WriteWords Blogs

Plain and perfect, rich and rare: what is "lyrical" writing?

A writer friend says that her MA tutor described her writing as "lyrical", and she asked what he meant. He said "something about lyrical writing remaking the world & making the world appear anew", but what does that mean in practice? At the basic level, "lyrical" means that it shares something with poetry: a certain intensity, perhaps, though it might be interior, emotional intensity, or an outward-looking evocation of time and place. It needn't necessarily be about beautiful things: as Sebastian Salgado's photographs of miners show, it's possible to make beautiful art out of ugly things, or out of frightening things as Elizabeth Bowen does here.

It needn't be about strange things or people or settings either, though of course it might be.

This Happy Fellow: my year at Goldsmiths

The Royal Literary Fund Fellow's job is simple, on paper. We are paid by the RLF to spend two days a week, in term time, for a year, supporting academic writing across the whole of an academic institution. Most are universities, but conservatoires and art schools also have RLF Fellows, and the students who come range from first years who've never written an essay to postgrads in the very middle of the PhD muddle. Their problems can be anything from "What does 'critically analyse' mean?" to "I need a Distinction or I won't get funding". I am cooking up a post of my Ten Top Tips for Academic Writing but, meanwhile, here's a tweaked version of a piece I wrote for the RLF Fellow's own forum, about my first impressions of the post.

Unlike some brand-new, nervous RLF Fellows, I was already familiar with the institution: Goldsmith�s is a small, compact campus three urban miles from home. It�s only concerned with the arts, humanities and social sciences, and I did my own PhD in Creative Writing there not so long ago. I also taught there for a year, so today�s undergraduates, from those who live and breathe Theory, to those whose sentences would be impressive in a nine year old, aren�t too much of a shock.

But that doesn�t mean I wasn�t brand new and nervous about the post.

Tales From My Writing Head: Tone (Part One)

There�s an old joke about a teacher berating a pupil: �Boy, don�t look at me in that tone of voice.� And it�s funny because it�s true, of course. My parents used to make a point of getting me to say sorry, for all kinds of things I didn�t feel sorry about. I would eventually say it � �Sorry� � but in a tone as if firing it out of my sphincter. It didn�t matter, though, because for them it was just the word that counted.

But for an author tone is everything. And yet it�s not an easy quality to dissect. You know when it�s right and you know when it�s wrong or muddled or absent. I don�t think it necessarily has to be smooth and suave, by the way � the correct tone can be choppy, long-winded or even boring, as long as it�s serving the job the reader expects it to do, or at least is surprised by in the right way.

When I was at art college, they got us to do an exercise to improve our ability to differentiate tones. Most of us are not so good at this because we�re subjected constantly to such a huge range of different colours which are already clearly differentiated. So, at college we used to paint a picture but only using one colour. This automatically made us focus more strongly on tone. I believe the key to establishing effective tone in writing is similar: not to restrict your writing to say one word but more to become adept at expressing a multitude of emotions and characteristics through a single approach to the story.

So, I�m going to try to break tone down into five constituents that hopefully will make it easier to get hold of:

The 500th Postiversary Competition: win a writer's retreat and other prizes

I can't quite believe that This Itch of Writing has being going for 500 posts - and five and a half years, come to that - but it's true. To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to have a competition, and some of my favourite writerly places have kindly offered prizes.

TO ENTER: Write a blog post, 500 words at most, which is helpful, interesting or illuminating for other writers. Of course this will stem from your own experience of writing, but the focus of This Itch of Writing is outwards, towards other writers, not inwards towards yourself. If you're new to This Itch of Writing, have a look here, to get an idea of the range of topics across the whole blog. If you want to include links or images that add real value to your post then please do, bearing in mind that This Itch is all about the words on the page.

THE PRIZES: In the spirit of This Itch that every writer is different and so wants and needs different things, the first prize is to be able to choose whichever of these three will be most useful and pleasurable for you:

A two-night Writers Retreat at Retreats for You in Sheepwash, North Devon, where full board and friendly writerly company come as standard, and total silence and lunch-on-a-tray are offered with equal generosity.

One year's Full Membership of WriteWords, which apart from anything else in the way of Groups, Jobs&Opps, Directory and so on, is the place that about 50% of all my posts here started out, as thinking-aloud-in-the-forum.

On the Wrong Side of the Circus at the Funeral

Behind me I heard a man with a foreign accent ask about a group of elderly men in dark red berets, gathered in the Circus. �Paras,� someone told him. �Oh, I thought they hated her.� Then, �Why are there Parisians here?�

�Paratroopers!� someone growled.
A woman in front of me turned round. �And they didn�t hate her- they admired her. They wished she was on their side to negotiate with the Common Market.� After this, silence for about half an hour.

I could hear protesters on the north side of the Circus: a single voice shouted �Maggie. Maggie. Maggie� and a chorus answered, �Dead. Dead. Dead�.

Time to revise, but how will I know if I'm making it better, not worse?

Everyone knows about the terror of the blank page that you've just written Chapter One at the top of. Some writers spend weeks approaching it, dabbing a couple of words on, and deleting them. Others research for a decade in order to avoid getting to the blank page moment at all. And one of the chief reasons that the crazy/shitty first draft principle works for so many people is that suddenly the cost of failure isn't so high: this was only a crazy first draft, after all. Anything goes to get words on the page; we'll turn them into the right words later.

But what if you're fine with starting, and with finishing that draft, but are terrified of revising? Some feel uneasily that their punctuation/grammar/spelling aren't up to scratch, but that's relatively easy to learn - and you may not be nearly as bad as you think. Others just don't know where to start eating this elephant: some suggestions here. But what if what worries you is revising the bigger and more intangible things? What if you're terrified you won't know if you're making it worse, not better? For some, that fear can be paralysing. First, here are some thoughts about how to keep in touch with the shore as you launch out into the unknown.

Time Goes By: 'Merrily We Roll Along' by Stephen Sondheim at The Harold Pinter Theatre

Stephen Sondheim , at 50, was the leading composer/lyricist of his generation, but 'Merrily We Roll Along', famously flopped on Broadway in 1981. However, Sondheim didn't give up, and thirty years on Michael Grandage's Donmar Warehouse production won the Olivier 'Best Musical' award.

Friday night's crowd at The Harold Pinter Theatre seemed to like this new production, but it was one of those audiences that seemed to be top-heavy with friends of the cast. Not that the cast weren�t good �they were- but the play still has its flaws.

A major weakness is that the story's told backwards, spanning two decades from the protagonists' washed-up middle age back to their early optimism ; it lacks the, �What happens next?' that normally drives a plot.

Tales from My Street: Does Writing at Eighty Per Cent pay the Bills Better than a Hundred?

�How come quality doesn�t really sell?� I say.

I�m not sure Nige has heard me, since he continues frowning at the three pints of lager lined up before him in a dead straight row. He�s not feeling comfortable, I know, since I insisted we sit at a table tonight, instead of his preferred position, leaning at the bar. I think he believes that the bar offers some protection against possible public criticism of his drinking methods. Which is, essentially, to wait until it�s almost closing time, then down all three pints in a minute or two, thereby, I suspect, feeling he�s had a really good night out. That and receiving a hefty alcohol kick. Three pints on the bar might just comprise two that the barman has temporarily placed there for other customers. In a dead straight row.

But my legs are aching from cycling to work most of this week and I need to sit.

�Because, Tel,� he says eventually, pushing the base of one of the glasses slightly, straightening the straightness of the line. �The extra time, money and sheer bleedin� effort required to make something a hundred per cent good is disproportionate to what�s needed to make it eighty per cent good.�

�You sound like you�re quoting from an instruction manual.�

He looks up. �I am. But it�s one that ain�t never been published.� He taps the side of his head. �Every builder has it burnt into his brain cells. These days, you learn the hard way through experience, but in ancient times, apprentices would be brainwashed at a very early stage by their masters. A young, keen guy would for instance take ages making sure he got some door painted perfect: no brush strokes showing, nice even application. But the gaffer would say, �No, no, no; you have to do it like this.� And he�d show him how to paint it much faster. If the apprentice was conscientious, he�d notice that the final quality of the gaffer�s work weren�t actually as good as his own.�

He stops speaking, nods at me knowingly, waiting for me to put the pieces of his quality puzzle together.

Fact is, he and I know that I�ve raised this subject in relation to writing. And lately I�ve been trying to figure out a certain mystery where authors are concerned.

What I learnt, as a writer, about writing, from A S Byatt's Possession

A while ago I blogged about what's going on, intuitively, when you're reading a really good book, using Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. But, of course, many of us do read a really good book for a conscious, specific purpose. And if you have to write at length about it then you have to read even more clear-headedly. In my case, the first time I did that was for my MPhil dissertation, and the book was A S Byatt's Possession.
I was writing a novel which wasn't, then, called The Mathematics of Love, and there were things I wanted to say about my first, 1819, story that couldn't be said until a 1976 world. I balked at the all too well-used letters-in-the-attic scenario, but it didn't matter: I invented my planning grid, and used it to track and pattern themes, images, ideas and places, and one mysterious child. Then my squirming, half-formed novel was rejected by an agent on the grounds that parallel narratives don't work. Aha! What I was trying to do had a name, had it?

With not a little sense of thumbing my nose at her I decided to write the critical paper for my Masters about a parallel narrative novel which does work. I needed novel with two stories with wholly different casts, set in wholly different eras and well-enough written to stand up to critical scrutiny: A. S. Byatt's Possession was the obvious candidate, with Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin as runner-up.

Quieter than usual: The Start of the London Marathon

So much of the area this year is cordonned off for the use of runners only that I need to take a detour if I'm watch the start from near the park gates. I walk all the way down to the Observatory. Overhead, the drone of helicopters, and I recall my husbands words to me just before I left home: 'Security is 40% up on last year.' Is that the reason why there seem to be fewer supporters in the park?

Spring Roundup: Pinterest, the Postiversary, and other stories

It must be spring in the air: I'm fantastically busy on various fronts, but some of them might be relevant to all you lovely blog-readers, so here goes.

Since October I've been absolutely loving my RLF Fellowship at Goldsmiths; it's been some of the most rewarding and enjoyable teaching I've ever done, so I'm delighted that playwright Annie Caulfield and I will again be there next year. Our job is to help with academic writing across the full spectrum of the College, from first years to PhDs and staff, from Fine Art to Social Work and Anthropology. I am planning an occasional series on academic writing, since I know quite a few blog-readers would be interested. And the RLF's website has excellent resources on academic writing, although you do need to do a bit of digging to find it all.

The York Festival of Writing 2013 is on the 13-15th September. I'll be there as usual - as will Debi, several hundred writers, and a hundred or so authors, agents and publishers - and I'll be teaching a half-day mini-course and several workshops, although exactly what hasn't yet been settled (did I say I've been a bit busy?). It's always a fantastic weekend, and if you want to get the flavour, there's a great video here, which was made last year.

I've been playing around with Pinterest, assembling a "board" each for The Mathematics of Love, and A Secret Alchemy.

Verbs for Carrying Dialogue: �Said� Versus the Rest

How much thought have you given to the verbs you�re using to carry dialogue in your novel? Elmore Leonard believes said is the only verb you should use, yet there are accomplished writers out there ignoring his recommendation. Who�s right?

Guided Tour needed

I'm new to the site and need a brief guide to how it works. In particular I need to know how to upload a whole book -- the option of pasting into a panel is only suitablefor short passages.

I could always send out an email with a book attached.

Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt: "Does it matter that I don't feel exposed?"

Q: I'm being kept up at night by one rejection; four full MS are still out there. The agent in question is super starry and it sounds like she gave my MS a thorough reading. She said some nice things, even said I nailed some things. But she said she didn't get a new perspective, neither was she challenged. I've also come across a lot of stuff about risk in writing. I am now wondering more generally where I actually take personal risks, and finding that I'm not doing it much. I guess the book that is looking for a home took a long time in the writing and is probably the 8th iteration of the original idea, so what might have been a new perspective is old hat. But more seriously the things that have affected me in life seem so far in the distance that to bring them up as material feels like a weird contrivance. My second novel is halfway done at least in draft format and although it has plenty (I think) in terms of new perspective I don't feel exposed in the writing of it - not really. Yeah, I'm trying stuff with voice but everyone is doing that to some extent. I know writers who only ever write about their lives and relationships. I don't think that's me so much. Am I alone?

A: I think it's easy to be vague and touchy-feely (or macho and suffering-artiste-ish) about how it's necessary to dare all and bare all if you want to write well, but I'm not sure it's the whole truth. It certainly isn't a guarantee of good writing that the original source experiences were difficult or powerful. But, conversely, it's not a guarantee of bad writing that they weren't, or that you didn't have them. And heaven help any of you writers if you felt tied in to writing about your own lives and relationships - how boring would that be?

Having said that, I do think that for most of us, the best writing comes from places and materials which are really potent for us.

The Making Of �Symptoms�: Part 1, Inspiration

The Symptoms of His Madness Were As Follows: is a short animated film by Sheryl Jenkins, based on a short story by me. The story itself is in my collection, The Bridge That Bunuel Built.

It came about through our contact on twitter. Somehow we followed each other. I checked out Sheryl�s work as an animator and wondered if she would be interested in doing something based on one of my stories. I didn�t want a conventional book trailer. But I did want something that could help me promote the collection and my writing. A kind of micro film, if you will.

Symptoms is quite short and intense so I thought that might be a good one to work with. I sent it to Sheryl and she agreed. Right from the start I gave her a pretty open brief � basically, I said take it and do whatever you want with it.

Ping-pong dialogue

A writer friend had feedback which said that her novel suffered from "ping-pong dialogue". Had any of us heard of this particular ailment, she asked here. None of us had, but the example she posted did suffer a bit from something I've seen a lot over the years, and no doubt I've been guilty of too; in fact, I'm rather grateful to have a name for it. It's not that the dialogue in itself is badly written; rather, it's a combination of things. Have a look at this:

"How long can you stay?" he asked
"My bus doesn't go till six," she said. She slung her jacket over the back of a chair.
"Would you like some coffee?"
"Only if you've got decaff, thanks."
"Yes, I've got some." He put the kettle on to boil.
"You've cut back the hedge," she said.
"It got shredded in that storm. Had to do something,"
"Ah, yes."
Roly began to scratch at the back door and whine.
"I'll just let him out."
"Does he still come upstairs and bark if you stay in the bath too long?"
"No. He only did that to you." The kettle clicked off.
"No milk, please."
"Right you are."
He put the mug on the table.
"Did you get my letter?"

Now, there are various things going on here, all of which could be contributing to the ping-pong effect.

Dressing to Kill in Cumbria: 'Silence' by Maria Buffini at the Jack Studio theatre

Shakespearean themes emerge in a play which starts with the enforced marriage of a French Princess to someone who doesn't even know that she's female.

Rick Daddario at Postcard Poems and Prose

Hawaiian native, artist, and author � Rick Daddario � has a beautiful existential poem published at Postcard Poems and Prose. He is an artist with decades of experience and his work with light and shadows is unique. His poetry leans toward short forms which sit well in a postcard format. Stop in and spend 90 seconds with his work.

Tonight I will be playing fiddle and concertina for...Read More Herre...

Feedback, humility and the sword of truth

Whether you have one would-be writing buddy, or a large writers' circle which meets twice a week, or a bunch of eager or reluctant students, giving and getting feedback is central to most writers' lives, but it's a while since I've blogged about it.

This discussion usually comes up when someone on a forum has found feedback distressingly painful, and battle lines are quickly drawn: "fluff is useless" vs. "no one has the right to destroy confidence", "some people just want to be told they're wonderful" vs. "some people can't admit there are other ways of writing". I've blogged before about how it all works best when there's a good match of style, but recently I've been thinking about what sort of mindset we all ought to try for, if we're going to get the most, and give the most, from feedback situations.
So where do you start trying to be useful as a critiquer?

Is It Worth It?

In Conditional Validation I was talking about how Malcolm Bradbury saying "They're good. Keep going" was enough for Ian McEwan to - well - keep going. We tend to think that the "they're good" is the important bit of that, but I more and more think that in some ways "Keep going" - said by someone whose knowledge and judgement you trust - is just as important. The thing is, they're two sides of the real question, which is "Is this worth doing?".

Mind you, Hilary Mantel said on Front Row that having won the Booker twice is no help at all, when you sit down to work on a new book: it's like the first day you started to write. The energy doesn't come from the pleasure of doing something know you're good at or are admired for; it comes from the knowledge that it will all turn out to be worth it, when you finally get to the summit. It's that knowledge which keeps you going over the endless immediate difficulties and setbacks of the terrain. Every step, every day, every month, every novel.

I realised this all over again recently,