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Comment from the book world in October 2017

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'Start by writing an outline'

30 October 2017

Starting out

As an aspiring writer, you should certainly start by writing an outline. I explain how to do this in this Masterclass. You solve a lot of problems with an outline. It is far easier to correct your mistakes if you write an outline than if you sat down and wrote, ‘Chapter One' at the top of a piece of paper and started writing. If you work that way, it will take an awfully long time to correct your mistakes.

You will spend six months or a year writing the book, and only then will you find out things that you wish you had known right at the start. Writing an outline also concentrates your mind. It is good to carry on reading a lot at this stage. Suppose you are writing a love story and you have decided that the hero of the story is in love with a woman who is already married. When you are reading other books, you will see how other writers have handled this and you'll see the problem from different angles. That will give you a rich sense of how many possibilities there are.

Ken Follett, author of The Kingsbridge Series and The Century Trilogy, whose latest novel is Edge of Eternity on his website, in a helpful series that it's hard not to quote from again.

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'Ways of keeping readers reading'

23 October 2017

'I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways of keeping readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell students to make their characters want something, even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaningless of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.'

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

'It is no good having people who are ordinary'

16 October 2017

'When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books...

I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.'

Roald Dahl on Brainyquotes

Are American literary novelists ‘less feverish about pecking order’ than the British?

9 October 2017

‘They're more realistic about it. Berryman, when Robert Frost died, said, ‘It's scary. Who's number one?' Very unsentimental. At least status anxiety is overt here. And I think writers have a better time from the press here than in England. My historical explanation is that Americans wondered what sort of country they were living in, a new, young country, and subliminally saw that writers would play a part in telling them; not just a collection of Italians, Germans, Jews, but a real nation. In England, they don't want to be told what they are. They're quite clear on that, thank you very much.

And they think writers are just pretentious egomaniacs.'

Martin Amis, author of London Fields, Money and The Rub of Time in the Guardian

 

'Slightly off-kilter reality'

2 October 2017

'I started with a desire to explore marriage this round. My previous two books were told from the point of view of women who were decidedly single-who didn't really even know how to sustain any kind of relationships, romantic or not. So I wanted to deal with a married couple, and do it as a "he said, she said" kind of narrative, because marriages are, in a way, one long version of a "he said she said" story. No matter how close we are to someone, there will always be a disconnect. I think that's why, when you go out to dinner with a married couple, there is invariably some story that they start telling, that each of them swear is being told wrong. And they are always so incensed about it, right? "You're telling it wrong!" But I think it's because, underneath, we find it alarming, that you are sharing a life with someone and yet can experience the same thing in very different ways. It's shocking sometimes. So this takes that idea of never entirely knowing your spouse, and blows it up times 1,000. As far as keeping it just this side of believable: thank you. I like to tiptoe right to the edge of gothic. My novels all have that just slightly off-kilter reality. It comes from my love of fairy tales, Lifetime movies and Davids Lynch and Cronenberg...'

Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and Dark Places, on her novel Sharp Objects, on her website.