Step into the world of Alan Moore’s incredible imagination and learn from the mastermind behind comics like From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Swamp Thing, and novels including the modern literary classic Jerusalem.

Learn about Alan Moore’s writing process and how he combines character, story, language and world-building to create the tales that have won him fans the world over. Ideal for aspiring fiction writers, this online course includes downloadable course notes to guide you on your own creative journey.

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BBC Maestro | Let The Greatest Be Your Teacher https://bbcm.co/yt

If you wish to develop as a writer always listen to your characters. Treat them as if they are your friends albeit friends that regrettably you sometimes have to kill. Anybody can write.

This is not some divine calling that only settles upon a few special individuals. Books and writing are capable of changing the entire world of modifying human consciousness. My intent is to simply make you a good writer a better writer.

Which means, basically, devastating a male opponent with the aid of a pineapple. I will be telling you what you need to create characters, to create stories to create landscapes. Creating a place it is a god-like experience.

You create every person in it. Every interaction... is all being created by you.

I will be talking about how to write about all of the thousand elements that go to make up a story. If you're writing a comic write it to the best of your ability as a comic. So if you've got six panels on a page, yeah roughly 35 words per panel should be your maximum.

Five double beats. Five iambs to each line. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.

Now, the bats and the skulls, that is fantastic. When I was starting the Swamp Thing series one of the first questions that I asked the comic company I said, "Er, so, which swamp is he the thing of?" Plot is not the story. The plot is not the structure.

It's just the plot. "This greed and gore emporium is not how life was meant to be." I want every one of you to get out there and to write me a better world. Because this one is completely f...

LOUD BEEP I am Alan Moore and this is my BBC Maestro course on writing and storytelling.

If you're a reader you are secretly a writer. On this course, I'm going to teach you everything I know about writing a bestseller. I'm going to show you how I created Jack Reacher from the very first pencilled word to where we are today.

"But Reacher was ready this time swinging straight into a snapping roundhouse right". I had no experience at all before I wrote my first book. I was 40 when I started.

You can start much older than that. In fact, it's better to. Why am I giving away all my secrets?

Because I'm a reader, too and I want to read your book. My course will show you how to take the reader from the very first page to the very last word. The mechanism of suspense does not really depend on the plot.

It depends on the pacing the timing, and the language in the book. It's obvious to you who's talking and what's going on but you've got to look at it from your reader's point of view. Are you sure that you're being clear enough?

If you have created a problem it's not your problem... it's the character's problem. Now what you've got to do...

get to work, write that book and I'll see you on the bestseller list in a couple of years. I'm Lee Child and this is my BBC Maestro course on writing popular fiction.

If you wish to develop as a writer you will also have to develop as a person. I would suggest that you will need to develop a moral standpoint which will probably also entail a political standpoint. I am not saying that that should be a left-wing opinion a right-wing opinion or even my own personal preference an anarchist opinion.

The important thing is the understanding that you should have a platform, a moral or political platform from which you can look at the world and hopefully to understand it which will need a certain amount of compassion and empathy whereby you can look at someone who has ideas that are completely foreign to your own and yet perhaps understand why they have them. What the factors were in their background that caused them to have those ideas perhaps to understand that you yourself brought up in slightly different circumstances may have had exactly those ideas. So that is the basis from which you can look at the world without necessarily being judgemental but simply trying to understand it.

I would also suggest that you will probably need these things to be slightly flexible because the ground will change under you in terms of politics and morality and things that may have seemed perfectly acceptable in say, the heady days of the 1960s by the time you reach the early-21st century you might have had some time to reconsider some of those things. So don't become locked into a rigid behaviour pattern. But you simply need to develop the moral standpoint and the political standpoint which will enable you to have a position to come from.

When you are writing about the world you will need to have a way of seeing these things. Books and writing are capable of changing the entire world of modifying human consciousness. You are modifying the consciousness of the reader and therefore you are modifying the reality of the reader.

Writing will modify the reality and the consciousness of the entire species and also, inevitably, will mean modifying the consciousness of the writer themselves. You will also need to develop an aesthetic point of view. What is it that you personally enjoy about, say, somebody's writing?

You will need to analyse that and also to analyse your own writing to see whether you've done the job that you wanted to do, or whether you've fallen short and it needs improving. So essentially, what you really need above anything whatever kind of artist you wish to be you need to develop a way of seeing the world that is unique to you that can only come from your experience and your perceptions and that is the basis that you can then turn into an energy that will fuel the rest of your writing career. But the first thing is to develop that self the writer as a person.

The writer that is you yourself. If I am going to tell you how to be a writer that will probably entail telling you what writing is and that means telling you where writing comes from. And as far as I understand it writing evolved from Palaeolithic shamanism and when that had happened that allowed human consciousness as we know it at the moment to commence.

Yeah sure, we had something before then we had awareness, we had empathy we could perhaps gesture and grunt but before we could write down the language we could not retain any information. We could not utilise our developing consciousness and thus, the people who had discovered the wonderful ability of writing would have had supernatural powers in the eyes of the people surrounding them. They would have been able to send their thoughts at a distance to somebody else who could read.

They would be able to capture moments to write down and record events which would lead to the understanding of cause and effect and seasonal differences. These things would lead to science and art and almost every field of human endeavour all arising from this old stone age magic. And when we look at the development of writing and magic we begin to see that they're actually the same thing.

That all of the artistic effects from painting, but especially to writing all of these effects are things that were regarded as magical powers in the ancient world as supernatural powers such was their force because they could change the world they could change human consciousness and they could change the world that we lived in. Essentially the world that we are living in now is one where we have unpacked our imagination and are living amongst those parts of our imagination that we've been able to bail out from inside our heads. The original bardic tradition of magic was one that was entirely based upon writing and literature and interestingly it was much more feared than just your common or garden witch or sorcerer.

Now, if a magician puts a curse upon you then your hens are probably going to lay a bit funny your child might be born with a squint. These are things that are survivable. They're not that terrible.

Whereas, when a bard puts a satire upon you then that will destroy you in the eyes of your friends in the eyes of your family potentially in your own eyes. And if it's a good enough satire if it is finely-worded enough then even 200 or 300 years after you're dead people might still be laughing at you and your absurdity. That was why satires were feared.

Now, the early gods of writing the scribe gods gods like Odin or Thoth or Hermes these are also the gods of magic. And I don't believe that that is entirely a coincidence that in my estimation, writing and magic are practically the same thing. So, I would like to think that the current generation of aspiring writers will not sell themselves short in this that you should never think of yourself as purely an entertainer for hire who is lucky to have the work.

You should try to remember the tradition that you are becoming part of. You should try to remember that a writer can change the world with their writing. Think of the books that have completely changed human history and see yourself in that light because if you are a writer then the substances that you are handling the things that you are juggling you are having an effect upon human history and the entirety of the human future.

Everybody can write. it's for everybody. It's not just for me and people with my amazing haircut it is for absolutely everybody.

It is for you. That, whatever the outcome of your writing career whatever your accomplishments, whatever success you have the most important thing would be that you had had a writing career. Writing will be your best friend.

If your life is turning to rubbish as sometimes life does if you are a writer, you can immediately step into another world of your own creation. You can lose yourself in a world where this world for the time that you are writing does not exist. And believe me, that can be an enormous comfort.

You will benefit immeasurably. Most of the people that I know who have started writing have become addicted to it. They might not necessarily be published writers but the actual act of writing gives them a huge dimension in their life which is easily as powerful as meditation techniques which is a meditation technique in itself.

You are concentrating upon a single thing which is the act of creating something in words. But also you might get publishable work out of it that can transform your life materially as well. There are so many benefits to writing and I really want you to allow yourself to share them.

I cannot tell you how much richer my own life has been since becoming a writer 40 years ago. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I hadn't done that. And I urge you to do exactly the same thing Natural differences in talent notwithstanding I would say that you are likely to be exactly as good a writer as you are a reader.

As far as I know, certainly in my own case everybody who becomes a writer has got there through reading. Even as a child, you will read some narrative some story that particularly seizes your imagination that transports you to a different place. You get the habit of reading.

You'll be reading under the bedclothes by torchlight. And sooner or later, you will think "Well, actually, I can write in the English language perhaps I could write some story like this." In fact, you could very easily say that reading is the gateway drug for writing. Read with an analytical eye.

To back-engineer your own responses. If you're reading a book and you suddenly find yourself frightened or touched or amused look back over the preceding pages or paragraphs and see how the writer has got you to feel that. This is one of the joys of being a writer that reads.

You can find out an awful lot about human responses from your own human responses and kind of back-engineer it to find out how they got that response. And I would suggest that you be as omnivorous as possible. To read everything.

Don't differentiate between the highest pinnacles of literature and the lowest slums of pulp and genre. Everything is potentially powerful and will enrich you as a writer. Yeah, read philosophical treatises and also read Viz.

Read the lowest things and the highest things and all points between. They can only expand your grasp of your subject and your career. Now, it's not only important to read books about all sorts of subjects.

As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books read terrible books as well because they can be more inspiring than the good books. If you're inspired by a good book there is always the danger of plagiarism of doing something that is too much like that good book. Whereas a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you're reading is...

"Jesus Christ, I could write this shit." That is immensely liberating. To find somebody who is published who is doing much, much worse than you. And by analysing why they are doing so badly this will immensely help your own style.

You will find out all of the mistakes not to make. "Why did this story offend me so much?" Yeah, analyse that, find out why you didn't like it. Find out all of the examples of clumsiness or bad thinking that spoiled the story for you.

That will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer. I think that it is massively important to not rest upon your laurels to not stick with a winning formula however much the temptation is to do that. The tactic that I have found most useful is to immediately drop a device as soon as you become aware that you are using it.

As soon as you think, "Oh. That's something I've done in my last two or three stories. Maybe I should drop that device." This will mean that you will have to go to all of the trouble of coming up with new devices for every story.

Which is a tremendous amount of work. And who knows whether the audience will like it or not. However, you will be progressing.

You will not be still and dead in the water When I say a "device" I am generally talking about the necessary tricks that we come up with as means to tell a story. For example, in my own work from Watchmen. A very simple early device that I worked out was that scene changes could be accomplished by an overlap of dialogue by an overlap of imagery even by an overlap of a colour between one scene and the next.

This is a device. It carries the reader through the changes in the narrative at a furious pace, and it's aesthetically pleasing. I was doing that throughout Watchmen.

I noticed that when I did a Batman book after that The Killing Joke I was still using the same techniques. That book is probably... I mean, I've largely abandoned most of my comic material but that one in particular I had abandoned almost as soon as I'd written it.

It seemed to add nothing new to my writing. It didn't seem to extend it in any way. So, that was the point at which I abandoned that device.

And with my next works I was trying radically different things. And when I'd finished with those works I tried to abandon those things, as well. Of course, you will learn things in doing any work and you should retain that learning.

That you can do this effect, that you can do such-and-such er, a device. But it is important to just keep moving fast in evolving these things. You will notice that your office space is a bit untidy.

Erm, some of those pencils could do with sharpening. Erm, you will perhaps start to tidy your office space because, you know, that will give you an orderly mind as you rationalise it before you start your screenplay. And then you'll notice that perhaps you've run out of some sort of vital office supply.

You're probably thinking about it and best pop into town and perhaps visit a stationer's make sure you're properly stocked up. OK, by the time you get back it's about half-past three in the afternoon. You don't really want to start something if you're going to be knocking off for the evening soon so probably best to leave it until tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow morning, something else will happen. You'll notice something else. You'll decide that you'd better read your research books again.

This is just, er, ordinary avoidance. Erm, everybody does it. You have got a job to do that's really important and on one level you're excited about it but you're also a bit apprehensive so you avoid it.

There's nothing wrong with this. All you have to do, in my case when I've been avoiding things for about three days then my working-class guilt will overwhelm me and I'll realise what a wretched procrastinator I am and have always been. And, at that point, when I can no longer bear myself I will get my arse onto the chair.

This is actually the biggest problem in any field of art. Getting your arse onto the chair. If you can do that then the rest of it will be a breeze.

But, yeah, we procrastinate. So, understand what you're doing. Think, "Right, I'm procrastinating.

I'm going to do it for as long as I need to and then I'm going to start work". Just know what you're doing know that you're procrastinating and then get over it. In conclusion, I would like to say that please, please write responsibly and also beware of dodgy adverbs as in, "'Come on', he barked doggedly." And further to that to always stop when the fun stops.

Now, I want every one of you to get out there and to write me a better world because this one is completely f-- Intro So, I would like to welcome you as an aspiring writer to this enormously important and timeless human tradition where you will be in a chain of people stretching back through the ages of shamans, magicians, above all, writers who have... done so much to actually shape the development of the human story, and of human history. That you can become part of that marvellous tradition and play your own part however small, however large in this marvellous enterprise of expanding the things that humans can do can say, can accomplish and, more importantly the number of ways in which they can talk about that stuff.

The number of things that they can say and the number of ways in which they can say it. All my commercial successes were never planned All of my commercial successes were never planned as such they were all remote outsiders that people liked. They liked them because they were well-written not because they were catching some current trend.

Nobody can advise about trends and the vagaries of public opinion. It is best in my experience to simply be a good writer. The imagination is endless The imagination is endless.

There is more in the human imagination, potentially than there is in the whole physical universe because the imagination contains the whole physical universe and a lot of things from universes that we have never seen and will never see. So, despite the importance of imagination it is probably also worth remembering that unless that is imagination that is having the will applied to it imagination is a treacherous, sucking bog that you can waste your entire life in thinking about how great it's going to be when you write your novel when you win the lottery when you hook up with the object of your affections. And none of these things need ever happen because you will be too busy enjoying the dream of them happening to ever take steps to bring them about in the real, physical world.

That is when imagination is dangerous. It's like quicksand. And it can neutralise your entire life if you let it.

This is why it is immensely important to train the will upon the imagination. Then, you will be able to bring your idle dreams and fancies down into a material form. Listen to your characters when you are dealing with characters it is advisable to always listen to your characters to allow them their integrity to allow them to have their way in terms of the narrative.

If there's something that that character seems to really want to do, then probably let them do it. Yeah, always listen to your characters always allow them their complete integrity. And...

Basically, no matter how horribly the narrative will call for you to treat them then allow them that integrity. Treat them as if they are your friends. Albeit friends that, regrettably you sometimes have to kill.

Plot is not the story You should always remember that plot is not the story. The plot is not the structure. It's just the plot.

It's what gets you from one end of the story to the other. But it is not the most important thing in the story. For example most stories can be reduced to a simple plot that makes them a nonsense.

George Orwell's Animal Farm, the plot of it which is some talking animals take over a farm is not what the story is about. And I apologise for anyone who hasn't read it yet for whom that might be a massive spoiler. Literary difficulty that...

Yeah, how do we do progressive writing? How do we progress? And, as usual it's by considered techniques.

One of the things that will almost certainly lead to progressive writing is the idea of literary difficulty. Now, this is an idea which I only heard about relatively recently and then found that I'd actually been practising it for most of my career. On my first novel, Voice of the Fire I made, for some reason, the first chapter is in an impenetrable made-up Neolithic language.

And it's also probably the longest chapter so most of the book's readers would have been turned back in droves. I always wondered why I'd done that. But, yes, it is literary difficulty.

The idea of which is that by making something about your writing slightly more difficult for the audience to understand you are going to alienate a certain percentage of your audience. However, the ones that remain will be forced to engage with the work on a much deeper level and so they will actually enjoy it more. And I think that this is a very important point about art in general.

That I do not believe that human beings are actually bred to respond to being spoon-fed their entertainment to being spoon-fed their ideas and information. I think that the art that I have best responded to myself is the art that has made me do some of the work The art of writing writing is not a single subject and neither is storytelling. These are things that are actually a collision of about 30 different things in a horrifying pile-up.

And one of the things that I hope that this course will do for you is to talk about all of the different facets of writing and how to put them all together. Being a good writer that the distinction between being a published or an unpublished writer is not one that I'm particularly concerned with here. My intent is to simply make you a good writer a better writer.

A writer that hopefully will then be able to navigate all of those tos and fros those back and forths of public opinion and public taste. If you're a good enough writer then you can rise over any problems like that. And what I'm saying is that having done this course that I can't guarantee whether you will be a successful, published writer like say, Jeffrey Archer or whether you will remain an unpublished loser like William Blake or Emily Dickinson.

When it comes to creating characters I've found that the best approach the best model that you can use for creating characters is to start from the assumption that if you, as a writer you, as a person, had been born in different circumstances a different place, a different time if you had had all of this stuff going on in your life that was different to your other circumstances then you could have been any other human being on the face of the planet given the right circumstances, given the right background given the right time and place. So, I choose to regard personality and identity as like a huge, multifaceted crystal of which we, as individuals choose only to polish one facet which is the personality that we will have throughout our lives. As a writer you can explore the other facets.

You can rotate that crystal and look at some of the other faces of it. And you can ask yourself the question "In what way would I have been different if I had been born in a different place, at a different time of a different gender, of a different morality of a different species?" Depending upon where your story is going. If you can do that then you can imagine a whole range of alternate personalities for yourself.

You can inhabit the characters rather than seeing them as another person. Ideally, all of the characters in your story are yourself. We are told that all of the characters in our dreams are us and that is obviously true.

And the same goes for our stories. You are going to be inhabiting these characters and you want to do it with conviction because you are trying to convince your readers that these are real people so let them be real people. whether that be simply imagining what the characters look like or what their voices are like or in actually understanding a difficult story point or a difficult way of approaching literature.

That once you've understood it once you've kind of cottoned on to it then, all of a sudden, it opens up your vistas. one way to give pace to your narratives to make them feel that they've got a kind of momentum and a speed that will carry the reader along with them is to make judicious use of cutting and editing which you can learn a lot from in just looking at movies and how they can condense time with an abrupt cut. An example from my own work of this would be in my proposed television series that I was working on last year where we had a scene where a young woman, a previously established character who has a violent personality disorder which means, basically, that she carries out horrific acts of physical brutality usually involving a fruit of some kind.

In a previous episode, we've seen her devastating a male opponent with the aid of a pineapple. In the scene that I was writing we have her confronted by a very aggressive bouncer at a club. And so I'd written the scene so that we cut between her face as she looks deadpan and impassive at the bouncer and then looks at the display of fruit on a nearby table including a gigantic watermelon looks back at the bouncer looks at the fruit and then you can cut straight to the ambulance arriving outside.

The entire audience will know exactly what has happened. And, in fact, it will be funnier to not have shown them the crucial scene where she devastates this poor fellow with a huge watermelon. It's funnier if you leave that out and cut straight to the aftermath.

Let the readers fill in the blank space for themselves. They'll probably find it much, much more enjoyable.

Now we're going to look at how we make ourself do the business of sitting down and getting it written. Writing is basically the application of bum to chair and fingers to keyboard This is actually the biggest problem in any field of art. Getting your arse onto the chair.

But I'm going to talk to you a bit about how I do it and the importance of what I would call bloody-mindedness or persistence And so part of this is just knowing that this is part of the process and giving yourself the faith in the story that's going to keep propelling you forwards through it. And that’s how you get your book started. And more importantly, that’s how you get your book finished.

And what I do, here’s a tip for you, is... Try and end your previous day's work in the middle of a sentence. So the next day you come straight back to it and you don’t even have to think about what am I going to write today.

You can just finish your sentence and keep going. this is the day that you've decided that you're going to do it. You will notice that your office space is a bit untidy.

Erm, some of those pencils could do with sharpening. Erm, you will perhaps start to tidy your office space because, you know, that will give you an orderly mind as you rationalise it before you start your screenplay. And then you'll notice that perhaps you've run out of some sort of vital office supply.

You're probably thinking about it and best pop into town and perhaps visit a stationer's make sure you're properly stocked up. OK, by the time you get back it's about half-past three in the afternoon. You don't really want to start something if you're going to be knocking off for the evening soon so probably best to leave it until tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow morning, something else will happen. You'll notice something else. You'll decide that you'd better read your research books again.

This is just, er, ordinary avoidance. Erm, everybody does it. You have got a job to do that's really important and on one level you're excited about it but you're also a bit apprehensive so you avoid it.

There's nothing wrong with this. All you have to do, in my case when I've been avoiding things for about three days then my working-class guilt will overwhelm me and I'll realise what a wretched procrastinator I am and have always been. And, at that point, when I can no longer bear myself I will get my arse onto the chair.

This is actually the biggest problem in any field of art. Getting your arse onto the chair. If you can do that then the rest of it will be a breeze.

But, yeah, we procrastinate. So, understand what you're doing. Think, "Right, I'm procrastinating.

I'm going to do it for as long as I need to and then I'm going to start work". You will find the same problem at the end of the screenwriting process according to Syd Field. You've been living with this project for months by that point, possibly.

And so it's a big part of your life. What's your life going to be like when you're not doing the project anymore? So you'll find that as you approach the final scenes you'll realise that one of the earlier scenes you could probably go back and correct it...

or something else that will avoid writing that final scene. We procrastinate at both ends of a project. Just know what you're doing know that you're procrastinating and then get over it.

So everybody is going to work differently but I'm just going to give you some guidance as to what works for me. My aim is to write 1,000 words a day. That may differ for you.

And what I know is that it's quite possible I will delete 999 of those the following day. But at this stage, it's partly about persuading my brain that I am moving forwards all the time even if that involves a certain degree of moving backwards at the same time. It's really about getting yourself into a flow state starting to understand your characters, your plot immersing yourself into this world that you want to create.

And some of that is going to be messy at that point. And it's OK if your confidence is shaken by that messiness because if you go in an art gallery and you look around every single painting there will have started as a rough sketch. Every single artist who painted those paintings will at some point have sunk their head into their hands and gone, "This is a disaster." And now there they are, several hundred years later being regarded as masterpieces.

So what I'm going to say to you is pain, disappointment, fear all these things, all these emotions are part of the process. And as soon as you stop feeling that they are an obstacle to writing then you can just get on and almost treat it like a job. I actually start in a number of ways.

Mostly I start at the beginning. I write a first chapter, which I very rarely keep by the time I've reached the final stages of the book. At this point, it's almost a confidence trick that I play on myself, just to get words onto the page because, frankly, even if you've got 2,000 words done it feels like you're in.

And for me, personally I know that until I reach 20 or 30,000 words I'm not even sure that book is going to work. That's usually the point at which I make a decision. So it doesn't cost me too much to start there.

And it may well be that at a later stage I delete that entire chapter and start the book somewhere else. Or in the case of Silver Bay which has a huge plot twist in the final chapter I wrote that chapter before I wrote the rest of the book because I figured that if I couldn't pull that scene off then there was no point wasting a year of my life writing another 100,000 words. I think, at this stage, if you think that you're writing a whole book that can be terribly intimidating.

There's a great phrase among marathon runners where if they're running up a hill, they say "Don't look at the summit, just take one step at a time. Look at your feet." And at this point, that's what I'm going to say to you. Just look at your feet.

Tell yourself you're going to write 1,000 words. Make it achievable. Maybe that's 500.

Whatever works for you at this stage. but don't panic about any of it. If you feel like the general direction is good just keep going, because at this point What my aim is is to get my brain into this book.

To be thinking, even if it's subconsciously throughout the rest of the day about what needs to be done about what story ideas might be popping into my head about what my character might be doing or how they might react to another scene. Some of this work won't be happening while you're sitting in your chair throwing out your thousand words. It will be going on in the background.

But until you get into that habit of sitting there every day and plugging away at your thousand words your brain can't do the background work. But I must admit that I have suffered from writer's block in the past. I've suffered twice and once it was really bad and I had writer's block for about for about a month, I think, even longer.

And what happened was I would go to my keyboard, sit down to write, and absolutely nothing would come, or I'd write a paragraph and know it was just absolute rubbish. I thought, Oh my God, is my career over? Am I ever going to be able to write again?

And I did this for like two or three weeks while I'd sit at the computer and nothing would come and I'd sit down at 9 o’clock, which is when I start. And at 4 or 5 o’clock I'd still have written absolutely nothing. So in the end, I thought, This is not going to work.

I need to find a way around this. So what I did is I tried to find other creative outlets, other creative things to do, enjoying other people's creativity, basically. So I went to art galleries, I went to museums, I went to the cinema more often and the theater.

Basically, I started piano lessons again. I did a course of music production. I did some other artistic courses.

I bought a book on drawing on the right side of your brain because I am a rubbish drawer, but there you go. Rubbish artist. But I bought the book and I kind of started working my way through the lessons.

Anything to ignite the creative spark within me again. So, you know, I did this for a while and then some ideas started coming to me. But I didn't want to push it because I didn't want to sit at my computer and have nothing come.

And what happened was, rather than sitting down to try and write a story, I thought, okay, let me try and write something different. And that's when I had an idea for a story. But I thought to make it different to everything else I've done, I'm going to write it in narrative verse.

And that is how Cloud Busting was born. Cloud Busting was the book I wrote after I had a really bad bout of writer's block. Now I think I got writer's block because you need to recharge your creative batteries.

And I love writing. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I though I wake up, I have my breakfast, I have my shower, and then I get to work and I love writing.

But I think you have to make time for other things. And I think it's about recharging those creative batteries by doing other things. And sometimes you can get so caught up in deadlines and wanting to get your story finished and moving from book to book to book with no gaps in and no kind of proper break, at least with me.

I think that's what happened. And I think basically my creative batteries ran dry. So I never do that anymore.

I don't go from book to book. I always try and have at least two or three week gap before I start the next one, because I made the mistake of thinking that if I wasn't writing, I wasn't writing. That's not true, because sometimes writing needs to take place in your head and you need to think about the ideas and let them marinate and don't feel that because you're not haven't got a pen in your hand or you're not at your keyboard that you're not writing.

You are. If you're thinking about those ideas and how that story might work, you absolutely are thinking. But I think you need to be very careful.

Just just take time to smell the flowers. Just think of this as getting going, right? It's not going to be perfect.

It may bear very little resemblance to what you eventually want but until you've got some words on the page you can't do anything. You can't do anything with a blank page. So this is your training ground.

Your start. You're jumping into the swimming pool. these will not be the lines that end up when you write the words "the end" at the end of your book.

Introduction (upbeat music) - When I started writing, one of the common criticisms I used to get is, "Why are you not writing about racism?" As if as a black author, that was the only thing I was qualified to write about, it used to really get on my nerves. But, after writing 49 books, I thought, Why Noughts Crosses "Okay, now I'm ready to write about racism." So "Noughts & Crosses" is actually my 50th book, and it was a book, to be honest, that I knew was going to be painful to write, because I wanted to incorporate a number of my childhood experiences and some of the things I went through as a teenager, Writing Noughts Crosses so in fact, a lot of the things that Callum goes through in "Noughts & Crosses" are based on true things that happened to me, like the first time he travels first class in a train and he gets accused of stealing the ticket, and that is almost word for word exactly what happened to me the first time I traveled on the train, the ticket inspector accused me of stealing the ticket. Or another scene in "Noughts & Crosses" is where Callum says to his teacher, "How come you never talk about Nought scientists and inventors and achievers?" And his teacher says to him, "Because there aren't any." And again, that is almost verbatim what my history teacher said to me, so it was a really cathartic book to write, I dealt with a lot of things in that book, there were a lot of things I thought I had let go from my own teenage years, and I realised writing it that I hadn't let them go, I just buried them.

Poetry is the music of being human. What we find when we write poems is that we understand more about ourselves and more about the world that we live in. By sharing my journey in poetry we'll find ways to perhaps help you bring out your own creativity your own unique voice.

Poetry comes from celebratory things as well as very dark, very painful things. It can be an interrogation of being alive. You'll get attuned to the world with an ear half-cocked an eye looking behaving in the way a poet should, I think like a spy.

If the sonnet is a solemn glass of port then the haiku is a shot of tequila. Poems are the stuff of being human and we all share that. You need to think why do you want to write it?

Who are you writing it for? Where are you going to publish it? I'm going to take us further along that journey by drafting, reading thinking about writing new poems.

By the end of the course we should begin to assemble a small collection of poems that you'll be proud of. I'm Carol Ann Duffy and this is my BBC Maestro course in writing poetry.

The first, the most important, is your own edit. How you do that is up to you. A lot of people write the first draft in a rush and then they say the real skill in writing is the rewriting.

So, they will go back and do a second draft maybe a third, fourth, fifth maybe many, many drafts. I don't do it that way, except maybe I do depending on how you define it. What I do is I write all day and then the very first thing I do the next morning is read back what I wrote yesterday.

And literally, I read it, I read it out loud. That is a fabulous way of detecting things that you're not detecting when you're just silently reading. So, I read through what I did the day before and I make all the necessary changes that I can think of that are necessary.

And having done that gives me two really valuable results. Number one, I have brushed up that passage to the best of my ability. And secondly, very importantly I have got into the story completely thoroughly.

I've reintroduced myself with the mood and the pace and the feel of this story so that when I've finished that part of the process and I start writing the next new section I'm totally in the groove. So, what I do is, I call it "churning" or kind of two steps forward, one step back. I write all day I check that the next morning amend it as necessary and then do the next new section which I will check the following morning and so on, a process of constant churning.

So that, at the end of my first draft you could easily think of it as, that's it. One draft. But it's actually, probably, effectively maybe the 100th draft because every day, I've churned through it perfecting it.

One of the worst mistakes you can make as a series writer is to fall in love with your character. There are numerous examples of series that start out where the main character is a plausible, authentic well-rounded person and stays that way for book after book and then suddenly, mystically they become more and more perfect better and better at certain things just a god amongst men, sometimes. It happened with Hannibal Lecter.

Remember him? OK, he was a cannibal and a psychopath but that's the conceit of the books, so we get past that and we see that, other than that he is an extremely normal person. He's a middle-class doctor from a small provincial city.

A really well-drawn character indeed quite apart from the fascination of his predilection for eating liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti. But then, nine years later when the next Hannibal Lecter book came out somehow, in those intervening years Lecter has changed into... he's the best at everything.

He's the world's greatest wine expert, all of a sudden. He speaks Renaissance Italian better than the Italian scholars speak it. He's a psychiatrist, which means he has an MD degree from possibly 20 years earlier but in this new book, he's performing brain surgery on live patients.

In other words, the author fell in love with the character all perspective was lost all critical distance was lost and the character comes out cartoonish. So that is super important. Maintain that critical distance between yourself and your character.

What I always say is I aim to like Reacher just a little bit less than you like him. That's what keeps him honest. That's what keeps him real.

I stay critical of him. And sometimes, I even put that in passages in the books. In other words, other people's third-party view of him just to make sure that we're all understanding I'm not in love with this guy.

I'm critical of him, I can criticise him I can describe bad things about him as well as the good things. and I am never going to fall in love with him and I suggest you don't either. Keep that critical distance.

Keep your character at arm's length. Don't let him take over your brain and don't start making excuses for him.

if you truly like what you've done you will find other people will like it too we are all of course individuals we are unique we are all different from one another but not that different if I like something that's going to be at least thousands of people in the world that will as well and there's a very interesting quote about Charles Dickens Dickens did not write for the audience Dickens was the audience write for yourself you are the audience you are already a reader you're a reader of the genre you know what you like you know what you don't like write for yourself and then you will find other people like it too how many other people is a kind of Lottery but there will be a substantial number and for commercial fiction to make a living you need a lot of readers but not all that many readers you can make a decent living with twenty thirty thousand people reading your books every year more than that it's gravy less than that is a problem but if you write a book that you are a hundred percent happy with then somebody else will be as well that's what I learned

Introduction It can be said that it's difficult now... to write particularly about the natural world with the innocence... of past poetry because we face a real crisis.

As I speak to you today there are terrible things happening all over the world but we still have to name where we are and what is happening. Poetry and the natural world Poetry about the natural world shouldn't be... a fantasy, it should have the same harsh truths in the poetry as it does have in the natural world.

Indeed, the history of poetry reflects what has happened in the world. If you look at how poetry changed after the First World War a catastrophe for the world poetry began to fracture. It began to reflect the broken-ness of the world in its poetry.

We have the development of modernism. The idyll of earlier poetry was no good it didn't serve to reflect and engage with the world that we live in. But naming is important.

And this is what we're trying to do here, I think... is think, "Yes, I've noticed, I've listened I've been still, I haven't written anything but now I must come to the paper and I must find the words which do justice to what I'm looking at. Luke Howard Some years ago, there was a volcano in 1783...

which... in those times, would have been regarded as a complete disaster and it darkened the skies all over Europe so that there was a permanent night and there was a young boy who was ten, called Luke Howard who was appalled and terrified by the effects of this volcano and he started looking up at the sky, eventually he would have seen the sun come back the light return... but it developed in him a habit of looking up and he was the first person...

through doing this, who named the shapes of clouds. So, we can think of him as an example for us as poets. He didn't write anything, he was just looking but eventually he came to his page and he wrote.

Poem This is a little poem of mine just about him. "Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds". "Eldezar and Asama Yama, 1783 erupted violently a great fog blending incredible skies over Europe.

In London, Luke Howard was ten. The sky's lad then. Smitten, he stared up evermore saw a meteor's fiery spurt the clamouring stars what the moon wouldn't do but loved clouds most - dragons and unicorns Hamlet's camels, weasels and whales the heads of heroes the sword of Excalibur, lit by the setting sun.

Mackerel sky, mackerel sky not long wet, not long dry. And he knew love goes naming even a curl of hair - thus, Cirrus. Cumulus.

Stratus. Nimbus." I use the phrase "love goes naming" there and I think what I mean there is what I feel about poetry. I think poetry is love in language.

Love goes naming. And that's what poetry wants to do. It wants to name, however difficult the naming is however challenging, particularly now it might be...

poetry is a form of love in words.

"The small boys came early to the hanging." Where's the author going to go with this? I'm Ken Follett and I've been writing popular fiction for the last 50 years. And what I'd like to do is to share with you some of the things I've learned along the way.

When we write a novel we create an imaginary world. And once you've created that world you have to draw the reader into it. That's the miracle of literature when that happens.

I always start with a dramatic question. If there's a nuclear war, how will it begin? There should be a story turn every four to six pages.

You just cleverly raise the tension another notch. If there's a battle make it the turning point of the war. If somebody falls in love make it the love of his life.

Don't rob a bank. Rob Fort Knox. So with the first draught on this side and a list of the changes I need to make on that side the middle is what I'm writing which is the second draught.

If you want to write a bestseller you need drama. You've got to invent more story. Wow.

What a great first line. That immediately creates a situation of suspense. This is not a moment to hold back.

Somebody once said to me, there are 1,000 people out there with an idea for a novel and the difference between them and you is that you've written it. I'm Ken Follett and this is my BBC Maestro course on writing bestselling fiction.

I'd began this poem, I had my notebook. I was actually on a train going from Edinburgh to London. It was a very long train journey and I passed...

Stafford, my hometown on the train, but it didn't stop... and it was a kind of sad... feeling in that I couldn't get off and go and visit my mum and then I began to hear her voice in my head and started the beginning of this poem on the train.

And had I not had my notebook, I would have lost this poem. The Way My Mother Speaks. "I say her phrases to myself in my head or under the shallows of my breath restful shapes moving.

The day and ever. The day and ever. The train this slow evening goes down England browsing for the right sky too blue swapped for a cool grey.

For miles I've been saying What like is it? The way I say things when I think. Nothing is silent.

Nothing is not silent. What like is it? Only tonight I am happy and sad like a child who stood at the end of summer and dipped a net in a green erotic pond.

The day and ever. The day and ever. I'm homesick...

free... in love with the way my mother speaks."

I'm always going on about keeping a notebook. So, in your notebooks it's a great idea to keep a kind of word hoard. To think...

spend a little bit of time one afternoon, one evening thinking of words that are important to you that you've forgotten. Earlier in the course, I mentioned my Scots words... "skelf" - splinter, "oose" - fluff or even little phrases that have meaning for me.

The broken biscuits that my mother used to buy in the market. My mother saying, "The day and ever". "What like is it?" I remember my daughter once saying to me "How many 'sympathies' did Beethoven write?" And that misuse of the word she meant of course "symphonies"...

entered me. It pleased me and amused me, but it entered me. And eventually I did write a poem simply out of that child's question called His Nine Sympathies.

And I had great fun playing around with that. So, words, how do we find them? They're in us already from our lives so far but we can also find new words or phrases by listening.

A poet has to be an ear... has to be an eye as well but we'll talk about that as we go on through the course. Listen.

Listen to the sounds and the music of speech everyday speech. If you're in conversations with friends or with children pay attention to the sounds that you're hearing and of course, don't be afraid to research words. Look at the root of a word.

Where did it come from? I called my last collection of poetry Sincerity for the reason that I wanted the poems in that collection whether they were autobiographical or more public to be sincere. The root of that word is Greek.

It means "without wax". And in Ancient Greece, if sculptors made a mistake in their sculpture, rather than admitting it they would cover it up with wax so that you couldn't see the flaw. So "sincerity" means "without wax", originally.

The flaws are allowed to be seen and that's why I chose that word. So it's very interesting to go quite deeply into the etymology of a word. To gather words...

I suppose you need to feel an affinity or a click... or an attraction to a word but your word hoard will grow.

Writing Valentine "Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light like the careful undressing of love. Here, it will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful. Not a cute card or a kissogram. I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are. Take it. Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring if you like.

Lethal, its scent will cling to your fingers cling to your knife." I wanted to write a poem for Valentine's Day and I was thinking of all the things I've just been talking about, about cliché. But I suppose I mostly wanted to surprise myself and that's something we'll be talking about going forward to take yourself unawares when you write a poem. So on this particular day, I was writing at my kitchen table.

I can't think why. I just couldn't be bothered going to the study and being all formal, poetry-mode. So I was writing at the kitchen table and thinking of the things that people give on Valentine's Day the gifts and the greetings cards.

And my eye fell on... a bowl of onions in the kitchen. And...

I picked one up and I remembered a line from Shakespeare "My eyes smell onion, I shall weep anon." And this kind of clicked in my mind. And I cut the onion in half, and peeled it, and looked at it and thought how as Shakespeare says onions can make us cry. But sometimes, alas, so can love.

Love isn't always smooth and perfect and happy-ever-after. So I thought that the onion would be the perfect, truthful as I say in the poem, Valentine's gift. Avoiding love cliches in poetry I think the love poem is the most challenging of poems to write because there's the danger of cliché the danger of tipping slightly into sentimental song lyric.

"I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah." I in fact come pretty close to saying that in one of these poems, but I'm aware that I'm doing it. How do we avoid cliché in the love poem? Well, firstly, be aware of it.

Be conscious of your words. And later we'll be focusing on drafting and redrafting our poems. Scrutinise your poems.

Don't go for the obvious the first phrase that comes to mind. Or if you do use a cliché, revitalise it. There's a wonderful, tiny poem by Roger McGough which is called Love Poem to a Married Woman.

That's the title. And here's the whole poem. "Your finger, sadly, has a familiar ring about it." Now, he uses a cliché, "familiar ring" but he makes it live again because we see the pun of the wedding ring on the finger.

So alertness to the words you're using to construct the poem is essential. And it doesn't matter if you're particular if you mention a particular incident as long as you feel confident that all lovers could relate to that poem. Carol Ann Duffy poems: Tea An example here is a poem, Tea which is simply about making a cup of tea for the beloved.

And of course, when we're in love, we love to do ordinary things. They seem miraculous. In this book I write about seeing the person I'm in love with with and I say that even the air around them seems famous.

We bestow upon the beloved a glamour a magic that they don't actually possess but they do in our heightened state. So this poem is simply about making a cup of tea. "I like pouring your tea lifting the heavy pot, and tipping it up so the fragrant liquid steams in your china cup.

Or when you're away, or at work I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip. As you sip. Of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions. Sugar? Milk?

And the answers I don't know by heart yet for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget. Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam Earl Grey, Ceylon, I love tea's names. Which tea would you like?

I say, but it's any tea for you, please. Any time of day. As the women harvest the slopes for the sweetest leaves on Mount Wuyi.

And I am your lover, smitten straining your tea." So in that poem, the reader can be in no doubt that I am, as I say, smitten, as the writer of the poem. But I put all my smitten-ness into the image of tea, of making a cup of tea. And I push that.

I make a litany of the names of tea which I now love. I say them. "Jasmine".

"Assam". I make them almost prayer-like or spell-like or blessing-like. And I go further.

I imagine where the tea is picked on a mountain in Japan. I picture the women who are picking the leaves for this tea. So I go beyond the very banal to try and impose...

on making a cup of tea the glamour and the magic and the electric feeling of being in love. Perhaps one of the reasons love poetry is so difficult Summary to write is because of its long history and because of its motifs and associations. We think of the moon when we think of love we think of flowers.

We have Burns saying, "My love is like a red, red rose." But conversely, we have Shakespeare saying "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun." Shakespeare there is aware of the dangers of the easy love poem, but Burns is as truthful and as aware of the joy of falling in love. So I think we write with... A kind of critic, a self-critic next to us our poetry policewoman, if you like.

If we're droning on about how wonderful the beloved is, we're being interrogated by someone or a voice in our head saying "Cliché. Boring." We really need to be aware of that, to make it new to make it fresh, and always interrogate our words. If we think about some of the love poems I've been talking about or have read we have, in my two poems, Tea and An Onion.

These aren't romantic... images, but they show the mind of the poet alert to everything in the world that can come to the service of the love poem. And that alertness...

that willingness to see everything as available to the cause of the poem is one way of guarding against cliché in love poems particularly. in love poems particularly.

Develop a Moral and Political standpoint - Alan Moore If you wish to develop as a writer you will also have to develop as a person. I would suggest that you will need to develop a moral standpoint which will probably also entail a political standpoint. I am not saying that that should be a left-wing opinion a right-wing opinion or even my own personal preference an anarchist opinion.

The important thing is the understanding that you should have a platform, a moral or political platform from which you can look at the world and hopefully to understand it which will need a certain amount of compassion and empathy whereby you can look at someone who has ideas that are completely foreign to your own and yet perhaps understand why they have them. What the factors were in their background that caused them to have those ideas perhaps to understand that you yourself brought up in slightly different circumstances may have had exactly those ideas. So that is the basis from which you can look at the world without necessarily being judgemental but simply trying to understand it.

Study the stories you love and the ones you hate – Bill Lawrence A little exercise that you can do for yourself is make three columns on a page and in the first column I want you to write down two or three shows that are successful and well liked but you personally do not like them or respond to them. You're not a fan. OK?

It's very easy to write negatives about a show that everybody admits stinks but there's got to be shows out there that your friends don't understand why you don't like them and people don't know why you haven't watched them. So you make the list of shows that are liked by many people by friends, that you don't like. Try to find in that first column, OK...

what are the similarities between those three shows as far as why you aren't responding to them because you'll know right then that if somebody said "Why don't you write a show in this world or this genre or this tone, that feels similar to that?" That's not your voice, at least not now. The second column I want you to write your version of how Veep is to me. Shows that you absolutely enjoy and think are great but you can't imagine yourself in a million years being able to have written them.

What are the similarities between those? And this is what's interesting about the second column. I would challenge you if you ever returned to your notebooks or returned to these videos ten years from now after you're a successful writer take a shot at writing one of them.

It's fun to kind of break out of your barriers and try something that you don't normally do but don't do it right away, that's my only advice to you. And in the third column are your favourite shows the ones that you eat, sleep breathe, drink, all that stuff. The ones that you just can't get enough of.

The ones that you can remember scenes line for line. The ones that made you think about doing this. And this is the most important part of this exercise.

I want you to write down even if you only pick three shows you can pick four or five, all in that last column I want you to write down ten things they have in common. And as you see this, especially if you stay general you'll kind of find the world that your voice currently exists in. Use music to maintain your tone – Jojo Moyes Think of tone as the musical soundtrack to your book.

What is the mood of it? Is it kind of gothic-y and dark? Is it a thriller and urgent and suspenseful?

Is it lush and swooning and romantic? I found, for me, a tip that has worked really well has been to listen to music again and again the same track, often throughout the process of writing a book. It helps me mentally maintain consistency of tone.

I think tone is something that you have to think about from the very start. Is this going to be a light and frothy book? Is it going to be really dark?

Because the thing that you need to hang on to is that clear picture. The consistency all the way through. You're going to have variations, obviously because nobody wants to read something that is 100% one way.

But it's really important that you keep in mind the kind of thing that you're writing. I'll give you an example. I wrote a book a few years ago called The Girl You Left Behind and it's set in the First World War in a part of occupied France where people were starving.

It was very bleak. The forest had been raided for firewood. Everything was grey and people were hungry.

And it was a place almost without hope, at that point. And so I found I listened to an album by Jónsi & Alex a Scandinavian group, called Riceboy which was very spare, electronic, acoustic music which somehow gave me that environment of bleakness that I needed to work in. And the odd thing is, and I've found this through talking to a lot of writers when we're writing, we can often listen to the same track again and again and again without getting bored of it, in the same way that you would if you weren't writing.

You know, normally you can only listen to the same track a few times before you start to tire of it. If you're writing it seems to activate a different part of your brain. So you may find that if you listen to a soundtrack, for example and a lot of the streamers are very good at this.

You can kind of pick a mood to listen to. In my most romantic book, The Last Letter From Your Lover I used a film soundtrack. It was the film Jane Eyre by Cary Fukunaga and I used the soundtrack by Dario Marianelli which is lush strings.

It's full of yearning and wishing and longing. It's a really romantic, wistful soundtrack and I listened to that again and again and again. Sometimes I listen to this same piece of music on and off for a year.

But what it does is it gives you that thread that consistency of tone that runs the whole way through the book, even if events within the book are changing. That's the mood. That's what you're trying to create.

A consistent mood. I mean, obviously you're going to vary within your book. It would be very bland if you had something that felt the same all the way through.

But it's like everything, you're going to have moments where the plot speeds up and slows down. You're going to have variations in scale. All these things are going to happen.

But it's like having a foundation that you keep returning to. As I said, especially if you're a first-time writer it's often really hard to maintain that feeling. And it's almost like having a line that you can vary bits of the plot up and down through but you still know that this is the tone you're going to return to again and again.

Be plausible rather than accurate - Lee Child The perpetual conflict between accuracy and plausibility. Which is more important? Suppose you're reading a book and let's say you live far away and the book is set in London.

And let's say the details supplied about London match your mental image of London based on everything that you have seen. Maybe you've been there a couple of times. You've certainly seen plenty of TV and movies that take place in London.

You have read books that take place in London and if what you're reading now fits that prior context you think, "Yeah, this is a superbly researched book." But maybe it isn't because, as you know if you do live in London or if you go there frequently London is actually not like the world's image of it. The world's image of London is polite bobbies in pointed hats and red phone boxes, and all that kind of thing gentlemen with rolled-up umbrellas and so on. That is the international, public, popular image of London but if you go there you know it's actually not like that anymore.

There are not that many phone boxes anymore because everybody has a cell phone. The police no longer walk about in traditional uniforms with the pointed hat. They've often got flak jackets on.

They're often carrying weapons. They're often in pairs. It's just not really the same as it was.

But if you put that in a book and somebody far away reads it they would think... "Well, this doesn't really sound like London" because it doesn't match the received image of London. So you've got to tread very carefully between accuracy and plausibility and in general, plausibility is better.

And I've done that many times in my books. For instance, the fifth book I wrote Echo Burning takes place far in the west of Texas very isolated, empty region and there is no police department for each town. I mean, that would be ridiculous.

It could be that the nearest police department is hundreds of miles away and therefore, people tend to rely on what they call the State Police or the Highway Patrol so that's what I went into. The law enforcement involvement in that book is the Highway Patrol or the State Police which is a state-wide organisation that has jurisdiction everywhere. And I think that everybody in the world understands the idea of the Highway Patrol.

They understand the State Police. They've seen it on TV shows. They've seen it in movies.

They get the concept. The problem was, in Texas the department is actually called something different. The department is called the Department of Public Safety and I felt that that would not communicate if somebody in another part of the world is reading that book and they hear about the Department of Public Safety does that mean what it should mean to them or not?

I think people in foreign countries would be scratching their head there and they'd be thinking, "Department of Public Safety? What is that? Restaurant inspectors or something?" So in other words, in order to be plausible I got less accurate.

The accurate name is Department of Public Safety. The plausible name is Highway Patrol and so that's what I used. And the rest of the world was totally satisfied with that.

It gave them what they needed. It mapped it out correctly for them. They were happy.

People in Texas were writing to me saying "You know it's not called the Highway Patrol?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I know that but for the rest of the world, for the majority of readers I had to be wrong in order to be right.

Introduction The voice that you talk in the voice that you hear in your head is the voice that you will rely on in your poetry. Now, that isn't to say that your word hoard the words on your painter's palette will not and should not increase. They absolutely should.

Oxford English Dictionary There are some poets whose favourite reading material is the Complete Oxford English Dictionary. We have a poet, say, Paul Muldoon who uses incredible words. It's often necessary reading the wonderful Paul Muldoon to go to the dictionary to look up some of the words he uses.

Ted Hughes tells us that when Sylvia Plath Ted Hughes wrote her poems she wrote with a thesaurus next to her and she would put circles around words that she came across, that she liked and wanted to use. So we must increase our resources as poets but we mustn't feel intimidated and that we don't have enough vocabulary to begin. The words you use will come from how you talk where you grew up, a dialect...

perhaps, from other countries other languages, all mixed up. Doesn't matter. They must belong to you and you must feel that they're your raw materials.

So, this is probably one of the first poems I wrote as an adult poet for a child, specifically and it's called Don't Be Scared. "Don't be scared. The dark is only a blanket for the moon to put on her bed.

The dark is a private cinema for the movie dreams in your head. The dark is a little black dress to show off the sequin stars. The dark is the wooden hole behind the strings of happy guitars.

The dark is a jeweller's velvet cloth where children sleep like pearls. The dark is a spool of film to photograph boys and girls. So smile in your sleep in the dark.

Don't be scared."

If I could give you one bit of advice out of pain, out of loss out of discomfort and anger the best literature comes. Hola, my friend. I am Isabel Allende.

I have been writing for 42 years and I have some experience that I would love to share with you. In this course we're going to talk about dialogue about tension about the narrative voice. The process of storytelling is magical.

You have to enter into a dimension of dream of intuition of premonition, even in order to surrender to the process of writing. And that is absolutely magical. But, for me, the most important thing is that you lose the fear of writing.

You are a writer. This is your purpose. This is the thing you want the most in the world.

Get it done. How do we get started? What bothers us?

What's an obsession? But there is also redemption and love and the joy of life. Look for those things that you remember and matter to you.

My life is magical. Life is mysterious. And all that, that happens in my life also happens in what I write.

If you're an aspiring writer or you are stuck with your novel that you've been writing for seven years this might be of some help. I am Isabel Allende and this is my BBC Maestro course on magical storytelling.

- After my 49th book, I thought, "Okay, now I will write about racism." Because I have enough of a backlist that features different kinds of stories that I won't be known as the racism writer or the issue writer, but I am, but nevermind, but that's when I wrote "Noughts & Crosses". And "Noughts & Crosses" came about, because I finally felt ready to address racism head on in one of my stories, and I also wanted to deal with some of the things that happened to me in my childhood and in my teenage years, things that I thought I had dealt with and I had let go, but in writing the book, I realized I hadn't let them go, I just buried them very deeply, so writing that book meant that I had to deal with an awful lot of things from my past, and that's why I found the book very painful to write, but very satisfying to write. So again, I would say, if you have painful experiences in your past, if you're mentally ready to write about them, then I would say lean into that.

I also think part of the reason I didn't write "Noughts & Crosses" before then is because I wasn't ready to kind of address some issues from my own childhood. But I would say don't shy away from those painful subjects, because they really do come across as true moments when people are reading about them in your stories.

What's my goal for you? Well, it's pretty modest. I want to change your entire life.

I've written 36 thrillers I've had over a dozen number one New York Times bestsellers. I have over ten TV series and movies around the world and this is why I'm ready to be the one to teach you all the things that I've learned over these years. We're going to do it step by step.

So you're going to be writing your novel or doing your screenplay along with me. We're going to get into ideas. We're going to get into plot.

We're going to get into character. We're going to get into dialogue. We're going to get into setting.

We're going to get into plot twists secrets, suspense, pacing and yes, of course, our big ending. We're also going to talk to my editor and my agent. So we're going to cover all aspects of both the writing and the publishing of the book.

Where do you start writing the book? We're going to start at the beginning, right? No.

We're going to start in the middle. Give every character a secret. What are they not telling us?

They always say, there's two characters in a room. They have to have conflict. No, they don't!

Sometimes the greatest moments you have is when you think there's going to be conflict and there isn't. You want to know where to get your ideas? I'm going to show you.

I don't care how old you are you can be a published novelist you can be a screenwriter You can have a successful TV series or movie. The only time that you fail here is when you quit and I'm not going to let you quit. I'm Harlan Coben and this...

is my BBC Maestro course on writing thrillers.

- The first book did end on quite a bleak note, and my editor said to me, "Oh, could we just add just one more page to kind of just leaven that?" So she made a suggestion, which I loved. So it ends on a newspaper article, which I think adds a more hopeful tone to it. The original ending would've been Callum being hanged and then that was the end of the story.

But what we did to add that hopefully-ever-after ending was add a newspaper article. So let me just read that to you now. "The trap door opens.

'I love you, Callum!' I scream, frantically. He drops like a stone. The words die on my lips.

There's no sound except the rope creaking and groaning as Callum's body swings slowly to and fro. Did he hear me? I don't know.

He must have heard me. Did he say, 'I love you, too?' Maybe I just imagined it. I can't be certain.

I don't know. Please God, please let him have heard me, please, please. If you're up there somewhere." Now that was my original ending, but then I ended it with birth announcements.

"At midnight on the 14th of May at Mercy Community Hospital to Persephone Hadley and Callum McGregor, deceased, a beautiful daughter Callie Rose. Persephone wishes it to be known that her daughter Callie Rose would be taking her father's name of McGregor. And again, I wanted to add that as that hopefully-ever-after moment where your hope lies in the next generation.

So, what is popular fiction? Well, we'll start with the word "popular". It means "of the people" "by the people", "for the people".

In other words, it's what a lot of people like. Which is great, because that means if you write a decent book, there's a big market for it. There's a big audience.

Really popular fiction is the only way of making a living that you can rely on. Lots of books sell well, but it's usually accidental. It's usually not intended, it's not expected.

But popular fiction is expected. You are writing for a huge audience of readers who are really just like you. If you've been a reader, you're one of them already.

And so you're really writing for yourself and people like you, and there's a lot of them. So, this is probably the only genre that you can rely on to earn a crust.

Introduction Dialogue is everything. And dialogue, more than anything else creates character and creates story. Because the more your character is feeling the more important it is to really convey that in what they're saying, or even not saying.

and will be perceived by the reader and anyone watching the performance. Now there are three main functions of dialogue which are to impart information, reveal character and move the story forward. So as you're writing your dialog, think about what purpose it's serving.

And it could be serving two of those points, or even all three. But if it's not doing its job, then think about what you can do to change that. Don't let your exposition be boring – Malorie Blackman Now, as far as giving information is concerned, one of the ways of doing that is exposition, which just means a kind of detailed way of imparting knowledge or information.

But be very wary of that because a whole lot of texts on the page where one character is explaining something quickly becomes really tedious. So what you want to do is try and break that up. So think about the way it was done in the film Chinatown.

Jack Nicholson in one scene has to give us lots of information, but the way it was broken up was the scene is him in the back of a car and he's searching all through his jacket pockets, trying to find a lighter because he's desperate to light his cigarette. And what that did is it gave us some action. It broke up what he was saying.

It wasn't just spewed at us. It was actually mixed in with what he was doing, which made it far more interesting. Keep dialogue authentic but keep it flowing – Harlan Coben The way a person speaks tells you more about them than anything else I could tell you where they were born, where they were raised the big trauma of their life the way somebody speaks, the way I'm speaking to you now is telling you more about me, Harlan Coben than I could do by describing myself.

You want to keep it as economical as possible. You want to make people sound real. Here's the problem.

How people really talk does not make great book dialogue. You have to be authentic, but not necessarily real. You can't have every "um" and "uh" and "like" people talk in circular ways.

So you have to figure out where's the meat and potatoes. You have to really cut down. So you're going back and forth as quickly as possible.

And then it becomes like a musical piece where it has to have a really nice flow. When you're reading it back to yourself it has to go nicely without missing any beats without feeling like we have any false notes. The very last thing that I do with the book is I read the entire book to myself out loud.

I know, it's not a fun day. And from there, I can then hear the false notes especially when I'm doing dialogue because people do talk a certain way. They don't say things that don't belong in their particular mouths.

And if you read it out loud, it will stand out and you will remove it. Less is more – Jojo Moyes I think, for me, one of the most satisfying things as a reader is what is not said in the lines. What is said between the lines or underneath the lines.

And that's when dialogue really takes off because readers are reading it on two levels. They're looking at what people say, your characters say and you're also looking at what they mean. In my own family my dad calls me and my sisters Brats One Two, and Three and it's clearly a term of endearment to us although it can surprise people when they hear it sometimes.

But love for us is expressed through other means. So when I wrote Me Before You, what I wanted was for Will and Lou to talk to each other in a way that was sometimes sarcastic, sometimes jokey. It very rarely conveyed what those two characters actually meant to each other.

So that towards the climactic moments of the book when they finally do open up and say the thing they mean it has so much more emotional resonance. It has heft and it has power partly because, up till this point they have barely said anything of that nature to each other at all. We, the reader, have watched it because we've seen it conveyed in the way they deal with each other and the things they agree to do for each other.

But until that point, we haven't had the reward of two people who say, "This is what you mean to me. This is how you've changed me. This is what I want for you." And so when it comes, it comes with a much greater force.

If you have characters who can clearly express themselves from the beginning there's actually not that much in it for the reader. Always be pushing the story forward – Jed Mercurio you need to keep going back to the decisions you made when you created the story structure. You need to keep revisiting what the scene is really about.

What is it that brings the audience into the scene and where does it carry them? What is the new information for the audience in the scene? What is the new information for the characters in the scene that makes them consider new actions and take new actions?

The locus of the scene is the setting and the characters who are in it. You have to consider the vectors, the magnitude and direction of movement that the characters take away from the information that they get in the scene. That is crucial.

And if you are writing lots of dialog that reads well and feels very characterful but isn't propelling the story, then you have to be ruthless. You have to look at a way that you can include the dialog that you want that reveals character. That is the key line or the clever moment, but you have to stay on track with the story.

The problem with dialog that just rejoices in its own quality at times is that the story stagnates. So you have to find that balance and the balance is found in the inclusion of action direction. Within the scene you have to describe what is physically going on.

You have to envisage where characters enter and exit, how they interact physically. If they interact physically and so on. And this is as much a part of the content of the scene as the things they say.

So dialog is important, but it's only important in the context of how it's said, how it's framed. And you need to consider the scene as a whole before you even consider the dialog within it. Be nosey, listen to real dialogue – Jojo Moyes and Harlan Coben How else do you learn about dialogue?

A lot of it is eavesdropping. This is one of the fringe benefits of my job. I am an inveterate eavesdropper.

When I'm going to a coffee shop I'm eavesdropping on the people next to me. I'm not being nosy. That's research.

That's research for you too now! Part of the writer's mind frame. You're allowed to listen in on people.

When I was starting out, I used to rent an office above a hairdresser and in summer especially I would open my window and just listen to the conversations that were outside. And from that, I learned all sorts of things. What people say, what they don't say speech patterns, rhythms, stuttering, non-stuttering.

I basically just learned to hear many different kinds of speech and many different ways that people communicate with each other. And again, I never replicate that in full. But what you do if you become a good listener is you start to absorb the many different ways that people communicate with each other.

And people do communicate in very, very different ways. But write down what you think makes something in dialogue compelling. What's that little phrase, that little expression that brings it all to life?

Intro So, you want to write a love story. What is it going to take to actually get your characters together? My name's Jojo Moyes.

I was a fairly unsuccessful writer who, ten years into her career, suddenly hit the big time and have now sold upwards of 50 million copies. I'm here to tell you how to write a love story. The best job in the world This is the best job in the world.

What can be better than heading to your desk every morning knowing that you are going to break hearts or repair them to create a world to navigate your characters through all sorts of situations? What youll learn I'm going to take you through my whole process and teach you what I have learnt over the years in terms of getting started working out what your ideas are to help maximise your chances of getting published. We're going to look at voice and tone.

Try to write through the senses. What would they be seeing here? What would they be smelling?

We're going to look at research and how to create characters that readers really care about. If you don't do the prep work if you don't know who your characters are before they finally meet on the page it's like a really bad blind date. Just no sparks fly.

What I'm not going to teach you is how to write a formulaic romance. There are no swooning women or tall, dark and handsome men in my books. Sex There is almost no modern love story that doesn't rub up against the thorny issue of sex.

If you write terms that are biologically accurate you often pull the reader out of the narrative. "She said penis!" SHE CHUCKLES Penis Do not wait for the muse. She's not going to turn up.

I expect to create something that I can polish and polish and rework and rework. Find your own path. Create something that people didn't know they wanted and that's the thing that's going to make your name.

Outro This is going to help you build your own story so that at the end, you have a fully-fledged love story that all of us are going to want to read. I'm Jojo Moyes and this is my BBC Maestro course on writing love stories.

Poets are part of the community "of the tribe", as Ted Hughes would have it. They're not outside. They're not...

kind of different or special. They just give utterance to the families and communities that they come from. They celebrate their families and neighbours or question them.

So, wherever your place and people are that's what I suggest that you write out of. Paying attention to the use of words, dialect... accents, quirkiness...

but being a true voice from where you come from.

For me character is everything whereas for some writers like Ken Follett who I know has done one of these courses narrative is the first consideration. For me, especially, I think because I write stories that are highly dependent on love it's vital that the reader really understands and can picture and inhabit the two lead characters that we're going to get involved with. I'm assuming there are two.

Who knows? You might be writing an alternative love story. But that involves for me doing a lot of preparatory work because I've found that if you don't do the prep work if you don't know who your characters are before they finally meet on the page it's like a really bad blind date.

Just no sparks fly.

Trusting our own words gives us a key into poetry. We know the music of our own accents. We know the music of our own cultures.

We know how we shout. We know how we whisper. We know how we celebrate.

We know how we grieve in our own words. And it's out of those words that we can make the music of our poems. Again, going back to my phrase, "the music of being human".

The music will come from our voice. Our voice on the page. Very often, being attentive again, to how we became aware of words which will often be very early in our lives...

can make us think again, see differently. Write something which... in a sense, teaches us something about ourselves.

- Someone once said to me that all the characters that writers create are facets of their own personality. Now, I don't know if that's true. I hope it's not true 'cause I have created some real horrors, but that said, I find that really interesting to kinda step into the shoes of someone who I have absolutely no empathy or sympathy for.

For example, in one of my books, "Knife Edge," which is the second in the "Noughts & Crosses" series, I have a character called Jude, who's Callum's brother, and he meets a girl called Cara. And he begins to fall in love with her, but he doesn't he want to, so he ends up beating her up and he beats her to death. And I remember writing this scene where he is punching her and kicking her and a chill went right down my spine as I was writing it.

And I thought, "Oh my God, is this too strong?" And then I thought, "No, this is exactly what would happen. You've got to be truthful to that moment." So instead of leaning away from it, I leant into it, and I really recommend that. If you are writing a story and you've got an antagonist or you've got a character in it who's doing something awful, don't shy away from showing that.

as a prospective reuter i would urge you to not only read good books read terrible books as well because they can be more inspiring than the good books if you're inspired by a good book there is always the danger of plagiarism of doing something that is too much like that good book whereas a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you're reading is jesus christ i could write this um that is immensely liberating to find somebody who is published who is doing much much worse than you and by analyzing why they are doing so badly this will immensely help your own style you will find out all of the mistakes not to make why did this story offend me so much yeah analyze that find out why you didn't like it find out all of the examples of clumsiness or bad thinking that spoiled the story for you that will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer

there is a certain important ratio to balance the page between the text and the images the simplest way of doing this this is the way the older voice i had heard that the strictest um most disciplinarian editor in the industry who was a reputedly very unpleasant man called mort weisinger who was an editor on superman back in the 60s but he had said that if you've got a six panel comic book page you could have no more than 35 words per panel so i thought well if that's strict that's probably a good law of thumb to go by so that means what six times 35 that's 210 so if you've got six panels on a page yeah roughly 35 words per panel should be your maximum if you've got nine panels on a page it's what 23 words if you've got four panels on a page it's about 52 words per panel so these are the simple technical things

when i say a device i am generally talking about the necessary tricks that we come up with as means to tell a story for example in my own work from watchmen a very simple early device that i worked out was that scene changes could be accomplished by an overlap of dialogue by an overlap of imagery even by an overlap of a colour between one scene and the next this is a device it carries the reader through the changes in the narrative at a furious pace and it's aesthetically pleasing of course you will learn things in doing any work and you should retain that learning that you can do this effect that you can do such and such a device but it is important to just keep moving fast in evolving these things

## S T O R Y T E L L I N G

This is what a human face looks like after 40 years

of writing. I’d like you to think about that...

## Co Urse No Tes 3.0

The Lessons

## Pa G E

01.	Introduction	3

Part One ~ Origins

02.	Writing As Enchantment		5

03.	Becoming A Writer		6

04.	Four Weapons		7

05.	Learning To Read		8

06.	Imagination ~ Fire Of The Gods		9

Part Two ~ Language

07.	Language As Technology	11

08.	The Neurology Of Writing	12

09.	Hemingway vs. Baudelaire ~ Who Would Win?	13

10.	Fascinating Rhythm	14

11.	Inventive Language	18

Part Three ~ Story

12.	Structure	20

13.	Genre	21

14.	Mode	22

15.	Time & Timing		23

16.	Misdirection		25

Part Four ~ Cast & Setting

17.	Character 		27

18.	Extreme Character 		29

19.	Place 		31

20.	Creating Place 		32

21.	Period 		34

Part Five ~ A Variety Of Forms

22.	Considering Media	36

23.	Comic Cuts	37

24.	Screen Gems	39

25.	Words, Music & Performance	41

26.	Future Media	43

Part Six ~ Progressive Writing

27.	The Need For Progress	44

28.	Forward Movements	45

29.	Approaches To The Future	46

30.	Lost In The Funhouse	48

31.	The Evolution Of Writing	49

32.	Extroduction 		50

01.	Introduction

Hello, I’m Alan Moore.

I’m a writer and warlock from Northampton.

This is not a commercial writing course, because I don’t know what that is – I’m not sure anybody does. None of my commercial successes were ever planned as such. They were all remote outsiders that people liked because they were well written, not because they were catching some current trend. I cannot teach you the vagaries of public opinion. I am not, despite my appearance, a Nostradamus. It is best, in my experience, to simply be a good writer. So that is what I will be attempting to instruct you on, irrespective of whether one is a successful author like, say, Jeffrey Archer, or an unpublished loser like William Blake or Emily Dickinson.

As for practical advice for a writing career, here’s mine: accept any work you’re offered that’s legal and morally tolerable, try to do as good a job as you can and learn from the resultant mess. Now, onto the magic. Storytelling, and writing, is not one discipline. It’s thirty or forty separate subjects all in one horrifying collision. You  will have  to learn about character, stories and landscapes, how to present place and period, how to inspire your imagination and then order it into a coherent plot. These and dozens   of other things are what I hope to be teaching you in this course.

This will equip you for a career as a writer. You’ll depart from the course with a lot more knowledge about being a writer and the degree of thinking it entails, how to navigate your way successfully around the various bedevilments any  writer is  going to face.

I will share with you the importance of progressing as a writer, of continually moving on and trying new things in order to stop yourself becoming stale and stagnant.

I hope that I will be able to show you all of the various aspects of the writer’s art so that you can do them as second nature.

And if that doesn’t make you the most perfect writer in the world, it will at least hopefully make you as good a writer as I am.

Alan Moore

This first section is concerned with the origins of writing

itself, historically, and with the origins of the individual as writer, personally.

Part One : Origins ~

02.	Writing As Enchantment

## W Ri Ti Ng & M A Gi C

Writing has been, and always will be, our foremost means of modifying human consciousness. You are modifying the consciousness of the  reader and  therefore  you are modifying the reality of the reader. Writing will modify the reality and the consciousness of the entire species and, inevitably, will mean modifying the consciousness of the writer themselves.

Before writing we had awareness, empathy, grunts and gestures, but before we could write down the language, we could not retain any information or develop our human consciousness. And thus, the people who had discovered the wonderful ability of writing would have had supernatural powers in the eyes of the people surrounding them. They would have been able to send their thoughts, at a distance, to somebody else. They would be able to capture moments, and record events, which would lead to the understanding of cause and effect. These things would lead to science and art and almost every field of human endeavour. All arising from this stone-age magic.

When we look at the development of writing and magic, we begin to see that they’re largely the same thing. Painting, writing – all of these effects were regarded as supernatural powers in the ancient world. They could change human consciousness and they could change the world that we lived in. Essentially, today we are living amongst those parts of our imagination that we’ve been able to bail out from inside our heads.

## Th E Bardi C Tradi Ti On

The bardic tradition of magic was one that was entirely based upon writing and literature. Interestingly, bards were much more feared than your common or garden witch or sorcerer. If a magician puts a curse upon you, then your hens are probably going to lay a bit funny. Your child might be born with a squint. These things are not that terrible. But if a bard puts a satire upon you, then that will destroy you in the eyes of your friends, your family and potentially your own eyes. And if it’s a good enough satire, if it is finely worded enough, then even two or three hundred years after you’re dead, people might still be laughing at you and your absurdity.

The early gods of writing, the scribe gods like Odin, Thoth or Hermes, were also the gods of magic. I don’t believe that that is entirely a coincidence. In my estimation, writing and magic are practically the same thing.

Stand tall with your pen. You should never think of yourself as purely an entertainer for hire who is lucky to have the work. You should remember that a writer can changethe world. Think of the books that have completely changed human history. See yourself in that light. Because if you are a writer, then you are having an effect upon human history. And the entirety of the human future.

Part One : Origins ~

03.	Becoming A Writer

## E Ve R Ybod Y Can W Ri Te

Don’t let the enchantment and mystical history put you off. Everybody can write. Perhaps, everybody should write. It is not some divine calling that only settles upon   a few special individuals.

The foremost and most important instrument in a writer’s toolkit is the writer herself. To develop as a writer will almost certainly entail developing as a person. It will be necessary to acquire a properly thought-through moral standpoint, and perhaps an equally well-reasoned political position from which to observe and weigh the world that is being written about.

I am not saying that those should be left-wing, right-wing or (my own personal preference) an anarchist opinion. The important thing is to have a moral or political platform from which to look at the world and hopefully understand it.  One  whereby you can employ compassion and empathy to look at  someone who  has  ideas that are completely foreign to your own and yet perhaps understand why they have them. Understand that you yourself, brought up in slightly different circumstances, may  have had exactly those ideas. And be flexible because the ground will inevitably change underneath you, politically and morally.

## W Ay S Of Se E I Ng

Equally vital is the development of  a  considered aesthetic viewpoint, the  criteria with which a writer can evaluate the work of others and, crucially, their own writings. Genuine passion will also be required, both for writing itself and for whatever is the writing’s subject. The development and husbandry of  a  unique  worldview,  which may take a career, can vastly extend a writer’s range and capabilities, and can also satisfyingly extend them as a human being.

Essentially, one should cultivate the ways of seeing that are a necessity for any creative individual.

Your experience and your perceptions can turn into an energy that will fuel the rest of your writing career. But the first thing is to develop that self – the writer as a person, you, yourself.

Once you’ve developed that, everything else will fall into place.

Part One : Origins ~

04.	Four Weapons

From time to time during this course, I’ll use magical terminology to make a point about writing. This doesn’t mean that I’m trying to  introduce you  to  some strange  cult or that you’ll have to sacrifice any goats or worship any ugly looking idols. I am simply sharing advice given to magicians which I think would also be useful advice for somebody aspiring to be a writer.

The first of these concepts is the four weapons – four symbolic tools  or  weapons that any magician is advised to ensure they possess a full complement of before commencing their magical career. These are the four suits of the Tarot  deck: coins (or discs, pentacles), swords, cups and wands. Each of these one of the four classical elements, and a human quality or ability, that is necessary if you wish to be a magician or a writer.

I advise you not to neglect any single one of them.

COI NS represent the element of earth, or your ability to deal with the material world. For a writer that means pay attention to your physical circumstances. You don’t want to starve in a garret. Also, try and obtain a knowledge of the physical world – how situations work, how people work – and how they all fit together. Educate yourself about history and science, hospitals and flight. Try and find out how every facet of the material world works and you’ll be a better writer because of it.

TH E SW ORD represents the element of air, or the human quality of intellect. It is the intellect that has a sharp cutting edge that enables you to discriminate between a good idea and a bad idea. To expand your intellect will be to expand your capacity to write about things. These things will be very useful to you in your career as a writer.

TH E CUP represents the element of water, or human emotion and compassion. Feel compassion for your most villainous character. If you’re going to write about them, or put words in their mouth, you need to understand them as a human being. The key to that is compassion – to be able to think yourself into somebody else’s shoes.

TH E W AND represents the element of fire, or the human spirit or will. This is the most important of the four weapons because it is the weapon that should be directing the other three. Will is the single most important element because, without it, you will not finish the shortest of stories. You can very easily end up with nothing but a stack of unfinished manuscripts. The important thing about will is that if you focus on your imagination, you can bring things into materialisation where they exist in the real world, where the rest of us exist and can read them.

## H Ow I Di Sco Ve Re D M Y W And

It’s easier said than done, finding your will. How is it done? I can only share my experience…

When normal avenues of education were forbidden to me at the age of about seventeen, I began to realise that I was at something of a disadvantage. But if I was ever to have the career that I’d dreamed of, as a writer and a creative individual who could support themselves, then I was going to have to attempt it at some point.

In my mid-twenties I decided to leave work and live off the then non-existent mercies of the benefit system until I could establish myself as a writer. I sat around and did very little for the best part of a year. I was planning huge projects that I was never

going to be able to finish. It came to the point where I saw myself starting these incredible epic sagas but only managing one page of pencil mess in six months.

I was never going to complete these things, so I would never have to send them in and have them judged by somebody. I would never have to have them rejected. Because if they got rejected, then I wouldn’t even have the dream of being a writer. I wouldn’t be able to say that I would have been a writer if it wasn’t for my working-class upbringing, or experience at school, or the circumstances of my life – there’d be some excuse.

What I realised was that I was trying to avoid being judged. And it was foredooming any attempt at being a writer. If you don’t finish your work and give it to somebody to appraise, then it will never get published. It’s entirely down to you. To be a writer, you must take responsibility for yourself and for your own actions.

As soon as I realised that, I took action. I sent some comic strip samples in and received a telegram reply saying they’d like to start running the strip. This was my first professional work and enabled me to build the rest of my career upon it.

Purely by taking my life into my own hands, I discovered not just the secret of being  a good writer, but the secret of being a responsible human being.

Part One : Origins ~

05.	Learning To Read

Natural differences in ability notwithstanding, it is probably fair to say that a person will be precisely as good a writer as they are a reader.

As a child, a story will seize your imagination and transport you to a different place. You get the habit of reading and do it under the bedclothes by torchlight. Sooner or later, you will consider writing a story yourself. In fact, you could very easily say that reading is the gateway drug for writing.

## H Ow T O Re Ad

Becoming a writer will change your reading experience in a number of ways. You will never again be able to completely immerse yourself in a story or a piece of text in the way you once did. Part of your mind will be continually analysing the text to try and find out how the writer achieved their effects. While that can be a little bit distancing, there are compensations. Once you understand how the writer is achieving their effects through thinking and ingenuity, it will perhaps be  a  much richer experience  for you.

Read with an analytical eye. If you’re suddenly frightened, touched, or amused while reading, look back over the preceding pages or paragraphs and see how the writer has achieved that. This is one of the joys of being a writer that reads. Your own responses can teach you a lot about universal human responses. Then you can back-engineer them to find out how the writer got that response.

## Bb C M Aestro	8	St O R Y Telling	Ba C K T O Con Te N T S

## W H A T T O Re Ad

I would suggest that you be as omnivorous as possible. Read everything. Don’t differentiate between the highest pinnacles of literature and the lowest slums of pulp and genre. Read philosophical treaties. Read Viz. Everything is potentially powerful and will enrich you as a writer.

Read terrible books because they can be more inspiring than good books. If you’re inspired by a good book, there is always the danger of plagiarism, of writing something too close to it. Whereas a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you’re reading is, “Jesus Christ, I could write this shit”. It’s immensely liberating. Analyse what they’re doing badly and you’ll discover all the mistakes not to make.

Go to your local bookshop or library and pick out a book at random. Something from the bargain bin is ideal. Analyse it, good or bad, using the techniques and approaches discussed in this lesson.

Part One : Origins ~

06.	Imagination ~ Fire Of The Gods

The nature of the fire stolen from the gods by Prometheus can be deduced from   a study of his name, which translates as ‘before-thought’, the consideration of events yet to occur, hence imagination.

Imagination is one of the most valuable precious metals that a writer can mine. It is essential. Whatever you’re writing about – fiction, historical events, football – you’re going to need an imagination to think yourself into that world.

## Adjust Th E Parame Te Rs

In Metamagical Themas, Douglas R Hofstadter shares a story of a friend of his who had suggested a possible way of looking at the imagination. This friend, in a crowded restaurant one Friday night, had said, “Boy, I’d hate to be a waitress in here tonight”.   If you imagine that any situation has parameter dials, you could adjust the details of the situation. In this case, the friend had adjusted two dials: the gender dial, so that he was now a female, and his social role, so that instead of being a customer, he was now somebody employed by the restaurant. Hofstadter considered this a creative act

– he has altered the parameters of reality and made a new story.

This is how a lot of art and writing gets created. For example, if we take Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and we adjust the parameters of time and place, then we’ve got West Side Story. Adjust them in a different way and you’ll have a different story.

## Prompt S

In Downriver, Iain Sinclair put together a sequence from a bunch of nineteenth- century postcards he’d bought from a junk shop. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies is a box of  cards, each of  which has  an  instruction written upon it, sometimes simple, sometimes unfathomable or ambiguous. The idea is to derail  our thinking when we’re stuck in a creative rut, to find a new way of looking at things. It has worked enough in my experience to make this a very useful tool.

The imagination is endless. There is potentially more in the human imagination than there is in the whole physical universe because the imagination contains the whole physical universe and a lot of things from universes that we have never seen and will never see.

## H Arne Ss Y Our W And

Remember to use your will alongside your imagination. Without having the will applied to it, imagination is a treacherous sucking bog that you can waste your entire life in. Losing yourself in daydreams is dangerous – thinking about how great it’s going to    be when you’ve written your novel, won the lottery and found love – it’s like quicksand and can neutralise your entire life if you let it.

Train your will upon your imagination and you will be able to bring your idle dreams and fancies down into a material form.

Imagination is the most priceless gold that you could ever possibly mine but don’t get caught in a cave-in at the pit.

Adjust the parameters on your favourite story and see if you  can create something novel and progressive. Does changing the character, setting or time period by one notch spark something different? Try different combinations and see what possibilities you can come up with.

Part Two : Language ~

07.	Language As Technology

## W E Can De Scri Be An Y Th Ing

The word technology means ‘writings about technique’. From the Greek ‘techne’ meaning art, skill, craft  or  technique and  ‘logos’ meaning word or  the  utterance  by which inward thought is expressed. Language is clearly our first and most spectacularly effective technology, upon which all the others are founded. Alfred Korzybski, the Einstein of semantics, concludes that the entirety of our conscious awareness, and thus the whole of our subjective reality, is comprised from nothing but language. Thus, with only a couple of dozen abstract glyphs and a peppering of punctuation, we can describe anything conceivable within human experience.

With the right language, we can create a virtual reality for the reader that is more immersive and more meaningful than anything remotely in the reach of other technologies: consider a visceral VR recreation of the Crimean War versus the experience of reading War and Peace. The latter would give you a meaningful account of what happened because there is a lot more to experience than simple sensation.

## Th E Pow E R Of W Ords

We must be careful. With that scattering of punctuation and those letters, we can create trivial short stories and entertainment, or we can create things of dangerous power that are so explosive that they could change the world – books like the Bible, the Qur’an, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf. Remember the power you have as a writer, use it wisely and, whatever you do, don’t write Mein Kampf.

a

It is important to have a wide vocabulary if you are going to achieve these effects upon altering human consciousness. I would recommend getting an etymological dictionary which will tell you where all the words come from and precisely what they mean.

## L O Ve Th E L Angu A Ge

More than that, you’re going to need a love of language, of new and unusual words. There wasn’t a lot of that around in the working-class neighbourhoods that I grew up in. Nevertheless, my mother particularly enjoyed unusual words, as if they belonged to better-off people but that she had somehow got hold of them.

She would take such glee in saying, ‘Oh, our Alan, why do you have to be so obstreperous?’ I think it was contagious because I began to gather unusual words and there are some fantastic ones out there: craquelure, which is the web of fissures in the varnish on a painting; or xanthic, which is a much nicer way of saying yellow; and quaquaversal, which means spreading out evenly in all directions.

I used the last to describe a massive pile of pornography as a ‘quaquaversal strumpet cascade’. You might only ever use these words once, if that, but it’s great    to know them.

Part Two : Language ~

08.	The Neurology Of Writing

## H Ow W Ri Ti Ng Affe C T S The Brai N

Reading is a neurological phenomenon. Words on the page trigger neural responses and we experience witnessed or described scenes in our nervous systems. In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel R. Delaney’s work on the language of science fiction, he discusses the efficacy of this opening line: “The red sun is high, the blue, low.”

Seven words in the right order and we are immediately transported to an entirely alien landscape that has two suns, one red, one blue, they are both casting shadows in different directions, probably violet where they intersect.

Why do words affect us in this way? I  think it might have something to do with    a recently discovered phenomenon called mirror neurons. If we are watching somebody rowing a boat, for example, the same area of our brain lights up as if we were rowing the boat ourselves. It’s like we get a ghostly echo in our neurology of the things that we are looking at. I suspect that this is the same whether we’re observing things in real life, watching a film or reading a book.

## W Ordpl Ay Sparks Syn Apse S

With modern brain imaging techniques, we can see how the brain reacts to wordplay. When Shakespeare turns the noun ‘lip’ into a verb meaning to kiss, or the adjective ‘bawdy’ into the noun ‘bawd’ meaning perhaps a sex worker, our neurology becomes really excited because something unusual is being done with language – and practically our entire consciousness is made of language.

Shakespeare often uses this clever wordplay before a dramatic denouement, so our brains are all wound up waiting for something exciting to happen and then he gives us his dramatic resolutions. This is the power of language over our minds.

## W E I Rd Wonde Rs

Unusual language alters the reader’s consciousness. Where James Joyce uses intricate techniques with the words themselves, so we don’t fully understand, our minds go into a different, much more receptive state. Believers in magic will use ‘barbarous tongues’ (a language that you do not personally understand) for spells, to induce a receptive trance-state.

It affects the writer too. I once spent so long inventing new and unusual language for a chapter in my novel Jerusalem, written in the language of James Joyce, that after the couple of months it took me to write it, I couldn’t even think in proper English anymore. My mind had become so conditioned to making up new words that I was unable to have a basic conversation. I had to take 18 months off.

In George Orwell’s 1984, he introduced ‘Newspeak’, which is a new form of English engineered by the totalitarian state designed to limit consciousness by limiting vocabulary. I fear that this may be true, that the less language you have, the more limited you are in what you can think. But must not the converse also be true? Must not an expanded use of language and vocabulary raise the consciousness, both of the author and of the reader? It is certainly something to think about.

Part Two : Language ~

09.	Hemingway vs. Baudelaire

~ Who Would Win?

Well, obviously Hemingway, because he’d have the gun, but our broader point here is a consideration of the Attic and the Asiatic styles of writing.

A T TI C WRI TE RS (like Hemingway) use simple, blunt sentences and plain English.

ASI A TI C W RI TE RS (like Baudelaire *) decorate language like a bombast’s wedding cake and use every linguistic trick at their disposal. (* And me)

Attic writing is popular and has its place in instruction manuals, while Asiatic writing gives you the opportunity to influence and affect the reader through the perfumed spell you are casting with your language.

Théophile Gaultier said that  decadent  writing  (a  form  of  Asiatic  writing)  should  be unafraid of borrowing from the most ancient mythologies and the most modern technical vocabularies. I agree. You have the whole of literature at your disposal. Combine the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia and the latest issue of New Scientist for a luscious broth.

Have a really big, satisfying think.	a

## Rh E T Ori C

The ancient Greeks discovered the magical effects of some of these wordy spell techniques and called it the art of rhetoric. These were  things that could improve the persuasiveness of your speech or writing and make it  sound more sonorous   to the persons listening to it. Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth, taught me  a great deal about rhetoric including hypotaxis, parataxis and hyperbaton

There’s also synesthesia, when one sense comes across as another. There’s a wonderful example from Raymond Chandler, who punctuated his blunt and paratactic crime writing with this element of sheet poetry:

“She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.”

Try writing the same paragraph in both the Attic and the Asiatic styles. Are there parts you like of either, or both? Now try combining them to get the best of both worlds.

Part Two : Language ~

10.	Fascinating Rhythm

When I was a teenager, I did what many teenagers do and wrote dreadful poetry that pretended to be about the H bomb or social injustice, when it was really about not being able to find a girlfriend and what I considered the injustices of my own life.    I typed them up for little fanzines me and my friends were publishing in those days and was happy with these early poems and how they looked on the printed page.

This sense of smug self-satisfaction lasted exactly until my first poetry reading, where lines that had looked fantastic to me on the page suddenly became impossible to navigate. I learned that the most important element is rhythm, both for reading aloud and for the reader to conjure in their own head.

## De Ve L Op Y Our ‘L I Te Rar Y E Ar’

Rhythm is a key implement in creating the mesmeric trance in which the reader should be suspended. It’s hypnotic. You can carry a lot of material on just the rhythm of the thing. There is a multiplicity of rhythmic devices that you can employ in your prose. Know what you’re using and know its effect, and your writing will be immeasurably enriched.

## An I Amb

Pronounced ‘I am’ (an iamb in itself), this is a metrical foot where the stress is on the second beat.

‘I am’

## A Troch E E

The opposite of an iamb, this is a two-beat metrical foot with the stress on the first syllable.

‘garden’

Most of Shakespeare is in iambic pentameter, which is five iambs to each line:

“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?”

Iambic pentameter is very similar to the rhythm of natural speech, mellifluous and pleasing to the ear, whereas trochees sound like a tribal beat with that unstressed ending. That is very effective for incantations, but otherwise it  will  inevitably end up sounding like Hiawatha, and nobody wants that.

## Al L I Te Ra Ti On

Words that begin with the same sound (not necessarily letters) placed close together. For example: the janiform gent lay jacent in the gym.

## An Aph Ora

When a certain word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of clauses or sentences that follow each other. For example, in William Blake’s poem London:

In every cry of every Man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

## Asson Ance

The repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds within words, phrases or sentences. For example: There’s no place like home; The early bird catches the worm; A stitch in time saves nine.

And that’s just the ‘a’s. There are dozens of literary techniques you can employ to enchant the reader with rhythm and rhyme. Take the time to look them up and try them on. Stephen Fry’s guide to writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled, kindly introduces these techniques.

## Re Ad Y Our W Ork Al Oud

I cannot stress enough how important it is to read your work aloud to yourself. Embody the writers of the Beat movement (like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg), who attempted to capture the spontaneous free-flowing energy of jazz and bebop.

See where you’ve dropped a syllable in the rhythm or when you’re left on an off-kilter stress. Any break in rhythm is a break in the mesmeric trance that you’re trying to cast over the reader. It will draw them out of the story, while a continuous beat will keep them enthralled right to the end of the piece.

## Ol D Gangste Rs Ne Ve R Di E

Old gangsters never die,

Except the few that pass away in cinemas at midnight, Lay there sprawling in the footlights

For the usherette or ice-cream girl to find.

And if I die – God knows, I might – don’t let me die in black and white. Don’t make me share a haunted screen

With every other ghostboy who stood Trembling in the foyer sipping wine,

Then coughed, and shot their cuffs, and checked the time, And stepped outside to get cut down by dead policemen, Faces strobing in the panic light,

Their long, dark cars parked out the back, Their halos black against the night

And John Dillinger’s name in finest bullet-silver etched upon their skin, A cold tattoo above the heart

Right next to where the badge is pinned. I could die carefully, at dusk.

Old gangsters never die.

’Cause buddy, I once owned a pair of diamond collar-studs, And as I live and breathe I swear that that’s no lie

And guys like me deserve to cash their chips more elegant

Than those without a shirt upon their back or shine upon their dancing shoes. Like playing poker – being dealt the Ace of Flames

You stand, and, whispering once your mother’s name, Pitch headlong dead across the roulette table,

Bullet-holes pinned like armistice poppies In neat rows across your back.

Or drowning. Do you know, so many hoods and hitmen got sent down To tread the river-bed for all eternity

And I would gladly kiss the hand of any man who’d bind my wrists And send me down

To be in such good company:

Dutch Schultz. Capone.

Why, men like that had hellstars in their eyes

And when they walked in groups of more than three

They must have looked like grounded constellations, torn down From a B-film sky.

Old gangsters never die.

Say, wouldn’t it be nice to fall asleep forever

In some old speakeasy in the 1920s where they never Pulled aside the blind and looked outside to find

That fifty years Had washed away All of the legends And the zoot-suits

And the bloodstains,

Like a fistful of dead roses someone left there with the hat-check girl Then drove off into old Chicago

With their windows wound and radios turned down To keep their holstered shoulders cold and dry.

Old gangsters never die.

Hey, John! I got the tickets for the show, here in my very hand. Enjoy the show,

And when you kiss that girl goodnight there in her red dress streaming Do it carefully.

Good burgundy upon the tongue, for she will kill you, John, And one must always kiss one’s killer,

Now ain’t that so?

Hey, Ma! They shot your boys out there

And as I live and breathe, I never seen a pair who fell so sweet To hear the final poetry of cordite in the air

Or turned their faces up, like so,

Receiving death as if it were a mother’s kiss or something black And rare.

Hey, fellas! Is it cold there in that movie-house tonight? Come on, let’s pass round that Jack Daniels

And we’ll talk about old murders, Double-crosses

And dead blondes, and we’ll say “Here’s looking at ya.” “Here’s blood in your eye.”

Old ghosts sit in the backroom. Old dreams wear dusty clothing. Old bodies don’t tell stories.

Old gangsters never die.

Part Two : Language ~

11.	Inventive Language

If you want your reader to make it through the entire length of your story without their interest waning, you’d be well advised to use some inventive language.

## A V Oid Cl I Ch És

Try to avoid using phrases that every other writer has used. There are ways of constantly making your language more adventurous.

## Th E E L E Me N T Of Surpri Se

Grab their attention with a surprising image or a startling use of words.

## Juxt Aposi Ti On

A great way to do this is by putting together words that seem to be discordant but together sometimes effect a beautiful disfigurement – as in the phrase ‘beautiful disfigurement’.

## Ste Ve Ayl E T T

Steve’s prose is genuinely hilarious, completely hallucinatory. He uses words, phrases and concepts in a way that I have never seen before. It makes whatever he is writing about guaranteed to be an enthralling piece of text.

“The optimist sees the future as a rabbit sees the  oncoming truck -  getting bigger,  not closer.”

“How many times does a man have to shave before his chin gets the message?”

a

“What’s life in this nation? Collect emptiness in a household of cornflakes. Transient fuel gobbles attention, the television aches, the truth walks. Scheme worms welcome your corpse, trap clicks and you’re in heaven, bored rigid.”

“Nothing like a spider in the mouth to get you thinking.”

## H . P. L O Vecraf T

Lovecraft has a reputation as an old-fashioned writer who hated modernism in any form, but I think that he was probably a closet modernist. He is often criticised for his overblown use of adjectives but he was using language in a very determined way. He would overload his creatures with descriptive adjectives, so much so that it would make it impossible for the reader to put together a clear mental picture.

“It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of  a  form  which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.”

“The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.”

“The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.”

## Oul Ipo

The Oulipo movement is a group of largely French-speaking writers who seek to create works of literature using constrained writing techniques. These restrictions force language and writing into interesting new strategies and forms such as Georges Perec’s novel La disparition, written without the letter ‘e’, the ingenious Eunoia by Christian Bök, with one individual vowel used per chapter, and even Oulipo police procedurals, or ‘OuliPopo’.

“Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal

– a gala ball that has what pagan charm small galas lack.”

From Chapter A, Eunoia

“Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks – impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib? Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing shtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight.  I dismiss nit-picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz – griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.”

From Chapter I, Eunoia

Try writing a paragraph or poem using only one vowel.

Part Three : Story ~

12.	Structure

## Non-Li Ne Ar N Arra Ti Ve

Structure means the shape and composition of the story – it can be as elaborate or simple as you want.

The first thing to determine structure is size.

## Th E Sh Or T St Or Y

In a short story, all of the elements of a long-form work are encountered in miniature and can be subsequently scaled up, making it a near-perfect starting point for any writer. And because they are relatively swiftly accomplished, you will be able to experiment more.

## Th Re E -A C T Struc Ture

Beginning, middle and end… It’s simple but an excellent way of structuring your story. Screenwriter Syd Field recommends jotting down notes on each scene on record cards and sorting them into three piles. He calls these three sections set up, confrontation and resolution. By the end of your setup, you should have established all of your characters and your essential situation, so that the reader thinks that they know where the rest of the book is going. In the confrontation, you should have something that completely reverses the reader’s expectations and finish on a big revelation that will propel the story towards a new and unexpected climax.

Once you’ve got your structure, you can play about with it. You don’t have to have your beginning, middle and end in that order. There are interesting effects that can be had by starting with the end, and then filling in how we  got  to  that point in  flashback.  You can chop your story into any order as long as it holds the reader’s interest and successfully tells your story.

## Form A T

Consider the variety of structural formats. You could employ an epistolary narrative, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is largely conducted through letters and diary extracts. This adds an air of authority and allows you to tell the story from numerous points of view. You might try stories structured like an  intrusive questionnaire, or an annotated poem, or a cache of documents, or an unadorned dialogue – you can borrow structures from almost anywhere. You are simply crafting the shape of the story to leave an impression in the mind of the reader.

## Be Y Ond Th E Pl O T

Always remember that the plot is not the story. It’s just what gets you from one end of the story to the other. For example, the plot of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – some animals take over a farm – is not what the book is about.

Part Three : Story ~

13.	Genre

## A C Ti On & Ad Ve N Ture ~ Comed Y ~ Fan T Asy ~ Horror ~ M Y Ste R Y ~ Dram A ~ Sci E Nce Fi C Ti On ~ Th Ri L Le R  ~ H I St Ori Cal ~ Rom Ance ~ W E Ste Rn ~ L I Te Rar Y Fi C Ti On ~ Bi L Dungsrom An (Comi Ng Of A Ge ) ~ Spe Cul Ati Ve Fi C Ti On ~ D Y St Opi An ~ M A Gi Cal Re Al I Sm ~

As with most important things in the world, genre comes from Northampton. Genre grew out of the gothic movement, which grew out of the graveyard poetry movement, which in turn grew out of the writings of the miserable but very eloquent Northampton divine, James Hervey. He wrote beautifully about how only God was eternal and that all of the flesh would eventually decay and fall away. This inspired the first graveyard poets, like Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and some were taken by the bats and skulls but not so much the God business, so you got the later graveyard poets which in turn inspired writers like Horace Walpole who loves all of this miserable ghoulishness and writes a novel based in its style – and so the gothic novel is invented. Up until   this point, literature had been the comedy of manners like Sheridan or Jane Austen, anything sensational and ghastly wasn’t considered to be proper writing.

## Trope S

Always start off with a genre that you know and enjoy. Something you’re genuinely excited about and know the tropes for, because if you’re well informed about that genre, you can deliberately bend or break it. There’s no better moment in genre than when the artificial tropes are highlighted for satirical or dramatic effect.

## Mi X I T Up

As you evolve as  a  writer, you’ll discover that real  life is  a collision of genres. We  are not separated into tragedies and comedies and romances and science-fiction dramas. They’re all happening at once, every day of our lives. Perhaps the best way  to approach this is to try and write in numerous different genres at once. Cormac McCarthy does this in Blood Meridian. He is positioned in the Western genre but smashes it with violent horror and luminous poetry.

Genre is a set of restrictions around different areas of literature, but breaking those walls down can give you an incredible release of energy that can fuel your stories.

Part Three : Story ~

14.	Mode

“Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows… Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.”

Excerpt from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

## Mode

Almost as important as its genre in shaping a story, is its mode. On one level, this      is the decision to tell a given story in a comedic mode, a dramatic mode, or some commingling of both. Both comedy and horror are working on the principle of subverting the reader’s expectations. They slide very easily between one another. I did a story about a haunted house that had two of the ghosts of deceased gunfighters chasing each other around a table in the  séance room,  shooting bits off of each other, so that eventually there’s just a pair of legs chasing the remains of the other gunfighter, while a head that has landed in the fireplace directs the remaining parts of its body. Now, that’s horrific but also kind of funny. With just a slight shift of atmosphere, you can affect the mode of your story.

## Te Nse

It is possible to write a story in the future tense but I wouldn’t advise it. Your best choices are past and present. Past tense is most generally used and is perhaps the easiest to write. It is very comfortable upon the ear, it is non-threatening and there is a sense of distance. With present tense narrative it is completely different – there is much more immediacy and engagement. It is somehow more electric to have these things happening in the present.

## Bb C M Aestro	22	St O R Y Telling	Ba C K T O Con Te N T S

## Pe Rson

A lot of writers will probably go for the third person – he, she, it. It is very useful because the third person is omniscient, it is an author’s voice that already knows everything about the story. A third person narrator is not restricted to what a single character knows or experiences, they can jump from place to place and throughout time without the character’s knowledge. However, the first person is powerfully immediate and puts you right inside the character. While it is perhaps more difficult, it does allow for clever literary tricks – like the unreliable narrator that allows for further misdirection and character revelation.

A third alternative is the close third person, where you’re talking in the third person

– he walks down the street, she goes to the laundry, and so on – but you’re so close   to the person that you can hear their thoughts. An example from my novel Jerusalem is the second chapter where the main character is a crack-addicted sex worker called Marla. It’s a third-person narrative, but we can see how her thoughts run around a rat maze, from need to fear to anger back to need again. We can be so close to her that we can hear her made-up internal arguments where she’s shouting in block capital letters at her mother who isn’t in the room with her and who she hasn’t seen for three years. We can be right at the centre of this person’s experience, and we can pull back and look at them from outside. It allows for free indirect discourse, a term that has arisen from neurology, which gives the reader the opportunity to dip in and out of different characters’ consciousness. This increases the readers’ empathy, enabling them to see even inside a flawed or villainous character and to see why they did the things that they did.

Try rewriting some of your work in close third person, using free indirect discourse to hop between the minds and thoughts of different characters.

Part Three : Story ~

15.	Time & Timing

Books involve at least two different kinds of time. There is narrative time, as it passes for the work’s characters, where there can be a gap of years in the turning of the page, and there is time as it passes, hopefully not too sluggishly, for the reader. An interesting use of the first kind can make the second kind a more pleasant experience.

## Ti Me Frame

There’s no reason why you have to start your story at the beginning and move mechanically to the end. You can start at the end  and  then fill in  the  background with flashbacks. You can start wherever you want. Stories like Rashomon and The Conversation repeat certain scenes or incidents from different perspectives, giving more information with each retelling.

## Pa C E

You can give a story pace by judicious edits, and an observation of the cuts in films can assist with this. I recently wrote  a  scene for  a  television programme, featuring  a character who carried out horrific acts of brutality with fruit, that involved cutting between her staring at an aggressive bouncer and a nearby watermelon –  looks at the bouncer, looks at the fruit, cut to ambulance arriving. The audience gets what happened and it’s funnier to cut straight to the aftermath. Let the readers fill in the gap.

## Ti Me Tra Ve L

If you’re writing a science fiction or fantasy narrative, you can do extraordinary things with time. The film Arrival, adapted from Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life, shows the arrival of aliens on Earth who attempt to communicate with humans. Eventually, the main character, who is a human linguist, begins to understand the aliens and that they see time as a solid, in which past, present and future are happening all at once. This leads to a very poignant conclusion where we realise that things that we had thought were flashbacks by the central character were, in fact, very sad premonitions. It’s a wonderful, heart-stopping, heartwarming film.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is another inspiring example. An American serviceman called Billy Pilgrim is a prisoner of war in Dresden at the exact moment when the Allies commence their comprehensive firebombing. Perhaps disturbed by this experience, he believes himself to have been abducted by a race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians and placed in a zoo with a Playboy centrefold called Montana Wildhack. These aliens also see time as a solid, that everything is happening at once and that people in the past are still alive in the past. This becomes Billy’s philosophy, so he ends up an old man simultaneously dying in bed and mating with Montana Wildhack in an alien zoo.

These are just two ways you can play with time if you have the liberty that science fiction and fantasy permit you.

## Ti Ming

A good way to learn the sense of timing is by studying comedians. Timing is crucial in telling a joke or delivering a routine. Look at some of the old silent screen comedians like Buster Keaton and examine how he times a joke. Eventually, you will start to get   a sense of how you can bring this element of timing to your stories and make them     a beautiful ride for the reader, or an excursion at breakneck pace if you feel like it.

Watch Buster Keaton’s film, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and analyse the silent star’s comedic timing. Consider the thought and effort that went into each comical moment and how you can bring this to your own writing.

Part Three : Story ~

16.	Misdirection

## T W I St

The most important tool a writer has is absolute honesty – no, only kidding. It’s misdirection. Misdirection is wonderful. You can completely deceive and betray your readership and they will thank you for it.

## W I Thol Di Ng Inform A Ti On

This is a very common form of misdirection that everybody uses, allowing your readership a drip-feed of information so that they only get information when you want them to have it, until the time comes to make the proper dramatic revelation.

## Unre Li Abl E N Arra T Or

As we discussed in the lesson on Mode, a first-person narrative can be used to misdirect the reader because of the protagonist’s bias. One of the  masters of  this kind of narrator is crime writer, Jim Thompson. In one book, his narrator tells about   a brutal bit of domestic abuse where he had pushed his wife into a full bath. Later,     he tells the story again, but this time it’s a good-natured bit of joshing and falling that ended with both of them laughing. You realise that he’s lying to us and himself by editing his past. It is a fantastic insight into a character that makes you feel very close to the story. You can misdirect your readership because they will trust a first-person narrator right up until the point they are given cause not to.

In Magic by William Goldman, the reader is told that a magician has a dummy, ‘Fats’, planted in the audience to heckle him. The act becomes a comedy act based around the banter between the magician and Fats. As the novel progresses, we see their personal relationship develop through off-stage conversations until, one night, an argument becomes increasingly vicious and personal. It escalates until the magician stands up, picks Fats up, folds him in  half, crams  him  into  a  suitcase and  slams  the lid shut. At that moment the reader realises that it is a literal dummy, not the technical term for a plant which we had assumed. In an instant, the reader’s entire  understanding of the novel crumbles away and they are shown the true situation. It’s an extraordinary feeling.

## L Ast L I Ne Reve Al

Some writers will leave the twist until the very last moment, like H. H. Munro, who wrote under the name of Saki. These magnificent stories end with a last line – or last word – that is like a punch in the stomach. One of Saki’s stories sees two noblemen of warring estates caught in a storm in an adjoining woodland. At first they argue and threaten one another about what they will do when their men arrive to rescue them but as times go on, they decide that they will help one another and end the rivalry. Eventually, they see figures and movement in the distance. The light is failing so they cannot see whose men it is. But the last one-word line of the story reveals everything

– “Wolves”.

## W Ri Te R Mi Sdi Re C T Th Y Se L F

As an author, you can deliberately misdirect yourself. A female crime writer, Patricia Highsmith I believe, used to write about the murder and the reactions before she knew who had committed the murder. About two-thirds through writing the  book, it  would hit her who must have been the murderer and she would then go back and make a few minor changes to strengthen that. The value of this technique is that if she didn’t know who the murderer was during the early chapters, there was no way she could even unconsciously telegraph that to the reader.

This happened to me writing the science fiction comic strip The Ballad of Halo Jones. In the first story arc we are introduced to the titular character, an ordinary young woman living on a gigantic hoop tethered just off Manhattan for housing poor people so that better-off people won’t have to look at them. She lives in a shared house with an older woman who owns a robot dog called Toby, an artificial intelligence and fierce killing machine that is for the older lady’s protection. I  wrote Halo Jones on  a hazardous shopping trip but realised the dog would spoil the story as they couldn’t get into any trouble. So I got the robot dog to take a shortcut and leave them to it. When they got home, they find that the old lady has been killed in their absence. The vengeful robot dog departs in chase of the assailant and Halo heads off into space as a hostess upon a luxury liner. In the second book, the robot dog accompanies her into space because the old lady left him to her. It was at that point I realised that the dog had killed his elderly owner so that he could be with Halo, who he had fallen madly   in love with. That gave me a magnificent plot twist to end the second book that was an enormous surprise to the reader because it was an enormous surprise to me.

So, in summary, misdirection is an enormously invaluable and irreplaceable tool for any aspiring writer… unless I’m lying.

Try writing a short story without plotting it out. Misdirect yourself by having no idea where you are going and seeing what happens. Whodunnit?

Part Four : Cast & Setting ~

17.	Character

Start from the assumption that any individual, in different circumstances, could have been any other individual. Thus, we can consider identity as an infinitely faceted crystal of which we choose to polish just one face.

By exploring other aspects, other faces of that crystal, you can imagine a whole range of alternate personalities for yourself. How would you think if you were of a different gender/race/morality/historical period/species?

You are going to be inhabiting these characters and you want to do it with conviction because you are trying to convince your readers that these are real people. So, let them be real people.

## H And The M Th E Pe N

You should come to know your characters so well that you will reach moments you had plotted that you now realise they would never do. This is the point where your characters are almost alive. Even if it  throws your  plot off, you  should always listen to what your characters are saying. The  point where  your  characters start dictating to you can be quite a surprising and eerie experience. When I was writing Watchmen, writing as the semi-psychotic, right-wing vigilante Rorschach, it occurred to me  that he hates himself and wants to die. So I had to refigure the ending based on what the character had told me about himself. Listen to your characters and what they’re trying to tell you with their words and actions because it can be very surprising.

## Bi Ographi Cal Re Se Arch

Sometimes, you  will be  writing about genuine historical individuals, and that is  a slightly different research-based process. When researching the royal surgeon, Sir William Withey Gull, for my book From Hell, I looked at every detail of the man’s life

–	his childhood as the son of a bargee; how the family’s circumstances changed when the railway started to replace barges; his early interest in nature, including biology. I was portraying him as a culprit of the Jack the Ripper murders and getting to know his politics, his worthwhile accomplishments and philosophy, would help me portray him as a nuanced individual, as well as the most famous serial murderer in British history. I didn’t want the stereotypical image of Jack the Ripper, simply a figure with    a top hat and a raised knife, but a real person that the audience would be able to understand. The only way of accomplishing that is through research.

## Th Re E -Di Me Nsi On Al H E Roe S & Vi L L Ai Ns

For your heroes to have any weight and resonance, you had better ensure your villains have the same. Even the most terrifying serial murderer should be written as a three- dimensional individual, so do try to get inside their personality. When writing V for Vendetta, I considered how to portray the  fascist secret state without reducing them to two-dimensional cartoons. I thought they would be perfectly ordinary people

–	bakers, street cleaners, cobblers and teachers – who had a very bad national experience. Some might be trying to do their best in a horrible regime, some going along with it because they’re frightened, while others might be actively enjoying the feeling of power. It’s important to  empathise with villains because, otherwise, they  can end up as completely predictable travesties.

The Show, a film I created with Mitch Jenkins, had an incredible number of characters, who all had narratives. There were no secondary characters, they all had story arcs and three-dimensional personalities. We told the actors to play it as if the whole film   is about you, because that’s how it works in real life. We all think that the whole film is about us. We are the centre of the narrative. The interaction of characters is generally a bunch of people interacting while all believing that the story is entirely about them. That is how three-dimensional characters behave.

## Borrow From A C T Ors

You don’t have to go full method and start living as your characters, but it’s not a bad idea to position yourself in front of a mirror and think about how the character feels and looks, physically. Try and inhabit them.

When I was writing an existing character for the Swamp Thing series, the Demon,  I did just this. How to embody a bright-yellow demon from hell who spoke in rhyme? So I sat down in front of a mirror and thought about a short, squat figure. Perhaps more dense than human beings, so his posture would be weighted down and he’d be fiercely solid. And hot. There would be an internal furnace that drove him to ferocity.  I attempted this low, inhuman growl and there he was. Once you’ve got the character’s voice, the way they stand and their body language, the way they think will follow on from that. This is the importance of inhabiting a character in the way an actor does.

Part Four : Cast & Setting ~

18.	Extreme Character

## Th E Spe Ci Fi C Be Come S Unive Rsal

When constructing a character, you will be taking things from your own life. Thoughts you’ve had, impressions you’ve had of people, and so on. I would advise you to look really deep into your own memories. Try to find those affecting moments that are unique to you because if we talk about something specific with enough passion, detail and reality, then it becomes universal. It strikes a chord somewhere deep in every human because, even if they haven’t had that precise experience, they have had something like it and thought it was something that had only happened to them.

This brings us to what is perhaps the most majestic power of art and  writing. If  we see an experience we thought was uniquely ours in a painting, film or novel, we feel less alone. And that is very possibly the ultimate purpose of all art and writing.

Sit in front of your mirror and embody your main character. Have them rehearse a speech, stand like them, mimic them smiling or giving themselves a pep talk. How do you feel in their shoes?

At some point during your writing career, you will probably be called upon to create characters that are not only beyond your experience but potentially beyond human experience altogether. At the shallow end this might include insane or psychopathic characters but there are also supernatural figures, aliens, inanimate objects or severed heads on spikes.

## H Ead On A Spi Ke

In  my novel, Voice of the  Fire, I  told the  gunpowder plot from the  point of view of    a decomposing head on a spike. That experience doesn’t exist, so I had to use my imagination. I put myself in that position and thought that probably my brains would have long since disintegrated, so that one of the few clinging relics might start to itch. What would I do to relieve it? Perhaps contrive to rock my skull back and forwards  slightly upon the spike. What would I be thinking? The birds would have taken my eyes, but I might still be able to hear. If you make it realistic enough, you can imagine yourself into any possible situation and create a real and unrepeatable experience for your readers.

## Al L -Se E I Ng E Ye

For my novel Jerusalem, I wanted a completely omniscient character who could see everything that was happening to all of the characters in the story, irrespective of which time period they were in. I decided to make a statue of the archangel Michael   in Northampton the still pivot around which the rest of the book is revolving, the thing that can see everything with his carven stone eyes. He is the absolute observer who knows everything that is happening to every character, everything that happened to their ancestors and everything that will happen to their descendants in a thousand years’ time.

## An A C T Of W I L L I Ng Posse Ssi On

If you create a particularly compelling character, good or evil, it will colour your own personality. It’s like an act of willing possession, you’ve invited these people into your head and they may stay around for a while. When I was writing From Hell, Sir William Withey Gull was a very compelling presence. Family and loved ones would note that, after writing, I would have a very sardonic, Victorian manner that I wore like a cloak.

## Franch I Se Ch Ara C Te Rs

You may reach a point in your career where you are called upon to handle franchised characters, those that you have not created and do not own. These generally come   in two forms: those that aren’t doing well and untouchable legends. In  the  latter case, the only thing you can do is look back at the past of that character, see what worked about it and try to emphasise that as a way of celebrating the qualities of the character rather than revisiting them.

The ones that aren’t doing well are your best bet because if  their sales figures are  that low, then you are probably being offered the character as a last-ditch act of desperation. This gives you a splendid opportunity for making it much better.

I had such an opportunity with Swamp Thing, a comic created in the early seventies about a scientist who’s fallen into swamp and arises as this green swamp monster that looks like it’s made out of vegetation. It had a certain appeal – it was a big swamp monster – but had huge limitations.

## ‘Solve E T Co A Gul A ’

With solve et coagula, you analyse something to find out why it isn’t working as well as it could, then put it back together in a hopefully improved way. This is what I did with Swamp Thing. Taking it apart I realised that there’s no way the scientist didn’t die. Armed with the knowledge of a horrid worm experiment where knowledge was transferred through ingestion, I made the swamp’s organisms absorb information from the scientist’s corpse, so the Swamp Thing wasn’t a transformed human being at all – he was a plant that thought it had been a human being. Or, as I’ve put it, ‘a ghost dressed in weeds’. Sales soared and everybody was very pleased with me.

## Do The Ri Gh T Thi Ng

Even extreme characters should have integrity, so listen to them and have them act in a way that is right for them, no matter how horribly the narrative will call for you   to treat them. Treat them as if they are your friends, albeit friends that regrettably you sometimes have to kill.

Apply the formula ‘solve et coagula’ to a story that you dislike. Can you dissect and reassemble it in an improved form?

Part Four : Cast & Setting ~

19.	Place

Place is incredibly important. Understanding place will greatly help your story and help you understand the psychology of your characters. The world in which a character spends their life has its effects upon them.

## W Al K W I Th A Ge Nd A

The method for investigating real places is perhaps a little bit complex and time consuming but it certainly pays off. There is a popular term called psychogeography or ‘walking with an agenda’ as Iain Sinclair calls it, that explores people’s experiences and history with a place.

Here’s an example from a  performance I  did at the Highbury Garage in London. I started to research the whole of Highbury and its history and discovered the following…

~ Under the Holloway Road is the double-headed Hackney Brook, an underground river that rises from two sources.

~ Highbury Hill was one of London’s pleasure hills, boasting all of the most exotic acts of its day, including Chang and Eng, the world’s first conjoined twins.

~ More recently the Highbury Garage had been run by an entrepreneur called Freddie Bird, who had connections with a lot of East End villains. One night he stopped

Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie creating uproar during a Dorothy Squires performance.

I noticed a link – the Kray twins, the double-headed Hackney Brook, Cheng and Eng the conjoined twins. There’s  something about things with two  heads that seems to  be underlying the landscape of Highbury. This became the basis for the story I told at Highbury Garage.

There are wonderful little connections that you could only spot by being on  the ground, but sometimes that won’t be possible. When I was starting the Swamp Thing series, I asked the comic company which swamp he was the ‘thing’ of. Having never considered this before, they guessed it might be the Florida Everglades or Louisiana.  I went with Louisiana because I like the music from there and so started to research with a local phrase book, a book of local slang, a map of the state and perhaps some individual towns, and a record of jukebox hits. I read about its history and learned that Spanish moss and water hyacinths grow there and that they have blue herons.

You don’t need very much and you will already know more about the place than most of the people that are living there. If you walk down a street and you know its history, all of the rich circumstances that have led up to that place, it will be like walking down a fantastic avenue of glory and mythology. Find out about places and make them burn with meaning and significance again, and you will find that the people living there will burn with meaning and significance.

## Pl A Ce As Ch Ara C Te R

In  some circumstances, the place can almost be the most important character in  a narrative. In The Show, the recent feature film I wrote and took part in, we were  lucky enough to have the collapsed bankrupt township of Northampton to ourselves. We were able to set a nightmare hanging in the actual place where these executions had taken place, all the way through showing shots of extraordinary buildings unique to Northampton.

The same can be said of books like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, where the castle Gormenghast is a physical presence that is altering the lives of all of the characters   in the book.

## Pl A Ce As St Or Y I Nspi Ra Ti On

If you look at any place deeply enough, I am convinced it will have a spectacular story to  tell you.  At  first glance, some places might seem devoid of  anything interesting  in their history or appearance but look again. Émile Zola saw a fantastic dreamland   in the rings of sedate red-brick suburbs radiating out from London and imagined endless novels from such a surreal landscape. Wherever you live, there is something sacred and fascinating about that ground on which you are standing. It is your duty  as a writer to excavate the meaning from that ground and convey it to your readers.

Part Four : Cast & Setting ~

20.	Creating Place

In this lesson, we tackle the creation of a wholly imaginary landscape or environment. To create a world is challenging but it is certainly not beyond your capabilities.

## I N Te Rn Al Consi Ste Ncy

It doesn’t matter how weird and fantastical it is, the rules of your world should be self-consistent. Whether it’s a world like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, or the fabulous and horrifically overgrown Eden of Brian Catling’s extraordinary Vorrh trilogy, you can keep it consistent.

## Te Xture

Texture is one of the first things the reader will be looking for to make it feel like     a real world. By texture, I mean all the trappings that we find around us in society

–	advertisements, scraps of news broadcasts, television  programmes,  songs  on the radio. We did this for The Show, which was based in Northampton, but not our Northampton: I wrote songs with musicians so that we could make the musical backdrop of the world keyed into the ideas that we were discussing; we came up with imaginary television shows, like a soap opera focused around German philosophy called Wittgenstein Terrace; products like Pet Noodles (like Pot Noodle with sinister pictures of missing pets on the containers); a celebrity magazine called Clammy.

Visit the place you are writing about. In person, if possible, but by research if not. What can you find out about its history, formative characters and psychogeography?

## Bb C M Aestro	32	St O R Y Telling

## I N Me Di A Re S

For the Halo Jones comic strip, I wanted to immerse the readers in the reality of this 50th-century world that I was imagining. I dumped the readers in media res

–	where you drop them right in the middle of everything without explaining it. They arrive halfway through a news broadcast talking about unfathomable things using unfathomable slang – things like a celebrity called Algae Baron Lux Roth Chop, who you have never heard of. This gives the reader the sense of being dumped in a real place and having to figure it all out, which is a satisfying experience for the reader because we delight in figuring things out.

## Th E Cre A T Or

Creating a place is almost a god-like experience. You create every element, every atom of that world, every person in it and every interaction. It can be a heady, exhilarating and, importantly, a totally immersive experience for you, and for the reader.

## Cre A Ti Ng Ne Opol I S

Top 10 came about because I wanted to create a superhero team. Often these team franchises don’t give enough attention to individual characters, so I considered a form that I knew handled a large cast well – the American police drama. The only way

Building Neopolis from the ground up, I needed to  consider  what  social  issues might be prevalent. With so many supernatural characters and  aliens with all  sorts of appearances, I didn’t think racism would occur, but there would be bigotries of  some sort. In Neopolis, it’s the robots that are second-class citizens, referred to contemptuously as ‘clickers’ and living in a ghetto known disparagingly as ‘Tin Town’.

Here, the place was offering me plot ideas. If I introduced a robot policeman, conflict and drama could ensue. And further, what about super pets? And pest control?

We did one storyline where a pest control officer – the Exverminator – releases super- powered cats to get rid of the mice. This ends up inciting a war between animal deities and it concludes with one god altering reality and time so that the initial infestation didn’t even happen.

This is the kind of thing you need to consider if you are going to think seriously about these absurd places and situations.

a superhero police force would work though, is if they were working in a city where	 	 everybody else had superpowers too. I started to conceive of a world where 1930s

America was so fed up with superheroes disrupting life with space invasions that they put them all in a city specially built for them. This was the beginning of Neopolis.

In Neopolis, everybody has superpowers. The only people using their powers to enforce the law are the police department, the rest of the population are short order chefs using their heat vision to grill hot dogs or super-speed pizza deliverers.

Read a novel or watch a film set in an imagined world. What is used to create texture and build up a sense of cultural cohesion? Are there newspapers, magazines, songs or other cultural touchpoints? How does the economy work?

Part Four : Cast & Setting ~

21.	Period

Period might be yet more influential in shaping a world and its characters. So, I would advise learning to love the processes of research because you are going to do an awful lot of it.

## Ah , Me Morie S

To a  certain degree, you can use your own recollection to enhance your depiction of  a period. A story set in the sixties or seventies, for example, I would colour with my own impressions but I would have to research further. We miss quite a lot and don’t necessarily understand the times we are living in.

## Pro Vi De Nce

In my book Providence, I mapped the  writings  of  H.  P.  Lovecraft  onto  a  specific  time and place. I situated his imaginary towns like Arkham in real American locations like Manchester in New Hampshire and Athol, Massachusetts, for his imaginary Dunwich. For the time, I thought that the best year would be just before Lovecraft had commenced his stories, which would be  circa 1919. I  made my  central character  a journalist so that he would have plenty of  motive for making investigations across the country, which is what I needed him to do to tell my story. I  decided it  would be    in New York and that he would probably be both Jewish and gay, as it might spark interestingly off Lovecraft’s regrettable antisemitism and homophobia.

I researched what papers a journalist might work for in 1919’s New York and found that the New York Herald had its offices in Herald Square, surrounded by a statue of the goddess Athena, stone owls and brass owls on the roof. It also had telephones and a pneumatic document delivery tube system. Those don’t look like the ones you’ve seen in films and we eventually managed to find a picture where they looked like a glass stirrup pump. These are the sort of details that are invaluable if you’re trying to conjure a real time.

The story starts in July 1919, when the papers were full of the Versailles Treaty after the closure of the First World War, when Germany had new restrictions put upon it that people worried would inevitably lead to a second world war. It was also the time of the first Red Scare, after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Governments around the world were terrified that it might happen in their own countries, and started to crack down on union activities. This resulted in strikes and an awful lot of unrest. My character visited Boston, the site of a couple of Lovecraft’s most important stories and also, the horrific Boston police strike of 1919. They had just dealt with the explosion of the molasses plant in Boston, which saw a three-foot wave of molasses rushing down the streets – children, horses, men and women getting trapped in it like flies on sticky paper. Unbelievable stuff which I could work into my story.

## De T Ai L S

I became perhaps a bit obsessive with the historical detail to the point that, discovering Lovecraft had researched the weather and phases of the moon, I decided that I couldn’t have  this long-dead racist  author getting some sort of  benefit over  me, and so did the same. It worked out really well. I was able to convey a time jump with different phases of the moon and discovered that January 1920 saw New York covered in snow, which made my final scenes in a park particularly picturesque. Find out all the details you can. By tracking down 1919 street plans for places like Athol (Manchester), I was able to know exactly what street my characters would have to walk down to get from A to B. It gives incredible confidence and authority to your writing that will convey itself to the reader.

## An A Chroni Sms

Watch out for anachronisms, as they can pull you out of the period quite forcefully.      In Boardwalk Empire, Stephen Graham as Al Capone compared a character with

## Spe E Ch & Sl Ang

A lot of what creates a sense of period will be the dialogue and idiom. I would advise using a dictionary of historical slang to build a glossary of slang for the  time and place your story is set in, say 18th-century America. You can even use the study of language to inform periods when we don’t have any idea how the people in that time talked. In my novel Voice of the Fire, I used a number of first-person narrators in Northampton, from its Neolithic origins right through to the present day. Chapter One featured an outcast Neolithic boy and I had to consider how he would speak and think.   I studied aboriginal languages and discovered that a lot of them only have one tense and very limited vocabularies. This was a key to inventing my Neolithic English, building a vocabulary of less than 500 words. This is astonishingly small as, by all accounts, you need a vocabulary of 10,000 words to even understand The Sun. This resulted in a long chapter, because a limited vocabulary means it takes longer to say things. It may be impenetrable to some readers, but it certainly conjured the time and the psychology of the individual talking. With each subsequent chapter I did the same, considering what the average person in Northampton would know at that time.

While place is of tremendous importance, we can never forget the importance of the moment, the particular era, the particular age. The time.

half a  tin  mask on  his  face to  Frankenstein. Although Mary Shelley had  written the	 	                                                                                                                                     novel in 1815, and Thomas Edison had produced a silent short film in 1910, a semi-

literate Chicago gangster is not going to be referencing a Mary Shelley novel in 1920.

Similarly,  Steve  Buscemi’s  character greets his  stepchildren as  munchkins. While L.

Frank Baum’s novel was written, nobody would have been referencing Wizard Of Oz characters until the MGM film in the thirties. This sort of thing can completely destroy a sense of period. Perhaps not everybody will notice, but there will always be people like me who will and probably bear a grudge against you for the rest of your life. And you don’t want that.

Pick a  period in history –  perhaps one that interests you or one you know nothing about – and compile a list of slang from that time using Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Use this list to create a first-person short story or poem from that period.

## Bb C M Aestro	35	St O R Y Telling	Ba C K T O Con Te N T S

Part Five : A Variety Of Forms ~

22.	Considering Media

You might enjoy a varied career as a writer, creating work for a number of different media, each with its own advantages and drawbacks.

## Th E Ad Apt A Ti On Curmudge On

Each medium has its own unique laws, things that it does splendidly and things it can’t do at all. This is probably why I am so unreasonably cranky about adaptations. I don’t see the logic of taking something which is perfectly realised as a comic book, novel, or even a film, and then realising it in another medium. The only advantage is financial, nothing to do with aesthetics or art; it is about squeezing the last few drops of money out of an idea by realising it as a computer game. Media are not interchangeable. If you are writing a comic, write it to the best of your ability and write it using those things that only a comic book can do. The same with a novel or film. Concentrate on the things that a novel does, or a film does, and no other media can do.

Yet I see people writing their novels with one eye on the film adaptation. That won’t work. They won’t make a film of your novel because you had a cinematic opening scene where you could imagine one of the characters looking just like Jodie Foster. Instead, they will ignore the novel because it is not playing to its own strengths. William Goldman’s book Magic lost the incredible twist when it was adapted to film, as it was obvious from the start that the character referred to as the dummy planted in the audience is a literal dummy. Similarly, David Lynch’s Eraserhead cannot be imagined as anything but a film, and there would be no point doing a graphic novel adaptation.

Part Five : A Variety Of Forms ~

23.	Comic Cuts

If you are writing a movie then play to the visual spectacle that film is capable of, the things that wordless sequences in movies or comic books can achieve, all the things that a novel can’t do. If you are writing a novel, play with person, tense, language and all the strengths of the medium. If you do this focused work in  a  number of fields it will enrich your writing.

## Transfe Rabl E Ski Ll S

A  lot of writing skills can be used across disciplines. You will find that working on  a film screenplay will give you a better sense of cutting and pacing that you can transfer to your other writing. While techniques of meter and rhythm used in poetry  can help you enthral the reader of your prose fiction.

Essentially, by covering different disciplines and media, you can become better at all of them. If you get the chance, play around in other fields. If there’s a field that doesn’t appeal to you because you’ve never tried it, then try to overcome your apprehension and plunge into it. You will probably find that you are much better than you imagined you were, simply with the skills that you have acquired through working in a variety    of media.

Here we arrive at the inevitable part of the course where we enter the nightmarish vortex of working in the comics industry.

## Boo , Comi Cs!

Comics is one of the most sublime media in the world. It is also one of the most voracious and kleptocratic industries, so I would advise avoiding until it has proper publishers who do not work to robbery targets.

## H Oorah , Comi Cs!

None of this takes away from the extraordinary power of comics as a medium. Capable of most of the literary effects described thus far, comics also have the sizeable added dimension of a sequential visual narrative. Unlike a movie, you can sit and ponder over the images and words for as long as it takes to absorb them. This gives you the opportunity to use the images as a separate ‘track’ on which to convey some aspects of the story, potentially freeing up the text to  talk about something else. This can create striking juxtapositions, provide counterpoint, or any number of novel effects. It also makes the comic form surprisingly elastic and able to contain immense amounts of information.

## Sci E Nce -Offi Ci Al E L Asti Ci T Y

When I was working on Brought to Light, I managed to fit in a mass of CIA information from the end of the Second World War, right up to the Iran-Contra affair – lots of sums of money, massacres, arms deals, drug deals, hundreds of names of conspirators and their associates. Thanks to the comics medium’s startling elasticity, I was able to do

a very elegant job getting all of that information in there, even having a couple of pages left over for little bit of extravagance that I’d added to the narrative to make it look that much more perfect.

In fact, there was a Pentagon study where they were  anxious to  find out  the  best way of conveying information in a form that would be understood and retained. They tried straight text, text with photographs, text with illustrations, and they tried comics. Will Eisner’s world’s worst Marine character would have the essentials of military life explained to him – how to assemble and disassemble your rifle – and it turned out of all of the methods of conveying information to soldiers, this was the one they would absorb and remember. Perhaps comics has a bigger future as an educational tool than in the entertainment medium.

## Comi Cs 101

In case you ignore my warnings and wish to work in the comics industry, it might be helpful if I give you the basics.

## ~ A V Oi D Re Dund Ancy

Don’t have a caption telling you that the hero goes downtown to sort things out if the panel has a picture of the hero going downtown to sort things out.

That’s redundancy.

## ~ Sti Ck T O The Ra Ti O

Mort Weisinger, disciplinarian editor on Superman back in the sixties, said

that if you’ve got a six-panel comic book page, you could have no more than 35 words per panel. So divide 210 words per page by the number of panels. Keep to that religiously.

## W E ’Ve On Ly Just Be Gun

With all these wonderful magic tricks, you can do nearly anything. And, given that comics in its modern form is a relatively young medium, there is the added advantage that there is still a whole world out there for writers with adventurous minds to explore. Just don’t come crying to me saying I didn’t warn you.

## ~ St Ar T W I Th A St Or Y M Ap

If it’s a 24-page story, write the number one to 24 down in a column and map

out what happens on each page.

Part Five : A Variety Of Forms ~

24.	Screen Gems

Just as any writer should fully acquaint themselves with the English language, I would advise any screenwriter to acquaint themselves with cinematic language. The way to do this is to study (and read intelligent critiques of) masters such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jean Cocteau and others, in this way acquiring a cinematic vocabulary.

## H I T Ch Cock’S Ge Ms

Reading François Truffaut’s book about Alfred Hitchcock was a revelation for me. He was explaining how Hitchcock achieved his effects in films like Psycho, shot by shot. I remember the scene in Psycho where one of the detectives is suspicious there might be something unusual on the upper floor of the Bates Motel. The  first shot is the detective looking up the stairwell, low-angled and looking up, which means that what you are looking up at is placed in a position of power, psychologically. In that instance, the audience’s tension increases because the detective is considering going upstairs but we feel the unknown power because of the way the image is set up. When the detective climbs the stairs it switches to an overhead shot, so that the audience is in the position of power but helpless to intervene. Whatever happens you are trapped looking at it from this position. This is the exact point at which the apparently crazy   old lady (which we later find to be Norman Bates himself) comes running out of the landing and stabs the detective to death – while we look on, helplessly.

The angle at which you look at something will affect the psychological mood of the shot. This is something that I’ve learned a great deal about when it came to writing for comics because it uses the same principles.

## Syd Fi E L D’S Ge Ms

Malcolm McLaren gave me a copy of Screenplay by Syd Field when we were working on the film Fashion Beast. It includes wonderful advice for any writer, but particularly for screenwriting.

## Procrasti N A Ti On

One of the most important lessons comes in the early chapters, where he confronts our natural inclination to procrastination. In my case, my working-class guilt takes  over and I get my arse onto the chair. This is the biggest problem in any field of art: getting your arse onto the chair. If you can do that, the rest of it will be a breeze. According to Syd Field, you will find the same problem at the end of the screenwriting process. Tinkering becomes a problem and you have trouble moving on. Just know what you’re doing, know that you’re procrastinating and then get over it.

## Th Re E -A C T Struc Ture

I mentioned earlier that Syd Field was also the exponent of the simple three-act screenplay. It’s best to consult his book, but here’s a swift introduction.

## ~ A Ct One : Se T-Up

You begin by establishing all of your characters, their environment and situations, so that the viewer has a good idea of the kind of story and a possible structure. They might even try to guess the ending.

## A W Ord On W Ri Ti Ng For Te L E Vi Si On

## ~ A C T T W O: Confron T A Ti On

The second act pursues the same ideas that were set up in Act One, but brings them to a surprising conclusion that completely redefines what people have understood from the film so far, and what they expect as an ending.

## ~ A Ct Th Re E :  Re Sol Uti On

The sudden twist at the end of the second act propels the action to a startling climax at the end of the third act.

These acts do not have to be of equal length. If everything is set up, you might have the big twist earlier on in the film, whatever seems to be the most dramatically suitable.

## Re Son An T Di Al Ogue

One thing that will greatly aid any screenplay is continuous resonant dialogue: no throwaway lines, keep the dialogue sparkling all the way through. Avoid expositional dialogue, where you use a character to explain the plot of the film. If you need to explain plot points, do it in a memorably amusing or dramatic way so that you don’t waste any of the opportunities that a line of dialogue would offer you.

You should be able to identify your characters by their dialogue, even if they are not on screen. Think about who is delivering the line and see if you can craft the line to reveal a little more about their character and psychology.

This is a great way of filling out characters. With a great line of dialogue, they will be immensely memorable.

This is something that I have less experience of, although I did write a projected five- season television series which will almost certainly never be made. It did, however, give me some idea how you should lay these things out. Foremost was that I knew the ending before I started - what the last shot in the last episode of the last season was going to be.

I cannot underline how important this is. I have given up on boxsets where it becomes apparent that the writers are making it up as they go along. The shapeless narrative drift is a terrible experience for both the writer and for the viewer, having invested hours watching to discover that there wasn’t  any  meaningful ending. It  is  important in any medium to know your ending first, but in something as long form as television   it is vital.

(BBC Maestro would no doubt be delighted if I pointed you to Jed Mercurio’s TV writing course here, but I am naturally above such commercial vulgarity.)

Read Syd Field’s book and plot your story out using his three-act structure.

Part Five : A Variety Of Forms ~

25.	Words, Music & Performance

We talked earlier about improving yourself by trying other forms of writing. I have always enjoyed songwriting. I cannot play a single musical instrument, but I am lucky enough to have known and collaborated with some really good musicians.

## Lyri Cs

Acquiring skills as a songwriter can be useful in a wider writing career, if only by demonstrating how supposedly decorative and flowery metre and rhyme can distil narrative information into a more compact form. That is why most of the great epics are told in verse.

## Musi C For Pl A Ce

There are  other benefits to being able to write a  decent song or two. If  you are   world building for an imagined place, music can be a great way to insert texture and background culture for your characters and events. I wrote songs for the series Top  10 to suggest character and to add atmosphere.

From a film industry point of view, it is also cheaper to write your own songs than pay extortionate royalties.

## Pe Rform Ance

Performing can be stressful but  being able to  captivate a  couple of  dozen  people at a  poetry reading will pay  enormous benefits. You  get  immediate reaction from  the audience, whereas in a normal writing career, the most perfect line of your life, permanent on a page, might get no response at all. A positive review or a warm letter, while welcome, is not the same as being able to tell in the moment whether your material and delivery are working or not. That’s invaluable.

Even if it is just a chance to show off, if you get the chance to perform your work in any capacity, please take it.

## Re Al Pe Opl E

A simple yet meaningful benefit is that you will be in a room with other people, otherwise the life of a writer can be a very solitary thing. Unlike some writers, I cannot go and sit in a coffee shop to create. I need complete silence and no interruptions, which leads to a condition of pretty much permanent isolation. In fact, when lockdown started, I thought that if the virus was created in a lab, it would have been by a writer. Lockdown is normal for writers like me. Never seeing your friends, never going out, hearing from people over the phone intermittently, being in a room on your own in complete silence – this is our existence.

## Ba Ck Ground Sil Ence

That brings me on to writing to music. I used to enjoy listening to music when I was a cartoonist but that’s a different thing entirely. Cartooning can be done by some sort of vestigial brain that you have in your wrists. I used to listen to the John Peel show and it wouldn’t affect my cartooning at all. Once you start writing, that all changes.

I realised that I couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics because it would interfere with the words that I was trying to write. I moved on to purely instrumental pieces but was halfway through an album by John McLaughlin when the music was interfering with the rhythms that I was trying to write in. Listening to ambient music lasted a couple   of months before I realised that was affecting the atmospheres I was creating. Some of my comic strips from that period feature huge captions focused on the way things sound, all because I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno and Harold Budd. Eventually  I gave in to the silence.

Write a song that acts as a soliloquy for your main character.

Part Five : A Variety Of Forms ~

26.	Future Media

Much like the shark, the printed book is a perfectly adapted form with little need for evolutionary change, that will probably still be with us in some form for as long as there are people. However, it will no doubt be frequently superseded by emergent technologies that demand new approaches to narrative, such as VR and the imminent launch of VR ‘metaverses’ from the big tech companies.

While at present such ventures seem mostly designed to facilitate data-harvesting, the technology might at some point become a genuine art form and  a  writer should be ready for that eventuality.

## Vi R Tu Al Re Al I T Y

As with place in prose, texture will help create that global sense of  culture in  a completely wrap-around reality. The little details like newspapers, magazines, shops, songs playing on the radio – everything a person might experience in this virtual world.

It would also help to give all background characters a story arc and distinct personality to conjure meaningful interactions and give a completely immersive experience.

A good novel is still our best form of virtual reality but VR in its current technological form is very compelling. I can see it becoming problematic with people divorcing themselves from reality and immersing themselves in an imaginary universe.  However, there are potential benefits that might come from  such a  technology like  the transcendental states described by  mystics. These are  things that only happen in people’s minds.

It is quite possible that by  using virtual reality we  might be  able to  move  people into more useful states of consciousness in the same way the mystics have always apparently been able to do. With enough skill it is possible that virtual reality could move your audience into a higher level of consciousness.

Part Six : Progressive Writing ~

27.	The Need For Progress

Another way in which writing resembles the shark, as posited above, is that if it doesn’t keep moving forward, it will die.

## Th E Gol De N Rut

One way that this death can occur, is the ‘golden rut’ that can afflict successful writers who have found a winning formula and then, effectively, choose to repeat it forever. This will probably lead to diminishing returns for the readership, but enough readers will want the same comforting book to maintain the author’s career. However, their writing will stagnate. All of those other books that they might have written will never exist. I think it is a big mistake to rest upon your laurels, however tempting it is.

## Drop I T

A tactic I have found most useful is to immediately drop a device as soon as you become aware you have used it before. This means that you will have to go the trouble of coming up with new devices for every story, which is  a  tremendous amount of work, but you will be progressing. You will not be a still dead shark in the water.   For example, a simple device I used in Watchmen was to overlap dialogue, imagery, or even colour between one scene and the next. This device carries the reader through the changes in the narrative at a furious pace as well as being aesthetically pleasing.  I noticed that when I did a Batman book, The Killing Joke, I was still using the same techniques. It seemed to add nothing new to my writing or extend it in any way, so I abandoned that device and tried radically different things. Of course you should retain learnings, but it is important to keep evolving.

Part Six : Progressive Writing ~

28.	Forward Movements

## A V An T-Garde

The work needs to move forward as well as the individual as a writer. You need to have a progressive edge to writing that is constantly progressing. There has been a fairly comprehensive failure by most of the avant-garde to engage readers because much of the material is deliberately dissonant. However, I believe there are ways to use avant-garde techniques that will greatly enrich a story without turning the audience away in droves.

It is necessary to have a progressive attitude to writing because the rate of change   is accelerating. I believe that in the present day, we will have more information in the next year than has existed in the whole of previous human history. The world around us is changing all the time so it is important for you as a writer to stay on top of that, and continue to move forward in your thinking and writing if you wish to survive the evolutionary changes that are already upon us.

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It is important to note that the avant-garde is not somehow sectioned off from the rest of literature but part of the body of writing.

## Th E Fi Rst X

Things that were immensely avant-garde in their day will carry out  a  slow passage  to the very heart of writing and culture until they are everywhere. Perhaps the first modernist or post-modern novel was Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the titular narrator is attempting to tell his life story. However, he becomes so digressive that he doesn’t get past his birth. This is an incredibly modern – and funny – technique that was avant-garde at the time.

## Th E Fi Rst Y

Another example would be Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, in which she introduced the ‘stream of consciousness’ writing technique. This is where you are inside a character’s head, pursuing thought followed by thought. It is a very compelling rush of experience that, since Virginia Woolf, has been used by everybody from the Beat writers to the cyberpunks. It is now a technique at the centre of literature and is there for any writer to employ whenever they wish.

Part Six : Progressive Writing ~

29.	Approaches To The Future

## Th E Fi Rst Z

Marcel Proust was the first person to write about involuntary memory in Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated as In Search of Lost Time). As with Sterne and Woolf, Proust’s was an approach that now pervades our culture, but was seen as radical at the time.

In most everyday writing you will find that using avant-garde techniques in otherwise non-avant-garde writing can be like adding a vital pinch of spice. It can enliven an entire work just by making some slight change to the way that you present it. It can make old ideas suddenly new again.

Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner was relentlessly modernistic, using shifting levels  of reality and modern approaches to psychology that were completely unheard of in television of the sixties. Yet the show was commissioned, and although it was dealing with strange, unprecedented things, it had an incredibly wide audience that seemed to go across all of the class barriers, so that people were discussing the philosophy in The Prisoner when they were in the newsagent buying a packet of cigarettes.  It was a wonderful example of how pervasive the avant-garde can be, in the right hands. It should certainly not be overlooked by any writer.

The mathematician, Douglas Hofstadter, described creativity as a set of adjustable parameter dials that can be applied to any situation. As we saw earlier, by tweaking the dials on Romeo and Juliet, say, you can create West Side Story. What Hofstadter also said was that a genius is somebody who twists a dial that nobody else had noticed, something so fundamental to the way we tell a story that nobody had thought it could be changed. So that is one practical approach to progressive writing.

## L I Te Rar Y Di Ffi Cult Y

This is an idea I  only heard  about relatively recently,  which I  had  been practising  for most of my career. In writing Voice of the Fire, I wrote the first chapter in an impenetrable invented Neolithic language and many readers would have been put off. This is the idea of literary difficulty, whereby a writer uses a technique that she knows will reduce her audience, but will force those readers who remain to engage with the work on a deeper, more satisfying level.

## A Udi E Nce Col L Abora Ti On

I think the art I have best responded to myself, is the art that has made me do some of the work, whether that be simply imagining what the characters look like or in understanding a difficult story point or a difficult way of approaching literature. It is extremely satisfying once you’ve cottoned on to it, then all of a sudden it opens up your vistas.

## Th E Cu T-Up

I remember the first time that I read the writings of William Burroughs, the Beat writer who famously pioneered the cut-up technique. This is where you cut texts up and then put them together mismatched so that you get these accidental sentences emerging with completely exotic uses of words and grammar that can be very striking. Some of them will be junk, but the joy is in the selecting.

The first time I read it I found it completely alienating, but I slowly started to see the poetry in it and how one might add a random element to storytelling.

## Scrumpi Ng From A Cade Mi A

A useful way to mine genuinely progressive ideas is to look at what is circulating in academia. Some of them will seem strange or difficult to understand but if you persist, you can find some wonderful ways of looking at things in academic books.

I recently came across ‘misprision’, an academic term that – if I’ve got it right – means a wilful misunderstanding where you know that a certain idea is not correct but you use it anyway because it opens up creative possibilities. When I was preparing my

H. P. Lovecraft opus, Providence, I was reading an awful lot of Lovecraft criticism including the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ that had been an invention of later writers and that Lovecraft himself would not have recognised. One psychologist, Dirk Mosig, suggested that all of Lovecraft’s stories were intended as episodes of some gigantic hypernovel, that he was creating a new form of the novel that comprised these 30 or 40 fragmentary stories. While H. P. Lovecraft had not meant anything like that, with the concept of ‘misprision’ in my mind, I thought, ‘But what if he had?’ And so I began building that hypernovel and so came the plot structure for Providence.

## Pi Ck Th E I R Brai Ns

I would suggest also mining some of the writings in modern neuroscience. They are coming up with all sorts of interesting terminology to talk about how the reading experience affects us on a neurological level. It was there that I learned of the concept of indirect free discourse, where you can move from the inside of one character’s stream of consciousness into another’s, often in the space of a page. In being able to inhabit all of the different characters in a novel, the reader will apparently have  a greater empathetic understanding of all of them, which will increase their involvement with the story. What is perhaps a throwaway concept to a neuroscientist is gold to a committed writer. Any scrap of technique that you could use that would give you a slight advantage over all of the other aspiring writers out there should be grasped with both hands.

t

## Bb C M Aestro	47	St O R Y Telling	Ba C K T O Con Te N T S

Part Six : Progressive Writing ~

30.	Lost In The Funhouse

In this penultimate segment, we discuss the dangers of progressive writing, taking the title of John Barth’s iconic postmodern story collection. One story, Night Swimmers, sees the narrator and his companions swimming in this dark ocean. One by one, they perhaps sink until there are fewer and fewer of them until, eventually, the narrator continues to swim beneath the dark skies. It ends there and is never explained. It occurred to me a month or  two after reading the story that they are sperm. It’s a wonderful story in a truly brilliant collection.

However, it had a cautious rebuttal from the John Barth fan and writer, David Foster Wallace, who responded with a character from one of his stories asking, “But for whom is the funhouse fun?” The implication is that producing work that is only comprehensible to a handful of academics is all but futile. It is elitist and exclusionary, ruling out a large chunk of your audience by doing that.

There are some wonderful ways of writing progressive avant-garde material that is still immensely entertaining.

## Mul L I Gan Ste W

As a catalogue of  the  pitfalls awaiting avant-garde writers and  a  salutary example  of successful progressive writing, I  recommend Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew,  an ingeniously hilarious avant-garde novel about someone writing a dreadful avant- garde novel.

t

There are some wonderful touches in it. All of the characters in the novel get together in between scenes to discuss how the novel is going and previous books they featured in.

“In one job I threw my clothes on at least twenty times.”

“My interest slackens when I’m forced to watch the smoke from my cigarette curl lazily in the air.”

“Especially when it’s blue smoke—and it’s always blue smoke!”

One chapter was the writer’s attempt at pornography and is one of the funniest pornographies that you will ever read. It was based on the style of Victorian pornographies with their very overblown language. You would have this sexual situation where the writer keeps describing the colour of the underwear being torn off the female participants. The writing gets so overwrought that some of the underwear is being ripped off numerous times and seems to be changing colours.

Another book of Gilbert Sorrentino you might want to look at is Aberration of Starlight, which is not funny so much as incredibly moving. It tells the story of a woman and   her young son at a boarding house, and the arrival of a travelling salesman who might be a good romantic match for  the  young single mother.  Each chapter is  composed of three or four different parts, perhaps a letter that the character has written but not posted, a fantasy the character has had, and so on. You start to get an idea of how all of these people are misunderstanding each other. In fact, the title is an astronomical term that means the difference between where a star really is and where we perceive it as being.

## Bb C M Aestro	48	St O R Y Telling	Ba C K T O Con Te N T S

Part Six : Progressive Writing ~

31.	The Evolution Of Writing

## Doc T Or Hoffm An

There are obviously many more wonderful avant-garde writers. I might recommend Angela Carter’s berserk Baroque fantasies that are like nothing else in science fiction, fantasy, or anything else for that matter. One of her early books, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, is a completely fluid landscape of changing genders and changing personalities.

## I Nfi Ni Te Je St

One of my favourite discoveries, one that many people had made long before me, is the writer David Foster Wallace, author of  Infinite Jest. Wallace likes to take  a basic institution, in  this case a  sports college training tennis players, but makes it represent the whole of society. The beauty of his work is his perverse sense of humour in the way that he relates with his readers. There are numerous footnotes, so you have to flip to the back of the book where the footnotes are there in order.  Many people will miss this out, but you miss an awful lot of the narrative if you do so. At around page 400, I came to a character using a very unusual turn of phrase, so   I turned to the footnote, which read, “No clue”. I realised at that point that David Foster Wallace was, in fact, trying to annoy me and at that point I was in on the joke and really enjoyed it. He’s employing literary difficulty to make the novel a challenge for the average reader, but that forces the reader to engage with the novel in a different way. All of David Foster Wallace’s work is fascinating and a suitably enquiring and progressive writer will find much of value there.

All of these are examples of avant-garde writing which does amazing, progressive things with literature which, more importantly, is enormous fun for the reader, taking us back to John Barth and the importance of a funhouse actually being fun.

The evolution of writing seems to work pretty much the same way human evolution has worked. Both writing and DNA are predicated on language (one with 26 letters, one with four), and both are seemingly capable of endless permutations, countless dead-ends but many spectacular breakthroughs, all in the service of evolving towards a more perfectly adapted form.

When we talk about the evolution of writing, we are talking about the evolution of the individual writer and writing as a field. I would remind you of our opening statement, where we said that, in the Palaeolithic period, writing became our foremost means of modifying human consciousness itself.

I would like to welcome you,  as  an  aspiring writer,  to  this enormously important and timeless human tradition. You are  part of  this society stretching back through  the ages of shamans, magicians and writers who have done so much to shape the development of the human story. You can become part of this marvellous tradition  and play your own part, however small, however large, in this marvellous enterprise of expanding the capacity of what human beings can think, or feel, or do, or say, along with the number of ways in which they can say it.

So, in conclusion, I would like to welcome every single one of you to this enormously important and transformative human tradition.

## Bb C M Aestro	49	St O R Y Telling	Ba C K T O Con Te N T S

32.	Extroduction

I would like to stress in this extroduction – and yes, that is a word I just made up (ah, the liberty of being a writer) – that writing is for everybody.

It is not just for me and people with my amazing haircut, it is for absolutely everybody, whatever the outcome of your writing career.

The most important thing is that you had a writing career. Writing will be your best friend. If your life is turning to rubbish, as life sometimes does, writing allows you to lose yourself in another world. The time that you are writing does not exist and, believe me, that can be an enormous comfort.

Most of the people I know who have started writing have become addicted to it. They might not necessarily be published, but the act of writing gives them a huge dimension in their life which is easily as powerful as meditation.

Writing is not only an excellent form of meditation that will enrich your life, but you also might get publishable work out of it that can transform your life materially as well.

There are so many benefits to writing. I cannot tell you how much richer my own life has been since becoming a writer 40 years ago. I urge you to open yourself up to the limitless opportunity and the limitless complexity that a life in writing will allow you.

So, in conclusion, I would like to ask you to please write responsibly, stop when the fun stops, and beware dodgy adverbs.

Now, I want every one of you to get out there and write me a better world, because this one is completely fundamentally flawed. And fucked.

Alan Moore

## Bb C M Aestro  50  St O R Y Telling	Ba C K T O Con Te N T S

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