The Creative Process

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.

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.