How to Make the Write Money Part 3

Your story will be more likely to come alive if you have authenticity in your settings – your descriptive pieces.This is achieved by your own familiarity with what you are writing about, in other words, heed what has been said many times; “always try to write about what you know.”

Consult your notebooks, your files, your “bank.” You should be accumulating a store of sketches on places, people, settings that you can dip into, words that will trigger your imagination and put validity into your descriptions. The art of description is not easy but can be made less difficult by the application of a few rules, and practice. Make detailed and mentally pictorial notes of food, clothes, furnishings, household utensils, everything in fact, that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelt.

This is invaluable practice in enabling you to introduce authenticity into your writing. The authors aim is to make the reader react to the description so that he can actually feel, see, hear, touch or smell that which is being described. At least try to look at pictures with the eye of the painter, buildings with the eye of an architect, listen to sounds with the ear of a musician.

The purpose of narrative description is to conjure up a vivid picture of the actual setting, but beware; if the description is too laboured, too long, or too high flown it will fail to achieve its desired effect. It must always possess some artistic merit, even when it only represents the commonplace; the one unforgivable offence of the writer is to be dull.

How do you avoid this risk of boring your reader with your descriptive passages? Dramatise. No better illustration of this intensifying process could be found than in this description; “Martin hesitated with his hand on the rusty latch of the formal gates. The wind had swung the gate against him as he approached, but the latch was caught up and did not fall into its hasp. He fingered the twisted iron ring which served as a handle and looked deprecatingly at the slovenly brick and rough cast front of Garroch. An eaves gutter had leaked and the plaster of the upper floors was marked with long brown streaks where dribbles of stained water had run into a strange pattern like the sketch of an inverted tree. The three half-dead little firs planted haphazard in the rough grass before the house wagged their heads fiercely in the October wind.

“If I believed in omens,’ reflected Martin, “I should certainly not go in. The gate bangs in my face and the trees shake their heads at me.” “

With acknowledgement to the late J.D.Beresford.

Notice how cleverly the author has combined drama into a descriptive passage. Scenes like this are fairly commonplace on a sombre, autumn day, but the reader is made to feel that this scene is quite out of the ordinary. The kind of details wanted in present day fiction are those know only to someone who has carefully observed them. If it is a town then you need to know the typical objects, building, people, jobs, livestock; again, that you know, for what is in your subconscious will surface to your conscious self when you are creating.

Nothing heightens suspense so much as clear descriptions of the natural elements. Creative writing possesses the great advantage of being able to rely on and distinguish between the most trivial atmospheric conditions; a screeching wind, a moaning wind, a gust of wind, a drizzle or a downpour.

Use your imagination, create the conditions in your head, visualize them and write down immediately what comes to mind. After all, this is only your rough draft. You can get down to the pleasurable business of refining and polishing later.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

STYLE

“Style, or craftsmanship, or form, or whatever other word you select to mean the same thing, is not a quality tacked on or spread over or fitted on to a writer’s work, but the very quality of the work itself.’ So remarked a distinguished critic.

Style is really the way you look at things. Things may vividly impress you and your reaction to these impressions may result in a style that is flamboyant, satirical, sardonic, passionate, or harsh. Of course there are several ways of expressing the same thing, but verbal bliss is only one of many considerations which make up an authors style. It is a frame of mind, a manifestation of the subconscious.

It is as well to remember that it is just not enough to have an admirable plot, or solid settings and characterisation, which, by themselves constitute the greater part of the story, but the writer needs to acquire a style of their own. Not necessarily a correct one, but at least a distinctive one. Otherwise he/she cannot hope to make their readers see people and places as they would wish to.

I can do no better to conclude this section than quote a piece of excellent advice offered by that master story teller Somerset Maugham to a would-be author; “The writer is well advised who writes most simply. I would have him use the plainest words and put them in the most natural order. I have no patience with writers who employ bizarre constructions and make a parade of unusual epithets. Nothing goes out of fashion so quickly as affectation, nor is anything so stilted as the modish phrase of the year before last. Above all, be clear. I do not think any writer has the right to ask the reader to puzzle over his meaning. If he knows it himself he can put it in plain terms; if he is unwilling to do this he must be very sure that it is profound enough to repay the readers trouble when he has got to the bottom of it. Nothing is so tiresome as the obscurity which envelopes a commonplace.”

In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style. Ernest Hemingway