Writing Advice: Highsmith, Plotting and (Re)Living Your Dreams

One of the main issues that tends to come up when I’m teaching creative writing is that of plot – as in, many new and aspiring writers generally believe that they don’t know how to plot and/or tell a story. And it’s no use telling them that they’ve been listening to stories since before they knew they were listening to stories, or that they have been absorbing plots ever since they first started watching TV, or that our species thrived, evolutionarily speaking, because our minds are hardwired to think in narrative terms. Most new writers are conditioned to believe that the secret to great writing is plotting, and they’re depending on me to reveal the great secret.
 There is no great secret, of course, but because people appreciate concrete detail and examples, I’m very happy to break down the basic plot mechanics and talk about seven-point plot arcs (other plot arcs are available) – I tend to use Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley as a case study, because (a) it’s a brilliant book and (b) it allows for a neat contrast between the novel and Anthony Minghella’s film due to one crucial scene change (no spoilers, etc.) in Minghella’s adaptation.
 And then, at the end of that class, I’ll give them a task: remember a dream and write down as much of it as you can, trying to capture its weirdness and bright colours and its random twists and turns (if you dream in seven-point plot arcs, so much the better).
 Some of them follow through on this homework, some of them don’t (some people, like me, rarely remember their dreams). And some of the results can be fantastic. But none of the results are anywhere near as fantastic as the wild idea that humans are so hardwired to tell stories that we do it even when we’re asleep; that even when we’re unconscious, we’re still telling ourselves stories.
 Do we know how and why it happens? I’ll wager that most of us don’t, and – unless the dreams become traumatising nightmares – we don’t much care. And in this context it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we understand we already know everything we know about the storytelling basics at the unconscious level; that we appreciate and accept that, in our most fundamental sense of self, we are storytelling beings.

Writing as Conversation: Exactly Who Are You Talking To?

As a teenager with (very) vague ambitions to be a writer, I surprised and gratified to be taken seriously by my Uncle Jim (that’s him on the right, in a self-portrait). I didn’t get to see Jim very often, because he lived on other side of the country, but he was the family’s resident intellectual – a designer with Waterford Glass, an amateur painter, and as well-read as he was well-travelled. I vividly recall a rainy spring afternoon when I was 14 or thereabouts: Jim had come to visit for a few days, and we spent the afternoon sitting in front of the fire having a long, rambling conversation about books, writing and all that jazz. The following day he went off for a walk and came back with a second-hand copy of Ulysses (he hadn’t been able to find a new copy anywhere in town), into which he’d slipped an encouraging note written on brown wrapping paper.
 I still have that note, and that copy of Ulysses. Over the years it became something of a totem for me, a touchstone, a tangible article of faith, even it would be years before I finally gathered to courage to read it. More importantly, though, I still have that memory of being taken seriously as a writer, which is why Jim’s self-portrait hangs above my desk. Because no matter what book I’m working on, and regardless of its genre, it’s always my Uncle Jim I’m talking to.
 When you’re starting out telling a story, focusing on a single person can be hugely helpful in terms of pinning down exactly what it is you’re trying to say, and why, and the best way to say it (i.e., the narrative voice). That person could be a friend or your sister, a writer you’d like to impress or some philistine from your past you desperately want to prove wrong. It might even be your own uncle, long gone but still a friendly presence at your elbow. But it doesn’t really matter who that person is, just so long as you feel you can speak directly to them as you tell your story.
 The most concise version of this idea came to me courtesy of the wonderful PD James, which I came across in her short but brilliant non-fiction title Talking about Detective Fiction:

“A book is a conversation with a reader, singular; not readers; have an ideal reader in mind; regardless of first-person or third-person voice, you’re telling that story to one person.” – PD James

 If you find yourself stuck in your writing, or struggling to get started, try this: stop writing, pick someone you know will care, and start telling them the story in the way you know they’ll like best. You’ll be amazed at how quickly the words start to come.

Daniel Woodrell: Love What You Do

Daniel Woodrell (right) is probably best known for his novel Winter’s Bone, although really you could pick any of his novels and make a reasonable argument that it is his finest work. Or was his finest work, as we should probably say now, given that Daniel passed late last November – although, as with all the great writers (and Daniel Woodrell was most certainly a great writer), he’ll never truly be gone so long as his novels are still read.
 I was lucky enough to meet with Daniel way back in 2012, when we were interviewed together for the Mountains to Sea Festival in Dun Laoghaire, when I took the opportunity to interview him for the Irish Times. To wit:

Back in September I had the very great pleasure of reading alongside Daniel Woodrell during the Mountains to Sea Festival in Dun Laoghaire. Even more enjoyable was the couple of hours before the event, when we sat down for a chat over some lunch, conducted an interview for the Irish Times, and then sat around some more, talking books and writing and whatnot.
 He’s a good guy, Daniel Woodrell. Understated, funny, with no affectations. The kind of quietly spoken that comes with carrying a big stick – or in his case, a big, big talent. I liked him a lot. And then, last week, after the interview finally appeared in the Irish Times, I received an email from him to say thanks, he liked the piece. A classy touch, and a pleasant surprise, but not really surprising, if you follow my drift.

 Naturally, it was that afternoon that sprang to mind when I first heard of Daniel’s passing. And while I – like many, I’d imagine – immediately resolved to go back and reread some of his novels, what has stuck with me ever since was what he said when I was concluding the interview with the standard question about advice for aspiring authors. Daniel thought for a little, then said:

‘Make sure you love what you do, because that might be all you get out of it.’

 Sage advice if you’re working on a novel, because if you don’t love your story and your characters, you’ll probably end up hating them over the course of a 100,000-word marathon, and that’s a scenario that rarely ends well.
 But that advice also applies to the bigger picture. Like most writers, I don’t earn a huge amount of money from my fiction (and by ‘don’t earn a huge amount’ I mean that most of the advances for my novels over the years just about paid my mortgage for that month). And that’s okay, from my point of view, because I didn’t start out writing fiction with any great plan to make a living from it – back then, if I’m honest, my main ambition was to write books that other writers would like, the idea there being that if other writers liked it, it was probably a decent book.
 It wasn’t until the brutally isolating days of the Covid pandemic, when everyone was shut up at home and baking banana bread and talking about mindfulness, that I belatedly discovered what writing truly meant to me. Writing was and always had been my form of mindfulness, I realised, my way of (partly) self-medicating for mental health. I didn’t just love what I did, I did it because I loved doing it, and because – imperceptibly, day after day after day – the process boosts my self-esteem, gets the synapses fizzing and the serotonin bubbling up nicely.
 ‘Make sure you love what you do, because that might be all you get out of it.’ No arguments here, Daniel, except to say that that ‘all’ contains multitudes. But you knew that too.

Writing Advice: Plotting, Buddhism and Marrying Millionaires

I’ve been seeking out writing advice for about 40 years at this point, and I’ve yet to find anything more succinct than that (reportedly) offered by John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist: ‘Marry a millionaire who thinks you’re a genius.’
 Sounds cute, but what Gardner actually says is this:

‘The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Even if one’s spouse is rich, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons so carefully than it teaches that one should never be dependent.’

 Not every writer gets to move in the 1% circles, of course, so even if you can overcome the whole dependence bit, Gardner’s isn’t the most practical advice you’ll ever get. Happily, writers tend to be quite generous when it comes to talking about their process, so there’s a whole world of tips and suggestions available to anyone willing to read author interviews.
 One of the most common questions that comes up when I’m teaching has to do with plotting. Should the entire novel be plotted out in advance before we begin? Is it okay not to know everything in advance?
 ‘Not necessarily,’ and ‘Yes,’ are the answers to those questions, respectively, and especially if you’re George Saunders, who has just published the excellent Vigil and who had this to say on the business of plotting when discussing Lincoln in the Bardo in an Observer interview titled ‘How Buddhism Made George Saunders a Better Writer’:

“To answer truthfully, I don’t really do a lot of pre-deciding,” Saunders said. “It’s more like wading into it, trying to make good line-to-line energy, and then trusting that that will decide for you. So in this case, that weird form came out of a series of obstructions that I ran into, and then thinking, How can I do this without sucking? How can I avoid this move that I think is going to produce a boring text?”

 Wading in, making good line-to-line energy, and not being boring: start with that and you won’t go too far wrong. John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, by the way, is aimed at “the beginning novelist who has already figured out that it is far more satisfying to write well than simply to write well enough to get published.” Which is you. Right?

Don Quixote and the Art of Storytelling

Don Quixote isn’t simply one of the greatest novels ever published, it’s a masterclass in the art of storytelling. In ‘Don Quixote as Theatre’, Dale Wasserman writes persuasively about Cervantes the playwright, and how the author’s failure in the domain of theatre led to creation of the timeless Knight of the Doleful Countenance. To wit:

Miguel de Cervantes was passionately and pre-eminently a man of the theatre. Very logically, his literary creation was an actor quite aware of the role he was playing. […] A playwright has no problem identifying the techniques of theatre in the novel Don Quixote. There is the creation of living, breathing characters; the manufacture of a world better than the one we have been born to; the search for concise yet poetic expression of that world; the difficulties of realization which never measure so splendidly as the dimensions in one’s mind.

 Wasserman also quotes my own favourite lines from the novel, and which, in a nutshell, sum up Quixote’s character and his abiding appeal:

‘When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it might be.’

 For more, click here.