Tag Archives: writing tips

How to write a short story collection

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Knit graffiti in Arnos Vale cr Judy DarleyToday’s guest post comes from writer KM Elkes and offers an insight into the art of stringing a short story collection together.

Telling people you are working on a novel is easy enough. People ‘get’ novels. Even the least reader-ish person has probably read a couple, either because they were forced to at school or because they were part of Generation Harry Potter.

But a short story collection? Not so much.

Maybe that’s because short story collections are relatively unfamiliar – not so surprising when you consider bookshops force readers into an Indiana Jones-style quest to find them. They lurk unassumingly, a diaspora spread among distant bookcases, waiting for the day when someone has the bright idea to give them a shelf of their own.

But there’s a deeper issue too – even those in the biz, writers and publishers, are sometimes ignorant of what a short story collection really is. Which makes putting one together feel like a Sisyphean task.

Think about it. There’s plenty of advice out there on what makes a good novel – how to write it, pace it, plot it, sell it. But I’ve yet to Google a go-to guide on what constitutes a fantastic collection.

Most short story writers are busy just trying to make each story the best we can. The emotional investment is quick, deep and hard, the art tricky.  It’s only when you come to the point of putting your own collection together that you realise it’s not simply a matter of polishing up your bestest, nicest stories and pressing Send.

What does a short story collection involve? What does it need?

Well, in my opinion, many of the same things that characterise a good short story – unity of purpose and theme.

I’m not talking specifically about some clunky link (hey, watchya know, they’re all characters from the same street!) but something less obvious, spider silk thin at times, but there, somehow.

Runaway by Alice MunroLook at some wonderful collections – Alice Munro’s Runaway; Cathedral by Raymond Carver; Nathan Englander’s For The Relief of Unbearable Urges; Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan. Whether or not the author planned it, there is a thread that runs through these books, located in place, or in an overarching theme, in the kind of lives they tackle and in that most intangible thing: voice.

Regardless of point of view, tense, sympathetic or abhorrent characters, regardless of timeframe or timeline, great authors have a voice, a way of storytelling that leaves an imprint on their collection.

Think of George Saunders at the frayed edge of satire, or the rich gravy of Saul Bellow’s language, the wry humour of Kevin Barry and Edith Pearlman’s precise concision – all give a shape that is the author’s own.

What can those of us putting our debut collection learn from this?

Being ruthless is necessary, especially with our earlier work. Yes they might have won prizes or been shortlisted for decent competitions, but do these stories fit with our latest work, where a more individual voice is starting to form? Perhaps it’s time for that tricky chat: “Thanks guys, we had fun, but I’ve moved on. It’s not you, it’s me.”

Tough love is also needed for the stories that are up to scratch, but simply don’t fit in. That cracking three thousand worder, which someone said reminded them of Jorge Luis Borges, probably won’t fit if you are building a reputation as the Cheever of Milton Keynes.

Even then, this process throws up fresh dilemmas. How do you know when you’re done? How do you know that the next story you write won’t be the one to top out the collection, the crowning glory that will pull it all together?

This is particularly tricky for me, and, I suspect, many other short story writers because I don’t (I can’t) write with a collection in mind. Story writing for me is a weird alchemy, when character, voice, theme and tone come together through some process that has little to do with the analytical part of my brain.

So time is important, to allow things to accrete. Maybe the key to creating a short story collection is the key to all writing – keep going, get better at it, read stories by people who are better than you, learn from them, accept your failures, don’t get carried away with your successes, rinse and repeat.

Eventually you may begin to ‘feel’ a group of stories huddling together. You sense a deeper resonance coming through, common themes being explored. You think – and this is as important as anything else – of a title that makes things tick.

Good advice is hard to come by, but fresh perspectives (note the plural), might help you push to keep creating new material or re-think existing work.

All of this points towards a simple fact – creating a short story collection is also about growing up as a writer, reaching a maturity which enables you to fathom how stories hang together, the palette you work with, the themes which gnaw at you and how that is not such a ‘bad thing’.

And that’s about as much as I can tell you. For now.

Author KM ElkesAbout the author

KM Elkes is an author, journalist and travel writer. He has won the Fish Publishing flash prize, been shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize and was one of the winners of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2014. He also won the Prolitzer short story prize in 2014 and wrote a winning entry for the Labello Press International Short Story Prize 2015. His work has appeared in various anthologies and won prizes at Words With Jam, Momaya Review, Writing WM, Bath Short Story Award, Lightship Publishing and Accenti in Canada. He blogs at www.kmelkes.co.uk and tweets via @mysmalltales.

KM Elkes will be sharing more of his writing expertise at free flash fiction workshops taking place at Bristol Central Library for National Flash Fiction Day (this Saturday!), along with NFFD director Calum Kerr and prize-winning author KM Elkes. The workshops take place from 1.30-4.30pm. KM is also taking part in An Evening of Flash Fiction, from 6pm at Foyles Bookstore Bristol, along with a number of other writers, including Zoe Gilbert, Kevlin Henney, Sarah Hilary, Freya Morris, Grace Palmer, Jonathan Pinnock, and, well, me.

How to play with time creatively

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Victoria Park cr Judy DarleyIn today’s guest post, author Kat Gordon talks us through how she went about weaving together different time periods in one narrative for her debut novel The Artificial Anatomy of Parks.

At its heart, my book The Artificial Anatomy of Parks is about family secrets and the damage they cause, and is told through interweaving narratives in the past and the present. The Parks are a larger-than-life, eccentric family, and Tallie – the protagonist – begins the novel as a young woman already estranged from them.She hears of her father’s heart attack, and visits him in hospital where she runs into other family members and is gradually drawn back into their world.

The more time she spends with them, the more she remembers her childhood, and teenage years, and the reason behind her estrangement, until she makes the decision to uncover what she sees as the biggest secret her family have been keeping from her: everything that happened the day her mother died, and how her mysterious Uncle Jack was involved.

Here are a few of the things I learned as I was writing the novel.

Innocence versus experience creates humour as well as poignancy

I knew from the start I wanted to depict Tallie, my protagonist, both as a child and an adult. When you’re writing from the perspective of children, you can have them say or do almost anything, because they don’t have the same sense of social niceties.

Most of the lightness in the novel comes from the dramatic irony of the adult Tallie recounting the younger Tallie’s actions and reactions with the benefit of hindsight and maturity. I think this distance is where the humour lies, and I really wanted that element in the novel, which covers some fairly dark territory at times. Weaving the two storylines together rather than having a more straightforwardly-linear narrative also allowed me to juxtapose Tallie’s happy childhood memories with her present day experience, lending poignancy to the narrative.

Victoria Park1 cr Judy Darley

You need to balance your timelines

On the other hand, when you’re writing adult characters they can analyse events better, and think about what’s happening around them in a more complex way, which is also very satisfying for the writer. On top of that, their actions can take on an added level of significance, either positive, or destructive, because they understand the concept of consequence, and that was very important for the pacing of the present-day narrative.

The narrative in the past follows Tallie from age five right up to twenty-one, five weeks before the novel starts, so it was always going to have a sense of progression and momentum, because we see her change so dramatically. The present-day narrative takes place over a period of roughly one week, so it could have felt too quick, or, given Tallie’s passive mindset at the start (she’s come to accept her lack of friends and family, and her unfulfilling job), it could have felt too slow. From the beginning, I was conscious of the fact that at some point in the present-day timeline she had to make a decision to become more active (knowing full well the risks and consequences involved), and that would be when the book kicked up a gear. It’s her decision to find Uncle Jack, who set everything in motion when he suddenly appeared all those years ago, that drives the book towards the big reveal at the end.

While I was doing the synopsising (more on that below), it also became obvious that I needed more of the present day (it was originally set over only three days), and that I needed to emphasise that arc so that it gained more of an equal weighting with the past (younger Tallie goes from happy, trusting and affectionate to unhappy and isolated; present day Tallie moves from brittle and damaged towards reconciliation, but that was getting lost).

You don’t want your readers to skip over one of the storylines to get to the other because they’re not as fully invested in it.

The form can help create suspense

Adult Tallie is able to drop hints about significant events – accidents, strangers arriving unannounced – in the past of which her younger self is blissfully unaware at the time. But also switching between the different time periods creates cliff-hangers, as the action in either the past or the present is interrupted for the other storyline.

These interruptions were something I could play up (for instance, by having adult Tallie comment directly on what’s just been happening in the past before the switch), or play down as I liked; in the middle section, just before Tallie starts trying to find Uncle Jack, I had a succession of very short scenes that switched rapidly between the two timelines, and that was meant to suggest her fractured, unsettled emotional state. So the form is really very useful on many levels!

Artificial-Anatomy-of-Parks-coverSynopsise!

Rather than writing the two narratives separately, I wrote The Artificial Anatomy of Parks as it reads, alternating between the younger and older Tallie’s perspectives. When I’d finished, I wrote detailed synopses of each scene on flash cards, and laid them all out on the floor (it took up a lot of space!). This really helped me concentrate on the pacing and allowed me to work out whether the revelations were happening at the right points; if something seemed to be happening out of sequence, I moved the cards around until it felt right.

If you’re setting the scene for a big reveal at the end (in my case, the big family secret), you have to make sure it’s ‘foregrounded’ throughout the novel, but subtly (you want to pique the reader’s interest, but not let them understand everything until the very last moment).

So although it can be time-consuming and nowhere near as fun as writing, synopsising is definitely something I’d recommend if at any point you’re worried about structure and pacing. In fact, for someone who is so terrible at timekeeping and organisation in real life, I’ve come to realise just how essential those two factors are in writing!

Kat GordonAuthor bio

Kat Gordon was born in London in 1984. She attended Camden School for Girls, read English at Somerville College, Oxford, and received a distinction in her creative writing masters from Royal Holloway. In between, Kat has been a gymnastics coach, a theatre usher, a piano accompanist, a nanny, a researcher and worked at Time Out. She has spent a lot of time travelling, primarily in Africa. Kat lives in London with her boyfriend and their terrifying cat, Maggie. The Artificial Anatomy of Parks will be published by Legend Press on 1st July 2015.

When metaphors come to life

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Harriet's catAward-winning short story writer Harriet Kline tells us how and why she likes to use animals as metaphors in her fiction, but warns us that they sometimes they take on a life of their own. 

I talk a lot to my cat. I ask her if she’s having a lovely sleep, or if she knows how beautiful she is. I talk to other animals too. I’ve been known to greet butterflies, thank blackbirds for their songs, hurl insults at flies. Trees, recalcitrant computers, zippers also get comments aimed their way.  I know I’m not the only one. Plenty of people name their cars and tell hamsters not be scared when they lift them out of the cage. Once I heard a woman say to her dog, we’ve talked about this before.

For me, there’s a particular set of feelings that comes with addressing things that won’t reply: A sense of power perhaps, in knowing that my comments will not be contradicted. A sense of foolishness, especially if I’m overheard. And also a sense of creativity. There really is no significance in a fly buzzing at my window or a zip sticking on my favourite dress, but when I speak to these things I fill them up with meaning. I create a relationship with them, through my words. We all do. We gain a sense of ourselves, of where we are in the world by relating to the things around us.

This set of feelings also occurs when I’m writing short stories. I feel powerful, creative and foolish all at once. I believe the link is that as I create a narrative, I simultaneously fill it up with meaning. As the story unfolds, the deeper, metaphorical layer is revealed. So a story about a young woman who finds a ladybird caught in her blouse is really about how she finds a small but gritty determination to survive. A story where three siblings neglect their guinea pigs is really about their unwillingness to admit to any vulnerability in themselves.

Harriet's dog

How it feels to use metaphors in your writing

What really interests me is not simply that I use metaphor as a writer, (many of us do,) but what it actually feels like to do that. I am intrigued by the very moment when something becomes significant. That twinge of self consciousness when I catch myself in the act of appropriating meaning. The pause between addressing the animal and remembering that it definitely won’t reply.

It is this active interface with metaphor, that I wanted to examine in Familiars, my collection of short stories. I wanted to make that moment of self consciousness central to each narrative and explore its effects on a range of protagonists. In some stories the significant animal relationship allows a transformation: A young woman comparing a dog’s whining with her own, comes to accept her feelings of grief.

In others the protagonist resists the moment, refusing to see significance when it is clearly present: A teenage boy is horrified by his sister’s attempts to imbue a robot with character. He insists it can have no feelings because he would rather not to admit to his own. In some stories the moment is fleeting: A woman, unable to express herself honestly is struck by the hideous hawing of a donkey. In others it is stretched into something magical: A mother struggling with feelings of awkwardness transforms repeatedly into a hare.

I chose animals (and a few magically animated objects) for this exploration because I’m certain that the impulse to talk to animals is almost universal. I guessed that the interface between animal, human and meaning is something my readers would recognise. I also suspected that many of us have imagined how the animals might reply.

And it was here that I had the most fun with my writing. What would a cat say if it could speak its mind? How does a ghost dog feel when someone walks through it? I thought it would be difficult to put language into the minds of animals, but what I’ve learned through writing Familiars is that is even more difficult not to. When the cat walks across my notebook as I write, I can’t help imagining her thoughts: Hey, don’t look at the paper, look at me. Or when my friend’s dog brings me a ragged slipper in his jaws it’s impossible not to believe he’s thinking, love me, love me, go on, please. So it was almost a relief to give free rein to this impulse, and create whole narratives from the minds of animals. It was as if the metaphors I had chosen began to take on a life of their own.

And yet, I also wanted to show that this impulse to make meaning is really a human concern. It’s how we connect, how we love and learn, take our place in the world. So I decided that my talking cat would have no reverence for language and less for any moments of significance. Despite her abilities her priorities would still be the food bowl and a warm place to lie in the sun. And by doing this, I hope I was also able to suggest that for humans it is different. Language gives us a richer and more wonderful life. We thrive on stories and metaphors and I believe they are central to our humanity.

Harriet KlineAbout the author

Harriet Kline won the London Magazine Short Story Competition 2013 and the Hissac Short Story Competition 2012. She was highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize 2014 and has been shortlisted and longlisted elsewhere. Two of her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Familiars as a collection is as yet unpublished. You can read Ghost at www.hissac.co.uk/Ghost and and Donkeys at shortstorysunday.com. Chest of Drawers appears in The London Magazine April/May 2014. Hares appears in Story.Book, Unbound Press and Spilling Ink Review. If you are interested in reading any of the other stories, contact Harriet through her website www.harrietkline.com “and we may be able to come to an arrangement.”

How to harness your demons

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Hamlet of Sachs Harbour, NWT, April 1992This week’s guest post comes from Joan Mettauer, author of Diamonds in an Arctic Sky, and explores how you can tackle life’s most brutal challenges by using them in your fiction.

The course of your life can change in an instant. I know it can, because mine did.

When I was young, I took too many things for granted – like life itself. Happily married, with two wonderful young sons, my world was suddenly turned upside down one sunny August afternoon when my eldest son died in an accident. He was just three weeks away from his third birthday. I became a bereaved mother at age 32, and a divorced, single parent at age 33. Unfair? You bet.

Having lived in various northern communities in Canada, I soon leapt at the opportunity to move to Inuvik, Northwest Territories, which lies high above Canada’s Arctic Circle in the ‘Land of the Midnight Sun.’ We all know, or have heard, that people deal with their grief in different ways; some eventually become addicted to prescription drugs, alcohol, illegal drugs, or even sex. I was on the downward, slippery slope to becoming an alcoholic when I finally woke up one day and said, ‘That’s enough.’

The Compassionate Friends, a grief-support organisation for bereaved parents, encouraged me to keep a diary, and to write about my grief. I couldn’t do it though, as my feelings were just too raw at the time. Their suggestion was never far from my mind, though, and 25 years later I finally found the courage to put into words my most private thoughts and feelings. My first novel, Diamonds in an Arctic Sky, is the result of my determination to face grief head-on.

Write what you know

Diamonds in an Arctic Sky-JoanMettauer-CoverWhen I retired and decided to start writing full-time, it was quite natural for me to write about the things I knew best – living in the north, and surviving the death of a child. My books’ heroine is Andi Nowak, and her life mirrors my own. Through Andi’s eyes and emotions I was able to pour out my own story, without having to think twice about how Andi was feeling. I knew exactly how she was feeling at all times. The serenity and beauty of the north play a large role in healing Andi’s ravaged emotions, and helping her come to terms with her grief. I feel that having something, or someone, important in one’s life is an essential element in restoring peace and equilibrium.

Add some dazzle

While plotting out the storyline for Diamonds in an Arctic Sky, it quickly became apparent that I would have to add something ‘extra’ to make the story more intriguing and readable. Alas, my life, interesting as it was to me, needed some perking up! I thought it would be great to add mystery and suspense to the story, and at the same time tell my readers another little-known fact about Canada’s north – we have a flourishing diamond mining industry. So I created a fictitious diamond mine near Inuvik (the real mines are all closer to Yellowknife, near Great Slave Lake).

I have read quite a few ‘how to’ books for writers, and also realise that to make my characters more believable, they must have struggles, internal battles and low points in their lives. Andi’s battle with alcoholism seemed like a natural and believable fit into the story, and gave her another personal challenge to overcome.

In my case, turning the events of my life into a work of fiction proved to be remarkably easy. The basic theme of the story echoes my life in Inuvik. The wonderful people I met in Inuvik made a huge impact on my life, so it seemed natural that most of the characters in my book, with the exception of North, Andi’s friend and eventual lover, are based on people I knew or worked with. Fictitiously, of course!

Joan MettauerAbout the author

Joan Mettauer was born and raised in Alberta’s heartland in Canada. Her love affair with aviation was sparked at an early age, and she dedicated most of her working years to the flying business. Living in various Northern communities, including Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, she travelled throughout Canada’s Arctic. Her final years in the aviation industry were spent in Inuvik, N.W.T., from where she bid farewell to the North. Now retired, she resides on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with her husband. Diamonds in an Arctic Sky is Joan’s first novel.

How to write hungrily

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dad, me, shan 1962

Dad, me and Shan, 1962 © Lynne Rees

In today’s guest post, Lynne Rees, aka the hungry writer, shows us how to use the ‘taste of memory’ in our writing. All images in the post were supplied by Lynne.

What’s your earliest memory of food? Mine is Farley’s Rusks, those flattened domes of featherweight biscuits my mother bought for my baby brother. I remember eating them dry, their distinctive sweet wheatiness, or in a bowl with milk where they transmuted into an immediate sludge. I don’t remember the occasion of this photo though, eating chips with my older sister and father on holiday in North Wales. It is 1962. I am four. The year before our brother is born.

Welshcakes cr Lynne Rees

Welshcakes © Lynne Rees

While I was teaching creative writing at the University of Kent a couple of my students commented that I couldn’t get through a seminar without mentioning food or drink. Really? I didn’t set out with that intention. There were no references to food in my lesson plans. But, yes, they were right. A bruise could be the colour of raw liver; the scent of bread heavy with promise. And, of course, if I was teaching around 1st March – St David’s Day, the patron saint of Wales – whichever writing groups I was leading that week got to taste my homemade Welshcakes.

To misquote a popular song, food was all around me!

And there was more. More than I realised. In The Oven House, my first book published in 2004, food is comfort, a metaphor for healing. It appears in my poems in the company of children, an unsettling chip shop owner, a bare-breasted woman striding down the street of a Californian town. And since 2010 it has been the central ingredient in the hungry writer’s weekly blog, a place where I eventually settled to record the moments when food, words and life collide.

Penrhyn railway bridge food cr Lynne Rees

Penrhyn railway bridge food © Lynne Rees

As writers, how do we recognise those compulsions and passions that are worth exploring, the ones that will ultimately feed us and our readers? I’ve come to the conclusion that everything feeds us: the ideas and projects that end up as insubstantial as cappuccino foam as well as the ones that rise like sweet cake and stay risen. I recognise that the process of writing, fully engaging with the discipline and boundaries of our work, is ultimately nurturing, and often delivers in ways we hadn’t planned or anticipated.

The first year of the hungry writer blog, with my self-imposed boundaries of posting weekly without fail, on the subject of food and family, and keeping in mind the idea of simple story telling rather than trying to impress with literary fireworks, gifted me the greater part of my fragmented memoir of home, forgiving the rain (Snapshot Press 2012).

If I hadn’t found that particular story-telling voice, upbeat but not flippant, accessible but with meaning and emotional depth, then I doubt I would have been commissioned to write Real Port Talbot (Seren Books 2013), a psycho-geographical account of my home town in South Wales.

Writing produces writing. It’s that simple. Not always a feast, of course. We have to be prepared for flops and indigestible left-overs. But even they can end up being recycled: our very own writer’s compost.

Food remains my passion on the hungry writer and although the years have seen me expand my original boundaries of food and family to include friends, travel, guest posts, books, social commentary and even jokes, the weekly writing prompts have been a constant. They are obviously formed in response to the specific memory, experience or insight I’m writing about that week but I trust they are universal enough for other writers to use in the exploration of their own lives and imaginations, to assist in lifting the lid on the scents and flavours of their own passions. Dancing, architecture, family history. Music, mountains, mathematical equations. The list is infinite. And if you haven’t identified a passion in your life yet? Don’t worry. Just write and keep on writing. Go deeper. What matters will eventually make itself known.

Hungry writing prompt
Write about a scent that reminds you of home.

Lynne ReesAbout the author

Lynne Rees was born and grew up in Port Talbot, South Wales, UK but left in 1978 to work in offshore banking in Jersey, Channel Islands. She moved to Kent, UK in 1985 where she opened and ran her own second-hand and antiquarian bookshop, Foxed & Bound (the inspiration for her novel, The Oven House), for twelve years. She began writing in 1988, obtained her Master’s degree in writing from the University of Glamorgan in 1996 (studying under the celebrated Welsh poet, Gillian Clarke) and was  awarded an International Hawthornden Fellowship in 2003.
The Hungry Writer: Eat, Live Write, a collection of stories, reflections, poems, recipes and a year’s worth of writing prompts will be published by Cultured Llama in Autumn 2015.

Midweek writing prompt – ice skating

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Ice skating cr Judy DarleyHow nostalgic is this winter scene? It could be twenty years ago, or last week! When I was a kid ice skating was the best fun in the world, but as I got older and taller, falling seemed more perilous and the soaring joy diminished.

Why is it that as we age, our mortality looms? I had a conversation once with a man who’d been cleaning the windows of a skyscraper for a decade and was just beginning to develop a dread of heights. The idea intrigued me.

Use this as your prompt this week and create a character who loses their love of a potentially dangerous activity that previously held no fear for them. It could be Banksy growing afraid of being caught, or a lion-tamer now terrified of wild animals.

How do they overcome their new-found trepidation? And if they don’t, how does it change their life?

If you write something prompted by this, please let me know by sending an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. With your permission, I’d love to share it on SkyLightRain.com.

From writer to publisher and back again

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Coffee in the park cr Judy DarleyLast week I quizzed Darren Laws, founder of Caffeine Nights Publishing, about what it takes to set up a successful independent publishing house. This week we discuss how to balance the roles of writer and publisher.  

Identify the various skills required

“The roles needed for writing and publishing are very different, almost polar opposites. Writing is very insular by its nature,” says Darren. “Publishing is all about creating relationships in the real world rather than the virtual world inside the author’s head. Authors give birth to their babies and have to let them go to the publisher to rear and help make successful children and adults.

Darren points out that each independent publishing house requires a different skillset from their publisher, but agrees that “there are specific skills which are required whatever publishing house you worked for. Communication is a great asset. I talk to a wide variety of people in publishing from authors to buyers to journalists and app developers. Likewise, authors also want to communicate, though primarily with readers.”

“The pleasure of reading and supporting a great novel are both primary interests to the author and the publisher,” says Darren. “Our joint goal is to bring the best possible version of a book to market and to work collectively to those ends. Both require discipline, creativity and the ability to work whatever hours are need to get the job done.” Continue reading →

How to launch a publishing house

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Coffee in the park cr Judy DarleyWhen I met Darren Laws in 2008, he was working in PR but already had high hopes for a literary career. In the first instalment in a two-part series, I pick Darren’s brain about what it takes to get a new, independent publishing house off the ground. 

Value your writing skills

“It was actually my writing skills which enabled me to get into public relations in the first instance,” Darren says. “I am pretty much an autodidact by nature. Never academic but always fascinated by learning about the various industry roles I have worked in over the years. I’m always wondering what I’m going to do when I grow up – I’ll probably never know the answer to that but writing and creativity has been at the core of everything I’ve done. I had long embarked on a writing career when I moved into public relations, so it was natural to continue writing through that period. PR itself offered some great writing challenges which I loved.”

In the early years Darren ran Caffeine Nights in the evenings and at night (hence the company’s name) while spending his days working full time as a public relations manager. “The job was excellent, offering the chance to work on many great and diverse campaigns in the UK and abroad, but the agency like many others really suffered during the last recession following the banking crisis,” he says. “The downturn lead to a dramatic reduction in staff at the agency I worked in and while I escaped the first round of cuts I wasn’t so lucky second time around.” Continue reading →

Semicolonic Irritation – a guide to the semicolon

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Shell semicolon cr JDarleyThere are few punctuation marks that instil more dread than the semicolon. Getting good, simple advice on how to use it can, however, be rather difficult. In this week’s guest post, Karin Stone of WM Group offers a crucial guide to the semicolon.

Many people will tell you that using the semicolon properly is ‘just a matter of feel’. Unfortunately, if you don’t have ‘the feel’ in the first place, such advice isn’t much help.

The fact is the semicolon is a very useful little tool, and one that is all too often overlooked. And, far from being a question of feel, there are clear rules governing the correct use of the semicolon.

Tips for using the semicolon

In many respects, the semicolon can be regarded as about half way between a comma and a colon. The upshot of this is that there are two things the semicolon is extremely good at: lists, and joining sentences together.

Lists: what’s the big idea?

Read the following sentence out loud:

When you go camping in winter, remember to pack your Long Johns, for extra warmth, a silver blanket, in case of emergency, a propane stove, as butane tends not to work well in the cold, and make sure there are plenty of people who know exactly where you’re going.

The sentence feels breathless – like somebody is just blurting out a load of information. Now try this version:

When you go camping in winter, remember to pack your Long Johns, for extra warmth; a silver blanket, in case of emergency; a propane stove, as butane tends not to work well in the cold; and make sure there are plenty of people who know exactly where you’re going.

Essentially, the semicolon allows you to give better instructions to the reader about what each bit of the sentence is doing. That makes it easier to read, and people will thank you for it.

You can see that each big idea is followed up by a little idea – ‘a silver blanket [big idea], in case of emergency [little idea]’. When you have a series of big ideas and little ideas, separate the big ones with a semicolon.

Joining: independence day

We’ve said it before, and no doubt we’ll say it again: one of the most important things you have to do is to engage your reader. That means encouraging them to interact with the words you’ve written. And the semicolon can play an important part here too.

Say you have two separate sentences:

The semicolon is a much under-used punctuation mark.
For some reason, people seem to be scared of it.

Joining these sentences together using a semicolon demonstrates that although the ideas are independent, they are also connected:

The semicolon is a much under-used punctuation mark; for some reason, people seem to be scared of it.

Here, we’ve got two ideas that are intimately linked. To show that the second sentence comes as an explanation or refinement of the first sentence, we join the two sentences together – using a semicolon. As a result, the nature of the relationship becomes easier for the reader to identify.

A really comma error

The biggest single mistake people make when it comes to the semicolon is not using one when they join two sentences together. An awful lot of people use a comma instead of a semicolon. They tend to ‘feel’ that there’s something wrong with what they’ve written, but can’t tell exactly what.

Consider the following example:

I used to be convinced that the semicolon was really difficult to use, now, I’m not so sure.

The key to good writing is that it makes good reading. But in the above sentence, it’s difficult at first to work out what the word ‘now’ is doing, and the sentence loses impact because it’s confusing.

I used to be convinced that the semicolon was really difficult to use; now, I’m not so sure.

Here the reader has clear directions as to what’s going on in the sentence. The word ‘now’ clearly relates to ‘I’m not so sure’, and confusion is avoided.

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If you’d like to share your own writing tips or journey on SkyLightRain, get in touch! Just send an email  to Judy(at)socketcreative.com.

How to write

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Each of Us cr Ben MoorToday’s guest post comes from Ben Moor – author, actor and Edinburgh Fringe regular – and offers a unique, and sometimes bewildering, insight into his personal writing process.

To me, my process is the most obvious way of coming up with a story that has ever been invented. Obviously, this is just to me, because when I explain it to others I get “Huh?”s and “Really?”s and the slight twist of the head a dog does when it’s trying to work out why if you’ve got a ball in your hand, you’re not throwing the ball.

The atoms

I guess you could really start with the sub atomic stuff, but atoms are small enough for this explanation. I spend a ton of time just coming up with the bits that will make a piece. These might be stand-alone images or puns or moments in time. They might be lines of misheard conversations. They might simply be two words put together that don’t usually go together. They might just be simple twists on the everyday. I write these in notebooks while on trains or on pads while sitting around the flat; often they come in the middle of the night in that pre-dream state when your mind is trying to get through the real-world stuff you’ve put into it over the course of a day and, enough already, it wants to get crazy.

Writing tip 1 – always have a pad by your bedside. What you write on it may or may not make sense later, but it definitely made sense to you at one point and therefore is valid work.

The apparatus

So these ideas next go through a process of mulling and reproduction. Lists and lists of them get transcribed into a notebook, about 25 to a page. Once in here they can be re-examined and continue to baffle.

After a while they get typed into a computer, get printed out and re-read. This distillation is important as, over time, connections and mysteries reveal themselves. For my last solo show – Each of Us – I eventually had about 1250 ideas placed in a printed out document. They’re all numbered for a good reason I’ll get onto.

Some of them were:
200. Air spooning in bed alone
448. Freestyle Sudoku
1230. National Distrust

This list was 21 pages and it’s really from this that the show would emerge.

The scaffolding

(I realise I’ve swapped metaphors from chemistry to construction. I get bored easily.)

So it’s now that the work on the narrative gets going. I always have a single image or a single question that forms the central part of a story. In Not Everything is Significant it was “What if you received next year’s diary already filled in in your handwriting – would you do those things on those days?”; in Each of Us it was seeing a woman on the tube flicking through photographs on a metal ring. It’s these that don’t necessarily begin my stories but are the things I always come back to. I always try and think what comes before such an image or moment; what leads a person to make such a thing matter to them.

It’s not a linear process – in A Supercollider for the Family, the big image was someone walking on a tightrope over a canyon, and in the final show that’s the very last moment.

But when I have that single driving central concept, that’s when the work of fitting a story and using all the images and ideas that have been coming to me really begins.

I’ll take a page of the notepad and start blocking things out – alongside me is the numbered list – and I’ll simply attach the numbers of the ideas that need to go in various places or at various times. You end up with a big sheet of paper with words and numbers, and good luck to someone who’s looking over your shoulder then – sense has not yet returned to the building.

Writing tip 2 – leave the house and do this. There’s a reason they invented coffee shops.

Brickwork cr Judy DarleyThe brickwork

So now you come back to the computer. Next to you is your writing by numbers page and on screen are all the numbered ideas and concepts. These now become sentences next to one another in these discrete sections and almost mini-stories in themselves. Paragraph writing is exquisitely satisfying now.

You might have a scene in a hotel lobby where you’ve put Number 1230 – maybe the character notices there’s a meeting of the National Distrust, an organisation devoted to destroying the country’s least historic buildings so the future can know nothing about them. Or a moment of loneliness for the character where Number 200 comes in – he sleeps alone but wraps his body around the empty bed-space she’s left behind – and something they don’t miss about their previous partner was that she filled in puzzles using any number she felt like – Number 448.

This is not yet a full story obviously. You just have semi-blocked out rooms and walls that only go up halfway. But print it all out again (I call this a Mess Draft) and re-read it and it will begin to show itself to you.

Part of writing is not writing. It’s letting the story tell itself to you, and I really believe that it does. Every time someone asks you what it is you’re working on, do tell them because certain things always happen: the story will tell itself through you in a new way or you’ll suddenly think of something new, and the other person will ask you a question about it you haven’t yet thought even needs an answer. Some people hate talking about their works in progress, but I think it’s a vital part of the process – a new eye (or ear) can show you what needs to be done.

The finishing off

So here’s the thing. This process of printing out what you’ve done, reading it and adding and editing, and seeing that bits need work or, actually, cutting, or that bit needs to go there, or that no makes no sense because of that, but now you can bring that other bit back you cut before even if it’s just for a throwaway line; this all takes quite a while. Of those 1250 original ideas, 125 made it into the final script of Each of Us, which over the course of an hour is more than two per minute; my stuff is dense. I’m not saying each idea is going to be a brilliant one, but they all should feel consistently part of the world of the piece – they should along help move the story on in some way, through character revelation, background detail and so on.

I have the luxury of knowing that a solo hour of performance for the Edinburgh Fringe has a word count of about 8,000 words and a submission deadline is an excellent focuser. I don’t usually change much of a show after a first performance (maybe an ad-lib here and there) so a preview reading is crucial. Again feedback and clarification questions come in super-handy.

Writing tip 3 – read your finished work out loud; dialogue is especially tricky until you hear it coming out of a human mouth.

Lizard Point cobweb cr Judy DarleyThe web

(“What? It’s been atoms and then bricks and now a web?” “Yes. Sorry.”)

Over time and experience I have developed a sense of mixing plot with world building, jokes and poetic images, pace and background, character and philosophy. And I only get that by going through this system of ideas and images first and then connecting them with a narrative and central question. It’s a web; everything (if it works) links up, and by losing jokes or scenes that don’t fit into the central structure and by fixing and strengthening the crucial parts, it becomes a strong and fulfilling way to catch flies.

Your audience are the flies.

Their imaginations, really are the flies, as those are what you’re aiming to catch with your work.

As I said, I don’t know if it will work for you, but it kind of does for me.

Good luck!

Ben MoorAbout the author

Ben Moor is an award-winning writer and actor. His TV and film appearances include The IT Crowd, Knowing Me, Knowing You and Casanova. As well as writing numerous works for the stage, he is the creator of the radio series Elastic Planet and Undone, and his journalism has appeared in The Guardian and The Idler. Each of Us (and other things) is on sale on Ben Moor’s website. Also available is More Trees to Climb, which collects three other solo stage pieces as short stories, and features an introduction by Stewart Lee.