“…cherry-pick the interesting incidents and emotions from your real life and put a fictional spin on them or give them to a fictional character with an agenda entirely separate from your own.” Louise Doughty tells us. You can do this with any aspect of our life and the more fictionalised your writing becomes, the less autobiographical. Write from what you know until you have enough writerly confidence to write what you don’t know, to rely on imagination alone.
Another Louise Doughty inspired piece of writing about being lost, physically and metaphorically. It is based on an incident in my life, but overly exaggerated. Actually, reading it back I really dislike the writing I have done (perhaps because most of my writing is in 1st person and this is in 3rd person – but this was intentional, to replicate the distance the character feels from those around her and from herself). However, the purpose of this blog is not to publish only highly edited and re-worked posts, but to give you a sense of ‘writing in process’ over the course of writing my novel…and it is my hope that seeing my less than brilliant writing will also inspire you to have a go at writing yourself.
Author, Louise Doughty encourages writers to “…start to build up a body of material-anecdotes, notes, stories.”
Any writing you do can be applied to your character(s), to build depth of character, to help you understand their motivations, their thoughts, how they act, what they sound like, how they respond to their environment. 1) Take a previous piece of writing and give it to one of your characters. Re-write the piece. 2) Try sitting in a café and jotting down overheard conversations, then giving some of this to your characters. Re-write the conversation with your characters as the speakers. 3) Write a diary entry of a day in your life, then give this day to one of your characters. Re-write the entry as though it was a day in the life of your character.
Today is all about characters. I find it useful to write a character profile so I have an idea of who this person is – it helps me determine how they might behave in certain situations and what their motivations are – and this can help build fuller, more rounded, authentic characters.
I have come across character profile forms from 1 to 35 pages long! They get writers to consider basic facts, like a character’s age and gender, on to such things as their appearance, behaviour, familial background, medical records, voice, grooming, etc., etc…the list goes on.
In deciding to write a novel this year, I have become a much more active writer. I am multi-tasking a number of writerly undertakings: I have been working on a plot for the novel, which prompted me to get back to researching the particular place, historical era and key figures relevant to the story. I have been reading much more, and reading in a more mindful manner, noting down all kinds of useful things during the reading and learning more about writing in the process. I have joined a writer’s group and am learning more about critiquing the work of others, reading my own work in public and accepting constructive criticism. And of course I have been writing more.
In A Novel in a Year, Louise Doughty says, “Naive enthusiasm is a huge asset in the early stages when the most important thing is to write.” She encourages us to write…which is after all what writers do – right?
I already have three ideas for novels. Two come from short stories I have already written, but feel there is much more in them…they are the spark of novels to come; and the third idea is one I have been milling around for a while now, wondering what to do with it. One is definitely young adult historical fiction, and this is the one I am planning to work on this year.
I think I need to work on plot, but I have no idea how to do this. Continue reading
As you know from my previous post, I intend to write a novel this year. I wonder who of you has the same desire. Feel free join me in this experiment and give your own novel a try.
I have bought Louise Doughty’s A Novel in a Year and plan to work through this week by week. While I will not post the content of her book (for obvious copyright reasons) I will post my writing in response to working through her weekly suggestions. Her book is aimed at helping you get ideas and draft material for a novel. Why did I choose this particular book over other equally helpful writing guides? I guess this one spoke to me, to my style of and ideas about writing, plus I like the idea of working through week-by-week tasks – it breaks down the idea of writing a novel into achievable steps, and I have a strong feeling that this will be both useful and exactly what I need.
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