This is a page especially for writers. There's a couple of articles I've written for Mslexia and the Birmingham Post about writing and if you scroll down you'll find a huge list of links to writing-related resources for teachers and writers. If you have any useful links I haven't included here get in touch and let me know about it!

Dressed to Thrill . . .
Julia Bell

It’s a common saying in publishing that an editor will make up his or her mind about a piece of writing within the first few pages. Certainly, on my MA course at Birkbeck, if an application hasn’t shown some kind of narrative promise in the first few pages, we are unlikely to be calling that candidate to interview. But how can you be so sure? I hear the disgruntled writer cry, it gets better after page 10! You’re not giving the work enough of a chance!
    Maybe so, but most busy editors don’t have time to give the work more than a passing glance, especially if it’s one taken from the toppling slush pile. Editors are looking for an immediate sense of promise, stylish use of language, strong characters, a story that lifts off the page and sparks the imagination. Unfortunately, as most editors will attest, these pieces are rare, even in work submitted via agents. Not because of a dearth of good writing, but rather I feel, because of a surfeit of impatient writers.
There are some sure fire ways of ensuring thatyour work comes back to you in that neatly addressed SAE, with a rejection slip. These basic technical mistakes tell the reader in the first few paragraphs that the writer isn’t yet in control of her material. Not that I am writing this article to shame the reader into writing better. Sometimes our ‘mistakes’ are the best parts of the writing – the ideas we hadn’t considered before setting out on the journey of the narrative – the insistent character who took over in chapter 5 – the plot twist at the end that seemed impossible at the start. These discoveries are all a valid part of the writing process.
What I am talking about here are the speculative, hopeful, but in the end rather hopeless submissions that publishing houses see on a dailybasis, from writers that seem to lack even a basic sensibility towards their own writing. Almost as if the writer hasn’t really read their own work carefully or critically enough. Or, perhaps there is a naïve hope that a busy editor will spot the promising metaphor in paragraph 6 and take the writer under her wing and edit the raw material into textual gold so that the writer doesn’t have to go to the trouble of correcting these mistakes for themselves. In these busy days of ‘blink’ decision making it’s a golden rule for novice writers that their submissions –to magazines, publishers, MA Courses, competitions, are the best they can be. Your first pages give your reader their first encounter with your voice, your characters, your style. It’s important you send your manuscript out suitably dressed for the occasion, and showing its best profile. In this article I’ve listed four problems that amount to ‘dead giveaways’ to an experienced editor, they are, if you like, the textual equivalent of sending your writing out with it’s skirt hitched into its knickers.

The Point of View Problem

Choosing the appropriate point of view for a story is the most crucial decision a writer has to make. They are deciding where they want the reader to look. Is it from inside the character in First person? Above them in Omniscient Third, from right beside them in Subjective Third, or maybe even the reader will become an implied character -‘You’ - in SecondPerson.
It’s usually obvious within a few paragraphs what kind of grip a writer has on their POV. My first dead giveaway would be fiction written in third person, which switches POV within the page, within paragraph, or sometimes within a sentence.
Consider this example from the opening of a novel:
Johnwas gazing out the open window. He was enjoying himself, talking mainly to Fred and Zoe and mainly about how all women wanted was money whatever their feminist ideas.
     Fred looked at John and said ‘marriage is buying a house for a stranger.’ John laughed, in the open way he had about him, skin crinkling round the eyes, but Fred still didn’t trust him.
Here is a potentiallytense opening scene. Some interesting characters. But the writing naively switches between John and Fred’s POV. Where is the reader supposed to look? The result is like reading shaky camera work, andit’s hard to distinguish between Fred and John, to clearly ‘see’ them as characters in the minds eye.
    While multiple points of view within a novel are of course a valid device – read SarahWaters, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith for some excellent examples, the points of view switch serially – section by section or chapter by chapter. Switching POV within the same paragraph or page is a risky strategy, if you’re Virginia Woolf you might get away with it, but if you’re not clear from the get go about where you want the reader to look, the harassed and time-pressured editor won’t keep reading for long.

Telling the Story

We’ve all heard the one about show not tell, but it’s a sorely misunderstood maxim. It doesn’t mean that the writer should dispense with narrative altogether and turn their novel into the equivalent of a screenplay:
    The room was dark. The candles giving out votive shadows.
    ‘Are you ready?’ The priest says.
    ‘Yes.’ Comes the reply.
   And so on. This kind of writing can sometimes come across as equally naïve, lacking in the pause and reflection that is the trademark of fiction. One of the unique aspects of fiction as a form is the way in which time can be fractured to allow for digression and reflection. Too much showing can result in the storytelling having too much surface and not enough depth.
    The polar opposite of this Beckett-esque sparseness is the Authorial Narrator, whose booming voice and self-important opinions can drown out the characters in a flood of telling detail. Where the writer doesn’t seem sure what to leave out, and instead insists on telling the reader everything about the character, right down to the name of their first pet and the eye colour of their parents. Take this for example:
    ‘In the yellow rain-strewn light surrounding the street lamps, she could see further down the street a group of young men eating takeaway food near to the entrance of an Indian restaurant. Steam could be seen coming out of their opened Styrofoam packages of ethnically contorted food. The group ate voraciously, no doubt to satisfy a beer-induced hunger, and peppered their late supper with succinct but loud conversation delivered in the local Geordie dialect. Karen decided to cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them. The street was wide and she passed by on the other side without ever being noticed. Even the rain was not able to dampen out the aroma of curry that drifted across the street. This evening, however, she did not feel like buying anything to eat, and just wanted to get home as quickly as possible.’
    This is a very loose description.There’s too much telling information. The sentence ‘the group ate . ..’ tells us what the author thinks about the characters, not what the character thinks. Why do we need to know that she’s not hungry? This seems like dead detail. The potential menace and atmosphere in this paragraph is dampened by the authorial voice which over-articulates the story. If the language is too arch, too glib, too knowing, too telling, the writer is drawing attention away from the key player in their story: the character.

Everything’s Provisional

Another common problem is writing which doesn’t set out clearly enough what is at stake for the characters and the story. The writing might start brightly enough – in fact, enough for our imaginary editor to imagine she’s onto something promising. Until she realises after a few pages of neat characterisation, that the story isn’t going anywhere. There’s lots of voice, maybe even a strong idea for a character. But no story. No clear sense of what’s at stake for the characters, and why we should be reading this particular book. Work like this is often accompanied by a covering letter explaining that the author hasn’t finished the book yet. And it shows.
The first chapter is often the one you redraft last, everything in a novel is provisional until the last word has been written and the whole story considered in the light of the journey your characters have taken. Don’t send out the first three chapters hoping that our busy editor will see the hidden genius and want to sign you upright away before another word is written. Deals like this are rare, unless you’re Wayne Rooney, better to wow an editor with a confident, snappy opening that hints at all the delights still to come, than one which is vaguely meandering in the direction of a story that has yet to be written.

The Long Game

Which leads me on to my final point, about patience. Sometimes I fear that some writers want to get published more than they want to write. Being asuccessful writer is a long apprenticeship. Writing a novel is a slow, frustrating process. It takes time and patience to get it right. Don’t send out your work to publishers and agents when you are feeling impatient and frustrated with it. Send out when you’re happy and confident in the work – the difference will show in the writing, trust me. If you play for the long game, perhaps go on a course or join a workshop, get some feedback and apply it. You’re already giving yourself a better chance of success. In the end write for the sake of the writing, to make the writing, your writing, the absolute best it can possibly be, only then is it really worth reaching for the Jiffy envelope.

©Julia Bell 2006


 
Birmingham Post Short Story Challenge Master Class by Julia Bell

No 6: Showing Not Telling

‘’Illustrating through action …’ In the sixth and final Short Story Master Class article, Julia Bell, who teaches creative writing at Birkbeck College, London, takes the works of American poet and short story writer Raymond Carver (1939–1988) to illustrate the art of Showing Not Telling.

Raymond Carver was an extraordinary writer. Born in 1938 in Oregon, his father was a sawmill worker and his mother a waitress and a secretary. He married young and for a great deal of his life, writing took second place to earning a living to support his family. He worked as a hospital porter, a textbook editor, a dictionary salesman, a delivery man and petrol pump attendant. His first collection of stories was published in 1976 – Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? – a book which took him nearly thirteen years to write.

After that, Raymond Carver wrote prolifically, publishing many collections of stories and poems. He died on 2 August 1988 and since his death, several anthologies of his work have been published, among them Short Cuts – the stories Robert Altman adapted for his 1992 film of the same name, and most recently Call If You Need Me a collection of his unpublished work, gathered from library archives, and the papers he left behind.

Perhaps the best book, if you’ve not encountered Raymond Carver before, is Where I’m Calling From, a collection of his stories across four different volumes of his work, with a few extras thrown in for good measure. In his introduction Carver says that writing should be about ‘Life. Always life.’ This was his mantra. He believed, like all the authors in this series, that the best subject for writing was to be found in the life around us. He writes about ordinary lives and shows us their extraordinary bits.

Take the story ‘They’re Not Your Husband’ – Earl Ober, a salesman, is out of work. One morning he goes to the coffee shop where his wife, Doreen, works, in the hope of getting a free meal. While he’s waiting for his food, he overhears some men who are eating at the counter commenting on Doreen’s body. They discuss her weight; make her bend over to get ice cream from the freezer, then snigger at her thighs. Finally, they make an obscene comment about ‘some jokers’ liking fat women. Earl is horrified and leaves the coffee shop without eating his food.

The whole story depends on how Earl responds to this incident. He starts to become obsessed with Doreen’s weight, forcing her to go on a diet. He goes for job interviews and never gets offered work: 'He read the classified. He went to the state employment office. Every three or four days he drove someplace for an interview, and at night he counted her tips. He smoothed out the dollar bills on the table and stacked the nickels, dimes and quarters in piles of one dollar each. Each morning he put her on the scale.'

Then Doreen loses lots of weight, her uniform is loose on her, and people at work are saying things. When she suggests to Earl that she might be losing too much weight he tells her not to ‘pay any attention to them. Tell them to mind their own business. They’re not your husband. You don’t have to live with them.’

After this Earl goes to the coffee shop again to see Doreen. He sits at the counter, making his food last, watching all the customers at the counter, waiting to see if they’ll say something about Doreen. But no one says anything. Eventually, Earl breaks the silence: ‘“What do you think of that?” Earl said to the man, nodding at Doreen as she moved down the counter. “Don’t you think that’s something special?”’ But no one in the coffee shop says anything, and one of the waitresses asks who ‘is this joker, anyway?’ and everyone states at him, and Earl and Doreen are both humiliated by his question.

What we can learn from Raymond Carver in this story is how to show and not tell. Even from this short précis you can get a sense of how deftly Carver constructed his characters. He doesn’t go off on long paragraphs of description. He only shows the reader the things they need to see, the relevant bits. He cuts to the quick.

For example, when Earl is counting out Doreen’s tips and then in the next moment putting her on the scale to check her weight, there is a very deliberate author guiding our connections here. Drawing our attention to a relevant detail, and saying ‘look at this – isn’t it ironic? What does this mean about these characters?’

There are several ways of interpreting this deceptively simple story and whenever students look at it in class they are always divided about whose side they’re on– Earl or Doreen’s. Raymond Carver leaves enough room in the story for the readers to decide for themselves – he doesn’t tell us what to think.

Good writers always try to show in this way – illustrating their characters through their actions and details. If you find yourself writing reams of back-story and notes and profiles, then, good, you’re discovering your character. But how much of this do you need to share with your reader? If you find that you’re writing no dialogue or action for your characters you might find it’s because you’re telling too much of your story, and not letting the characters be dramatic on the page. You’re describing them in action, not showing them in action.

Think about how Raymond Carver could have written this story. He could have told us that Earl was obsessed, that he was poor, sad, lonely, and regretful. But the story wouldn’t have been a story any more. It would have been a psychological profile.

Regret, loneliness, sadness: these are all big abstract words. Grand themes. But what do they really mean? It’s the author’s job to try and realise these abstract emotions in a concrete way. To show the reader how someone who is full of regret, for example, might behave, how their inner conflict affects how they act and talk.

‘Show not tell’ is really an exhortation to the writer to dramatise their stories. Make them active, and full of  ‘Life. Always life.’

© Julia Bell, 2002

RAYMOND CARVER was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938 and lived in Port Angeles, Washington, until his death in 1988. It was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? (1976) that his work began to reach a wider audience. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last 11 years of his life. During this period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by further poetry collections, including A New Path to the Waterfall.

The Literary Consultacy: http://www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk

Mslexia: For Women Who Write: http://www.mslexia.co.uk

The Arvon Foundation: http://www.arvonfoundation.org

Zoetrope All-Story Magazine: http://www.all-story.comPrompts to help inspire your writingRandom Title Generator

Short Story - Competitions and Information: http://www.theshortstory.org.uk/

Database of Agents and Publishers: http://www.everyonewhosanyone.com/

Online Writing Community: http://www.writewords.org.uk/

Spread the Word - London Literature Development: http://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/

Poets & Writers Magazine: http://www.pw.org

BBC Writers Room: http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/

Ploughshares: http://www.pshares.org/

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