Dialogue in fiction is nothing like how people talk in real life. Anyone who says different needs to a) listen more and/or b) get a job where they have to talk a lot, like sales or retail. Actually, scratch that last one, it’s probably not worth it.

            There are the obvious differences, such as the absence of uhs, ums, and ers from most dialogue (unless planted there deliberately and with intention). There’s tendency of real people to go off on rambling tangents that interest no one, or share irrelevant details of their lives.

There is rarely ‘small talk’ in good dialogue. Rarely do characters start a conversation in an interesting book with: ‘Hey, how are you today?’ Not too bad. How about you? Had to take the dog to the vet…’

            A group of people in a book manage not to interrupt each other for the most part, unlike real people in a crowd, who will shout and interject constantly, derailing the conversation a hundred times a minute.

            But even when you take all of these differences into account – and if you do nothing more than that your dialogue will at least be readable – there is still so much more to learn. You might think you’re writing dialogue in English, but in reality you’re speaking another language, with its own rules to follow, few of which apply in real conversation.

            This is what I know so far about that language.

1.  There is conflict in every conversation.

There’s an important point to be made here. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that conflict means two characters yelling at each other. That can make for a good scene, depending on what they’re yelling about, but it’s not necessarily what I mean by ‘conflict.’

            Here’s an example: one character has an idea about how to solve the book’s central problem, another character has a different idea. They disagree about it, and maybe someone takes action the other has warned them against.

            Another: The two characters prioritize different goals that don’t necessarily match up. Gollem covets the ring; Frodo is trying to destroy it. Even though they are working together, their goals are different, giving rise to constant conflict in their every interaction.

            There are plenty of ways to create conflict between characters. Even if they agree on their goals and solutions to a problem, give them radically different worldviews. Perhaps character A did something in the past which character B disapproves of, and the lack of mutual respect is always present in their dialogue.

            Plenty of possibilities, and one of the best ways to create engaging dialogue is to ask yourself where the conflict is, or how it can be created. Do not write, as I often have in the past, dialogues with this kind of format:

            ‘Oh my god! Terrible thing has happened. We have to do X thing in response to solve the problem!’

            ‘Oh no that’s terrible. Yes, you’re right, that response seems completely reasonable. Let’s go do X right now.’

            Come on, man. No one wants to read that.

2. Constant underlying tension

There is a lot of overlap here with the above point, since you can often use the conflict inherent in the dialogue to create underlying tension. That isn’t always the case, though. For a good example of what I mean, go watch basically any Quentin Tarantino movie.

That guy loves putting in long dialogue scenes in which nothing meaningful is said, yet the audience is fully engaged.  

            The reason he can pull it off is because he practically always infuses the dialogue with tension. The perfect example of this is in the opening scene of ‘Inglorious Basterds’, where the SS Colonel is interviewing a family who he suspects of hiding Jews. The tension is there because of course, we know they are in fact hiding Jews who are holding their breath in another room. Watching the scene, the reader is constantly on edge because of the question will he discover them? And if he does, what will he do then? Probably something violent and horrific, something viewers have long come to expect from Tarantino. And, of course, the more sympathy Tarantino can drum up for the honest farmers, the more we fear this possibility.

            In that scene, the Colonel does not kick the door down and start yelling about hidden Jews. That would be a release of tension, not a preservation of it. Instead, he calmly and politely addresses the farmers, asks for milk, and so on. Compare this to another famous Tarantino scene, in which the two hitmen talk, not about the people they are about to murder in cold blood, but about what big macs are called in France. The very mundanity of the conversation preserves the tension – but it only works because we sense what’s coming.

3. Dialogue is a window to character.

In both fiction and real life, you can learn a lot from the way people talk. There are a million factors that can play a part here. How much do they talk, or how little? Long, rambling, breathless sentences, or short, blunt ones? Do they have an affinity for beautiful speech and wordplay, showing off their intelligence, or are they plain spoken? Do they laugh a lot, or never?

            Obviously I could go on, but it’s better if you consider your own experience in dealing with people. If you truly pay attention to the people in your life, you’ll start to notice all of the ways their personalities come through in their every word and gesture.

            From there, you will be able to match certain speech habits and patterns with particular character types. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but keep the ideal in mind: if you do it perfectly, the reader should not need dialogue tags at all to know who is speaking, but will immediately hear the correct voice in their minds. (You will not, of course, ever do it perfectly, but it’s good to try).

4. The non-verbal is as important as the verbal.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to write conversations that consist purely of dialogue. It can be done – Elmore Leonard often goes for pages of pure dialogue – but it’s not advisable. For one thing, you’re likely to find yourself writing a script rather than a novel. For another, the longer you leave your reader with nothing but dialogue, the harder it becomes for them to actually visualise the conversation. The characters become frozen in place, a couple of talking heads floating in a void.

            Another less obvious use for doing this is to help manage pacing. One of the problems with a continuous stretch of dialogue is that it reads too fast – especially if the sentences are short. That can actually be useful for short action scenes, but for most dialogue the use of body language helps to give the reader a small amount of time to digest what’s being said.

            Note the difference between these two exchanges:

Exchange 1:

            ‘The last thing he told me was to watch Alex. Said he didn’t trust him at all. Said there was a rat somewhere in the organisation.’

            ‘What, you think it could be him?’

            ‘Rats are rats, Jim. Could be anyone. Could be me.’

            ‘Yeah, well. I’ll take my chances.’

Exchange 2:

            ‘The last thing he told me was to watch Alex. Said he didn’t trust him at all. Said there was a rat somewhere in the organisation.’

            ‘What,’ Jim said, finally igniting the cigarette that had been hanging from his lips for several minutes, ‘You think it could be him?’

            ‘Rats are rats, Jim. Could be anyone.’ Ray’s expression remained deadpan. ‘Could be me.’

            The corner of Jim’s mouth turned up, just slightly, acknowledging the unspoken implication. Could be me, could be you. Taking a deep lungful of smoke, he let it all out in twin streams through his nostrils and sat back in his chair, serene.

            ‘Yeah, well. I’ll take my chances.’

The second exchange is much slower, giving the reader time to think about every word. But the sections between dialogue do more than that. They serve as dialogue tags, so that at every moment the reader is fully aware of who is talking. In a long chain of straight dialogue, it gets very easy to lose track of that, and impossible if there are more than two characters talking.

            These pauses also add depth to the conversation. ‘Could be me, could be you.’ This is an added subtext that adds tension. It’s clear that Ray suspects Jim, and Jim knows it. His relaxed response to this, leaning back and having a smoke, tells us something about him as a character.

            You might also notice that I used ‘Ray’s expression remained deadpan’ to split his sentence into two parts so that the pause after ‘Could be anyone’ is longer, and the final statement ‘could be me’ hits harder.

5. Dialogue attribution

If you’ve read On Writing, you’ll know how Mr. King feels about dialogue attribution, and I tend to agree: he said/she said is best. But even better, in my opinion, is to be clear enough so that even that isn’t necessary. As invisible as the word ‘said’ tends to be (and invisible is what you want in this case), it becomes all too visible if overused, as in the following case:

            ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Darla said.

            ‘Listen, we just have to figure out what Bill wants, and co-operate, right Bill?’ Ryan said.

            ‘But what about – ’ Darla said

            ‘Never mind him,’ Ryan said.

            ‘Right. Both of you in the corner, for a start,’ Bill said.

            ‘I can’t – I won’t go!’ Darla said.

Setting aside for the fact that the dialogue itself sucks, all those ‘saids’ sound repetitive. This kind of exchange is better served by other kinds of dialogue tags. Ideally, if you’re sure the reader knows who’s talking, you can eliminate dialogue attribution altogether.

            King also takes a hard line on adverbs, and while he makes a good point (specifically, that context should tell your reader how someone said something), I have read many books that use them quite well. Overuse is a pitfall, but as long as you’re conscious and careful with how you use adverbs, and stick to ‘said’ most of the time where necessary, the occasional ‘he said harshly/serenely/sharply’ is okay and can sometimes clarify the intention and tone of the character.

6. Everyone has an accent; everyone has a verbal tic.

Yes, even you. There is no one on earth who does not possess some kind of accent and some kind of verbal tic. You might not realise this if you have always lived in the same small community where everyone talks the same, but it is true. I discovered this when I emigrated to Australia from South Africa. Within my first week of school I learned a painful lesson: it was not the Australians who had the bizarre foreign accents, but me!

These kinds of verbal tells can be useful for a number of reasons – adding realism, giving the reader a sense of place and time, dialogue attribution etc. But it can also be easily overdone. In my experience, the best way to go about it is to keep the speech patterns of your characters in mind, yet use as little accent as possible in dialogue.

            For example, if you have a character from the American south, the last thing you want to do is write every sentence like this: ‘Well ah do say sah what a fahn day we’re havin’. I mean, imagine trying to navigate through that mess as a reader. And never mind the potential for unintentional racism.

            Instead, make sure that when the character is first introduced, a particular accent or verbal tic is fixed in the reader’s mind. After that, only very occasional reminders are necessary to maintain the effect. As long as the reader remembers what they’re supposed to be hearing, they will make all the necessary changes in their own mind.

            Of course, don’t say a character has a thick Jamaican accent and then allow them to say things like: ‘I do say, this is a curious situation.’

At the time of writing, that’s about all I know when it comes to the art of dialogue in fiction. If you really want to improve, though, I wasn’t entirely joking about getting a job in retail or sales – although any activity that forces you to constantly interact with other people will help. The listening, of course, more than the speaking. And the watching. And the smelling. Yeah, people smell different, and sometimes that’s a useful thing to know when you write about them. People feel different, too, and probably taste different, as I’m sure some uncontacted tribes might attest… but that’s all for another post. Hope this helped.

A lot of the articles that come up when you google ‘Nightmares’ revolve around how to cure them or stop them from happening. Most people agree that nightmares are an unpleasant experience, and the fewer of them you have the better.

            On one hand, having too many bad dreams can’t be good – especially if it causes insomnia or somniphobia (fear of sleep). Onnneee, two, Freddy’s comin for youuuu… We’ve all been there, right?

            Personally, though, I find I enjoy nightmares in an odd way. Kind of the same way I enjoy cold showers, really: painful while it’s happening, but the aftermath has its rewards. Since I’m a generally happy and optimistic person, I had a hunch that even though I seem to have more nightmares than most people (one or two a week, I’d say), they were doing me more good than harm. Weird as it sounds, I kinda like them. I like how they make me think about them the next day, how they make me appreciate my life more (thank god I’m not being eaten alive by goblins! Hallelujah!), and how they often force me to think about things I wouldn’t otherwise.

            Plus, I’ve always thought that if books are, as Neil Gaiman says, dreams you hold in your hands, doesn’t that make horror books physical nightmares? And if we assume that the mind in some way needs dreams for its health and function (and all science demonstrates that it does), then it follows that nightmares must serve some purpose, must be good for something.

            One study from the university of Geneva revealed that after experiencing nightmares, the brain areas responsible for controlling emotions responded to fear-inducing situations much more effectively. Another recent study found that people who reported being fans of horror media or had a morbid curiosity were more resilient in the face of adversity.

            To tell the truth, I tend to roll my eyes with this type of stuff – not because I don’t think there’s something to it, but because there’s something broken about needing to justify reading fiction for the purpose of self-improvement. It bothers me. It brings to mind an image of some bright teenager being forced to read The Brothers Karamazov because they’re told that reading fiction develops your mind in such and such a way. Even if it does, is that not the worst way to go about it? What about the love? What about the enjoyment of the activity? Why do so many people go on about how many books they’ve ‘devoured’? as though the number of pages consumed is the goal, instead of their content?

            Aaaaanyway, I digress.

            You know who’s really annoying? Relentlessly ‘positive’ people. But why? Why would consistent positivity be annoying? Because it’s dishonest. If you know someone who always has a wide smile pasted on their face and refuses to acknowledge any kind of negative emotions or feeling no matter what because stay positive! They’re probably suppressing a lot of shit. They might be suicidal.

            I’m joking, but also not. The way I see it, one can’t be happy in a meaningful sense unless one fully acknowledges and comes to terms with darkness and misery. Of course, ignorance is bliss, and one has only to look at a pet dog to see the truth in that. Still, I don’t think blissful ignorance is true happiness, any more than injecting heroin is true happiness. And it’s certainly not the kind of happiness an adult can or should aspire to. One cannot will oneself into ignorance, and trying to do so is an act of suppression.

            None of that shit would have flown back in the hunter gatherer days. Imagine walking the savannah with your tribe and trying to pretend Lions didn’t eat people. The real heroes were the men and women who sat around the fire late at night and told everyone else what they’d seen happen. Better yet, those that wove tales about what could happen, especially if you left the comfort of the fire and entered the dark jungle alone. The first horror writers weren’t writers at all but story tellers, and their purpose was as much to caution as it was to entertain.

            Fear, as any soldier or first responder will tell you, is useful. And with fear comes the knowledge of darkness, of what lies beyond the campfire, and what could lie there, and therefore what you should watch for.

            But Ben! You cry. Maybe that was true back then, when people were getting stalked by lions on a daily basis. But how could a book like IT or Dracula or Frankenstein inform anyone or help anyone? What good would it do me to cross the road to avoid sewer gratings in case there are clowns hiding there?

            Well, first of all, if you think horror no longer serves that kind of purpose, I would draw your attention to Black Mirror. Practically every episode of that show is a cautionary tale regarding the future of technology. How about the transcendent horror film Midsomer? You don’t think that’s something of a warning about the nature of cults and their innate appeal? Have you noticed how practically every modern day zombie movie is actually about a man made virus that spreads through human hosts?

            But I’m cherry picking, aren’t I? Let’s use the initial examples – monster movies like IT or Dracula or Frankenstein, to which you could also add most ghost stories. These are certainly more abstract things, more departed from reality than something like Black Mirror. In these cases, I believe the focus is not so much on the lion as it is on the human in question. In other words, where a show like Black Mirror focuses on the external threat – technology/the lion – IT focuses on the behaviour of the Losers – the seven friends who ultimately defeat Pennywise.

When you tell the horror story of the human being hunted by the lion, there are two sides to the tale. The obvious one is that of the lion itself, but no less significant is that of the human. How does he or she react, and why? What are the results? Many of these kinds of tales often end badly for the human element, in part if not in total. You see? these stories say: if you’re getting hunted by a lion and you react this way, you will be eaten alive!’ And the more terrifying you can make that consequence, the more you turn the listener’s mind towards something good, towards avoiding that outcome as best they can. Aha, they think. I know that story: the lion stalks the man, and he freezes in place and is eaten. Now I know if I’m being stalked, I will run as fast as I can back to the tribe, and so stand a chance of survival.

            To return to the story of IT, in which a killer clown feasts on the town of Derry, Maine, we see the point more clearly. IT is a stand-in for the lion, and the focus of the story, despite its title, is not with IT at all but with the children who ultimately face their fears and walk into the lion’s den to eliminate the threat to their village. Not all of them survive, of course, but that is only true to reality: if you face your fear and slay the beast, you’re unlikely to come out unscathed. However, the effort will be worth it.  

            There is a parallel in psychology: the treatment of various fears and PTSD often consists of Exposure therapy, as outlined in this interesting Time Article. Essentially, exposing the person to what they’re afraid of in small, incrementally increasing amounts. Over time, the person develops a resistance to it almost as they would if exposed to small increasing amounts of snake venom.

            This might explain why books like Survivor Song (Paul Tremblay) have become so popular during the covid pandemic. People are self medicating, seeking to give themselves some exposure therapy so that when they have to put on their mask and step outside they’re a little braver for it, have a little more resistance.

            As a disclaimer, I should probably point out that it’s not a direct cause and effect thing. As the Time article from above mentions, too-frequent nightmares can be signs of trauma and depression rather than mental health. And while having an awareness of the suffering and evil of the world may be valuable, having an obsession about these things can quickly sink one in a mire of depression. The underpaid folks who work as content moderators for social media – or literally anyone who’s spent too much time on liveleak – will attest to that. The key, as always, is balance.

            “No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

 – Carl Jung

Recently I wrote a story for someone I know who has Trypophobia – the fear of closely packed holes. The story turned out well and I’ll probably end up selling it in the near future, and this got me thinking about something Stephen Graham Jones said in one of his ‘on writing essays.’ I can’t remember the exact quote but it was something about how he always likes to accept deadlines because it reminds him that at the end of the day he’s a writer, and that he should be able to write a certain type of story to a specific length by a specific time.

It’s the same kind of ‘craftsman’ mentality that Stephen King subscribes to, when he says in On Writing that building novels is just like laying pipe or driving long haul trucks. And it’s the same idea that Steven Pressfield talks about in The War of Art.

In the past I’ve felt a mild resistance to writing according to a limitation or specific topic. Instinctively I don’t like having someone else tell me what to write. Like when every year every magazine starts asking for stories themed for Halloween, and then later for Christmas.

But I’ve come to realise that, if you’re actually good, it shouldn’t matter what topic you write on. A truly good writer could produce 100 stories, all of them Christmas themed, and all of them perfectly original. Stephen King wrote a vampire novel and a haunted hotel novel and they were both excellent. Stephen Graham Jones recently wrote a werewolf novel, Mongrels, and it was completely original and unique to him. Werewolves are one of the most done and re-done topics in all of horror literature.

The lesson is that limitations do not inhibit creativity: they actually encourage it. This is one of the reasons I’ve come to favour The Heroes Journey and the classic three-act structure. I love constraints. These days, I pursue limitation. I like that I can ask someone what their biggest fear is, and write a story around it, and the story actually works. It’s satisfying, like having a friend tell you they really need a car, and you build one for them and it runs well.

To find your voice, to make an idea into your idea, something that no one else on earth could write but you – the same way no one on earth could have written Oliver Twist but Dickens – you have to impose limitations.

If you need a good example, there’s a story by Adam Nevill in his collection of shorts called Some Will Not Sleep. I believe it’s the one called ‘Where Angels Come In’. It’s damn good, and it’s also founded on the most basic and unoriginal premise imaginable: two kids explore a haunted house. I mean, really? You couldn’t get less original than that! And yet, it’s a great and original story, because it’s told in a way that only Adam Nevill could tell it. The dread, the shifting of things just out of sight, the (no spoiler) ending had his name written all over it, and as a result this most basic of premises, in his hands, becomes a completely unique tale.

 

 

 

 

Some people have been doing a thing where they post about all the books they’ve written on the long journey to success. Seemed like a cool idea, so I thought I’d give it a crack…

Year: 2001

Title: Bobby Crown

Length: 50,000 words.

This was my first real book, written at the age of about eleven. It was about a kid who went into another world where he fought a bunch of monsters and whatnot. I just remember thinking that Bobby Crown was a cool name.

 

Year: 2002 – 2007

Title: Felix Bones Saga

Length: 160,000 words across four books.

As you can see, I had a thing about cool names back then. I also had a thing about boys adventuring in other universes and killing monsters, since that was exactly the plot of all four books, once again.

 

Year: 2009

Title: Hunt

Length: 70,000 words.

This was basically my version of hunger games. In my version though, the arena was filled with a bunch of African wildlife, lions and shit. I wrote the whole thing in pencil, for some reason.

 

Year: 2010

Title: The Garden

Length: 100,000 words.

Still hadn’t got the hang of titles yet. This was just about a haunted garden tormenting some kid’s family. He has to venture down to the bottom of it, where he finds some crazy monster and then kills it to save his girlfriend. Involved carnivorous monkeys. Probably the most fun I had writing a book in my youth, to be honest.

 

Year: 2010

Title: Green Thumb

Length: 70,000 words

Guess plants were my jam back in 2010. This is a kid oppressed by his parents who gains the power to control plants. He somehow uses his power to kill a bunch of people.

 

Year: 2011

Title: Winter

Length: 80,000

Some guy goes into an isolated little town. The idea was that there were all these creepy things going on in town, and I could branch off and address each area as an individual story. Inspired by the old school series Spookesville by Christopher Pike. Didn’t turn out well, the whole thing was fragmented and the story had no structure.

 

Year: 2011

Title: Wild

Length: 80,000

Terrible, terrible book. I wanted to write about a caveman in caveman times. So in this one a stone age guy has his tribe killed by wolves or some shit and he just goes wandering across the savannah in search of a home. No dialogue, no research, no point reading. Lesson learned.

Year: 2011

Title: Drugged

Length: 110,000

Wrote this during once a week, twelve-hour long writing binges fuelled by alcohol and energy drinks. The writing was awful, but there were some fun scenes. It was about a guy who develops a drug that gives him superpowers and is then hunted by the mafia because they want to steal it. Kinda like that movie Limitless, but I think that hadn’t come out yet. I enjoyed myself, but it was ultimately unreadable.

 

Year: 2012

Title: The Spiral Door

Length: 110,000

A group of kids move into some old guy’s mansion. Old guy has a collection of doors (of all things), in a big room in the house, and one of these leads into a creepy parallel universe. For some reason, I insisted on making every chapter 4,000 words long, and paid no attention to pacing or writing coherent scenes. So while I became lost in my own world, it was painfully boring for anyone else to read. Again, lesson learned.

 

Year: 2013

Title: Red Night

Length: 110,000

A friend of mine told me this was one of his favourite books, and he seems sincere, although I sure wouldn’t agree with him. A group of scientists exploring the Congo run into a massacred village, and soon discover the cause is a bunch of demon-worshipping superhuman cannibals. Just your average run of the mill horror/adventure.

 

Year: 2014

Title: North Winds

Length: 60,000

This one was so close to being okay! But about two thirds of the way in I killed off most of the main characters and introduced a bunch of new ones and had to rely on some heavy deus ex machina for the ending to make sense. It was a monster story concerning a mythological beast called a Draugr from Viking folklore, terrorizing a town in Northern Ireland. Another mistake I made was not knowing anything at all about Northern Ireland.

 

Year: 2014

Title: Book of Worlds

Length: 75,000

My first actually decent and readable book with a proper structure. I even self published it for a while, and it got a positive review on goodreads. (I think it might even still come up if you google it, but it’s not available to buy any more.) I had some superfluous characters and plot holes and the writing was still a bit amateur, but otherwise it was okay. A group of kids figure out a way to open doorways into other worlds, but they let some horrible shit through and have to close it before the world is destroyed. I have some kind of obsession with portals.

 

Year: 2015

Title: Cursed

Length: 78,000

Energised by my recent success, I was sure that this book would be even better than my last. In the end, the complicated plot was so riddled with characters and meanderings that it was not salvageable. It didn’t help that the premise was mediocre: An evil witch attacks a town, but it turns out that the way to beat her is to (gasp) not be afraid of her and thus deprive her of power.

 

Year: 2016

Title: Bunyip

Length: 72,000

This time, I vowed to keep it simple: an isolated farmhouse in the Australian outback with just a few characters and an interesting monster. Surely I couldn’t screw up such a simple idea? But yes, yes I could. Despite my success with the three-act structure in Book of Worlds, my plot construction was flimsy at best. I didn’t know how to use scenes, and this was also before I read The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Story Grid, Stein On Writing and quite a few more that drastically changed how I approached novel writing. Luckily thanks to said books, this novel was also the last unmitigated failure I’ve had, to date.

 

Year: 2017

Title: Demon Haunted Boy

Length: 110,000

A boy travels into the underworld to retrieve the soul of his young sister, which has been stolen by demons.

This was actually two short books, but it would have ended up being a quadrilogy if I’d ever finished it. I was doing a self-publishing experiment, posting up one chapter at a time on the website in the hopes of attracting people, and selling it as an ebook. The story itself wasn’t bad, although I was stretched to my limit trying to juggle all the different plotlines.

I still think it might have turned out okay, but the one chapter at a time method does not work – at least not for me, though Charles Dickens did quite well with it. I also lost my illusions about self-publishing and learned that that path isn’t for me. That said, I learned a lot about story telling over the course of the books, and enjoyed every minute of it.

 

Year: 2018

Title: Holly and the Nobodies

Length: 83,000

Holly Anderson is a lonely girl, born with the power to materialize living beings from thin air. When she decides to kidnap a ‘real’ person to be her friend, schoolgirl Alex Miller becomes the target. But when Alex goes missing, her close friend James is the only one who suspects what really happened, and the farther he pursues the truth, the deeper into Holly’s bizarre world he finds himself. Even with some of Holly’s odd creatures on their side, it is soon apparent that they won’t get out unscathed – if they get out at all.

If that sounded like a draft blurb, good – it is. At the time of writing I’ve only just finished and am trying to get it published. Finally, I wrote something that doesn’t make me hate myself! I joke, but it was insanely difficult – and just as insanely fun – to write.

 

So that’s all of ‘em. The novels, anyway. I’ve written too many short stories to count or even remember. Sometimes it looks like a long road, but the truth is I’m only just beginning. Sisyphus will heave the boulder once more – but he does it with a grin.

Keep writing everybody – it’s amazing how far you can come in seventeen short years…

 

 

 

‘Where do you get your ideas?’

This question is notoriously annoying for writers and usually elicits a sarcastic or disparaging response. The general consensus is that no one really knows. Until now, my responses to the question have been more to do with action than method: ‘I stare at blank walls.’ ‘I go for long walks.’ Or when I’m impatient: ‘Same place you get yours.’

But I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, mostly because I’ve been having a lot of bad ideas (and worse – no ideas) and I decided to nail down something more solid – something I, and hopefully you, can use. Sure, I stare at walls, but what actually goes on in my mind when I make that jump from disconnected thoughts to a coherent idea? What black magic is this?

So, over the past few months I set up camp in the slimy dungeons of my mind and I watched my thoughts from afar to see what they were doing. Here is my field report.

 

There are, I discovered, certain things I like. They seem completely random, yet connected in some way I can’t quite identify. Cacti is a recent one I became aware of. Why the hell would I be interested in cacti? Cacti, of all things! I don’t know, but I am – I love cacti. (Now I think of it, maybe it has something to do with tequila…) Here are some other things I like: Hyenas. The Moon. Hell. Silver. Keys and locks. Fire. Blood. Wood and stone. Knives. Monsters of all kinds. Shadows. Time. Magic. The ocean. Jungles. Cities (big and dirty preferred). Everything Noir. Guns. I could probably fill several pages with these things, ranging from objects to abstract concepts. Why they fascinate me, I have no idea – but luckily I don’t have to know.

When I go for one of my long night walks, or stare at a blank wall, or stay up late and stare at nothing, I turn my mind towards these things that I like, and I focus on one or another and see if I can make what I think of as a ‘story element’.

A story element is a character, a setting, a concept, an emotion, a sensation, a monster, fill in the blank; it is an aspect of a story, a single piece of the puzzle. Here’s an example from a walk I took yesterday. Among the things I like are: Motorbikes, Cool, James Dean type characters, and Magic. Thinking on this, I came up with a character, a wizard who has – instead of a magic wand and a broomstick – a magical cigarette lighter and a motorbike that takes him wherever he wants to go and never runs out of fuel. I haven’t decided yet whether or not he’s good or evil, or what story he’s going to fit in, or even what the magical properties of his cigarettes might be, but none of that matters – I have enough to write him into a story if he fits, so he’s become a workable story element.

Once an element is clear enough in my mind, I file it away. Some of these I’ll forget, which is fine because that means they weren’t good enough to be memorable – and it’s for the sake of this sifting process that I never write down my story elements. If I can forget it, I should. The good ones will always sit there and maybe jump to the forefront of my mind again in the future to be fleshed out a little more.

In any case, during the course of a walk or a blank-wall stare I’ll file away a few of these, so I always have a bunch of them boiling in the back of my mind like so many eyeballs in the witch’s pot. The next phase is to take an element here and another there and try to combine them to make the beginnings of a story. Usually this is where I’m asking a lot of ‘what if’ questions.

There’s a story I’m working on right now with the following elements: a surfer in a small seaside town who hears an urban legend about a secret ‘break’ of monster waves. The break is also rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of a surfer who died there, but the story is only known by the town’s oldest resident, a bartender with greasy grey hair and a mysterious past.

This is what I call a ‘seed’, which is basically just a collection of several story elements wound together in a very rudimentary and incomplete story. There’s a lot I don’t know, for example, and in fact some of the things I just outlined will probably never make it into even the first draft. The elements in this case are the character of the old bartender, the setting of the seaside town with a secret break, and the concept of a ghost surfer haunting a beach. These elements in turn were developed from a few of those ‘random things I like’, specifically: The ocean, surfing, giant waves, small towns, ghosts and secrets. I’m pretty sure I can work a silver coin into there, too – but I’m not sure how.

I have a page in my red notebook called ‘Seeds’, and here I’ll finally write down the titles of the most resilient seeds – those that won’t be forgotten. By the time I do this, I usually have the story fleshed out enough that I have an ending in mind. I can already hear some writers throwing up their hands and saying: I could never do that! Once I know the ending it takes all the fun out of it! I hear you, I do – I’m an improviser myself. That’s why the ending I have in mind almost never turns out to be the way the story actually ends. I only use it as something to aim at, with the understanding that it is subject to change.

Once I have the seed written down, the thing is getting written – for better or worse. There was a time when I’d have a dozen seeds at a time recorded, and of them only two or three would end up in draft, but since then I’ve learned to wait, to let the sick children die, so to speak. They say to kill your darlings; I say let the runts starve.

So that’s how I do it, boys and girls: that is the best answer I can give for the age old question – make of it what you will, and I hope it helps, or gives some insight rather than a sarcastic comment about unimaginative journalists.

Adios for now.

There is a strange mysticism around the creative arts – albeit one that has been slowly eroded by works such as On Writing, The War of Art, Stein on Writing, and many others. The traditional idea is that creativity is a mysterious force, and that artists are damaged madmen who are able to think and see on some other plane and connect with this force. They are compelled to write, yet sometimes the words ‘just don’t come’ or the muse is absent, or they can only write when they have achieved the perfect state of mind, brought on by a mixture of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, and sleep deprivation.

I think most reading this have been enlightened beyond such ideas by the aforementioned books. No one can argue that Stephen King, writing two thousand words every day no matter what, ever waits for the muse, and Ramsey Campbell is at the keyboard at six every morning – no inspiration needed.

Still, there are some things even us jaded anti-musing, vomit-drafting, regular-producing folks will not do. For me in the past there have been certain conditions under which I won’t write. If my laptop breaks, for example. If I’m on holiday and between novels. If I don’t have ‘enough’ time.

Your own hang ups might be different: maybe you only write in the morning, or only late at night. Maybe you only write longhand, or only by keyboard. Or only in public places, or never, or only with music, or never. You see my point. Such conditions are not conducive to the creative process! you cry. I will never produce anything of value in the midst of such chaos!

But I thought we agreed earlier that ‘the creative process’ is nothing more than the act of creation itself. Isn’t that the whole point of not being afraid to write bad work, and to write as frequently as possible regardless of how you ‘feel’ at any given time?

The trick, my friend, lies in the art of Guerrilla writing.

In your element, under ideal conditions, you are the most effective soldier. Your gun is clean and fully loaded, your uniform spotless, your physical body at peak fitness. You can kill a lot of bad guys that way, but the problem is if you only train under such conditions, you’ll get eaten alive in short order as soon as you’re dropped in the jungle.

No, the best kind of writer is the guerrilla writer. You want to be like Rambo, able to disappear into the roughest of environments and subsist indefinitely as if you’d lived there all your life. Not only can you survive in the jungle, you can become part of it, thrive in it, even.

But before I get lost in my own analogy, allow me to demonstrate.

Not long ago, a couple of things aligned in my life that made me aware of this concept. The first occurred only in my mind, as I was pondering the concept of the Ideal Horror Writer. Who would this person be, I wondered, and what would he or she do? While I was contemplating this, I lost the use of my trusty laptop, ten hours a week of free time – which was scarce to begin with – and I completely ran out of story ideas.

Ordinarily, any one of these would have put an enormous dent in my productivity for at least a month or until I could figure out a way around the problem, but all three? No one could blame me for taking a little time off to regroup, right? And I would have, except…

Except I was bothered by that idea of the perfect writer. Would someone like that accept my decision? Surely not – they would be capable of working under any conditions! If I was that perfect version of myself, that highest conceivable standard, wouldn’t I be able to seal off the world at will, find the nearest available tools, and conjure at least the seed of an idea – enough to start?

Yes, I decided. I would. After all, if I had a gun to my head with the trigger primed to pull at midnight if I had not arrived at my daily word quota, I’m pretty damn certain I could do it, even if the result had to function as a first draft of a story.

Once I understood this, the way forward was simple – after all, the only way to be able to do something is to start doing it. If you’re a bad snowboarder, there’s only one way to become a good snowboarder: Snowboard. Some things don’t fall under this rule, I know. Practice being ten years younger all you want, it won’t take a minute off your life. But experience has taught me that most people vastly underestimate how many things do follow this rule, and I suspected that on-demand creativity was one of these.

Therefore, to become a guerrilla writer – the kind unfazed by exploding laptops, public places, mental exhaustion, breaks in routine, and all the rest… I would have to start pretending that I already was one.

And so, over the course of that one month, I wrote. I wrote tired. I wrote longhand, on sheets of paper taken from someone else’s printer with someone else’s pen. I wrote with only the flimsiest premises in mind and followed them wherever they took me, abandoning many projects along the way but taking an element from each until – lo and behold – I found myself writing an actual idea. I wrote late at night and early in the morning and in between; hungry, thirsty, drunk, caffeinated, in rooms with people, by myself, with music or movies playing in the background, and in the dead quiet of midnight.

I fought in all weathers, and I improvised with what I had. I had to use strategy – whatever it took to win the war, in other words, which is after all the ultimate goal of any guerrilla soldier.

But the big question remains: what did I learn?

You probably won’t like the answer. Most people don’t like simple truths, and for good reason: They already know what it is, and they haven’t been acting on it. That’s why.

So here is the truth: If you want to be able to do something, you have to just do it, over and over again. Then you can do it.

Do you want to be able to focus your mind in the space of a few minutes and smash out a hundred words of acceptable (relatively) quality, in between work shifts? Then you just have to start doing it. You have to act as though you already have that ability, and in the doing of the action you will attain it.

The famous soccer player Pele said: ‘Everything is Practice’, and I found the words returning to me every time I sat down to write. When I wrote under time pressure, I was practicing writing under time pressure. Keep in mind, however, that when Pele said ‘Everything’ that means negatives as well as positives. So, every time you decide not to write because of some circumstance, you are also practicing not writing. Every time you allow yourself to become distracted, you are practicing becoming distracted.

I found, soon enough, that by forcing myself to adhere to this brutal regime of guerrilla writing, not only was the quality of my writing improving under the circumstances, it was also becoming less hard (I don’t want to say easy) to begin. Suddenly the idea of writing longhand on scrap paper with no idea of how to start and less than thirty minutes available was automatic – a prospect I would have dismissed in the past. Impossible, I’d have said, I can’t work under such conditions. I’ll hardly get anything done, and what I do finish will be dogshit.

Which brings me to another thing I learned: it is entirely possible that even under the least hospitable circumstances/mental and physical states/whatever other confounding factors there may be – you can produce work that is just as high quality as if everything had all been in your favour.

Of course, ideal conditions are still best. But the good thing about being a skilled guerrilla writer is that you’re just as good – if not better – in ideal conditions as you were before. Plus, if the shit really hits the fan? You can shrug your shoulders, slather some mud across your war-mad face, and start killing.