Book after Book

Write what you know. As aspiring writers we had this drummed into our heads. Write what you know. I took this advice literally when I sat down to write my thankfully unpublished first novel. It was the story of a person like me (an introverted, slightly intellectual, average looking suburbanite), in a situation like mine, whining about the things that were bugging a person just like me and arguing that the reader should take her side. It was dreadful stuff and I thank God every day that I could not find a publisher for it and that print-on-demand and Kindle did not yet exist. I would never have lived it down. Plumbing my own life for interesting narratives never yielded much. That is not to say I did not try. Oh I tried. I tried. I tried to make a novel out of a painful, but in retrospect silly, one-sided love affair. I started one on my dabblings with Eastern religion. I tried to turn my professional radio experience into a humorous novel. I tried to write about what it felt like to b...

Amanda Sington-Williams on: Dialogue . *** Dialogue plays an essential part in novel writing. Dialogue can move the story on and can be used as a tool for informing the reader about one character’s backstory. Dialogue also develops characterisation and can add tension to the narrative. Your characters will all have different ways of speaking, have individual turns of phrase and use certain words more than others. When writing dialogue, make sure each character sounds different. Unless it is important to the narrative or characterisation, it is a good idea to cut out all the frills like greetings, enquiries about cups of tea/sugar/milk, the weather, traffic on the road, the inconsequential chit-chat that we spend time on in real life. Too much of this will slow down the narrative. When writing dialogue, use different ways of telling the reader what is the mood of a character. Rather than saying he/she said angrily/tearfully which describes the character’s emotions, you could show the e...

Amanda Sington-Williams on: The first chapter. *** Right, so - you’ve got your main character(s) and you’ve decided which is the best type of narrator to tell your story. You’ve either got a chapter by chapter plot with a detailed plan written out with military style precision or you’ve got an idea running round your head that you want to explore. Perhaps your novel plan exists somewhere in between: notes on the back of an envelope or a spidergram. Anyhow, there you are with a blank screen/paper in front of you and you’re trying to think of that winning first line. But the time spent in this task might be better spent writing. So just write. Let the words flow and imagine that you are the character. This will be the first of many drafts so there is plenty of time to think of the opening sentence and it’s always a possibility that once you’ve finished the first draft of the novel, it will be apparent that it needs to start either earlier or later in the plot. So, how to start? Firstly,...

Amanda Sington-Williams on: Multiple viewpoints and second person narrator. *** Using multiple viewpoints Many contemporary novelists use multiple viewpoints to narrate their novels. This gives an opportunity for the reader to understand how more than one character views the world that the author has created. Using more than one viewpoint can be a vehicle for creating great tension. However, unless handled carefully, switching between viewpoints can be frustrating for the reader as they are left hanging while the narrator is switching to another character’s viewpoint. The best way to avoid this is to ensure all of the characters are interesting enough for the reader to get fully involved with them. Before embarking on using more than one viewpoint, it is necessary to understand what is meant by ‘viewpoint.’ For example, say you wish to write a novel about John, who is a father, and Mary, who is his daughter, and you wish to switch between their viewpoints. First of all you must, as th...

Amanda Sington-Williams on: Third person narrators . *** There are three main types of third person narrator. Within each , however, there are many variants, some of which I’ll talk about in other writing tip instalments. An omniscient narrator is ‘god-like’ and has knowledge of all the characters and events. An omniscient narrator often has opinions about characters. The reader is often given information about the weather, location, or characters’ moods in a way which could appear as subjective. This is the narrators’ view of the world. In addition, the omniscient narrator is able to see inside the characters’ minds, has full knowledge of their feelings and intentions and understands their emotions. The omniscient narrator is always written in the past tense and this kind of narration is the traditional way of telling a story. It was used by classical writers such as Dickens and the Brontës, and perhaps less in contemporary fiction. A non-omniscient third person past narrator is a ...

Amanda Sington-Williams on: First person narrators . *** Choosing the type of narrator to tell your story is as important as knowing your character. If you choose to tell your story using a first person narrator, some readers might be confused about who the narrator is and who the author is. Authors must be clear about their role, so that they don’t slip into autobiographical mode. This is why character building is so important. When writing in first person, the narrator is the character that drives the story. The author must be able to ‘possess’ their character so it reads authentically. Using a first person narrator can be limiting, as the view of the world is restricted to how he/she sees it. You might choose a first person present to narrate your story, or a first person past. Alternatively you might use a combination of the two. First person present gives a strong sense of immediacy and allows the narrator to explore the consciousness of the character. It has a sense of ‘freshnes...

Amanda Sington-Williams on: Characterisation . *** Characters drive a novel and it is important that novelists know their characters almost better than they know themselves. A writer must know where and when their characters were born, what they like and dislike, what kind of childhood they had, where they’ve lived, what they fear and how they react in a crisis. In order to hold the reader’s interest, the characters need to be interesting. Though it is not essential that the reader likes them, there must be something about them that makes the reader want to find out what happens to them. Some novels have an innumerable amount of main characters ( Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie is an example), but it is probably easier to work with three or four. It is the main character(s) that form a novel and I spend a lot of time thinking about them before I start writing. In a novel, there are usually minor, walk-on characters too; sometimes they can be stereotypical of a certain kind of p...

Amanda Sington-Williams, whose short story The Zoo Keeper has previously appeared on Book After Book in serialised form, has generously agreed to share her writing tips with us over the next few months. With an MA in Creative Writing and Authorship from Sussex University and her debut novel, The Eloquence of Desire , published by Sparkling Books , she teaches novel writing at The Hanover Centre in Brighton. So, my dear aspiring writers, remember to come back on February 11th for your first lesson, which will be about characterisation.