How to Write Fiction

Published by Guardian Books 2011

ISBN: 978 085265 2701

Version 1.0

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Designed and set by Suzanne Lemon. Edited by Nell Card. All illustrations by Jirayu Koo.

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How to write fiction: A Guardian masterclass

“Writing is a natural process,” says novelist Andrew Miller. “We are, all of us, geared up for it ... But no one writes for long without understanding that they are entering mystery ...”

To guide you on your way, we've assembled a cast of acclaimed writers and industry insiders. From harnessing what Nabokov called “the first little throb”, our writers will take you through every step of the creative writing process. Each chapter is accompanied by carefully crafted exercises from Kate Grenville's The Writing Book, designed to help bring your novel to life.

We hope you find the advice and inspiration you need to sit down today and write.

The write way

With so many different ways to write fiction there are no hard-and-fast rules. Best to stop worrying about what you can't do and focus on what you're good at, says
Geoff Dyer

T
he great thing about this cat – the writing one – is that there are a thousand different ways to skin it. In fact, you don't have to skin it at all – and it doesn't even need to be a cat! What I mean, in the first instance, is feel free to dispute or ignore everything in this introduction or in the articles that follow. As Tobias Wolff puts it in his masterly novel Old School: “For a writer there is no such thing as an exemplary life … Certain writers do good work at the bottom of a bottle. The outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in one sort of desert or another.”

This freedom is the challenging perk of the non-job. If you are a tennis player any weakness – an inability, say, to deal with high-bouncing balls to your backhand – will be just that. And so you must devote long hours of practice to making the vulnerable parts of your game less vulnerable. If you are a writer the equivalent weakness can rarely be made good so you are probably better off letting it atrophy and enhancing some other aspect of your performance.

Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can't do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the things they can. “I can't do this,” exclaims the distraught Mother-Writer in People Like That Are the Only People Here, Lorrie Moore's famous story about a young child dying of cancer. “I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I do the careful ironies of daydreams. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built …” From the sum total of these apparent trivialities emerges a fiction which succeeds in doing precisely what it claims it can't.

Or take a more extreme example: Franz Kafka. Was ever a writer so consumed by the things he couldn't do? Stitch together all the things Kafka couldn't do and you have a draft of War and Peace. The corollary of this is that what he was left with was stuff no one else could do – or had ever done. Stepping over into music, wasn't it partly Beethoven's inability to conjure melodies as effortlessly as Mozart that encouraged the development of his transcendent rhythmic power? How reassuring to know that the same problems that afflict journeymen artists also operate at the level of genius.

A spokesman for the former, I have written novels even though I have absolutely no ability to think of – and no interest in – stories and plots. The best I can come up with are situations which tend, with some slight variation of locale, to be just one situation: boy meets girl. Other things – structure and tone – must, in these severely compromised circumstances, take over some of the load-bearing work normally assumed by plot. The same holds true for certain kinds of non-fiction, those animated by – and reliant on more than – the appeal of their ostensible subject matter.

This is another lesson: you don't have to know what kind of book you are writing until you have written a good deal of it, maybe not until you've finished it – maybe not even then. That's the second sense in which the cat doesn't have to be a cat. All that matters is that at some point the book generates a form and style uniquely appropriate to its own needs. Why bother offering readers an experience that they can get from someone else? The playwright David Hare once claimed that: “The two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction'.” Remember this: literary fiction does not set a standard that is to be aspired to; it describes a habit of convention that people – writers and readers alike – collapse into, like a comfy old sofa.

Which, surely, is not such a bad place to be. Except, for writers, the sofa should always be an extension of the desk. Reading is not just part of your apprenticeship; it continues to inform, stimulate and invigorate your writing life – and it is never passive. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, rereading Sophie's Choice by William Styron, “trying to see how it worked”. (Styron's novel was, for him, “a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey”.)

There's a lesson here. One's reading does not have to be confined to the commanding – and thereby discouraging – heights of the truly great. Take a look also at what's happening on the lower slopes, even in the crowded troughs. We tend to think of ambition operating in terms of some ultimate destination – the Nobel Prize or bust! – but it also manifests itself incrementally, at the level of pettiness. To read a well-regarded writer and to find the conviction growing in yourself that he or she is second- or third-rate, that, in Bob Dylan's words, “you can say it just as good”, is both encouraging and, if acted upon, a niggling form of ambition. (If it is not acted upon it becomes simply corrosive.)

As with ambition so with practicalities. It's a daunting prospect to sit down with the intention of writing a masterpiece. If it has any chance of being realised that ambition is best broken down into achievable increments, such as I will sit here for two hours, or 500 words or whatever. Keep these targets manageable and you will feel good about your progress, even if that progress is, inevitably, measured negatively.

The satisfactions of writing are indistinguishable from its challenges and difficulties. It is constantly testing all your faculties and skills (of expression, concentration, memory, imagination and empathy) on the smallest scale (sentences, words, commas) and the largest (the overall design, structure and purpose of the book) simultaneously. It brings you absolutely and always up against your limitations. That's why people keep at it – and why it's far easier to give advice about writing than it is to do it.

Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and many non-fiction books including The Ongoing Moment, But Beautiful and Out of Sheer Rage. His latest book, Zona, a meditation on cinema, will be published in February by Canongate

‘New writers … dive in'

Mired in research? Fearful of failure? Procrastination is the writer's biggest enemy. Fight it, urges
Jill Dawson
– a series of false starts is better than no start at all

N
abokov called it “the first little throb”. The first inkling of the novel you want to write. He was speaking of Lolita, of course. Something that beats beneath everything else; something troubling, insistent, itchy and physical: pain and desire mixed. In his earlier novella The Enchanter, which feels in some ways like an early draft of Lolita, the protagonist speaks of his “hopeless yearning to extract something from beauty, to hold it still for an instant, to do something with it”.

Maybe that's what the desire to write a novel is. Trying to hold something still, pin it down, stick things (words) to paper. Maybe … but plenty of writers, and I'm definitely in this group, couldn't tell you at the start why they wanted to write a particular novel, only that they feel this throb powerfully.

I urge new writers to dive in. There is never a perfect time to write your novel, though writing students seem to believe there is. Begin today. That has been my consistent advice in the 20 or so years I've been writing, or teaching writing, or talking about writing.

I can, of course, see the temptations of not beginning. Chiefly, not beginning sustains the belief that you are gifted, that the novel – when you one day get round to writing it – will surpass all others, that you will suffer no rejections, that it will be published at once and be thereafter visible in every bookshop you step into, that you will never suffer a bad review or sit at a dinner party and hear the question: “So, should I have heard of you?”

Not beginning protects you from the disappointment – no, shame – of reading what you have written and finding it rubbish. It also prevents you from an equally disturbing possibility: discovering that you can write. What then have you been doing all those years? Success or failure can both be avoided by never starting at all – this then is the spell that procrastination casts. How to step out from under it?

The writers I know are all obsessive. The unpublished ones obsess over getting published; the rest about “this crazy obsessive business of trying to be a good writer” (in the words of American novelist Richard Yates). You could try to put this compulsive trait to good use. Yes, you might need to start with some research, but you don't have to spend years on this before feeling ready to begin. You can also research alongside the writing, making the most of your obsessive qualities, which will keep the material fresh and give you something to do on the days when writing doesn't go well. While writing The Great Lover I reread the poems and letters of Rupert Brooke over and over, which did indeed change the structure of the novel (I'd never intended to include Brooke's voice). Surprise in fiction can be a pleasure for you as well as the reader. And conversely, if you're bored, your reader will be too.

Shouldn't you complete the research, plot it out, know where it's going before you put finger to key? I know there are writers who work this way, but not being one of them, I can't tell you about that method. It might suit you. But so might mine.

There is much anxiety created in new writers about writing the beginning of their novel, how the first line has to grab the reader's attention, how they must open with a vivid scene or phrase, that kind of thing. Reading wonderful opening lines makes it look easy and implies that there is a formula for this – shock the reader by opening with: “Mother died today, or maybe yesterday, I don't know” (Camus's The Outsider), or stun them with lyrical virtuosity: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

Brilliant opening lines rarely come to the writer the minute she or he begins, so why worry, especially since it's much easier now than in Nabokov's day to make changes to a manuscript. The perfect opener is more likely to suggest itself after you have many more words on paper, once you know the characters well, once the whole thing feels thicker and juicier and more developed.

Whatever your level of experience, writing a novel usually feels like a series of false starts. When we begin the voice sounds wrong, the characters don't “come through”, the tone is wrong, even the year and the place you've put them in, all feel wrong. But how can you, the writer, know these things, see them, until you've put words on the page, taken a look at them? This is drafting. Resisting producing a draft means not producing anything at all (“Perfection is terrible … it tamps the womb”, wrote Plath). Is the prose alive or dead? That's all you need to know to carry on.

Most draft novels, like old bread, would benefit from topping and tailing. But you can't do that until there's something solid, some dry crusts to slice away. A rough start is unavoidable; a warm-up. There's no way to write a novel without being willing to do this.

The trick is not to care that it all gets pared away, not to mourn those thousands of abandoned words, those endless new beginnings. Weak beginnings are inevitable and essential. The first little throb turns into a steady pulse, a heartbeat, the tapping of keys. It's an austere and repetitive service, the writing of a novel. But, of course, there is joy, too.

Jill Dawson is the author of seven novels and editor of six anthologies of poetry and short stories. Twice nominated for the Orange prize, she has held many fellowships and currently runs a mentoring project for new writers called Gold Dust (
gold-dust.org.uk
). Her latest novel, Lucky Bunny, is published by Sceptre