, are the chapters short or long, or varied in length? Are the different parts of equal size? How many points of view and locations exist in the story? (Check out Chapter 20 for loads more on structuring your work.)

Look at the techniques the writer uses to convey the way that people speak in dialogue, to describe a scene or build suspense. See how the plot unfolds, how secrets are hidden and how clues are revealed. Examine how events are foreshadowed and surprises created. (Chapters 4 and 6 discuss dialogue, and Chapters 14 and Chapter 21 creating and maintaining suspense.)

Picking passages you really like from a book and imitating them as closely as possible using your own settings, characters and story can be helpful. It helps you to see how really good fiction works. Consider these to be exercises, like a musician playing scales or an artist making a sketch from a famous painting. You don’t even need to put them in your work in progress, although you can use them, often altered, if they fit.

I was once working on a novel based on my experience of working in a women’s prison. The beginning just wouldn’t come right, so in exasperation I picked up a copy of one of my favourite novels, John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). It starts with a terse dialogue at Checkpoint Charlie, where the main character is waiting for someone to cross over. I immediately started my novel with a tense dialogue just before the main character meets the disturbed woman who is the focus of the narrative, ditching the first 20 pages I’d written!

However much you’re influenced by other books and other writers – and all writers...