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I name this paperback …

by Matthew McGuinness on

So, after about 18 months writing and rewriting, I finally got around to publishing the ebook version of the long-awaited third title in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series. That was a week ago on 28 May. It had been a surprisingly tough writing journey, so I was delighted to see it there on the Amazon website – complete with a cover deigned by my own fair hand.

Only one problem. Amazon were dragging their feet over the publication of the paperback version.

If you’re familiar with the Kindle Direct Publishing service you’ll know that each author has a kind of dashboard page where they do most things connected with the publication and management of their books. Having successfully uploaded an ebook of Write Like J.K. Rowling to KDP via this dashboard, I waited several days for Amazon’s feedback on the acceptability of the laboriously designed and formatted paperback text and cover. Its status resolutely remained at ‘IN REVIEW’.

June arrived, and I was beginning to lose all hope when finally the status changed. It wasn’t good news. The book had been rejected on copyright grounds. The email that appeared in my inbox to explain the rejection was not at all clear on the reasons, but it seemed to be something to do with the fact that I was using legally protected words in my title. That could really only be ‘Harry Potter’, although ‘J.K. Rowling’ was a possibility too.

To cut a long story short, I eventually concluded that trying to talk Amazon round was doomed to failure, and I decided instead to rename the book.

At first, I toyed with the idea of calling it Write Like She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. But after a bit more thought I realised this was just a bit too vengeful. ‘He-who-must-not-be-named’ is of course one of Voldemort’s nicknames in the Harry Potter novels, and it was a sense of power-crazed oppressiveness about it that’s lacking from the other main nickname: ‘You-Know-Who’. This latter option was the one I went for.

In a pessimistic moment right after submitting the new paperback materials and completing the redesign of all related web pages and promotional materials, I did wonder whether this would actually satisfy Amazon. After all, their explanation had not been all that clear, and it was just possble they might continue to hold up my book launch on the basis of some other technicality. But nothing prepared me for the subsequent few days of back-and-forth attempts to get both the ebook and the paperback version published..

When the next rejection came, I was fairly patient and went through the KDP publication rules with a fine-tooth comb. But no new explanatory information leapt out at me. All I could thin, of to do was simply to resubmit and hop[e that another Amazon moderator would pick it up and see the matter differently. This happened several times, and always it came back as a rejection after half a dday of waiting in despair. At my lowest moment, I thought of withdrawing the books and selling them via a less dominant retail outlet or via my own website.

But eventually, a miracle happened – the paperback was accepted – it seemed some other pair of eyes at Amazon HQ had been cast over this troublesome boomerang of a book, and their owner had approved the paperback for publication.

Only one problem: the ebook was now being rejected!!!

I had decided to rename that as well, in order to avoid confusing my readers, and when I came to resubmit it with a fresh cover and internal text, the KDP moderators spat it out like a cat with a fur ball. This is spite of the fact that the title no longer contained the words ”Harry Potter or ‘J.K. Rowling’. I can only think that the people responsible for policing J.K. Rowling’s various pieces of valuable intellectual property are so litigious and vigilant that their attention is drawn by such innocuous terms as ‘must-not-be-named’ – inspired as it is by Voldemort’s nickname.- and that even the mighty Amazon is terrified of receiving a legal letter requesting with threats and menaces that they cease and desist from allowing the abuse of Ms. Rowling’s intellectual property.

Again, cutting this long story short, I spent another day or so trying to repeat the trick I’d pulled off with the paperback – I simply resubmitted it again and again. But this time Amazon showed a much stiffer backbone and nothing changed. At points I could have thrown my laptop out of the window, but thankfully something stopped me, and instead, I went through teh KDP rules for publication again very carefully. Something caught my eye. It was the fact that KDP don’t like to see the word ‘bestseller’ in titles. The subtitle I had chosen referred to ‘a bestselling children’s novel’. Could that be the offending detail, even though the term didn’t even represent a claim about my own book but rather about the indisputably bestselling first Harry Potter book? For lack of any better ideas, I decided to act on that basis and simply try getting rid of the book’s subtitle – the section that contained the ‘bestselling’ reference.

Blow me down if it didn’t only work!!!

In fact, the speed with which the subtitle-free ebook was accepted even suggested that the KDP moderators were quite desperate to clear this case and move on. Maybe this is fanciful, but I imagined a cheer of relief arising from some cubicle in a locked down office somewhere as the occupant saw what I’d done and approved the ebook … OK, that’s silly, I know. But it had begun to feel like a perspnal battle of wills between me and the Amazon bureaucrats, and when I saw the change of status to ‘PUBLISHING’, I could have kissed the bureaucrat responsible.

So, that’s my story. I hope you enjoy the book and that the new title is acceptable to you. I fear sometimes that it will prove too confusing for potential buyers, but there again it could just as easily provide a hook – an intriguing reason for looking into the text itself to find out exactly what the books all about. We shall see!

Write Like J.K. Rowling: Sample of Exercises

by Matthew McGuinness on


Thanks for the many emails asking when ‘Write Like J.K. Rowling’ will be coming out. The answer is, very very soon, I’m currently finishing the accompanying exercises, and hope to publish the ebook, paperback and exercises within a couple of weeks.

I’m extremely proud of the book, as it draws out some really unexpected and helpful lessons from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (known as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US).

Since some of you might have a bit of writing time on your hands right now, I thought I should send you a sample of the exercises accompanying the book. So, here is the opening sequence – a guide to creating a setting for a novel. It can be applied to absolutely any genre.

The Setting

  1. Most popular novels demarcate a physical space and its human community – a main stage and actors. Give yourself exactly 1 minute to make a list of the main stages and their associated communities in as many novels as you can think of.
  2. Careful physical description of the stage satisfies a touristic urge in the reader but also anchors them in a reassuring way – it’s also exciting to be immersed in a different community.
    1. From your list, pick the main stage and community that you would most like to immerse yourself in. List some of the features that you enjoyed discovering as you read about it.
    2. Make a list of any other locations and communities – real or imagined – that you have thought about as a possible main stage for your own story, or which you would especially like to immerse yourself in.
  3. A main stage may have physical pressures built in that promote drama.
    1. Run through your list of potential locations and briefly identify the key physical constraints that affect the people’s lives there.
    2. Run through the list again and briefly list any social or psychological stress/conflict likely to be caused by the physical constraints.
  4. A main stage should also have moral pressures built in, promoting drama.
    1. Run through your list of potential communities and briefly identify the key values that govern the lives of people.
    2. Run through the list again and briefly list any social or psychological stress/conflict likely to be caused by the value system.
  5. School is an attractive subject for children. Do any of the settings in your list lend themselves to a story about some kind of educational experience (broadly defined)? If not, can you adjust one of your ideas along those lines?
  6. Which of your potential locations and associated communities is beginning to look the most promising in terms of generating drama? Focus on that from now on as your main stage.
  7. Indirect delivery of background information is usually best in a novel.
    1. Think of three indirect ways in which the physical constraints of your chosen location might express themselves in the environment or in people’s lives and actions.
    2. Think of three indirect ways in which the values of your chosen community might express themselves in people’s lives and actions.
  8. In HPATPS, descriptions of place are dense and elaborate to begin with, but sparse later.
    1. Give yourself five minutes to write a paragraph describing your main stage, which should cover as many indirect expressions of physical and values-based strain as possible.
    2. Give yourself 1 minute to come up with a single sentence that succinctly summarises the key feature of one specific place within that main stage location.

Write Like J.K. Rowling – extract from forthcoming book

by Matthew McGuinness on

There’s a critical tool that I think is extremely helpful when it comes to analysing the key features of the climax of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s a well-known theory about story structure that you may already be aware of. In 1949, Joseph Campbell was the first person to state an idea that we now take for granted: the notion that a great many stories conform to a similar underlying pattern. Since then, the theory has been revisited many times by many different authors, but all propose a similar story pattern – it has come to be known as ‘the hero’s journey’. The clearest description of this pattern is probably by Christopher Vogler in his book from 2007, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. This is the outline he describes.
1. The hero is called to adventure.
2. The hero leaves their ordinary world for an extraordinary domain.
3. The hero undergoes various tests.
4. The hero experiences a crisis – their greatest and most transformative ordeal.
5. At the climax of the story, the hero undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth.
6. The hero returns to their ordinary world to share the benefits of their adventure.
Vogler goes into some detail when discussing the ‘crisis’ or major ordeal that heroes undergo during their journey. He talks in terms of a ‘cave’ (symbolic or literal) that the hero approaches and enters. Below, I’ve listed some of the key features of the cave and the ordeal, as described by Vogler.
• The cave is located at the very heart of the extraordinary world.
• The cave will be heavily defended.
• The hero may be warned not to enter.
• The audience must be reminded that the stakes are high.
• The hero may pause at the threshold of the cave, for example to summon courage, plan or engage in reconnaissance.
• Before the cave can be entered, a series of tests must be passed.
• If there is a team of protagonists trying to get to the cave, they may regroup and recommit.
• There will be a point beyond which only the one true hero can go – the team must be left behind.
• The ordeal in the cave is the greatest source of terror and wonder the hero could experience. It will usually involve coming face to face with an archenemy.
• In the encounter, the hero will be acting out their inner struggle – the archenemy represents the shadow side of their character.
• The hero appears to die but is reborn.
It strikes me that these observations correspond very closely to the key characteristics of the climactic sequence in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which are described in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen. I’ll take Vogler’s observations in order and identify the equivalent moments in the novel.
• The events of Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen take place in a location deep below Hogwarts – the main stage of the novel’s action.
• The location is concealed, forbidden and can only be accessed via a single trapdoor, which is guarded by a vicious monster.
• When Harry and his inner circle are making for the trapdoor, Neville intercepts them from losing more house points.
• As Harry is trying to reason with Neville, he can’t forget the seriousness of the situation – he has one eye on the time: ‘Harry looked at the grandfather clock by the door. They couldn’t afford to waste any more time, Snape might even now be playing Fluffy to sleep.’
• At the trapdoor itself, Harry and the others have an anxious moment: ‘Seeing the open door somehow seemed to impress upon all three of them what was facing them.’
• On the other side of the trapdoor, there is a sequence of tests waiting for them. A vicious plant, elusive flying keys, a violent chess game and a riddle.
• While dealing with the tests, there are moments of disagreement: ‘”Do you want to stop Snape or not?”’ says Ron when he’s challenged on his chess tactics.
• The final test involves bottles of liquid – only one of them will get you through a black fire that protects the chamber where the Philosopher’s Stone is thought to be. Harry has to drink that.
• The highpoint of the novel’s climatic sequence is the face-to-face encounter between Harry and Voldemort. This evil wizard has been a dark presence in Harry’s life, having murdered his parents. Within the wider world of the novel, even Voldemort’s name is enough to strike terror into people’s hearts. The scar on Harry’s forehead is a sign of the threat from Voldemort. But it is also a reminder of a deep mystery – Voldemort was badly damaged when he last tried to kill Harry.
• In the Sorting Hat episode, earlier in the novel, it became clear that Harry had the potential to follow an evil path as a hanger-on of Voldemort. This is the inner struggle that the conflict in Chapter Seventeen acts out. In fact, J.K. Rowling includes a metaphor that perfectly describes a human soul that has lost the battle with its shadow side: Quirrell hosting Voldemort on the back of his head.
• Harry falls unconscious during the struggle with Quirrell/Voldemort but comes round and finds himself safe with Dumbledore.
Of course, we can’t separate the climactic sequence of the novel from the story that precedes it. If we consider the main body of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it too has many points of correspondence with the journey described by Vogler and others: Harry is called out of his ordinary life with the Dursleys into the extraordinary world of Hogwarts, where he undergoes the various challenges associated with the Bildungsroman, Fantasy and Mystery plots.
However, I think it’s unwise to treat ‘the hero’s journey’ as a key that unlocks every aspect of a story. It can blind you to the many other ways of analysing a text and cause you gloss over the unique aspects of an author’s achievement. There is also a tendency I’ve observed (and occasionally fallen victim to) for literary critics to twist and distort stories in order to make them fit Vogler’s pattern. You only have to ask yourself, what is the climax stage of ‘the hero’s journey’ in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone if the confrontation with Voldemort is to be considered the crisis stage. The novel is over and done within a few pages of the showdown. Maybe you could argue that the events in the forbidden forest are the true crisis stage, which would make the clash with Voldemort the climax stage. But that doesn’t really stand up to a close comparison of Vogler’s descriptions and the detail of the novel, and, in any case, that way madness lies!
That said, I do think this influential theory helps us to see what makes the climactic sequence of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone so effective. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that J.K. Rowling has read the Vogler book, or something like it. It’s certainly no surprise to me that most of the subsequent Harry Potter books have a similar final encounter with evil.

The Thing That Stops You Writing Your Novel

by Matthew McGuinness on

There’s a dirty little secret shared by many aspiring writers – certainly by me, and maybe by you too. It’s so embarrassing that hardly anyone admits to it or takes proper steps to overcome it. And that’s a shame, because it’s the thing that gets in the way of writing success more than anything else. Let me tell you what that thing is … It’s distraction.

How many of us have declared ourselves sufferers from writer’s block when what we’re really suffering from is social media addiction. Who hasn’t, at some point, persuaded themselves that they’re researching a subject for their novel when what they’re really doing is disappearing down a rabbit hole of Web links?

Writing on an Internet-ready device is like trying to complete your tax return on the beach. The work just isn’t going to get done.

A couple of solutions are often suggested. The first involves installing software that blocks problem websites such as social media. However, my experience has been that Web developers have found clever ways of preventing you from blocking several particularly addictive sites, including Facebook. The software is also quite expensive in some cases. The second solution that is often suggested involves using a typewriter of some kind. But realistically that’s not possible for most people – and of course sometimes you do legitimately need Internet access while writing.

So, allow me to share three strategies that have really worked for me in overcoming distraction while remaining online.

  1. Share your Web surfing history with someone else at the end of every day. This works best if the sharing is mutual, if you really care what the other person thinks of you and if the other person has a strong interest in your success. I share with my wife.
  2. Create a simple web page that contains nothing but the message ‘STOP WASTING TIME!!!’ You can do this simply by saving a word processed document in HTML format. Now go to your browser and change the settings so that your new Web page appears whenever a new window or tab is opened.
  3. If you have calendar software, configure an appointment entitled ‘STOP WASTING TIME!!!’ for every hour of your working day. That way, you will repeatedly receive a nagging popup message.

Let me know how these techniques go for you. And if you have any distraction-avoidance techniques of your own, do share them in the comments section.

Talking Turkey

by Matthew McGuinness on

In this post, I have a couple of suggested techniques that make use of the neat speech functionality in Microsoft Windows / MS Word. I’ve found they really help me to achieve greater flow and productivity.

If I had to say what my biggest problem is when I’m writing an extended piece of fiction, it’s the problem of spontaneity. I tend to get bogged down as I go over and over small details of phrasing. I know in theory that I should just write freely and quickly and then go back over the text to edit it, but I have an internal critic who makes the Terminator look like a weakling.

Getting bogged down like that has two effects.

The first effect of unspontaneity is that I tend to lose my way. As a result, I fail to create an engaging, natural-feeling flow of events and dialogue.

To overcome that tendency towards stilted, unnatural writing, I recently started to look into the dictation functionality within Windows 10 (look it up using the search box in your task bar). Basically, I wanted to be able to describe out loud what I was imagining, and have it appear on the page without the cumbersome business of typing and thinking one word at a time.

Although it doesn’t work as perfectly as all that, I did find that – as a general technique – it allowed me to think in paragraphs rather than words or phrases, especially when I managed to totally absorb myself in my imaginary world and watch the story in my head like a movie. You might benefit from doing a mindfulness exercise beforehand.

The important thing is to spend the time teaching the software how to understand your particular way of speaking. It provides test passages for you to read before you start using the software for real. But, in addition to that, you should make use of the software’s correction functionality while you are dictating, so that it can learn where it is going wrong.

The second effect of my spontaneous writing habits may also be familiar to you. Basically, when I get past the initial pages of a new piece of writing and have perhaps a chapter in front of me, I often find that the writing seems stale and dull. The initial spark of inspiration that originally made me commit to that particular idea is gone, and what remains is lifeless and callow.

The reason for this feeling is that I have spent so long labouring over the idea that I’ve essentially killed it – at least in my own estimation. Like a sculptor who works on clay for so long that it goes dry and falls apart, I’ve ruined my material by overworking it.

Or have I?

The thing is, I’ve noticed a strange effect. If I come back to one of those passage a month later, it often seems much less damaged and dysfunctional than I thought.

So, another technique that I explored to overcome this temporary sense of disillusion makes use of the reading functionality in MS Word. Under the ‘Review’ tab, there is an option to have the software read your text back to you. Although the voices (there are 3 to choose from) are somewhat robotic, they do have enough natural phrasing to be understandable.

I find that hearing my writing read to me by another voice – not the one that’s in my head – really helps me to see the text as a viable, objective piece of literature – something that could stand on its own two feet and be acceptable to other readers. Of course, you might have a friend willing to do that for you, but if you’re like me, showing a first draft to any other human being would be mortifying.

Give these techniques a go and let me know what you think.

How to Make the Most of National Novel Writing Month

by Matthew McGuinness on

Thirty days to finish a novel-length piece of writing. It’s a simple and compelling idea that gets millions of people writing like demons every November and beyond. But, in my opinion, what does more than anything else to make National Novel Writing Month so incredibly successful (300,000 participants each and every year) is the fact that most of us prefer the sprint to the long haul. We’re better at brief periods of intense focus and energetic effort to get things done, as opposed to patient, steady labour over longer periods.

Thinking about my own life, you can see that pattern in the way I approach everything from housework to business admin. I procrastinate and delay and finally give over an entire rainy Sunday to digging myself out of the hole I’ve made. From casual observation I believe I’m not unusual in working like this. And the organisers of NaNoWriMo seem to have come to the same conclusion, creating a short-term event that harnesses people’s natural preference for bursts of effort. In a way, November is the rainy Sunday of the year, so, it’s only fitting that it should be the month when we embark on these creative splurges.

To ensure that we keep our noses to the grindstone, the organisers have rather cleverly placed the emphasis on producing the maximum number of words. When you register and create a project, you have to specify the word count that you’re aiming to achieve. During the month, motivational emails from NaNoWriMo and forum chit-chat on their website drive you towards that magic number. And when you pass the finishing post, you have the opportunity to validate the length of your text and get a certificate. Basically, it’s all about producing plenty of words. Quality is supremely unimportant. In fact, you have full permission to write absolute twaddle so long as you get a novel-length text written.

At first glance, it might seem like a bit of a philistine attitude, but, as NaNoWriMo addicts are at pains to point out, you don’t have a finished novel at the end of the month – or at least it would be very surprising if you did. Rather, you have something that you can take in hand at a later stage – something for analysis and reshaping with your editor hat on. And maybe, after several more drafts, you do eventually turn it into something you’re proud of and feel you can share with the public.

That’s all fantastic, and it’s been spectacularly successful at getting people writing. But the thing is, there are some people who, even with that liberating permission to throw a bucket of absolute nonsense at the blank page, still find themselves stuck and unable to reach anything like a respectable word count for the month. And, reader, I have a confession to make, I was one of those people. I tried for two years on the trot to write a first draft of a novel during National Novel Writing Month and failed spectacularly both times. There was nothing stopping me writing. I had plenty of time at my disposal and a great novel idea in both cases. But I was terribly hung up on the idea that I should be producing something that resembled a readable and entertaining story first time round. However, in my third year I did finally manage to reach my word limit, and it was simply because I made a small change in my way of thinking.

The change was that I stopped using the word ‘draft’. I know it’s a word that’s supposed to suggest imperfection and a certain provisional quality, but let’s be honest with ourselves, we all have a vain hope that somehow magically, we will be the first author in the existence of the universe to produce a first draft that is pretty darned perfect, requiring only a few tweaks and a spellcheck to become publishable material. It’s almost inevitable for two reasons. Firstly, we’re all lazy to some degree and we want to complete the mammoth task of writing a novel in as few stages as possible. Secondly, by using the same word – ‘draft’ – to describe the first document we produce (the manic splurge of ideas) and the last document we produce (the polished, print-ready manuscript) we create a fatal confusion in our own minds.

Before making my third attempt at NaNoWriMo, I started thinking about other models of the creative process – ways of looking at it that didn’t confuse your first attempts with your final product. I’ve always felt that writing, as a creative discipline taught in a variety of formal and informal settings, has a lot to learn from the other arts. That’s the principle behind my Popular Fiction Masterclass series, which encourages aspiring authors to study the works of bestsellers like a renaissance artist studying the sculptures of the ancient Greeks.

My first suggestion for breaking down the idea of the ‘first draft’ into something more manageable is to see it as a sort of quarrying process. Long before Michelangelo began carving his legendary sculpture of David, for example, he set about finding the perfect block of marble. Naturally, he had a reasonable idea of the shape and proportions of the block that he needed, but to some extent, the block that he eventually chose to work with exercised a degree of influence over the final result. You could say, in fact, that the quarryman – and before him the geological forces that produced the marble – had a good deal of influence over the masterpiece that now stands in the Accademia gallery, Florence. Naturally, the quarryman didn’t have an artistic vision as such, but he did, presumably, have a knack for connecting with artists, understanding their overall needs and then hacking out a piece of material that would enable them to exercise their genius. That’s what you’re doing at the earliest stages of your novel-writing process – you’re hacking a block of promising, roughly story-shaped ideas out of your mind.

Here’s a second idea. To bear in mind if you’re stuck during national novel writing month. A lot of writers of popular music tend to use jamming as a way of producing ideas for songs. The legendary guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen has said that he always has his instrument plugged into an amplifier so that he can just pick it up and start playing around with riffs and tunes while he does something else. That is another way of looking at the ‘first draft’ – as jamming. It’s not an imperfect attempt to write a finished novel, it’s a successful attempt to produce exciting material by riffing on themes that interest you or stimulate your imagination in some way. Subsequent stages of the process will handle the more formal aspects of writing the novel, just as a musician like Malmsteen will take their ideas and shape them into a finished track – at the right time.

Stories with Multiple Timeframes

by Matthew McGuinness on

There’s no doubt that Stephen King’s novel IT, and the various adaptations for cinema and TV, have an almost unique claim to cult status in the horror genre. However, I am strongly of the opinion that this eerie tale of past trauma and present-day striving for redemption is much more than just the world’s favourite scary story. In my view, it’s a work of art with a technical assurance that puts it up there with the best of literary fiction.

The most impressive of Stephen King’s achievements in IT is, without doubt, the double narrative – allowing stories from 1958 and 1985 to run alongside one another and interact in complex ways. For a full account of how he approaches that challenge, you can check out the Popular Fiction Masterclass title Write Like Stephen King. But in this blog post I’m going to cast a fresh light on the technique. I’ll be looking at how other novelists and screen writers make use of double narratives to pursue their own artistic ends.

Let me start by giving a couple of anti-examples. These are stories that illustrate what IT is not. Firstly, IT is not structured around flashbacks. A flashback is a window into the past that is forever anchored in the present – a story about the past is being told by someone in the present. A good example would be the movie The Usual Suspects. Its story is largely told in hindsight by a man being interviewed by the police. The past narrative therefore derives its meaning and pretext entirely from the present-day recollection.

It’s true that there are a number of occasions on which Stephen King’s characters are launched from 1985 back into their own 1958 childhoods by moments of recollection. For example, in Part 2 we see a number of chapter section endings that cut off a sentence in mid-flow as a character is in full reminiscence, then resume it back in 1958 at the start of the next section. But that is by no means always the case. The transition between the years is often unannounced. In fact, by Part 5 it’s intentionally difficult to tell which year we’re meant to be in. This means that the 1958 and 1985 narratives have a separate existence with no dependence and very little anchoring.

It’s interesting to note that, in The Usual Suspects, the flashback is almost the entirety of the movie. As in that great cinematic classic, Citizen Kane, the writer has pushed the flashback structure to its very limit – way beyond the cliché of a shimmering screen followed by a brief, voiced-over episode from the past. And yet, for all that, the past narrative in The Usual Suspects remains anchored in the present. The final moments of the present-day narrative, which reveal the identity of master criminal Keyser Söze, complete the meaning of the flashback scenes.

In IT, the 1958 story could have an independent existence as a novel and it would be a perfectly satisfying read. The presence of a 1985 story adds another dimension to it but doesn’t complete it as such. In that sense, we’re seeing a more elusive and ambitious narrative project.

Now my second anti-example – the movie Donnie Darko. In many ways this account of the events leading up to a devastating accident are exploring territory that’s very similar to IT. Circularity is the defining structural principle of both narratives. Donnie Darko begins with the destruction of a house by an aircraft engine that seems to fall out of nowhere and ends with a depiction of the events that lie behind the aircraft accident. IT is full of circular structures, but the most prominent is the central characters’ exact repetition of their childhood rebellion against a supernatural foe. The difference is that the movie tears up the normal rules of time and space and simply plugs the end of the narrative into the beginning. As such, it arguably sits within the time travel genre. By contrast, the novel restricts its circularity to narrative structures as experienced by the reader rather than life events as experienced by the characters. Stephen King flirts with the idea that the 1985 events are influencing the 1958 events but keeps that firmly within the bounds of metaphor. For example, Mike Hanlon (in 1958) walks past the house where he would live 1985 and (we are conspicuously informed) feels nothing!

Both Donnie Darko and IT are using the idea of circularity to evoke the disturbed inner world of their central characters, but it has to be said that Stephen King’s approach is a much subtler instrument. The sections on narrative in my book Write Like Stephen King fully describe the many variations on the novel’s circularity metaphor.

Let’s move on and look at some examples of writers doing things with double narratives that are very similar to IT.

My first example is a novel that quite clearly falls into the ‘literary fiction’ category: Waterland by Graham Swift. I’m not at all embarrassed to place a bestselling horror novel alongside a modern classic that appears on university reading lists. I believe IT should be seen as part of the same cultural landscape as literary fiction. Waterland has its own double narrative. It takes place in rural Norfolk before the war and London in the 1980s. The central characters are seen undergoing a traumatic coming of age that leaves them unable to have children. In parallel, we are shown the consequences of this sterility – a psychological and marital crisis late in the characters’ lives. One of the defining characteristics of Waterland (and many other novels that are considered ‘postmodern’) is the fact that it uses its narrative structure as a kind of metaphor to express its own thematic meanings. Specifically, the double narrative – alternation between pre-war Norfolk and post-war London – seems to mimic one of the novel’s central images: the idea of circularity and inescapable patterns of behaviour. The story of Waterland is full of images reflecting that idea – eels being the most important one. We hear how these creatures swim all the way to the Sargasso sea to breed, whereupon their young swim all the way back to the waterways of Norfolk. The to-and-fro movement between past and present in the novel powerfully expresses this strange, cyclical behaviour.

This metaphorical use of structure is also seen in IT. In fact, the meaning expressed through that technique is rather similar to the circularity idea in Waterland. Cycles of harmful behaviour (social and psychological) are found everywhere in IT – guilt, alcoholism, inappropriate sexual relationships, and so on. Almost every character and community in the novel seems to be going round in destructive circles, unable to leave their past behind. The novel mimics this in its alternation between past and present. As the 1958 and 1985 stories are narrated in parallel, with the same group of characters undergoing two very similar journeys at 27 years remove, the reader begins to feel the disorienting weirdness of that inability to escape harmful behaviour.

The idea of a double narrative, with one story set in the past and one in the future, has become a very familiar feature of contemporary literature and cinema. The metaphorical possibilities have been recognised by authors both literary and popular, but there are other approaches to the double narrative structure that can be equally powerful.  Let’s now look at a movie example that illustrates a slightly different approach.

The Godfather Part II cuts between the early life of mob boss Vito Corleone – In turn-of-the century Sicily then New York – and the experiences of his son and successor Michael Corleone half a century later. This is no mere flashback fest since there is no dependency between the two narratives. Vito’s early life is not being recalled by someone within Michael’s story, for example. Nor does the 1950s story complete or explain the earlier events in a way that’s similar to The Usual Suspects.

The parallel narration of Vito’s and Michael’s stories does not seem to serve a metaphorical purpose akin to the use of narrative structure in IT. Naturally, it’s no less expressive for that. Its main strength is that it creates a gap across which sparks of meaning can jump. Similar themes surface in both Corleone narratives – family, loyalty, revenge, religion, roots, the responsibility of leadership etc. – and we are able to consider from different perspectives thanks to the differing events of Vito’s and Michael’s lives. For example, Vito returns to Sicily to take revenge on his mother’s killer. By contrast, Michael kills a family member – Fredo, his brother. However, there’s a strange act of mercy in that he waits for his mother to die before ordering the killing. It’s a beautiful and poetic technique, capable of creating an incredibly rich fabric of interconnecting meanings.

This concludes my brief survey of the double narrative structure. It’s now over to you. Can you think of any movies or novels that make use of it? If so, what specific purpose does it serve?

Write Like Stephen King

by Matthew McGuinness on

I hope you all had a great summer. I’ve been hard at work on the next volume in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series. It’s called Write Like Stephen King: A study guide focusing on the novel IT. And the good news is, it should be out within the month. I’ve completed the text and the cover art has been commissioned.

To be notified as soon as the book’s available, you can register at http://popularfictionmasterclass.com (sign up to download the free book ‘Ten Unusual Tips for Writers’).

But to give you a taste of what’s to come, I thought I might post part of the first chapter …

Anxiety

Stephen King’s IT has affected the imaginations of readers and filmgoers to a truly extraordinary degree. Although the book isn’t the origin of that familiar popular-cultural motif ‘the scary clown’, the notion that clowns are dark and threatening characters did take a much stronger hold on the popular consciousness after King’s terrifying creation Pennywise reared his orange-tufted head in 1986. You would have to turn to the novel Dracula or the movie Jaws to find another horror creation that had been so successful in giving people’s fears a new shape. And even then, there’s clearly a reason to be scared of vampires or sharks. But a clown? What gives?

The clown isn’t the only form taken by ‘It’, but it’s certainly the guise that people remember. That’s why publishers of the book and filmmakers responsible for the various adaptations have routinely used clown imagery in their publicity. It’s clearly the most successful ingredient in Stephen King’s recipe for fear, and the reason isn’t difficult to see. People find clowns in general a mildly alarming mix of the anarchic and the pleasant. The unpredictable nature of these colourful, custard-pie-throwing creatures is without doubt unsettling. They’re soppy but destructive, bold but vulnerable, physical but decorative. As a result, they leave children and adults alike with ambivalent feelings. When we’re watching them, we feel the experience could go either way, tipping over into laughter or unpleasantness. It’s that state of instability that makes them great raw material for horror. Naturally, no one runs in terror from a circus tent when they appear in the ring – we all understand that they’re basically a safe and entertaining phenomenon. The point is that underneath the sweetness there’s a potential for unpleasantness. The characterisation of Pennywise simply takes the alarming side and puts it on steroids, making it infinitely crazier and more terrifying than the reality.

This focus on semi-trusted aspects of life – drawing out and enhancing the features that are already slightly threatening – is a standard technique in the horror genre. Think of Hitchcock’s film The Birds, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, with its terrifying sparrows, crows, seagulls and even chickens. Our feathered friends may not be an obvious source of danger in real life, but in large flocks they display a mysterious group intelligence. Their scaly feet, beady eyes and quick movements are also somewhat unpleasant. The film takes those characteristics and turns up the volume on them until they become truly scary.

Consider, also, the 1976 supernatural thriller movie The Omen, which gradually reveals that Damian, a little boy with a mischievous glint in his eye, is in fact a satanic incarnation. It’s something that one might say jokingly about a naughty child, that he’s the devil incarnate. But in the movie, that slightly negative feeling towards a child is made concrete and larger than life.

Stephen King has deployed the same technique to great effect in a number of his novels. In Cujo, and Pet Sematary, for example, family pets are the source of fear. It’s easy to see how some people develop negative feelings about dogs, for example, if they’ve been bothered by animals that bark and leap up, or if they’ve read a news story about a mauling. But this anxiety is usually something that exists under the surface of more positive feelings. The novels exploit that subterranean fear by dragging it out into the open and exaggerating it. In The Shining, it’s a husband and father who turns into a monster. He displays an exaggerated version of the unpredictability and anger that can shake a child’s trust in an otherwise loving parent.

Anxiety – the idea that our nagging fears will turn out to be completely justified – is a normal and natural reflex, just waiting to be triggered by a skilful writer of horror stories. Originally a survival instinct, anxiety has stayed with us to the present day, manifesting itself in perfectly ordinary circumstances. In fact, most members of the human race experience the same kind anxieties at the same stage of personal development. As toddlers, we’re worried about abandonment by our parents. Child psychologists believe it stems from early experiences of separation from our parents, which instils a fear that protection and care might be withdrawn at any moment. Significantly, toddlers are not usually anxious about the many obvious sources of danger in their lives – things such as crossing the road or the consequences of pushing random items up their noses. If anything, those kinds of experiences have a frisson of excitement. Instead, their nightmares focus on the suspected precariousness of their situation. Older children or teenagers tend to be afraid of things like social rejection at school – the suspicion that their friends will suddenly turn nasty on them if they do something uncool. Once again, it’s not the obvious dangers like climbing trees or experimenting with cigarettes that cause them anxiety. Those things are considered rather exciting. Then, as we enter adult life and start a family, fears for our children predominate – specifically, fears about the people and things we trust to entertain and protect them. The anxiety that something bad will happen as soon as they’re out of sight or left in the charge of carers is universal. And you can add to that the many fears artificially created and fuelled by the media – thoughts that we may be inadvertently harming our children by making the wrong nutritional or educational choices on their behalf.

One factor behind the terrifying effectiveness of Pennywise is that the idea of a child-murdering clown taps into this reservoir of anxiety about child rearing. Stephen King supplies a scattering of details that encourage us to see the character in those terms. When Georgie encounters Pennywise in the drain, he’s reminded of two children’s television characters from the 1950s: Bozo and Clarabell. It’s also noted that Pennywise is wearing ‘white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.’ So, in the run up to the boy’s grisly murder, we are being reminded of televisual experiences that formed the background to most children’s lives in the Western World for more than half a century. This is not accidental. In an even clearer statement of purpose, Stephen King writes that ‘If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald.’ In its details, the characterisation of Pennywise draws on those aspects of childhood that parents typically feel most ambivalent about: TV, cinema, fast food – trashy popular culture in general.

The horror genre is full of films and novels exploiting the same fears. For example, in the 1982 movie Poltergeist, the television becomes a channel for communication between a little girl and malevolent spirits. The memorable image of the child staring into a hissing TV screen crystallises that anxiety, just like the cartoonish characterisation of Pennywise. The anxiety is then amped up for horrific effect when the child disappears into the dark world behind the screen. It’s an equivalent of Georgie’s murder, which turns up the volume on the same set of parental fears. Interestingly, when the movie was remade in 2015, the publicity images didn’t revolve around the image of a TV, but rather a ‘scary clown’ toy that plays a minor role in the paranormal events of the story. It’s a testament to the power of that particular image to tap into a common set of fears.

A Bonus Tip for Writers

by Matthew McGuinness on

I’m always on the lookout for inspiring but unusual techniques that will help writers to get their imaginations revved up and producing great material almost without trying. In other words, I like to find ways of getting people into a state that we call ‘flow’. Flow is that beautiful condition of mind in which you are semi-hypnotised – outside yourself looking at a lean, mean creating machine doing its stuff in an effortless and masterful way.

Needless to say, if you can find the secret door that reliably takes you through into this beautiful secret garden of the writing life, you will be much more likely to produce work that 1) pleases you, and 2) pleases your public. Unselfconscious work is nearly always better work because it is fearless, deep and fluent. In fact it has all the qualities that we like in a friend. As a result, people will want to spend time in the company of your writing.

In my free book ‘Ten Unusual Tips for Writers’ I offered some suggested techniques that might take you on a journey into flow. As the title suggests, I tried to steer away from the same old stuff that many creative writing gurus churn out. We’re all familiar by now with practices such as character-building questionnaires and morning pages. They’ve been extensively discussed in many books and blogs, and in fact they do help a number of aspiring authors. But, for the rest of us, who find those well-trodden paths lead round in circles, it can be frustrating to hear the same old advice spun out again and again. That’s why I made it my business to mark out some new routes up the mountain. You can download that book here.

Now and again, new techniques occur to me, and I like to tell people about them here on this blog, or on my Facebook page. Handily enough, one occurred to be this morning (Sunday), on my usual day for blog writing, so here goes.

You’re probably not familiar with the world of library albums. You should be. It is a wonderful source of inspiration. Essentially, music libraries are the big beautiful reservoir from which most of the music you hear on TV comes. I’m sorry to disillusion you, but the soundtrack for your favourite show was almost certainly not written to order. It was probably sourced from one of the huge databases of music owned by large media companies such as Universal. That doesn’t mean the music is any less powerful or evocative, in fact quite the opposite. It is written to target a very specific mood, setting, character or moment so that it can be taken off the shelf and used in a TV show without too much fuss. And it doesn’t result in a highly generic feel either. That’s because the secret to success for composers of library music is to find niches rather than trying to be generic. And, to help TV producers find precisely the niche music they need, the library companies tag each piece with very specific descriptive terms. The titles are highly specific and evocative too, as you can imagine.

The great news is, you can access this music, for listening purposes without charge or registration. Yes, you, as a writer, can go to a website such as https://www.universalproductionmusic.com and dive into a totally free and almost limitless sea of inspiration. When I use this resource, it’s as though I’m the producer of my own internal TV show, selecting a soundtrack that’s suitable for the story concept I have in mind. I search for what I need by entering keywords rather than exploring genres or artists. The search terms I use arise naturally from the story or novel idea I’m working on. I hit the search button, and up pops a list of musical pieces that are designed to have strong associations for my specific imaginative niche. 

I don’t know whether everyone is like this, but I find music incredibly good fertiliser for my creative process. As I listen, I find characters, settings and  situations flooding into my mind. It helps that library music is designed as an accompaniment to visual stories. Sure you could search for music on YouTube, but you will not find much that is so skillfully and specifically hooked in to key moments in stories. Suppose you need something that suggests the reconciliation of lovers. It will be there in a good music library – tagged to make it accessible. Or maybe you need inspiration for a scene in which your character returns to a childhood home. No problem – a number of alternative pieces will appear, all with slightly different takes on the same moment.

I find this an extremely powerful technique, and I hope you will too. Give it a go and tell me how you get on by commenting either below or on my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pfmasterclass/.

Stuck on the Opening Chapter?

by Matthew McGuinness on

I suffer from a very common affliction of novel writers … getting stuck on opening scenes. I work and work at the first chapter, trying to create the seed from which a great story can grow, and eventually the clay gets dry (he said, mixing his metaphors) and the whole thing falls apart in my hands.

While trying to come up with a solution to this a year or so ago, I happened to be re-watching Breaking Bad. As I binge-watched, it struck me that a potential answer was right there in front of me. I’d always enjoyed those amazing opening sequences to each of the episodes, when we see the main characters in some dreadful fix, and we just can’t imagine how they got there or how they’re going to get out of it. It always made me wonder if the writers literally set themselves a challenge by putting the characters in the deepest hole they could think of before pulling out all the stops to create an explanation and a solution.

Who cares whether the Breaking Bad writers did it, I thought, why not give it a go yourself? And I did. The result was a revelation. I created a novel outline that I was truly pleased with for the first time since finishing my creative writing MA.

I suppose you could say that the scene I initially imagined was a sort of midpoint – to use the terminology of screenwriting gurus like Save the Cat author Blake Snyder. It was an apparent epic defeat for my hero – an event for which I initially had no background in mind and no idea how the hero could turn it around. What I found was that the challenge forced my imagination to dig deep. It gave my unconscious something to chew on, and within a few days I’d pushed out from the midpoint in both directions to create a complete three-act plan

So, if you’re stuck on your opening scene, vainly striving for perfection before you’ll allow yourself to move on, maybe give this technique a try.