The Rule of six

The rule of six

I first heard about the rule of six from the fabulous writer and teacher John Claude Bemis. It thought it was a great way to help me along with very many of the issues in my writing. Since then, I’ve found out that it is based on a Native American practice for expanding possible theories or solutions to problems we face. So, for example, rather than answering a question with one answer, it challenges you to come up with six possible answers or six different explanations or possible stories that could answer the question. This reduces the risk of jumping to conclusions and broadens the scope of understanding.

This rule can be applied to all areas of life but is particularly useful for creative endeavours. For example, when developing characters, one can explore different backstories and motivations that could explain the character’s behaviour. It can lead to more complex and relatable characters as it takes into account different aspects and influences from the character’s backstory.

Let’s assume your main character is an investigative journalist who is pursuing a lead on disappearances in a small country town. Why is this particular lead compelling for your character. If you apply the rule of six, you will not stop after the first explanation:

1.      Personal trauma: her younger sister disappeared under similar circumstances.

That is a good start, but let’s challenge yourself, come up with five more explanations:

2.      Professional ambition: there is a new chief editor at the newspaper, and she is really keen to prove herself.

3.      External pressure: another journalist from a different newspaper is hot on her heels pursuing the same story. Time is of utmost importance.

4.      Sense of right and wrong: her strong moral values compel her to act and see justice done.

5.      Curiosity: she has always been a curious person who loves solving puzzles and has therefore chosen investigative journalism.

6.      Personal connection: she went to school with one of the mother’s of one victim.

This approach allows for a rich and multi-dimensional character portrayal.

But this is not its only application. Equally, you can use it to generate ideas, brainstorm different scenarios, openings and conclusions. I have found it particularly useful when I look at a sentence or paragraph, and I just know it’s not right. This rule allows me to write a few really bad sentences, without the pressure of ‘getting it right.’ Usually, I am out of ideas by sentence three or four. Then, the real thinking starts. Now that I have used up all my bad ideas, I can move on to more outlandish concepts and ideas. Sometimes, if I think I am still mining the depts of weird or I feel I am not quite there, but it feels like the right ideas at the tip of my pen, I keep going. I do another round of six sentences/paragraphs.

Even if you are not convinced (to be honest, I wasn’t at first, either, but John Claude is quite persistent), give it a try! I am positive, you will hate the idea by number three or four but will come around by five or six.

It challenges you to get out of your comfort zone or the single-rail track you’ve been stuck in. And isn’t that the problem most of the time?

Show, don't tell!

Show, don’t tell

Every single person who has ever engaged in creative writing will have heard this mantra: ‘Show, don’t tell!’ The explanation is straightforward: it is much more impactful to make the reader feel something than tell them what to feel. Less straightforward is the method of how to achieve that.

The most famous example of what that means is Anton Chekhov’s advice: ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.’

As someone who teaches academic writing for a living, this is particulary hard for me. Every single day I teach, analyse, extrapolate on how an idea needs to be previewed in the introduction; it is then introduced in the topic sentence, only to be further explained in the rest of the paragraph, with ample evidence, examples and citations. And lastly, it is to be summarised once more in the conclusion.

Over the years, I have caught myself many times applying this approach to my creative writing as well. When I re-read my writing a few days later, I often think, ‘What idiot wrote this?’ forgetting for a moment that the idiot is me.

However, knowing that this is wrong does not necessarily lead to success. It is still quite hard to avoid that trap of telling the reader what to feel rather than showing them how something feels.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learnt over the years.

1.    Not all telling is bad. It is very much needed for so-called ‘narrative bridges,’ avoiding boring details no one wants to read. They are called ‘bridges’ because they take us from one interesting scene to another. The key here is to be concise. Telling allows us to say in one sentence what otherwise would take pages but is not important to show. A rough guide is that a book should be about 90% scenes and 10% narrative bridges.

2.    Don’t use filters (particularly in dialogue) to refer to how the character feels (such as ‘she remembers’ or ‘she implied softly.’ Let the reader come to those conclusions through strong action words and the content of the dialogue)

3.    Avoid words like ‘because’ and ‘in order to.’
Instead of writing ‘Her stomach growled because she was hungry,’ simply write ‘Her stomach growled.’ Or, instead of writing ‘In order to reach the top of the mountain, Trevor packed crampons, rope, sling and an axe.’ It would be much better to leave out the first clause completely and write ‘Trevor packed crampons, rope, sling and an axe.’ The reader is smart enough to know that this is for mountain climbing.

4.    Emotions should not be named but shown by the bodily reaction. So, instead of writing ‘She was so sad she cried all night,’ it is better to just write ‘She cried all night.’ If it is a bit more complex than this, the manifestation of emotions should be built into the character’s actions and behaviour.

5.    Use specifics – It might sound contradictory, but the more specific we get, the more universal the experience becomes. If there are enough details about a character, their background, their experiences family situation, etc, the more they feel ‘real,’ and the better we can relate to them. But be careful, no one likes an information dump.

6.    Use all senses – the scene becomes more relatable the more senses it can engage.

7.    Use active voice – this is a particular pitfall for me as in academic writing, passive voice is favoured (changing slowly, thank god!). Whenever possible, don’t write ‘She was cheated on by her boyfriend,’ but write ‘The boyfriend cheated on her.’

8.    Don’t use progressive tenses, such as present continuous (‘I am sitting at my desk’) or present perfect continuous (‘I have been living here for thirty years.’). Action is much more immediate if told in simple tense, such as ‘I sat down at my desk’ and ‘I’ve lived here for thirty years.’

9.    Avoid linking verbs, such as ‘be, seem, feel,’ and use active verbs instead. So, instead of writing ‘She seemed to favour the younger brother,’ give an action in which it is clear she favours the younger brother: ‘Once again, she gave the best cut of meat to the younger brother.’

10. Dialogue can be your life saver here. When in doubt, rather than uhming and aahing, write down the scene using dialogue. It is never too late to prune later on (using narrative bridging to delete the boring parts of the conversation), but it will help you avoid the pitfall of being too explanatory and boring the reader.

Useful resources:

·         M. McCowan: Effective editing

·         J, Hynes: Writing Great Fiction

·         Ackerman and Puglisi: The Emotion Thesaurus

·         J. Hardy: Understanding Show, Don’t Tell

Websites:

·         Edwina Shaw has a number of great pages with great advice, and one of them is about ‘Show, don’t tell’: https://edwinashaw.com/2024/04/22/show-dont-tell-mostly/

·         The Reedsy website is a treasure trove for so many aspects of the writing process, and this topic is covered there as well: https://blog.reedsy.com/show-dont-tell/

What I've learnt about dialogue 2

What I’ve learnt about dialogue 2

Ok, so now that the formatting hurdles are out of the way, I wanted to share some lessons I’ve learnt about using dialogue in fiction.

One of the first big lessons I learnt was that dialogue is not speech. It is not a transcript of what we say. If you’ve ever read a transcript, you know what I mean. It is mind-numbingly boring to see how many times we use words like ‘uhm,’ ‘yeah,’ ‘like.’ And how little we actually say!

Another common mistake is using dialogue to dump all the backstory we burn to share with the reader. Or repeating what both the characters already know. (You know a writer has a problem if they write, ‘As you know, Leslie, I arrived three days ago.’) And dialogue should never be used to explain.

In fiction, dialogue has quite a different function. As J.H. Lawson says, it is ‘compression and extension of action.’ It is action, not conversation. We use dialogue not by accident or only because two or three characters are talking to each other. That can be done by indirect speech or best in a summary. Dialogue functions to evoke character, advance the plot or provide exposition. Ideally, it combines at least two of those.

Here are some dialogue tips I’ve learnt over the years:

1. Before writing dialogue, consider: Is direct, indirect or summary best?

2. Short exchanges are better than monologues. Anything is better than a monologue!

3. Is dialogue doing more than one thing: revealing character, setting the mood, moving the action, etc?

4. Dialogue must be speakable. Read out loud!

5. Let dialogue express what the speaker wants and what the story is about.

6. Dialogue is more interesting when characters say ‘no’ to each other.

7. Never use it for exposition.

8. Let your characters occasionally avoid or conceal saying what they mean / want (or let them be incapable of saying it)

9. Let your characters contradict themselves (give them room to change or reveal surprising turns of emotion)

10. Read your dialogue aloud, make sure it’s comfortable to the mouth, breath and the ear.

11. Eavesdrop (again, you don’t want to transcribe but listen for that turn of phrase that one of your characters uses all the time or an interesting expression that perfectly fits one of your characters!)

Good exercises and explanations are available in the following books:

J. Hynes: Writing great fiction

M. McCowan: Effective editing

J. Burroway: Writing fiction

D. Maas: The emotional craft of fiction

What I've learnt about dialogue 1

When I started writing longer fiction (rather than writing anecdotes, stories as birthday presents or jokey pieces), I avoided dialogue like the devil. I thought, it’s not for me. Surely, there are writers out there who do that? So, my first draft of my first manuscript, in all its 80,000-word glory did not have one single dialogue. All pure descriptions.

I know. Feel free to roll your eyes. Needless to say, it wasn’t very good. Apart from being a first draft, of course, it lacked engagement, action, drama.

I’ve come a long way since then. But I’ve worked hard on it. I’ve read, I’ve listened, I’ve read some more. I’m still learning and constantly revising but I’d like to share the most valuable lessons.

There are so many that I will have to put this in two parts.

In part 1, I am going to talk about the mechanics of dialogue. These are pretty straightforward rules that are easy to follow and revise for.

1. What is said aloud should be within quotation marks. If they are thoughts, do not use quotation marks! (if they need to be set apart from the narrative, use italics)

2. Punctuation goes within/before quotation marks.

3. Use dialogue tags - they tell us who has spoken. They are connected to the dialogue line with a comma.
        ‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
   a. The tag ‘said’ is adequate to the task, and is as unobtrusive as punctuation. Readers do
   not notice it.
   b. If the tag interrupts a sentence, it is put between commas:
        ‘I’m hungry,’ she said, ‘so let’s go.’
   c. If it interrupts an utterance but not a sentence, it is separated by a comma from the first
   part and finishes with a sentence.
        ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘What’s for dinner?’

4. Avoid words less neutral like ‘she wailed,’ ‘she sighed,’ ‘he gasped,’ or ‘he hissed.’ They interrupt the flow of the conversation. Occasionally, these words are OK if they refer to volume (shouted, whispered), but only occasionally.

5. Also occasionally, it is OK to replace ‘she/he said’ with an action.
        ‘I’m hungry.’ She clanked the knife against the plate. ‘Is it almost done?’

6. Start a new paragraph for each new speaker.

7. If an action is described between direct speech, put it in the paragraph of the speaker it describes.

8. Use contractions whenever possible.
   Instead of:
   ‘I am hungry. I would like a sandwich.’
   Use:
   ‘I’m hungry. I’d like a sandwich.’
   (as an English teacher teaching Academic English, this one is hard for me)

9. Avoid using the name of the person spoken to in direct speech. It doesn’t sound conversational. Unless greeting them or trying to get their attention.

10. Avoid adverbs with ‘said’. Dialogue should convey that manner. If not, an accompanying action is better and more emphatic.
    Don’t write:
         ‘I’m hungry,’ she said angrily.
    Better:
         ‘I’m hungry,’ she said and clanked the fork against the plate.

Take a shower … or the train

Take a shower … or the train

I have recently read / listened to a lot about creativity, how to get ourselves out of a dark spot, how to break procrastination, how to move forward with our story/poem, etc, etc, etc. It seems that everyone agrees on two points:

1.      Get yourself in a safe spot, a comfortable place where you feel relaxed, but also motivated/ able to write.

2.      You don’t have to write anything when you’re there for a while/ or write rubbish for as long as it takes.

But I would expand on that second point and add:

3.      Do not, under any circumstances, absolutely do not distract yourself from doing nothing / writing rubbish. So, social media, Youtube videos, podcasts, etc. are completely, absolutely, definitively, non-negotiably FORBIDDEN.

Basically, all you have to do is get yourself into a safe place. That safe place can also be an activity that doesn’t require too much of your brain power. It can be walking the dog, gardening, ironing or whatever else you can do on ‘autopilot.’

It is in those moments that you allow your creative subconscious to work on whatever problem is bothering you and that needs to be resolved. It’s no coincidence that so many of us have had their best ideas in the shower. It is a time when we simply focus on the water. All other senses, thoughts are left to themselves, allowing our subconscious to work on those hard tasks of creativity.

I can attest to the veracity of all these points:

1.      Find the perfect spot
For me, that is the train. I take the train to work every morning. It is a 45-50 minute ride with patchy internet coverage. I pause my podcast when I board the train, take out my notebook, write the date on the next blank page and…..

Well, it depends. If I’m in the middle of a scene/idea that I’m working on, I write like a fury.

But, more often than not, I’m stuck or completely drained of any creative notions. That is when I do one of two things:

a.      I stare out the window. I do not stress, I do NOT go back to my podcast. I simply look out the window, notice how the flame tree has lost all its flowers so quickly this year, how seasons change so quickly, how life goes by so quickly, how my character is afraid of death.
You get the point. Because I allowed my brain to roam freely, it did! And made the necessary connotations and led me back to my story.

b.      I look at the blank page in front of me and start writing whatever comes into my head. I can’t tell you how many times my first sentence has been: ‘I don’t know what to write.’ I basically force myself to write down whatever thoughts I have at the moment. Very, very often they are the self-flagellation type of thoughts regarding my lack of talent, perseverance, commitment, etc.
Once I’m through with lashing my fragile ego, I start writing about what has caused my current block, what problem in the story I don’t seem to be able to resolve. For example, I write about how my main character seems to be going through a crisis, but I lack the words/emotional depth/experience to put it on paper. Ok, so there is a bit more self-flagellation going on here, but it is moving in the right direction, towards my story. Depending on how much time this has taken, I might have arrived at my end destination, and I stop writing. If I am still a few stations away from my stop, I might keep writing some more about my character and actually, as they often say, write myself into the story. I discover something about the character I would have never discovered had I not kept writing and writing and writing. Because I have now arrived at my destination, I have not written that much. No matter. I have set myself up for tomorrow’s train ride when I will be able to continue where I stopped and will be able to write like a fury.

2.      You don’t have to write anything
This is, of course, covered in the above explanation.

3.      No distractions
It is absolutely vital not to engage your brain in other activities during this period. If you give in and check that inbox or Instagram updates, you will be there for the next 20-30 minutes, and the opportunity will be gone. I have done this more than once, still do. I tell myself I need to check the weather urgently, but when I get out my phone, I accidentally click on something else, which leads to something else, etc. You know the drill. I’m pretty sure it happens to most of us.

I can give you the opposite example as well. I was on the magic Magnetic Island where I do not have phone reception. One day, I locked myself out of my Airbnb. My friend who had the second key wasn’t going to be back for hours. I only had my phone on me. What was I going to do for the next 3-4 hours? I was panicking. I walked up and down the beautiful beach in a frenzy. I sat down on a bench. I noticed the dappled shade the palm tree gave me. I looked at the glittering spray of the water. I listened to the gentle lap-laps of the ocean kissing the beach. I was calm. I knew what to do.
I went to the only store in the village, bought myself a pen and a notebook. I went back to the bench under the palm tree, I admired the sparkling sea and the clear sky. I pulled up my legs on the bench, put the notebook on my thighs and started writing. Withing a few minutes, while writing about my experience with the sea and the sky and the palm, I was ready to dive back into my story. That very day I figured out that my current story structure wasn’t working and that I needed to re-arrange my scenes differently.
Since then, whenever we go back to Magnetic Island, my friend and I choose to stay at a place that does not have wifi.

I hope this is inspirational enough for you to try these methods out for yourself.

Setting the scene

Setting the scene (my haphazard contributions to writing advice continue)

I am an impatient reader. I don’t care for nature descriptions, and I am known to have skipped pages and pages when a fight scene was described (looking at you, book 3 of Hunger Games). All I’m interested in is what the characters did and why they did it. As I read, so I write. I mostly focus on the psychology of the characters and the actions they take in line with that. I focus on their thoughts, emotions and dialogue. I write the bare minimum related to surroundings. Which is wrong, of course. I can see the action vividly in my head, but I need to allow the reader to do that as well. And without proper setting of scene, that is not possible.

I really admire writers who make the setting an ‘additional character.’ You can feel yourself transposed into the environment where the characters are. You can see and smell and hear the surroundings.

 I barely give the GPS coordinates.

Francis Flaherty in The Elements of Story suggests:

‘The way to stir the dozing reader, to propel him down the river, is to exploit the five senses. How do you wake a sleeping teenager? Fry some bacon. The smell, so ethereal but so strong, will lift him right up, float him down the stairs and deposit him at the kitchen table, just as in a cartoon. Rouse your reader in the same way.’

I struggled with this for years until I did the course ‘Story doctor’ with Kate Forsyth. In the course, Kate explained how to make sure that every scene is grounded and engaging. This should not happen during the first or second draft, but once you’re sure you have figured out most other problems in the story. She advises to use different colours to highlight, using a different colour the following language in every scene: green for smell, read for hearing, blue for touching, etc.

If you don’t have at least three of the colours on every page, it means the reader will have a hard time picturing/feeling the scene, and you need to re-write and add one or two more of the senses to the scene.  

This has worked wonders for me. Over the years, I’ve gotten better, and I don’t highlight as religiously as I have in the past, but I still try to do it to every scene that I feel doesn’t quite work, and I don’t know what’s wrong with it.

(Kate recommends to save the yellow highlighter for adverbs. If you have more than three on a page, delete, delete, delete)

Resources:

Francis Flaherty’s book ‘The Elements of Story’ is written for non-fiction writers but is applicable to fiction writers as well. Chapter 19, ‘The Smell of Pleather,’ is dedicated to the five senses the writer needs to evoke in the reader.

Kate Grenville’s ‘The Writing Book’ is a treasure trove of advice and practice activities. Chapter 7, ‘Description,’ focuses on how to write good/relevant descriptions, followed by examples from literature and exercises.

Show up for the muse

Show up for the muse

(with thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert for the title (and so much more))  

Following the myth I’ve read about and what I’ve seen on TV, I used to sit up late at night at the kitchen table with a piece of paper in front of me, a candle throwing flickering light across the white pages, a huge shadow on the wall of one hand holding a pen, the other cupping my chin. I’d stay in that position, gazing out into the darkness through the small kitchen window, waiting for the muse to arrive.

She rarely did. To be honest, she only turned up if I’d been out with friends and had a few glasses of cheap wine. That’s why so many writers were alcoholics, right?  Not that we measured our consumption in glasses, the bottle going around the circle, followed by a joint. But that is a different story for a different time.

I often though that the muse just didn’t like me, that I lacked the necessary mental or emotional constitution to be worthy of her. Until I started listening to Elizabeth Gilbert. She saved me from myself and my romantic notions of writing and what it means to be a writer.

Late-night sessions, alcohol-fuelled, luring the muse to my candle-light window? All wrong, Gilbert says. You need to show up for the muse every day. Every day! And you don’t lure her with an alcohol-soaked mind and badly lit pages. You lure her with hard work!

That is obviously not romantic – hard work! – or enticing to anyone except a Protestant from the Cromwell age. But being annoyed with my own non-productivity and the possibility of liver cirrhosis, I gave it a go. What did I have to lose?

Only a few hangovers.

I allocated an hour to writing each morning. I got up earlier and sat at that same kitchen table, sans the candle and alcohol in my blood stream. And wrote.

The beginning, like all beginnings, was hard. But Gilbert’s voice  did not let up. ‘You can’t give up the first time or second time, or third time, …,’ she droned.  ‘Keep writing, even if it is your shopping list, just keep writing.’

So I did.

Liz Gilbert says it’s OK to just sit there. If you need to. But do not, under any circumstances, grab your phone or reach out to your friend Google. Just sit there, write about whatever comes into your head, or simply stare out the window. No other activities allowed. Once the allocated time is over, you can get up and get on with the rest of your day. But make sure you return the next day, and the next, and the next.

And I did. Every morning I’d sit there for an hour and oscillate between staring out the window and writing about what a shit writer I was. By day four, I was ready to start writing about what had happened to me the day before and what how I felt about it. And I set myself a new goal. I would write two pages each morning, no matter what. Even if I repeated the same words over and over again, I would reach the bottom of that second page. Even on my worst days, when the two pages turned into a journal of self-flagellation, I kept writing. In my darkest moments, when I was the harshest critic imaginable, when my self-abuse reached new depths, I could still hear Liz’s voice, ‘Keep writing! You will get there, I promise!’ 

And so I kept writing, about my hopeless self mostly. But more and more often, I wrote about my family, friends, people on the train, on the street, in meetings, sketches of nature, observations I’d made - about how that boy smiled when his mother entered the room, how the manager’s words were a mismatch with his actions, how the lily pad was a perfect hideout for the fish, protecting it from the stork.

There was no magic in those words; there were no twists or sudden breakthroughs. But I noticed how I started writing less and less nonsense about myself and more and more short character studies and inspired descriptions of nature, analyses of feelings. Amongst all the shambolic doodling and half-formed sentences, one clear theme had emerged. I kept writing over and over again about the mother-daughter bond. It seems to me to be the most complex relationship, one that goes through so many stages, starting with total dependency at one end, then changing and transforming into relationships that goes from friendship and love to distancing, resentment, sometimes complete estrangement, although only rarely lasting for a long period of time, only to end up where it all started – total dependence, once again, but this time the other way round.

When I made the discovery of my central theme, I knew I had been visited by the muse. And I knew I had found my North Star. James Baldwin said:

‘Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.’

Since then I have written two novels and am currently working on a third where the central relationship is that of mother and daughter. The setting and plot changes, but the central theme is the same. And in some of my non-fiction pieces, I have written about my relationship with my own mother.

The muse had visited without me noticing, dipping in and out of my pages. But I had only been visited because I kept writing.

So, please, whatever you do, do not wait for the muse to show up! You need to show up for the muse!

Happy writing!

Happy daily writing!

Resources:

If you want to be inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert as I have been, please read her book Big Magic and/or watch the YouTube videos of her talking about the muse or creative genius, as she usually calls it.

I would also recommend Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a fabulous book that is more encompassing (and that I refer to and defer to all the time). It starts off with the fundamentals:

‘If there is a single tool that is the bedrock of my creative life – and any creative life – that tool is morning pages.’

Write, whenever, wherever

Do not wait for the muse to knock on your window when  you sit at the table with a notebook in front of you. 

Those moments are rare, if they happen at all. 

You need to invite the muse by writing every day, wherever you are, on the train, in a meeting, at the restaurant. 

The writing can be a snippet of a conversation you have overheard or a sentence, or word, that came to mind while watching the trees flit by. 

The problem with writing is similar to the problem of parenting: there is no one right way to do it.

Which is, of course, beautiful, but also hard. We cannot simply sit down and learn the rules and apply them. We have to try out suggestions, apply, modify, improvise. Until we find something that works for us. This time. But not necessarily the next time round. 

This is an attempt to share what I’ve learnt from others by trying, failing, modifying, improvising.