Week 1: Starting to write fiction

Introduction

Welcome to this free course, Start writing fiction: characters and stories. Start by watching the introductory video from course author, Derek Neale.

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Transcript

Derek Neale

Hello and welcome to Start writing fiction. I’m Derek Neale and I teach creative writing here at The Open University. I’ll be your guide throughout the course and each week, I’ll let you know what’s coming up.

We’re going to focus on a skill that is central to the writing of all stories and novels – creating characters. Through course you’ll explore various ideas and exercises to help you develop your own characters and then reveal them to your reader.

You’ll hear from a number of writers – including Michèle Roberts, Alex Garland, and Louis de Bernières as they talk about their own experience of writing.

And you’ll have the chance to share comments and ideas with your fellow writers while sampling how established authors such as Toni Morrison and Graham Greene have written and presented their characters. By the end of the course you’ll have learned tricks such as using a journal to generate ideas, the importance of editing and redrafting and you’ll have started to read like a writer.

You’ll be writing throughout and towards the end of the course you will capitalise on the tools you’ve picked up by writing a more substantial story.

So, welcome to week one! To begin with we are going to look at how keeping a journal can help you capture and develop your ideas. You’ll explore the difference between fact and fiction and take a look at some George Orwell and Zoë Heller characters. And you’ll hear from writers including Tim Pears and Abdulrazak Gurnah talking about how they started to write.

Most important of all, you'll start writing yourself.

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Start writing fiction: characters and stories focuses on a skill which is central to the writing of all stories and novels – creating characters. You’ll hear from a variety of writers talking about how they started and how they created their stories and characters. You’ll learn the benefits of using a writer’s notebook or journal, how to read like a writer and how to edit, as you start writing your own stories.

Derek Neale is your guide through the course. A novelist and short story writer – his latest novel is The Book of Guardians – Derek has recorded many interviews with novelists, playwrights and biographers about their approach to writing. He’ll introduce each week, reminding you of what you’ve learned and mentioning the highlights of the week ahead. The course map  gives an overview of the course.

Each week’s work is designed to take about three hours – but if you want to develop your skills as a writer you may well spend longer than this. Even just a short paragraph can take a while to get right – though sometimes, of course it can work more or less immediately. How long you spend on the writing exercises is up to you – but you will develop best as a writer if you recognise that writing can’t usually be done quickly, it’s something you need to live with and return to again and again. This course is designed with that in mind.

Here’s a run-down of features that have been developed to help you study. The course is designed to run on desktops, tablets and mobile devices; however, some of the material is quite detailed and using a larger screen will enhance your experience. Materials are best viewed running the most up-to-date software available for your device and using the most recent version of the web browser.

1.1 What is fiction?

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What is fiction?

Fiction is all about characters. Writing – trying to find and create characters – can be full of surprises; a person’s imagination is a powerful force.

Start writing fiction will help you to make the best use of what you already have … and what you know.

You’ll be able to draw on your own experiences, and what you’ve read – your observations and imagination, your language and ideas.

You’ll come to discover – as you start to create stories – the best rules and lessons for you, the best ways for you to create characters – the best way for you to write.

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Fiction is all about characters. Make the best of everything you already have and know – your unique ‘material’ and ‘equipment’ for creating characters:

• your experiences (including your reading experiences)
• your memories and personal history
• your feelings and desires
• your language, imagination, observations and ideas.

1.1.1 Fact and fiction

Figure 1

Trying to write both fact and fiction can help you realise the relationship between the two.

1.1.2 What can you see?

Figure 2

Fiction thrives on elements that are factual or seem factual; it traditionally contains much information which appears real and normal.

What did you find from writing the fact and fiction paragraphs, and from reading any others?

You may have seen or heard game shows with a similar premise – panel members talk imaginatively and often comically about themselves, or an object or a moment from history, trying to smuggle through facts that the other panellists don’t notice. The fun thing is that the truthful things are often the elements that sound most invented. But common factual details are of use in stories too.

Writing what you know is all important to the would-be fiction writer. Your source material doesn’t have to be exotic, or fantastical. The most mundane details from everyday lives can provide the most fruitful source for stories. And sometimes the mundane mixed with the fantastical can be amusing too.

1.2 Creating your own space

Figure 3

Start a ‘writer’s notebook’ to collect facts and fictions, observations from everyday life and things you imagine.

Your notebook, or journal, should be with you at all times so that you can jot down anything that strikes you as interesting or unusual, and anything you might want to remember to come back to later.

Your notebook will become a secret testing ground, for trying out ideas, phrases, mini-stories and scenes, bits of dialogue – all in complete freedom, with the knowledge that if things don’t work, no one sees these trial runs but you. Over time, your notebook will prove invaluable. It’s especially useful for noting down characters that you might want to develop later.

Make notes in a way that suits you, so that you can do it wherever you are – on trains, buses, in cafés, at home or work. Make your notebook a place you like going. You might use:

• a traditional school exercise book
• a hardback notebook with plain paper
• lined paper collected and ordered in a file
• your tablet, smart phone or laptop.

The only rule is to use whatever works best for you. You’ll return to your writer’s notebook in greater detail later, but start to use it right away.

1.2.1 Keeping track of useful details

Taking note of details of the appearance of people who take your interest should become a habit – people you see on the street, or in other venues.

Write down, in your notebook or journal, any interesting and unusual details that strike you about any of the characters from the following video. (Please note that there is no speech in this video.)

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These notes may help you to create characters you will be imagining and writing about in the weeks to come. They may, at some point, form the basis for a short story.

1.2.2 Reviewing your notes

Figure 4

It’s important to review the details and ideas you collect in your notebook.

Read the notes you made after watching the video. Did you concentrate on physical details? Did you note any details of clothing or expression?

Now open all your senses, and take notice of things around you in everyday life. Concentrate not only on what you see but also on sounds, smells and touch.

This should become a habit – a way of seeing the world. Always reflect on the notes you have taken in your journal.

Did you note things you heard – the way people speak or a squeaky or breathy voice?

Did you note any smells – like a distinctive perfume, or the smell of fried fish on someone’s clothes?

When reflecting on your notes, highlight any details you find especially interesting and to which you might want to return, to work on in more detail later.

1.3 Why writers write

Figure 5

There are all sorts of reasons why people start to write. Throughout this course you will listen to established writers speaking about their work.

Here are a number of novelists talking about how they began to write. You will hear Alex Garland, Michèle Roberts, Tim Pears, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Monique Roffey and Louis de Bernières.

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NARRATOR

There are all sorts of reasons why people start to write. Throughout this course you’ll listen to established writers speaking about their work. Here are a number of novelists talking about how they began to write. You’ll hear Alex Garland, Michèle Roberts, Tim Pears, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Monique Roffey and Louis de Bernières.

ALEX GARLAND

I got into writing really through drawing comic strips. My Dad’s a cartoonist and I grew up around comic books, I was always reading them and I, he draws so, you know, as a kid I was copying him and did drawings and um, I always thought that would be how I’d make my living really. At a certain point I think I was about 21, two things happened. One is I began to realise that I wasn’t as good at drawing as I needed to be in order to really make this work and I also began to get frustrated I think by how long it took to tell a story because you’d write it and then you’d draw it and the drawing which wasn’t that good would take me ages and ages and ages, and eventually what I did was, I just ditched the pictures pretty much and stuck with the words.

MICHÈLE ROBERTS

I think I began writing, and of course this is a story I’ve made up in adulthood looking back, and it’s a story that changes I think probably every 10 years as I go through my life – I think I began writing to invent some kind of cultural identity for myself, because of being half French and half English, that was the major conflict in my life. I think being a Catholic was very important to me. Partly in a positive sense because it gave me lots of stories – Catholicism is a source ofwhat we might call magical realism – mad, crazy things the saints get up to – miracles, and so on and so forth. Catholicism was also a very bad place for a young woman growing up. It’s a very misogynistic religion – I think it’s founded on the fear of the body and in particular the female body. I felt completely crushed by it. And also crushed by the practice of sitting in church listening to a priest who was very angry and particularly with young people, rant on Sunday after Sunday about our sins and our evil and our inequities. And I think as a very angry young woman I just began to start talking in my head and as soon as I could, I left the Church and read voraciously and lived a free life and began to write down all the angry things in my head and they turned into stories. So in a sense I think, I always had the love of language, because growing up in a bilingual household with a story-telling English grandmother and a father who’d wanted to write stories about his war time experience, a mother who taught French literature, I was surrounded by story-telling and books, and poetry and recipes and people quarrelling and using language very powerfully and I think that I began to find that subjects arrived. And nowadays when people ask me what I write about, I say – food, sex and God. And that just about sums it up. TIM PEARS: I always wanted to be a writer from when I was very young, I think it came from being somewhat unhappy as a child. In my second book, In the Land of Plenty the main character in it, the middle son of a family, Freeman family about whom the book’s, that follows their fortunes he’s a sort of semi-autobiographical character, he’s a photographer who takes photographs, partly to try and understand the world by looking through the lens of the camera, and partly to have something to hide behind, and I think really, that’s, for me writing has been that, or was that, that’s why I became a writer. Because, I was perplexed by, by life and by people and, grown-ups and the world, and writing was an attempt to understand it, but also, something to, to hide behind.

ABDULRAZAK GURNAH

Why I’m not sure, I guess why’s one of those things that happens as you’re doing it, but how is more like a stumbling into it more than, you know, having some kind of ambition at a certain age and saying – I know what I’m going to do, starting to write, rather than wanting to. And the starting for me happened with coming to England. I mean I used to write before, like at school, write the odd thing and so on, but it was only kind of playing, doing it for your friends and that kind of thing. Not what we mean when we say ‘a writer’. But it was after coming to England and kind of thinking about what it means to have left home, to have left people you know, to have come here, coming to grips with the things that were happening, not all of which were nice things. And it was during that process of thinking about things, understanding your position in relation to where you are that I started to write things, just things, and then after a while the things you think, well can I do something with these things. And you gradually realise that you’ve got something that is developing or that is growing and then get silly and say I could write a book! You know, that’s how it began really.

MONIQUE ROFFEY

I think it was, um, just a sensibility I’ve been writing from a very young age even as a child and in the same way that some people are naturally very musical or interested in insects or good at tennis or you know, crazy about trains or whatever it is, I mean from a very young age I’ve been writing diaries and journals and I just think it just progressed. I was a journalist for a while and um you know I was always writing something else, a screenplay or a comedy script or a tele this or a, you know, something. I think eventually when you’re old enough, you know, and you want to take yourself a bit more seriously I just woke up one day and said right – I’m going to make the next step and I’m gonna write a novel, I’m gonna have a go. So it’s been something that I’ve always done, there was never a conscious decision.

LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

I always knew that I was going to be a writer. My father wrote poetry so in our house it was quite normal to want to do that sort of thing. And I knew it from a very early age, I suppose from about the age 12. And um I had a couple of fantastically good English teachers, I think about three all together who were a definite inspiration and a guide. Then all through my teenage years I wrote poetry mostly the sort of embarrassing soppy love poetry that one does write about ‘Why don’t you love me?’ and ‘I’m going to kill myself’, that sort of thing. And then um in, in my 20s I actually forgot that I was going to be a writer because I thought I was going to be a rock star and I wrote songs and things instead. But I did carry on writing things from time to time and then when I was 35 I had a motorcycle crash that put me in plaster for six months and during that time I really couldn’t go out much, so I wrote my first novel to keep myself entertained.

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As you are listening, consider:

• How did these writers come to write?
• Why did they start to write?
• Were there any similarities in their respective journeys towards writing?

You’ll reflect on your thoughts in the next section.

1.4 The writing journey starts

Figure 6

It’s helpful to listen to what other writers have to say about the wish to write, but it is also important to listen to yourself too.

1.4.1 Developing a character from your notebook

Figure 7

Review the notes you’ve collected in your notebook to find a character to develop further.

1.4.2 Reading characters

Figure 8

Reading other novels and stories to see how characters appear is one of the most essential preparations you can undertake.

Take a look at these character sketches from George Orwell’s Burmese Days and Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. Note down how you think the writers are managing to portray character. The extracts are also available as a PDF  for your convenience.

1.4.3 Week 1 quiz

The following quiz will encourage you to think further about developing characters, but it will also encourage you to read as a writer.

1.4.4 Comparing your characters

Figure 9

Can you use any of these methods in your stories and with your characters?

Having looked at the characters and ways of revealing characters in the passages from Burmese Days and Notes on a Scandal, go back to your character sketch and add any elements – for instance, details of appearance or behaviour – which you think might bring the character to life for your reader.

• Consider the ways in which your reader might be getting involved in the invention and imagining of your characters.
• Orwell uses third-person narration, and focuses on one physical aspect of Flory to create a picture of his psychological state.
• Heller uses first-person narration, which means we are dealing with two characters – the character being described, and the character doing the observing and describing. This adds an intrigue about the relationship between the two characters.
• Neither method is better than the other – they are just different approaches. Check whether you are using third or first person narration.
• Remember that your reader will always have to participate in the imagining of your characters.

1.5 Summary of Week 1

Figure 10

At the end of the first week of Start writing fiction, you’ve explored the differences between fact and fiction, begun to look at how characters are developed and heard from some successful writers on how they started to write.

You’ve also started your own notebook – hopefully you’ve already experienced how keeping a notebook can help your development as a writer.

In Week 2, you’ll think about what inspires you to write, what you can learn from other writers and how to start writing. You can move on to Week 2 now.

If studying this week of Start writing fiction has inspired you, take a look at the area specifically created for you to explore more about writing fiction on OpenLearn.

References

Acknowledgements

This course was written by Derek Neale.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated in the acknowledgements section, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:

Figures

Figure 5 © The Open University/J Vespa (Garland)/Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert (Roberts)/David Levenson (Gurnah). Ben Stansall (Roffey)/Ulf Andersen (de Bernières) - all via Getty Images/Rory Carnegie (Pears)

Figure 8 © The Open University/Getty Images/Popperfoto (Orwell)/Amy Graves (Heller)

AV

Why writers write © The Open University/Alex Garland/Michèle Roberts/Tim Pears/Abdulrazak Gurnah/Monique Roffey/Louis de Bernières.