A Writer On Writing: Novel Writing Booster Kit
Sally Jenkins picks up further tips on writing a novel.
The other Saturday I attended a novel-writing ‘booster’ workshop with the author, Martin Davies. http://www.hodder.co.uk/authors/author.aspx?AuthorID=26645
The aim was to build on what we had learnt earlier in the year at his ‘starter’ workshop . http://sallyjenkins.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/how-to-write-a-novel/
Martin set lots of exercises to get the pen moving over the page and thus prove to ourselves that ‘writing’ isn’t some wonderful magical gift that you must have in bucket loads in order to succeed – instead tenacity is one of the qualities most useful to a writer.
Once again Martin was very generous with his advice and I came away with the following tips jotted down:
•If a minor character is feeling 2-dimensional, give him an unusual hobby to flesh him out.
•Before you begin your novel, write a two-sentence or ‘elevator’ pitch – and repeat this exercise at regular intervals to make sure you’re not going off at a tangent,
•The odd observed detail will bring your settings and characters to life – not swathes of description.
•When setting a scene, mention one big thing e.g. the mountain that dominated the landscape, and one small thing e.g. the cigarette burn on the table-cloth.
•Finish the first draft without looking back over your work AT ALL.
•In preparation for the second draft print out the manuscript and read it through, marking any corrections/changes as you go - don’t change anything yet because you’ll lose the momentum of how the story flows. When you’ve read and marked to the end you can begin changing the text. Repeat this as many times as necessary.
•Read aloud to check the flow of the story.
•Write what you feel excited and moved by.
•Don’t tell other people what your novel is about - it will make it feel stale to you.
So now I’m trying to pluck up the courage to go back to the Pocket Novel that I completed in the summer. I need to turn that rough first draft into something comprehensible – or maybe I’ll decide that it’s rubbish and bin it! But, as Martin said, no writing is wasted – it’s all practice for better writing. http://www.dcthomsonshop.co.uk/Product-My_Weekly_Pocket_Novel-MWN(1)-WEB11(1184).aspx
