ANNA

Sherry Thomas appears on all my recommendation lists, and the one word I come back to again and again to describe her writing is “charming”. It’s woefully inadequate. There’s an ineffable quality to Sherry’s writing – it’s unlike anyone else, utterly unique. Beginning one of her novels is always, for me, like being told a fairytale as a child. A magical set of characters who draw you into a world that is lit up from the inside.

Her stories are pure emotion. Her heroes feel deeply, sympathetically human, even when they are supernaturally gorgeous, titled, clever, what-have-you. Her heroines are often not as young as they used to be (which is true of everyone of course *g*) and are suffused with a kind of nostalgia for all that has passed in exchange for hard-won wisdom and maturity.

It’s incredibly exciting for me to have Sherry on the blog – and I feel like her post makes a chip in understanding what gives her writing that quality I simply cannot name.

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SHERRY

When I received Anna’s invitation to participate in the celebration of her blog’s face-lift by contributing an article, I asked her if there is anything she’d like me to write about. And this was her reply:

There is something specific I keep coming back to when I think about your writing, and I hope it’s something you feel you can easily write about. Even though Ravishing the Heiress was an emotional read in all sorts of ways, what stuck with me was Alice [the dormouse]. It was very straightforward imagery – Alice stood in for Fitz’s first love. But that didn’t make it any less powerful, or wonderful to read. I think its charm and power was probably IN its simplicity – and in how deeply you followed through on it, down to the taxidermied mouse representing Fitz’s mistaken feelings. (I would never have thought a boy soliloquising to his dead mouse could make me cry, but it did!) 

So I’d love to hear you talk about how that part of the story came about – did you plan it that way, or did it happen of its own accord? How does imagery enrich a story, and how do you pull forward parts of your story to represent the larger, deeper and altogether more complex emotional story?

It is something of a two-part subject. But as it so happens, last month I wrote about the first half of it, the deployment of strong details to evoke strong emotions, at Writers in the Storm.

If you have time, I recommend you read that post first. But if you don’t, here is the short takeaway: You can pick just about anything and make it a striking detail that evokes emotions. It’s not the detail themselves that matter, but the world, the history, the characters you build around it. And you enter that state of emotions via the exactitude and specificity of details.

For example, Anna, in her request, had mentioned Alice the dormouse, from my book Ravishing the Heiress. Why was there a dormouse in the story? Well, when I started writing Ravishing the Heiress, I’d just finished the first full draft of The Burning Sky, my young adult fantasy, a reverse-Harry Potter story about adolescent mages plotting to overthrow the dark lord from a muggle school. The muggle school in question happens to be Eton College—yes, of course there is a girl passing herself off as a boy—and so I’d read quite a bit about the school and the life of the students during the 1880s.

And one of the things I’d learned was that there were hawkers who catered specifically to the student population at Eton, and at least one of whom sold dormice as pets. So why not have the hero’s beloved—the one he doesn’t get to marry—give him a dormouse as a present, and as a symbol of their passionate feelings for each other?

It’s not a bad detail. And it’s certainly an emotional one. But just as I never bother with a detail unless I can connect it to the larger emotions of the story, once I have such a detail, I’m never content with using it only once.

Years ago, when the great Judith Ivory was still actively writing, I went to Dallas to listen to her speak at a conference. During her workshop, she mentioned a story. When the hero and the heroine first meet, she is wearing the scarf. They would be separated for much of the book, so whenever the author wants to remind the readers that the hero is still very much in love with the heroine, she’d have him either have his eyes caught by a flash of something red while he’s walking down the street and whip around to see who is the wearer or have him take out the scarf from where it is stored to look at it.

I very rarely remember specific writing advice, but the way Ms. Ivory explained the scarf just made so much sense. You pick your meaningful detail—anything will do. Now you work consciously at it, weaving it into the fabric of the story and repeating it at crucial moments. And voila, suddenly you have a lovely emotional refrain that runs through your narrative.

For example, in Skyfall, [beginning possible spoiler] the latest Bond flick, the first time Bond and M meet face to face, he notices an ugly dog figurine on her desk. In the middle of the movie, the dog appears again, the only thing to survive her office after an attack. With these meaningful repetitions, the ugly dog figurine comes to stand for M. So that by the end of the movie, when the dog figurine is given to Bond, he understands the significance of the gesture and so do we the moviegoers. [End possible spoiler.]

Another example. In my book His at Night, the heroine is a young lady who lives under a tyrannical uncle. On the third round of revisions, still largely dissatisfied with the book, I decided the story needed far deeper emotions. And lo, I see that in the beginning of the book, my heroine is reading a travelogue about Capri, dreaming of being there and being free.

Why Capri? Because for a different book, I’d looked up Capri and had some research material lying around.

So in itself, Capri doesn’t have any significance. But I decided to make it significant to my character. Every time she is particularly lonely or upset, she reaches for the guidebook and imagines herself upon the island’s rocky shores. Capri, in other words, comes to stand for all her hopes and dreams.

When the hero has a nightmare, she cradles him and tells him about her Capri, about what keeps her nightmares at bay. And eventually, when the hero messes up—don’t they always—and needs to beg for her forgiveness, he finds that book on Capri she loves so much, memorizes the entire section, and recites it back to her, to let her know that he might have acted like a jackass, but he does understand her hopes and dreams and they are infinitely important to him.

So just to recap, pick something, anything that is significant to one or both of your lead characters. What makes it important to readers is the iteration.

(A slight corollary: We all know that the amount of real estate a character or an event receives in a book more or less correlates to their importance. What is sometimes left unsaid is that if any element is important to a story, it should be introduced early on. That is particularly true when you are trying to create a motif. Whatever details/symbols you plan to use, introduce them early. So that you have time to develop them, to make your readers understand their significance.)

And of course, my hearty congratulations to Anna, for the fabulous new look of this blog.

Note: every comment puts your name in the hat for an accidental housewife e-reader cover.

ANNA

Nelika McDonald is another friend from my writing school days who has given me endless support and inspiration as a writer. We first became friends when she showed her brand-new engagement ring off to me, because she “knew I would understand”. (I was never shy about my romantic soul.)

In our second and final year a couple of us were asked to show our writing to an editor at Pan Macmillan. Nelika was not only brave enough to actually do so – she sold her young adult novel on a couple of chapters. When you read her post you will begin to understand why her editor became addicted to her voice in such a short space of time.

The novel will be published next year.

When I read her most recent draft, I couldn’t help thinking of her writing like a cloth she had woven, detail by detail. This cloth is an exceptionally beautiful, rich thing, that perhaps needs to be trimmed a little here, taken in a little there, but is complete in itself. (This feels to me like quite a daggy, writerly description, but I can’t think of it any other way.)

She is, without hesitation, a writer to watch out for.

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NELIKA

When I read, I want to feel like I am being given an access-all-areas pass to another world.

I want immersion, chin-deep. And for this to happen, I need to be able to believe in the world written on the pages. Not believe in the literal sense, but in the sense of buying into the world I am reading about. I want to have a teenage crush on the world I’m reading; I want to find every aspect of it fascinating. I want the worlds I read to be compositions for whole orchestras, with a scope and magnitude and richness and fullness that astound me. I’m talking about suspension of disbelief, but of that particular variety when the world you are reading about is based in your own, but is not your own. For the purposes of this post, I’m talking about writing in general contemporary fiction and not writing that is intentionally set in a different world, time period or dimension. I think a whole other set of rules comes into play for world-building in genre fiction, and I don’t really feel like I have the qualifications to discuss that particular talent. However, if you want an example, read anything Anna has ever written. The lady is a pro. Probably some of what I’m going to talk about applies along the whole fiction spectrum, but I only really write and read contemporary fiction set in this ordinary world, so that’s my frame of reference.

I think this is about why we read what we do.

For me, (and I think this is a truly individual thing) reading is about trying to comprehend my world. In everything I read, I’m looking for some sort of lesson to take away about human behaviour, or the way the world works. Even if the story I am reading is set in a world vastly different from the one I inhabit, I am still looking for something that holds true across them both. I think this is usually subconscious. What I’m seeking is not an overt lesson, because I don’t want to be preached to or patronised, but I do want to learn something, and feel enriched somehow. But not enriched like that milk with extra calcium, where they write about it in bold caps on the label with exclamation marks. I want to not know what I’ve learnt until later, if at all. I also want to be entertained, and delight in the prose, and marvel at the construction of the story and be surprised and freaking awed at the same time, by the way. I’m pretty demanding. But, so I should be. Getting prosaic for a minute, books exist in a marketplace like anything else, and healthy competition can foster a higher standard of product, if the demand is there for it.

Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking about how it is that writers create believable worlds, worlds that are multi-dimensional, complex and layered, but still entirely ordinary, and not fantastical or farcical. What do they need to give us to make us buy into these worlds, and how much should they tell us to establish the parameters of it without dictating its every boundary? Are there specific tricks or techniques that they use to do this?

As a reader, I’m a voyeur. I want to look through a window and spy on something. But this is just a peep show- it’s more exciting if I can’t see it all. I told you I was demanding! So, say I’m looking into a room. It’s a good view, and I can see the whole room. But that isn’t enough. I want to believe that if I went through the doorway in that room, I would find myself in a hallway, from which other rooms branched off. I want to be able to imagine what’s in those rooms too. Maybe one has a door that you need to lift up as you open it, and inside there is a small bed made of pine with stickers all over the headboard, and in the wardrobe there is a green tin of treasures with a scarecrow on it. Behind the chest of drawers, a rock shaped like a crescent moon with a face drawn on it in crayon is gathering dust, a little coat of grey snowballed around it. Down the hall there is another room with another small bed, but this one is stripped bare, and the wardrobe stands empty, doors ajar. There is a coin and the lid of a pen on the bedside table. The only decoration is a homemade dream-catcher hanging from the windowsill, with a cobweb made of matchsticks and bits of foil and cut up plastic straws dangling down from it.

In the best writing I’ve read, the author hasn’t given too many details, but the ones they have given are important. They allowed me to extrapolate and fill in the blanks myself. For instance, maybe they told me that in one bedroom in this house, the mother’s room, there is a photo of a little girl with a candle beside it and some rosary beads. Then, having deduced that a little girl has died, I could decide what was in her room by myself. This is where writing a believable world intersects with writing a believable character. The details given about a character can inform the reader’s view of their world, and vice-versa. Maybe, from what I know of the mother, I can decide if she would keep her little girl’s room as a shrine, preserved exactly how it was on the day her daughter died, or pack it up and lock the door. That’s a whole other post, though. The important thing is that, as a reader, I think there are other rooms at all.

One way to talk about this idea of a believable written world is with the idea of verisimilitude. This is probably the fanciest word I know. And, in my bastardised, simplified comprehension of it, all it means is narrative authority. And that is how I prefer to think of it. For me, the word authority conveys an aspect that I think is important- confidence. I think the writer needs to feel like he or she has the ability to write the world that they do, but also that they are qualified to write it, maybe even have some sort of imperative to write it. And this confidence makes the reader believe in it. In the book I’m currently working on/being strangled by, the setting is a fictional town called Banville. Banville is loosely based on a mash-up of a few places I have visited, in a few different countries. But when I write Banville, I try and write it like I’ve lived there my whole life. Partly, this is because I can’t expect readers to believe in the plausibility of Banville if I don’t. But more so, it is because I want them to believe in my characters, as they exist in Banville, and be captivated by and invest in my whole plot and book, accordingly. I feel like these things are a long, linked chain, and if one link is broken the chain becomes weak. Really weak. Like, if it was holding up a swing, you would look at how rusty and fragile it seemed and decide to force your child to pretend to enjoy drawing in the dirt with a stick instead.

For an example of confidence in writing, I nominate Rose Tremain. I read The Road Home a little while ago, and there was something so incredibly assured about it that I got really depressed and complained to Anna that I felt like that sort of assurance can only come with writing for years and years and I would just have to slog on for another twenty years before I got there and even then there was no guarantee I could attain that level of masterful skill, so what was the point? And then we had excellent sandwiches and I felt better again.

Another way I have noticed a writer build a believable, ordinary world is by writing as though the reader is viewing this world at a certain point in time, but it has actually existed for much longer. This sounds obvious, but it was kind of a revelation to me. I think it was Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, and I can’t remember the exact passage, but it was something about how someone had moved a shovel and it had been there for so long that there was a patch of dead grass underneath it. Or if we return to the house I talked about earlier, this might involve talking about the people who had lived there before the current characters. About how one old man who lived there painted the pantry such a vile acidic green that you can still see it on the skirting boards underneath the white that’s there now, if you look closely.

An extension of this technique is through language use. Once I thought about the passage in which the shovel was moved, I noticed that Barbara Kingsolver often used this technique, to great effect- a character’s coat was slung over the back of a chair instead of on a hook where it ‘usually’ hung, or she found a single earring that had been missing ‘for a long time’. For so long, in fact, that she had bought similar earrings to try and replace them, but they were ‘never’ quite the right size/shape/length. The use of terms like ‘used to’ or ‘usually’ imply that there is a before and after in this world. It has existed, and will continue to exist, beyond the point in time you are reading about.

Another technique she uses (still with Ms Kingsolver here, fangirl much?) is to anchor the world she writes about to biology. Barbara Kingsolver is a scientist, so it makes sense that this informs her work, but the way she applies science to her narratives are awesome.  Sometimes science is central and sometimes more peripheral to the story, but she always reminds the reader that the world she writes is tethered to the universe by the laws of science- everything is in a cycle. Plants grow, blossom and die, seasons change, the weather is terrible or wonderful or strange. Animals and people grow, blossom and die, too. Her characters exist in and engage with the natural world, because the natural world exists in their world. They are just a microcosm. Like babushka dolls- her worlds are nestled inside greater ones.

There are so many other techniques that fit into this discussion, like self-referential writing and wanky postmodern stuff about breaking the fourth wall and so on, but I don’t want to sully Anna’s beautiful new blog with all of that, much as I secretly love it. So that will do for now. This has been a pretty great exercise in clarifying my thoughts and learning from the masters, and it’s an absolute honour to be featured alongside so many crazy-talented writers. Thanks Anna! x

ANNA

Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while will have noticed I talk about Cat a lot. (It’s usually when I’m struggling though an idea and she’s said something illuminating.) She is my writing buddy and crit partner extraordinaire, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be where I am today without her.

We met in a poetry class at uni. Cat thought much more of my poems than I did, and her terse, hilarious, clever poetry wasn’t what I’d expected this very friendly woman to write. We both gave up poetry, which is likely a good thing.

She was the first person to read the first draft of My Lady Untamed, back when it was called The Three Loves of Miss Beatrice Sutherland and Miss Beatrice Sutherland was kind of a snivelling doormat. She encouraged me, even then. And then she introduced me to Lymond.

These days we write together three days a week, 10-5. We know each other’s work inside-out, and have gotten pretty damn good at feeling out when our brainstorming is sparking something and when the other person’s just drawing a blank. Our coffee breaks are full of writing conversation; our particular loves are Dunnett and Vampire Diaries.

Cat published the first two books of Captive Prince as an online serial (it’s still live), and she’s been working the past couple of months on getting them ready for self-publication as e- and paper books. The amount of work and self will that has gone into the process is incredible and very inspiring.

I would tell you about why I love her books, but her post is going to do it for me. It’s a master class in tension. It’s the kind of insight I get every week. And no, you can’t have her.

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CAT

I love tension. I love long scenes between characters in which the tension rises and rises. My favourite author is Dorothy Dunnett, and she is the master of tension, especially in her later books, with scenes that run for twenty pages or more, in which the tension is not only sustained, it is also continually escalated–the holy grail of tension.

“How do you create tension in your writing?” is a question I am continually investigating. I’m not certain there is a simple formula, but there is certainly a single, unavoidable truth:

If you want tension in your story you have to 1) create it and 2) sustain it.

Creating it is easier than sustaining it. Sustaining tension for me becomes exponentially more difficult the longer I try to sustain it, and the stronger the tension that I am trying to sustain. I am often wrestling with a variety of techniques in order to try to push my tension higher or sustain tension through a longer scene.

I feel like I’m only at the beginning of my understanding of tension, and I still have many secrets to unlock. But for what it’s worth, here’s my take on how tension works, and some of the ways to create it and sustain it in writing.

Creating tension

Tension is something that exists between, usually between two forces, usually between two forces that are in opposition. I think of tension as either ‘push’ tension, like the tension in two bodies that are straining against one another until one of them gives ground, or ‘pull’ tension, like the tension in a rope that is being pulled at each end in a tug of war.

These forces might be two characters with opposing goals (external tension), they might be two opposing desires within one character (internal tension), they might be a character’s desire for a goal and the barrier to that goal. There are multiple possible forces, multiple forms of tension. The goodie versus baddie fight is tense because the force of survival is pitted against the force of annihilation. Sexual tension exists when the force of sexual desire pushes against the force of restraint and/or the obstacle to that desire: we want to but we can’t, or won’t, or musn’t, yet, for some reason. The stronger those forces, the more powerful the tension.

Because tension requires two forces to exist, creating tension means constructing and establishing those forces, then clearly expressing them to the reader. Once the forces are constructed, and the stakes made plain, tension will result. The more clearly the forces are drawn, and the higher the stakes are for the characters, the higher the tension.

One of the ways that I often see this done is by embedding the opposing forces into the characters themselves. That is probably one reason why opposites work so well in fiction: the rule follower and the loose canon, the fighter and the scholar, the Machiavel and the Alexander slicing through the Gordian knot. The hero and the villain. The character who sees things in black and white versus the character who sees things in shades of grey. Opposing archetypes are immediately in tension and have the potential to push or pull forever. One or the other must give way, and yet neither will give way, resulting in tension.

Another way I often see tension created is via the drawing of a boundary (as one force) and an opposing force that can then push against it. I’m going to use a big overblown example from a story that I read recently–

“If you touch me, I’ll kill you,” the character says. *  Tension is created because a clear boundary has been set, as well as clear stakes–life and death, but also pride, if the character backs down.

This is the same technique at work when Elizabeth Bennett says, “You are the last man on earth I would ever marry.” The boundary is clear, and the nature of the force pushing against the boundary, and the stakes–again pride, which is in tension with personal desire and happiness.

Another iteration of the boundary technique, used in an adventure setting, is one Anna discussed with me:  Haymitch telling Katniss never, ever to go to the cornucopia, because she’ll be slaughtered if she does. As soon as necessity forces Katniss to go to the cornucopia, the scene is tense, because she is pushing against a well-defined boundary, with clear stakes. Goal and threat are in tension.

Tension can also be created by the writing itself. That is, the writing can act as a force on the emotions of the scene, holding it back. “I’ll kill you,” he said steadily is more tense than, “I’ll kill you,” he screamed wildly, because the word choice restrains the (obviously) strident emotional content. Calm, strapped-down language acts as a force restraining the force of the emotion, creating tension.

Sustaining tension

There are lots of things that will cause tension to break or drop out, but for my money the three biggest tension-killers are 1) collapsing one of the opposing forces 2) catharsis, and 3) repetition.

Collapsing one of the forces is easy to understand: it’s capitulation, one of the forces giving in to the other. I think it can also happen by accident if one of the forces becomes less clear, less well drawn than the other, so that maintaining forces over time is important for sustaining tension.

Catharsis is the release of strong emotions, which also releases tension. Cathartic acts, such as violence or sex, will let all the tension out of the scene–or even the story–unless you manage to hold the emotion back, somehow, during those scenes. It’s hard, although not impossible, to have your character punch someone in the face in a tense way. The tension exists in the moment before the punch, and rises as the punch is delayed, but is released in the cathartic act, the punch itself. The reason why delaying catharsis increases tension is because the force of emotional release is set against the force of restraint, and those forces increase as the cathartic moment approaches.

Romance writers will know that it is equally hard, though not impossible, to have your characters have sex in a tense way–or, I should say, in a way that maintains sexual tension throughout and after the scene–unless something is held back, some type of catharsis avoided. In both sexual and dramatic contexts, sometimes even cathartic words will let out tension–screamed, wailed, flailed, sobbed, exploded, screeched–any words in which emotional release is implied will release tension from the scene.

Finally, repetition kills tension. “If you touch me I’ll kill you,” is tense, but the second time the character says it, whether to the same person or someone else, it’s a fizzle. In romance parlance, a first kiss has more tension in it than a second kiss, unless there is something new about the second kiss.

Romance provides a good case study here because readers are familiar with the way that the romantic narrative is often written as a series of firsts: first touch, first kiss, first oral sex, first penetrative sex, first whichever act remains that we haven’t got around to yet. The acts can occur in any order, but repetition will cause a drop in tension, unless there is some other tension in play, some emotional first to substitute for the physical first.

Emotional repetition is an easier trap to fall into than physical repetition, but even deadlier to tension. The second time the emotional note is played it will lack the tension of the first, a reheated dinner. This is the reason why love triangles fall flat when the character oscillates between suitors one too many times, “it’s him, no it’s him, no it’s him, no it’s him.” It’s the reason why unresolved sexual tension goes stale if characters repeat the same moves in the forwards-backwards dance, or rehash an objection when it has already played out the first time.

Because books are usually structured around a character arc or progression from ‘beginning self’ to ‘end self’, to hold tension the writer must order every step in the evolution, a series of notes played one after the other, in the correct sequence, with nothing repeated.

In my own writing, I often ask myself: Can I play this moment later? If the answer is yes, then I reserve the moment for later. If the answer is no, then I know that I’ve found the right moment to play the note. I have a Shakespeare quote inappropriately in my head, If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now. Sorry Hamlet.

Because repetition kills tension, one unexpected side-effect is that tense scenes burn through material, fast. A tense face off between characters will burn through backstory like nothing else.  And once the material is burned, it can never be used again. So sustaining tension also means creating enough material to sustain that tension.

Probably the best example that I can think of is one that only 0.001% of people reading this will be familiar with, nevertheless: the “salt pans” scene in book five of Dunnett’s Niccolo series, in which the books’ primary antagonists face off for the first time. Because it is the first time, the antagonists have five books worth of material to burn through and can hurl increasingly tense verbal exchanges at one another for unbelievable lengths of time. The scene incredibly sustains at defcon one tension levels for three chapters, a tour-de-force that I have never seen another author replicate. It was only because Dunnett saved all her material for that one scene that it was even possible.

I remember setting myself the “Dunnett challenge” of extending my tense face off as long as possible towards the end of book two of Captive Prince. In that scene, my hero faces down a traitor, and the two have a verbal drag-down match that I wanted to run for pages and pages, and be as tense as possible. I made it to eight pages, at which point I had burned through all the usable material that I had, including a twist I had reserved just for that scene, and some huge chunks of backstory. In the end, I just didn’t have enough to sustain any more than that, and I was done.

In this way, it’s much easier to write, say, fan fiction, where if Harry and Draco have a stand off, you have seven books worth of Rowling’s material to burn, everything from, “You imprisoned my family” to “You didn’t shake my hand on the train.” In original fiction, you have to build before you burn.

I think this also shows one of the ways in which tension requires an effort of imagination—the stronger the tension, the stronger the effort of imagination required. It’s not only thinking up burnable material, but also what I think of as “pathfinding”.  Pathfinding works something like this:

Once tension is created, there are three choices: break it, sustain it, or escalate it. Breaking it is easy. Sustaining it is harder. Escalating it is harder still. To use an earlier example, the escalating move on hearing, “If you touch me I’ll kill you,” is to have the other character calmly reach out to touch. ** But once that is done, what happens next? It’s imaginatively very hard work to think of something that doesn’t involve catharsis by violence, collapsing one of the forces by backing down, or repetition.

Escalating in this example might be a dead end, something that you can’t think your way out of as the author, in which case better to go sideways and choose a path that instead sustains the tension at its current level.  “Will you?” is one tension-sustaining rejoinder that springs randomly to mind and so on, picking a path carefully through the dead ends and tension drops.

So, these are my thoughts on tension. I’m curious to hear from other writers about techniques that they use, and from readers, about which books or authors they find do tension well. Or which books are tensionless! Recommendations for books with stellar unresolved sexual tension are always welcome.

* This line did not occur in a sexual context, just FYI—although even as I type this I realise that “If you touch me, I’ll kill you” is embedded into one of my characters (Laurent) as a fundamental romantic character premise, despite him never saying the words aloud

** LOL what even is this example

Note: every comment puts your name in the hat for an accidental housewife e-reader cover!