Thoughts About Technique

Analysis of writing techniques from a general perspective.

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.

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?

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.

Realisms

by Matthew McGuinness on

Every novel is a bargain with the reader – an agreement that says the author is going to package up and deliver certain types of descriptive detail, and in exchange the reader is going to accept it as a real world. It’s what we love more than anything else about the experience of reading fiction – that willing self-immersion in a made-up universe. Given the importance of sealing this literary contract, it’s surprising that readers are so flexible over what they’re willing to accept as ‘real’. By that, I don’t mean they’re willing to accept fantasy worlds as well as more familiar worlds. I mean they’re willing to accept rather vague and undetailed worlds as well as highly specific and detailed worlds. You could, no doubt, come up with numerous examples from your own reading to prove that point. But, allow me to focus on two books: It by Stephen King (the novel I’m currently writing about) and Killing Floor by Lee Child (the last novel I wrote about).

This may sound odd, but Stephen King’s novel, for the most part, comes across as ultra-realistic. You can open it at almost any page and find a passage that would make a very good case study of descriptive technique for a creative writing class. It’s specific but economical. It covers all the senses, but always focuses on the most evocative sense for a particular situation. One of the defining characteristics is the large number of popular cultural references. King gives us everything from TV shows to kids’ insults – the whole fabric of young lives in the 1950s. By contrast, as readers of my book on Killing Floor will know, Lee Child is very sparing with his description. The world of the novel feels thin, like a stage set. While the details are conveyed just as vividly as Stephen King’s, they are nothing like as varied or plentiful.

Don’t misunderstand me. Both writers are equally great. Their respective styles of realism are not indications of superior or inferior skill. They’ve simply made different creative decisions that affect their style of realism.

Those creative decisions are, to a large extent, determined by the genres that the two authors are writing in. In King’s case, he is telling a supernatural thriller story. Like many supernatural thrillers, it  contains elements of wild fantasy – stuff that is totally beyond our real experience. Strangely, that makes it necessary to first establish with absolute clarity, a world that closely resembles our own. If you think for a moment, you’ll realise that the episodes of supernatural horror in It would be much less shocking if they weren’t shattering a fairly humdrum world.

That’s the most obvious reason for King’s ultra-realism. There’s also a slightly less obvious explanation. Basically, King  needs us to empathise strongly with the main characters in order to get worried about them. Worry is an essential part of a good thriller. And one of the best ways of promoting concern for literary characters  is to show us how much we have in common with them. Most readers will see some TV programme or comic mentioned in It that they’re familiar with – even if it’s only the ‘Lone Ranger’. If they were born in the mid-twentieth century, they might even remember using the same kind of playground language as the kids in the novel. With that kind of kinship, it’s inevitable that we’re going to be anxious for them when they’re in peril.

The need to make us empathise as much as possible with each of the various fictional children is particularlyurgent because there is no one ‘hero’ in It. There are lots of characters whose thoughts we enter and follow for a while. Sometimes we barely get to know them before they die horribly. As a result, King does whatever he can to make us rapidly connect with them. That includes providing an in-depth guided tour of their popular cultural preferences as well as their physical and psychological environment.

Lee Child presents us with just one hero – Jack Reacher. Consequently, there’s nothing like as much personal detail supplied. We barely know five facts about his biography by the end of Killing Floor. It’s true that we receive a drip feed of information about his military skills throughout the novel, but those titbits are only ever provided to drive the narrative forward. Contrast that with the waterfall of colourful details that serve no narrative purpose in It. The evocation of Reacher is not only thinner than the description of the kids in It, but also a  less anchored in the real world. He’s not a superhero or a creature of pure fantasy, however. He’s a sort of  hybrid – a filtered, simplified and somewhat enhanced collection of human traits.

The world that Reacher inhabits has a similarly hybrid realism. It references familiar things, but only those things that can be exploited for their for symbolic resonance. The town of Margrave exists to make us reflect on aspects of wealth and power. The description of its semi-real landscape of political statues and posh suburbs is honed to achieve that effect. Lee Child deliberately withholds all detail that doesn’t contribute to it.

As you can see, different types of realism can serve different literary purposes. If you’re working on your own novel, think about the type of realism you’re evoking. Does it help to convey meaning or hinder it? Should you increase or decrease the level of detail? Have you thought about the particular types of detail you should be focusing on?

The No. 1 Obsession of Creative Writing Teachers

by Matthew McGuinness on

If you’ve ever attended a creative writing course of any kind, whether a short workshop or a degree programme, the chances are you’ve encountered a particular idea about ‘good’ writing. Obsession is probably too strong a description of this idea, but it’s not far off. It’s the idea that good writing must have a narrator with consistent viewpoint, and the viewpoint must be very closely associated with the consciousness of a character in the world of the novel – at least for a sizable section of the story.

Sound like gobbledygook? Let me illustrate this commonly taught notion with examples. In 19th-century novels, it was deemed acceptable for the narrator to float above the world of the novel like a god. So, for example, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens famously begins with the following sentence.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the season of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Three things strike one immediately about this.

1) The narrator is located in a specific period, but not the period of the novel’s events.
2) The narrator is very closely aligned with the author. He refers to ‘now’ – presumably the time of the novel’s writing.
3) The narrator adopts a sweeping overview of an entire epoch and an air of magisterial authority.

This kind of writing was all well and good in the Victorian period, say many creative writing teachers – a strongly hierarchical world in which people were willing to accept all sorts of authority figures – but not today.

Now my second example. It’s the first sentence of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day.

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.

Again, three things stand out.
1) The narrator is a character in the novel talking about events that may form part of the story to follow.
2) The narrator is not authoritative. He is speculating that something will probably happen.
3) We are immediately immersed in the character’s consciousness through his distinctive vocabulary and phrasing. It comes across as long-winded and a little pompous.

This, we are told, is the modern conception of ‘good’ writing – writing that is suitable for a period in human history when authorities of all kinds have been thoroughly debunked.

This kind of thinking is so general that you can scarcely find a voice to question it among creative writing teachers – especially in universities. However, outside of the lecture room, authors of popular fiction have been busily getting on with narrating stories in a variety of different styles, selecting the tool that’s most suitable to their particular need.

A third example will illustrate my point – this time it’s the first sentence of It by Stephen King.

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know and can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

Here are my three observations about this third example of an opening sentence.
1) As with Charles Dickens’ narrator, Stephen King’s narrator is located in a specific period beyond the novel’s events, and looks back in order to give a sweeping overview. But, unlike Dickens’ narrator, he or she seems to have lived through the novel’s events.
2) It’s not clear from this sentence, but the narrator of It, like the narrator in A Tale of Two Cities, is not a character in the story. However, he or she is clearly not the author, given point 1 above.
3) Stephen King’s narrator, like Ishiguro’s, is not authoritative. He or she cannot be sure about the truth of the events.

So, what do we take from all this? Firstly, it’s clear that Stephen King is aware of the off-putting nature of authoritative voices for modern readers. He deliberately avoids giving the impression of an all-knowing, god-like persona. This is achieved by making the narrator part of the fiction, and giving them a specific viewpoint that imposes limits on their knowledge. However, in some ways, King’s narrator is highly reminiscent of the one in A Tale of Two Cities and other 19th-century novels. He or she is not in any way involved in the fictional action, and provides a sweeping overview.

Stephen King is clearly giving his narrator precisely the characteristics that best serve his storytelling. He is not afraid of breaking the taboo against narrators with a panoramic overview of the story. Furthermore, he is not afraid to change the narrator’s characteristics as the novel proceeds, if it serves the storytelling. For example, he allows the viewpoint to drift in and out of the characters’ heads (so to speak) with incredible rapidity.

This pragmatism is really only possible in popular fiction, away from the judgmental eyes of creative writing purists. And Stephen King pushes the range of narrative possibilities wider than practically any other author. That is why I have chosen to make It the next novel I’ll be discussing in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series.

Openings

by Matthew McGuinness on

It’s a fact of modern life that most literature is treated more or less like a throwaway commodity. Of course, people value literary experiences – a great novel can change the way people see the world. But, these days, they make their decision about the value of a novel increasingly quickly.

The publishing industry has been incredibly good at creating opportunities for people to start reading a book on impulse. It requires no investment of money to read a few pages using the preview feature on Amazon, and if you’re a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited, you can read as much as you like without paying anything on top of your monthly subscription. This kind of thing has made us voracious starters of books. But it has also made us ruthless abandoners. As a result, it is more important than ever for authors to grip their reader from the word go.

To grip a reader at the start of a novel you need to think on three levels: first sentence, first paragraph and first chapter. Below I’ve provided tick lists for each level, trying to make them as relevant as possible for all genres of popular fiction.

Sentence

  • The first sentence should launch straight into action that is appropriate for the genre.
  • It should not be dialogue or description.
  • It should have an emotion associated with it that relates to the emotional journey you will be giving the reader – that could be fear for a thriller or loneliness for a romance, for example.

Paragraph

  • The first paragraph should not be about waking up or walking into a room or other such inconsequential transition moments.
  • It should introduce the main character.
  • It should set the tone of voice – this is a big part of what readers get hooked by.
  • It should evoke a problem or challenge that is appropriate for the genre, although it doesn’t have to be the one that’s going to preoccupy the main character long term.
  • If it doesn’t directly relate to the challenge that will preoccupy the main character long term, it could foreshadow it.

Chapter

  • Forget prefaces – they are a way of avoiding starting the story.
  • Forget retrospective episodes as this will misrepresent the novel to potential readers; try to carry out exposition more subtly.
  • By the end of the chapter, your reader should have fallen in love with the main character.
  • The first chapter should at least suggest the nature of the main task or problem that will preoccupy the main character.
  • Try to end on a cliffhanger – in other words, leave questions in the reader’s mind.

    • Whodunnit?

    by Matthew McGuinness on

    Think of your favourite crime novel. Is it a whodunnit, a whydunnit or a howdunnit? We assume that whodunnits are the be-all-and-end-all of crime fiction / crime cinema, but that’s far from the truth. Some of the most well-known novels and films fall into the other two categories.

    Characterisation Thoughts

    by Matthew McGuinness on

    Three things make for a compelling secondary character.

    Firstly, we have to have a reasonably detailed account of their appearance and habits. But beware. It’s no good just piling up quirks and random characteristics. Everything that we find out has to make them a better foil for your novel’s main character.

    Secondly, we need some insight into their back story. Exercise your ingenuity to come up with indirect methods of exposition though.

    Thirdly, the character needs contradictions and tensions in their life. Use this sparingly, as a bunch of highly conflicted characters can give the reader overwhelm.