Useful Things

There are several things that are useful to a writer.

They are, in no particular order:

A library card - I can't afford to buy all the books I want/need to read. I don't suppose too many of us can.

A desk of your own - you need to be able to get to it whenever you want.

Writing implements - whatever form these may take. I still write with pen and paper - usually in bed late at night when the story won't leave me alone and the only way I can get to sleep is to get it out of my head and into a notebook. Everything ends up on the computer though.

Time - grab it when and where you can.

And Lists - lists of books to read, ideas for other stories, character's names etc.

My favourite list/collection, and one I recommend every writer starts, is favourite first lines.

I came across the best first line the other day. It's from The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney by Suzanne Harper:

"It was three minutes past midnight, and the dead wouldn't leave me alone. "

If you don't want to keep reading after that you have no imagination.

I love the first lines from Before I Die by Jenny Downham, even though it's actually two lines:

“I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger.”

Start your own and keep them in a journal, in a drawer, in your desk. They can provoke all sorts of thinking when you are stalled, but they are also just great one-line poems.

Jennifer

DESCRIPTIVE PASSAGES - Can there be too much of a good thing?

There are two schools of thought -
1. Literary is good, and
2. Literary is boring and bad.

These two schools of thought usually marry up to two schools of readers - those who like dense descriptive works and those who like fast-paced page turners with minimal description.

[Dictionary definition of Literary: characterised by an excessive or affected display of learning. Mostly used by writers and readers to mean weighty, descriptive and introspective prose].

I sit somewhere in the middle. I love rich metaphors and clever similes, I love to be transported to another time or place by a well-turned phrase, but - the fastest way to lose a reader is make it hard for them to read or make them feel like they're stupid.

So how do you do it, make it enough without it being like a meal overdosed with chillies - all burn and no taste?

Everytime there's a pivotal or highly charged [searing] emotional moment - good or bad - try to bring ALL the senses into it but especially smell. This will slow the story and bring the reader's attention into focus. This is also the time when you can use metaphors and easily get away with it [if they are good ones and not cliches] and the rest of the story can keep moving forward quickly.

1. Describe something small that's in the space or being observed ie: the seeds or stuff that drops from dying flowers in a vase.

2. Describe something huge ie: a church spire out a window, a gum tree you can see through a window and the sound of the branches reaching down and scraping on the tin roof.

3. Describe something unexpected in the space - this can be something sinister, something portenteuos that could be relevant later, something joyous and spirit-lifting or something that reveals character that the reader wasn't aware of previously: ie a bottle of metallic blue fingernail polish in an 89-year old woman's bathroom cabinet

This year I was very successful and a winner in the richest short story competition in Australia. In my [winning] short story every time the boy was with his father there were smells associated with that time. Even after the father had left I had the boy smelling the letter the father had sent hoping to smell the tobacco that might have transferred from the father's hands when he sealed and sent it.

Even things/smells that you might not think are important will be - in this same story I described how the boy would walk down the railway line to where his father worked - past the guinea grass that smelt fresh and green and the molasses grass that clung to his clothes.

I was talking to the editor of the book the story was published in, Roseanne Fitzgibbon, [who was also one of the judges] and she said that in the preliminary judging meetings one of the judges reacted strongly to the description of the smell of the guinea grass - she said it had placed her right there, at that place in the story.

The rest of the judges were southerners and didn't even know what guinea grass was but it had impacted tremendously on that one judge.

So be aware of even the smallest things.

But mostly make it count, put description in the parts of the story where you want an emotional connection between the reader and the characters. Something written wholly in clever metaphors and similes is hard to read, it's hard to tell what's important and it's draining - like wading through treacle.

Stories have to move, the reader should be desperate to turn the pages - save your best writing for, edit your best writing into, the most emotional, pivotal, searing moments.

Jennifer