Head in the clouds... as usual

I love dipping into physics, so long as no-one expects me to understand it properly. Things like the cloud chamber fascinate me. Physicists who study the elementary particles can’t actually see these particles, they can only see the trails they make in the clouds of a cloud chamber. By following these trails they can see how they interact with other particles and so deduce many of each particle’s properties.

Call this a foolish leap, but this reminds me a lot of characters in a story. In a good book, you get to know characters not by direct description (“he was a hard, uncaring sort of man”) but by how they interact with those around them; by the trails they make in the clouds. If characters are like particles, then their traces are all the subplots that trail away from them. In the end you don’t need to see the character at all – like the physicist, you can pinpoint him purely from the trails he leaves behind.

On a totally random digression, don’t those particle tracks in the picture remind you of the Nazca lines? Just a thought.

Five mimsy ponderings at Tuesday

1. The only good stories are the true ones.
   
   
2. Past achievements look easy from a distance.
   
   
3. A bad craftsman may blame his tools, but the good craftsman weeps when his favourite saw breaks.
   
   
4. Good art sails close to the wind. Art in progress should always teeter on the brink of disaster.
   
   
5. Parents have no special talent. Authors have no special talent. An author is just a parent who can hear the unwritten book crying.

Emotional Esperanto

You can visit the remotest human tribe on earth, smile at them, and be understood.

The only universal language is human emotions. You can describe any experience to any person so long as you do it in terms of feelings, not facts. You can even get near to capturing untouchable things like colours and melodies.

That’s how writing works, and it’s what makes it possible to write good sci-fi and fantasy. It should be impossible to describe a world that neither the author nor the reader has ever experienced, but it isn’t. Because in actual fact, the good fantasy writer doesn’t describe an unfamiliar world, but a world that everyone knows intimately: the world of human emotions, just cast in a different mould. You write not what is, but how it feels.

Mixing your colours

Often, when writing early drafts of books, you can end up with whole scenes that never make the final cut, or which simply don’t belong in the story. (One thing I’ve found is that the most carefully planned story can shatter into pieces the moment you start trying to write it). But these orphaned scenes are not wasted, far from it. They are part of what I have started to call ‘mixing your colours’.

When talking about writing I tend to use painting metaphors a lot, which is weird as I can’t paint at all. But I tend to think of characters as different colours. Not in a literal way (I’m not synaesthetic) but in the sense of them all being there, lined up on your palette. To write in a particular character’s voice, to write them into a scene, you have to get into their head. But you can’t do this unless you already know them well.

Just as an artist has to mix their colours properly before starting to paint, so it helps if a writer has already written a number of scenes featuring their key characters. Once this has been done, you have a fairly good idea of how each character reacts in certain situations, how they sound, what they say, and what they’d never say. After a while, you don’t have to think about it… you just dip your brush into the appropriate character’s colour and they appear on the page, with even the smallest brushstroke containing something of them.

I tend to ‘mix my colours’ as I go, learning about the characters during the messy first draft. But I’m sure it can be done consciously and deliberately too. It must be a good idea to pick random dramatic scenes from life, and write your character taking part in them. By the end of the process, you ought to have a good quantity of their ‘colour’ on your writer’s palette, there to use freely when you start writing the book for real. Who knows, I may even try that myself.

A poem

Submission

Another flare to fire into the night
More leaden lines to try and turn to gold
More waiting for the fickle fish to bite
Another script is straining to be sold.

A lifeline twists into a hangman’s rope
A brave new spring becomes a dreary drought
Another coal to feed the fires of hope
Another clinker soon to be spat out.

Crystal ideas

Where do you get your ideas from?

Every writer gets asked this question. Many are annoyed by it. The simple fact is, they just don’t know. But why don’t they know? They don’t know because, in most cases, ideas don’t actually come ‘from’ anywhere at all. Instead, they are grown.

Ideas are grown. But they don’t grow like plants so much as like crystals. I got a chemistry set when I was about 9, which included a guide to growing your own copper sulphate crystal (copper sulphate is a pretty sort of blue). I remember the process well, and these days it strikes me that I do a similar sort of thing when trying to conceive ideas for books.

How to grow a crystal / have an idea

First, you must make a saturated solution, by dissolving a salt (e.g. copper sulphate) in a jar of water as you heat it up – as much as the water will hold.

Think of the jar as being your mind. The salt you dissolve is all the things that have happened to you. The things that interest you or worry you, the things that have affected you. All the people you’ve met, all the funny, sad, strange or alarming things you have seen. All these experiences are dissolved in your head. You can even stretch the metaphor to say that the heating of the water represents a major emotional event – something that upsets you or thrills you – for these are often the things that set people writing.

Then (going back to that jar of copper sulphate solution) you stand back and let the water cool. Soon the first small blue crystals will start to form around the edges. These are your first tentative ideas, the things that pop into your head seemingly from nowhere. They are both the most mysterious and the most precious of all, for no-one can say quite how these ideas appear. There’s no guarantee that they will. You just have to hope you have made the solution strong enough, and be patient.

Once you have a nice encrusting of crystals around the edges, you choose the largest or the best-shaped – that is, your most promising idea. You extract the crystal carefully from the solution and, ever so delicately, tie a cotton thread around it. In other words: you write the idea down on paper. This is the point at which it’s most likely to break. It didn’t break? Good. Now this is the crystal you’re growing.

And so the process really starts. You re-heat the water so that all those other crystals re-dissolve. Hang your chosen crystal in the cooling, saturated solution. (It just so happens that people usually hang theirs from a pencil.) This is you letting your special idea just drift in your mind. And just as copper sulphate coming out of solution will magically bind into your crystal along its particular faces, making it larger and more solid, so your other thoughts, feelings and experiences may gently attach to the lattices of your idea, creating characters, locations, situations and drama, turning your lonely, floating notion into a structure – into a story.

Good stories grow. They aren’t built. If you try to construct them as you would a matchstick model, you will probably end up with something just as lumpy and unconvincing. But if you just hang that first good idea in a rich enough brew of emotions and experiences, then it might just develop into something beautiful.

At least, that’s the theory. None of the crystals I tried making with my chemistry set ever grew larger than a sunflower seed.

Ooh, a lump of gold, I’ll have that

Gold is found in stony ground

One of the startling discoveries I’ve made in the course of 13 years of trying to write novels. That the best bits always catch the writer by surprise, and often crop up where you least expect them. That is – the hardest passages to write, the dull bits, the linking bits, the have-to bits, contain the most potential to surprise you and turn up some of the best writing. Because by definition you haven’t planned them, so you are feeling your way in the dark. And that’s when you make unexpected discoveries.

For example, in a book I never managed to get published, I “had to” write a scene near the end to make it feel like a wind-down before the proper climax. It turned into a sweet little family scene of kite flying in the hills, that I still like enough to resurrect someday, maybe. I never would have planned it because nothing really happened, but in fact it helped to round off certain characters’ individual stories. In other words, you never know…