Characters – Nastasya Parker

Finding a Door

This Week’s Bit of String: A dark and stormy night

One rainy evening out of several rainy evenings this week, our cat Oberon got restless. He was hanging around the hallway, so I opened the front door in case he wanted to go out.

*It’s all a bit much when you’re a small scaredy cat.*

Named for the prince of the fairies, Obie does have a microchip-activated catflap in our double-glazed back door. It’s complete with fixed metal platforms in and outside the door for him to step up to the opening and then down, most daintily. Whenever possible, though, he naturally prefers a door to be opened for him.

When I opened the front door that night, exposing the wind and rain, Obie hissed immediately. That’s a no, then.

He lives in hope that the front door, actually at the driveway side of our semi-detached house, will reveal a different world from the one he sees out the back door into the garden, or the front windows onto the front garden and the cul-de-sac.

For us humans, opening our own front door rarely brings surprises. We expect most deliveries and don’t receive many guests. With Remembrance Day just passed, I consider the days when a knock at the door could bring devastating news. Now we have much tinier rectangles that do that for us.

Story Portals

Last Saturday, before the sun retired into indefinite hibernation, I spent the day wandering around Stroud for the Book Festival there. I went to Alice Jolly’s book launch for her new novel, The Matchbox Girl. It sounds excellent, a story told by an imagined adolescent neurodivergent girl who collects matchboxes and spends time in the Vienna Children’s Hospital, where she gets to know Dr. Asperger.

Jolly told us about the Children’s Hospital, and its workers who resisted categorising children, viewed each patient as gifted, and simply believed the deficiency lay in adults who hadn’t learned to understand a child’s differences yet.

Mock exams started this week for my poor SEN students, so let me tell you, that sounds pretty awesome.

*Seasonal front door reflections, Woodstock, Vermont*

Unfortunately, The Matchbox Girl is set in 1934 and the ensuing years. So, things didn’t go so well in the lovely Vienna Children’s Hospital after a while. Dr. Asperger was revealed in this century to have collaborated disastrously with the Nazis.

Jolly explained that she was researching Dr. Asperger and the hospital, but didn’t know how to write a novel about it all until she had the idea of the matchbox-collecting Adelheid.

She said, “When writing a novel, you must never go in through the front door. You must find a way in the back.”

This edict pierced me. I’m always seeking to improve my craft and when a talented writer, who teaches Creative Writing at Oxford no less, issues a proclamation about how stories work, I immediately inventory everything I ever wrote. I suspect I’m not the only one?

Anyway, I was thinking, “What is the front door to each of my individual projects, and which is the back? Have I been heavy-handed and just crashed through the front, is that my problem? Why don’t I immediately understand what my novel’s front door is, is that my problem?”

Head and Heart

I meant to submit my novel The Gospel of Eve to more publishers and agents this year. But I was wrapping up an edit and more dauntingly, a synopsis rewrite, when I became so busy with critiques and a new project and work and family, I sort of forgot. That’s a major goal for 2026.

But Eve in herself is like a pre-fabricated back door, isn’t she, relegated as such for millennia? In my new project, I suppose the front door is the whole relentless mess of trying to appear good, while the back door is the comparatively straightforward (but still quite messy) task of fixing up a New England resort and cabins. Each banging cottage door reveals not just the renovations needed inside, but further internal turmoil for the new owners resulting from past relationships.

While at Stroud Book Festival, I also attended an interview with Elif Shafak regarding her latest novel, There are Rivers in the Sky. I’m excited to read this book as well. It spans history through a single drop of rain and incorporates the epic Gilgamesh poem.

Elif Shafak is passionate and graceful, and she spoke about the difference between information, which we have in overabundance; knowledge, which requires sustained commitment; and wisdom, which engages the heart.

I don’t want to worry so much about front doors and back doors and such, so that the heart of my project goes the way of the sun recently, obscured by my deluge of thoughts. It’s been such a long time since I actually started writing a novel from scratch—my Eve novel started as a short story—that I’m constantly questioning myself. Were my previous drafts this rough?

But after receiving very positive feedback about the first 3000 words, I started to feel better. It takes time to find a story’s heart, front door, and back door. Now that I know someone wants to read more, that gives me strength to keep discovering.

Have you been to any literature festivals this year? What great books have you discovered, and what insights did you gain into your own creative work?

All Over the Place

This Week’s Bit of String: Expanding brackets

Back in school for the Christmas term, I spent 40 minutes working with a student on algebraic practice expanding brackets. Guiding him to multiply each bracketed term by each term in the other brackets, explaining why we’re multiplying here.

He was making progress, starting to remember a couple more steps as we moved on to the third problem of his online homework—and then he was sick of it. He insisted on guessing, repeatedly and incorrectly, stabbing the keyboard, for the fourth problem.

I sputtered reminders that he could work out the right answer if he tried.

*Autumn leaves at Mascoma Lake, New Hampshire*

He stabbed another wrong guess. “Miss, I just saw, like, three stages of grief pass over your face in one second.”

He may well have seen anger and bargaining and depression, but his comment then immediately made me laugh. It’s fitting, I suppose. It’s been a very busy couple of weeks.

Across the Ocean and Back

Just a week ago, as the half-term break ended, I arrived back from the USA. I published my previous blog post from Heathrow Departures on my way out, and spent the entire flight westward on writing tasks. Caught up on the latest Mslexia issue, scribbled about the journey, and wrote answers to interview questions for a Writers Showcase I’ll be participating in at the end of the month.

I made the trip for three reasons: to be with my family as we cope with bereavement, to start finding some private closure for myself, and to help out in any way possible. My parents are now in charge of my aunt’s house as well as their own, and my autistic cousin is now a wonderful part of our family. There’s a lot going on.

For example, on my first full day there I woke up at 4:15 a.m. and started scribbling about the previous evening’s reunion with my family. At the vaguest sign of daylight, around 6:45, I embarked on a 5-mile hike. I started in awe of the New England autumn colours which I haven’t seen much in 22 years and eventually made my way to the cemetery where I had a good cry at 8 a.m. over the family graves. I thanked our lost loves for giving us such good examples of how to look after each other.

After helping my mom with weeding, organising the pantry, and then hoovering up cobwebs from the basement ceiling, we left my aunt’s house for my parents’ and met up with my brother and his kids, plus my kiddo and their fiancé, for raucous family times. This included, among other random moments, me bouncing my niece on my lap while singing a sped-up version of a Sunday school song about Daniel in the lion’s den, in honour of my cousin’s middle name Daniel. Junie demanded it twice more.

And that was just one day! It was a wonderful week, I managed to squeeze a fair bit in, although it feels surreally separate from my back-to-term life. Despite the lack of sleep on the overnight flight home plus hints of jet lag, I made it through this past week at school while also cleaning my own house this time, running the BlueSky channel for Women Writers Network, critiquing 3 different pieces for other writers, editing the opening section of my new novel to submit that for feedback, starting my Thanksgiving cooking, and writing this masterful piece.

Ups and Downs

My day job itself is a microcosmic whirlwind of emotion. I’ll spend an excruciating hour with a student who refuses to go to classes so it’s down to TAs to educate her 1:1. An hour despairing of my career choice while she refuses to do anything while she glowers at her phone under a fur-lines parka hood. Try to make conversation and half the time I’m met with a sneering, “You WHAT?” The next hour, I might be fortunate enough to attend a Photography class, prompting and scribing a student’s self-evaluation of his work while a couple other boys in the class exchange corny jokes.

“Miss, what do you think of this one: What did the first hat say to the second hat? —You stay here, I’ll go on a head.”

I told my husband’s favourite joke which involves an elephant impersonation so I could never do it justice here. This surprised the boys so much, they cracked up. Meanwhile, my student tried his best to bite his smile back and I could claim my revenge:

“Pretty sure I just saw all five stages of grief pass over your face when I told that joke,” I quipped.

While acknowledging, and celebrating really, that our lives are made up of such emotional tempests, and that progress is often two steps forward and one (or two or three) back, I don’t necessarily like that portrayed too realistically in a book. I like a story to have a fairly orderly trajectory.

Yes, the protagonist, having been made suddenly aware of a problem during the inciting incident, will over-compensate and mess it all up. Yes, all will seem lost at the midpoint and they’ll have to rally again. But it irks me when a writer reconciles characters just to fall out over something else, for example, or gives them a crucial self-realisation only to forget it in the next chapter and have to learn it again. This seems common in stories of middle-class angst.

Maybe my intolerance makes me a selfish reader, but I don’t need fiction to resemble real life that much. I can read about real, sometimes harrowing issues, but give me some kind of actual trajectory through it. The ups and downs of real life are tiring enough.

Does that bother you in a book? How firmly do you like stories plotted, or are you happy enough to spend each moment with a character?

My Writingversary

This Week’s Bit of String: Pencils, coughs, and cake

Thirty-three years ago Wednesday, I started properly writing my first book. I was eleven years old, in seventh grade. I hid behind my hair and refused to wear my ugly glasses. When I was forced to speak in front of the class, a classmate hooted, “Turn up your hearing aids, everybody.”

I may not have had much to say, but I had a story to write. I’d planned it for months; drawing up maps and a census, tracing pictures I thought resembled my characters, recording a soundtrack mixtape. I blocked out scenes with my little pencil-people that lived in cardboard tenement blocks, or in drawer compartments above my jeans and sweaters.

And then I finally started writing it. It had taken time to realise I could do more than play-act it in miniature, I could write it. Preserve it. Do the grown-up thing.

On the very evening after I’d begun my writing, I received encouragement at the junior high school’s annual Open Evening. My new English teacher praised my classwork extensively to my parents. She was the first to focus on my writing. It felt like an endorsement on behalf of the universe, the timing of her conviction that I could go far. I remember being giddily pleased, while of course trying not to show it.

In the next two months, with pencils, stacks of double-sided lined paper, and my tiny printing (I’ve no idea why they say that’s a symptom of a control freak), I wrote 386 pages. Whilst maintaining my good grades, too. I have never been able to replicate that accomplishment in terms of volume produced.

Reaching Limits

That draft should have been more than 386 pages. I hadn’t reached the end, even though I knew exactly what should come next. I had thought about it, played reels of it in my mind often enough. I contracted bronchitis and was sick for 3 weeks, then got it again the following month and was sick for longer.

Not only had I entered my Author Era, I was pioneering what would become my Victorian street urchin-inspired cough. To this day, I’m susceptible to it, and it serves as a homing signal for my family to find me.

I was barely able to do schoolwork, and I stopped writing my story. Throughout the following decade, I simply restarted the same story, standing in new sidekicks as I met new friends, and I never got past 100 pages. The first novel I would ever complete, Artefacts, was a very different story although it had a similar protagonist modeled somewhat inadvertently on myself. But my self-perception had evolved over the years requiring a different plot, because my dream ending shifted from being rescued to self-acceptance.

I finished my first novel in 2015, almost 23 years after my original Writingversary. My first published story, in The Bristol Prize Anthology 2010, came 17.5 years after the Writingversary. 10.5 years after my Writingversary, I completed a degree in Writing and Literature while a single mother working full-time. I’ve had quite a few short stories published now. Not so with my novels yet, but I wonder if my 7th grade teacher, and the many supportive teachers and college instructors that followed, might still be impressed.

Marking Success

It’s a bit staggering to consider that I’ve been putting pencil to paper to write planned projects for more than three decades. Naturally, I wish I had more to show for it. Winning the 2017 Gloucestershire Prose Prize and reading at Cheltenham Literature Festival was a highlight, and my story “Pie a la Mode” won £250 in Amazon vouchers from the Funny Pearls humour website. Enough to fund equipment for a pet cat, and even a new hoover to clean up after our dark feline prince Oberon.

*This year’s Writingversary* *destination*

Writing has opened up social opportunities as I’ve made wonderful friends through writing groups, and it’s an integral part of my mental well-being. I don’t feel right if I don’t do it. By building my writing habit over the years, I’ve built resilience as well. I may not have a lucrative career, but I am constantly creating or fine-tuning pieces.

I still sometimes wonder if my bouts of poorliness tend to follow a particularly busy writing stretch. But now, because writing is part of my daily life, I tend to keep working on projects even when a cough strikes, or even flu.

Maybe that’s my best success. Thirty-three years provide many chances to give up, and I didn’t. For this year’s Writingversary, I walked up to the local Garden Centre after work and had a drink in the cafe and a slice of pumpkin cake with maple chai frosting. I scribbled in the golden autumn light. The timing of my Writingversary draws me to this season, and I’m so glad I found a bit of time to celebrate.

Do you remember when you first started writing? How do you celebrate this milestone?

Carried Along

This Week’s Bit of String: A wide range of accounts

Only one exam left. I’m happy for our students that they won’t have to sit through them anymore, but disappointed that it’s the only accepted measure for how they’ve done in secondary school.

My role in exams this year, in addition to reading and scribing for a 16-year-old with special needs, is also to act as language modifier for him. This is a rarely-granted access arrangement, for those with hearing and/ or processing disabilities, as well as reading difficulties.

It means I can assist with clarifying a question, but of course it’s quite restricted. I can’t define or ‘modify’ any subject-specific terminology, and it’s best to leave the engine of the question, command words, untouched (explain, analyse, evaluate, the whole Bloom’s Taxonomy lot). I can help with “carrier language,” the words that form the framework of the question.

Here’s an example. In the first History paper, one of the questions was: “Give an account of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

The student asked me what “account” meant. “Like Instagram or Facebook?”

I rephrased it as “Tell the story of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

This gave him a clearer idea. While the concession of having a language modifier is rare, I wonder how many students unshakably associate the word account with social media, just as an example. For students who are neurodiverse, a word they’re unsure about can be very hard to see past.

Staying Flexible

Adults have this issue as well. There’s a new writer to the writing feedback group I’m in, and both times I’ve sent her my writing, she comments negatively because she’s made an assumption early on and then the story doesn’t comply with it. In a short story where the protagonist was looking after her grandmother, the reader decided that Nan was the name of one of the protagonist’s children, criticised me for mentioning a “grandmother” because that was adding too many characters, and continued to complain that the character didn’t interact with Nan in a manner suitable for a young child.

Revising our assumptions as we go along is a vital skill. Certainly, it’s more innate to some than others. I try to reserve judgment as I’m reading, and when something doesn’t make sense I go back and work out what I may have misinterpreted. I don’t often read book blurbs anymore because they sometimes distort the significance of plot aspects and lead you to expect something different.

This comes from when I read Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You. The back of the book talked about how the heroine “knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home,” and said “knowing what’s coming keeps her sane.” For perhaps my own personal reasons, I concluded the protagonist was neurodivergent, maybe on the autism spectrum. I was baffled and a bit annoyed when she wasn’t.

My frustration was my own fault and based on my assumptions, so I decided not to read book blurbs anymore. I want to get swept up when I read, not anchored down by my potentially outmoded notions. When we read fiction or poetry, all language is carrier language. It’s all taking us somewhere.

Letting Characters Carry

During the last couple of weeks, I started writing my new novel. It feels as if, in a way, most of the language in the first draft is carrier language. That’s what I’m reminding myself anyway. It’s clunky because mainly, I’m seeing how the characters develop the plot. When I go back and edit, I can polish the voice and streamline the form. Many revisions from now it will travel, it will fly, rather than get shoved along.

*I love these roots at an old canal mill site, but for now I can’t get too attached.*

I’ve done a lot of planning and character research, and I feel I’ve honed my craft in terms of focusing the story structure and understanding the direction, kicking off with inciting incidents and such. But I won’t get super attached to anything just yet. I scribbled many notes on my characters’ backgrounds, considering their needs versus their wants, so I feel I know about them, but I can’t presume I know them deeply. I must remain open to what they do, because they could alter my planned plot.

A few pages in, I’m trying to stop thinking about how to rewrite with improved style. It doesn’t matter yet. My characters are more important. This absolves me for now from having to write beautifully or cleverly, which is great since I’m tired and not ready for that yet.

Stories carried by characters engage me more than stories dragged through certain plot points, and I think that’s true for many readers. However, we don’t want the plot to trudge as characters wield the burden of their thoughts too heavily. Later, I’ll correct the balance.

How do you stay flexible? What carries you when you start a project?

Staying Creative

This Week’s Bit of String: An accident-prone day

You know those days when everything goes wrong? Last Sunday, I had a few chores left on my weekend list. I needed to change the sheets, but inadvertently laundered a tissue with the bed linens. It avenged its fate by leaving sticky fragments all over everything.

I stepped outside to put some recycling in the bin, an opportunity also to chat with our neighbour in the adjoining half of the duplex. This brought up a fencing dispute which is provoking grief and peevishness on both sides.

While we attempted to reach a compromise in the sunshine, I saw my cat speed round the house and dart in the open back door with a pigeon in his mouth. I spent the next 20 minutes waiting for him to finish tearing into it behind the couch, and at least as much time after that shifting the furniture, picking up pieces, hoovering feathers, cleaning the carpet, and wiping bloodstains off the lamp cable.

In the afternoon, I needed to clean the fridge. I dropped an egg, it slipped underneath the appliance, I had to empty the fridge completely and move it and clean behind it. When wiping the worktops in preparation for hoovering, I tipped a bit of water on my laptop, which has thankfully survived unscathed.

With half my chores taking up more time and aggravation than planned, I reached the evening exhausted (but with a clean house!) and thought, am I actually going to write today? I barely felt human, let alone like a writer.

The Great Humaniser

Maybe I was a walking disaster because, after a week of flu, I was still battling extra fatigue and some headaches. My husband was now in the throes of the virus so the house was generally miserable, had been for a little while, and wouldn’t be imminently abating.

*Thank goodness it’s been sunny and springy or I’d have been seriously depressed.*

When I’m sick, or drained after being sick, I refer to myself as “running a reduced service.” I still have to do laundry and basic cleaning and cook and if not get groceries myself, arrange for them. Have to help my family in whatever way possible, and must get back to school to do my job as hastily as I can. The result is I’m doing nothing but work and chores; no extra exercise or writing sessions. No social gatherings or outings for entertainment, or long hikes. It’s a drag and can continue for weeks because a reduced service is still fairly demanding and I’m rarely getting a decent night’s sleep.

I don’t know if it’s the best physical remedy, but the best emotional one might be to write anyway. That’s what I did Sunday. I bashed out 500 more words of a character sketch, prepping a new novel. I went from feeling I was barely surviving, to remembering I am capable of adding beauty and empathy to the world through what I create.

Any creative endeavour brings out our humanity and even transcends it.

Why We Write

The past couple weeks reminded me why we write (or make music, or create art). Even while I was sick, if I could get a few minutes of fresh air, and perk myself up listening to quality tunes, I could then engage in some writerly activity most days. That creative feeling fought off some of the glumness.

Here are ways creativity elevates us:

Wearing pyjamas for the 4th day running doesn’t mean we can’t write a piquant description of the flowers sprouting outside or the cat’s sleeping position. Tip: Take 5 or 10 minutes, scribble about what you see. Write your favourite line from those scribbles on a post-it or take a picture on your phone as a reminder of your formidable talent.

The more we practise bits of writing, the more we notice without trying. When an articulate description comes to mind, we feel observant; we feel less like we’re missing out on life. Even if that’s a clever phrase about how cough syrup tastes, or the pound of a headache.

We can still be part of a community. Being on Twitter isn’t always a positive experience these days, but I was running the profile for the Women Writers Network while I was poorly. My Tweet about a recent visit to Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, an independent bookshop in Bath, received over 350 likes, and dozens of responses with other writerly/ literary types adding their indie bookseller recommendations. It turned into a real bright spot. If you’re low on energy, taking a few minutes to encourage and lift up others on social media can boost our mood.

When we’re forced to take a break, it knocks our confidence. I found that, though I’d kept some semblance of writing in my life, I still felt disheartened about picking up bigger projects again. On Saturday while I was feeling a bit better, I sat in the sunny dining room and did a watercolour based on a favourite place, where I’m setting my next novel. I’m not an artist and don’t have much experience with watercolour, but I made myself complete it. This took less mental energy than writing, but plenty of courage. And I don’t hate how it turned out. It reminded me it’s ok to bash out writing too. We just have to go for it.

Do you use creativity as an antidote when things go wrong? What are your tips for maintaining a creative state of mind when low on strength?

Following Through

This Week’s Bit of String: Setting out the pots and pans

On busy days, I put out the cooking dishes I’ll need for dinner before I even leave for work. I’m convinced it helps me later on.

It’s a mystery to my husband, the difference it makes to have a saucepan out ready for pasta, or a baking sheet for roast veg, maybe even the olive oil standing to attention beside the stove. I realise it doesn’t actually save me time. But it’s a springboard, a little jump in momentum.

If I feel a task is already started, it’s less daunting to carry on with the whole thing. Not that I have much choice regarding cooking dinner! But if it’s a really awful chore, like dusting or scrubbing the shower, having the space cleared and the cloth or scrub brush out convinces me to get on with it when I get up in the morning or come home from the schoolday.

Writing is similar. Just amending Pages’s silly default settings, titling a document, and putting page numbers at the bottom (to be really optimistic), makes me feel I’ve got going. No turning back. And when a piece is properly in progress, I sometimes utilise the trick of stopping midsentence so I know how to crack on when I return to it.

Finding the Way Through

To write a novel, I plan to a fair degree. After all, it’s so much work; I need to be sure something tangibly happens, that my protagonist is transformed in some way. Then I can write with a sense of what needs to occur in the beginning, middle, and end, stepping stones to guide me through the big project.

Short stories are often more vibey for me. I might have a character idea or an event idea, but almost never both. So I won’t necessarily know what happens, or who it’s happening to. Still, a short story feels less unwieldy, and it’s exciting to dive in without a plan. But the amount of options can be daunting.

In lieu of plot points to get me through, for a short story I like to coalesce around a certain language motif, or imagery theme. In “Pie a la Mode,” I followed the schoolyear’s changing weather and linked it to relationships. In “The Albatross of Albany High School,” I had Coleridge’s poem weaving throughout, a thread to follow. My current short story is about a fairground accident so I have all the carnival imagery to focus on.

The Finish Line

I’ve only just finished the fairground story, which I started writing during half-term. It’s been a long time since I did a first draft, and this is a really rough one. Just write it, I had to remind myself. Keep slamming whatever down; shape it later. And holy guacamole, I’ve got plenty here to chisel.

Winging it with writing a story feels similar to the fasting and dieting I’ve been doing. Fasting removes the usual structure of meals, the timings of a day dependent on treats. What are the markers here, am I even nearing my goal?

In an essay for LitHub, short story writer Yukiko Tominga talks about how she knows when to end a story. It’s “when I feel kindness.” Writing is her process toward loving a character despite their flaws. If she still feels “meanness” toward anyone, the story isn’t done.

This seems a beautiful way to view any process, really. We are journeying toward kindness. Any glimmer of sympathy is a stepping stone toward this, any hint of another’s motives is a thread we can follow toward sympathy or even empathy.

Planning ahead with my chores, placing equipment ready, I’m doing myself little favours, getting the initiation of the tasks out of the way. My diet makes me feel kinder to myself, and gives me more focus in the meantime. My current story draft, slapped down with random idea spatters and sprawling tendrils, has material I can work with to feel kindness to the characters and hopefully point readers in that direction.

What kindnesses are you striving for?

Prescription for Description

This Week’s Bit of String: Bluebell woods

For several blissful minutes on Sunday, I was alone in a bluebell wood, without even being rained on. The freshly unfolding flowers formed a bright, periwinkle-coloured carpet beneath beech trees. Underfoot, leaves crackled and beech nut husks split like sparking embers, and birds sang with pheasants occasionally interjecting a cough. There were so many blooms I could smell them, a beautiful faint perfume akin to hyacinth. I sat against a mossy tree trunk.

“This is as good as it gets,” I thought. How often do I have time to just sit, and amidst such wonder? The colour of bluebells revives like a charge of electricity.

But to recharge a depleted object, said object ought to keep still. And I did not. I couldn’t surrender my quest to capture the stunning colour in an iPhone photo (spoiler: not possible) and I was checking my FitBit steps, already past 13,000, and mentally inventorying my remaining chores of the day. My brain is an action junkie.

It’s like this when I read as well. I love reading, I love being engrossed and being transported elsewhere. But I get a bit itchy, so to speak, when entering a thicket of dense paragraphs. This translates somewhat to my writing. I feel that writing dialogue is my favourite and my best.

Is this a character flaw? I’ve always worried it’s unintellectual, this reluctance to immerse myself in long, lyrical descriptive prose.

A Little Less Conversation

I do like descriptions of course; I’m not a complete philistine. I had to read Nathaniel Hawthorne in high school and loved The Scarlet Letter. I’ve gotten through plenty of other classics. It’s just a relief when a story whizzes through dialogue, especially since I do a fair portion of my reading while on the treadmill. Got to keep up a good pace!

Over the years I’ve had to realise that snappy dialogue doesn’t equal efficient plot development. I interpreted “show don’t tell” to mean you let readers watch a conversation unfold, and decide for themselves what’s going on. But there’s a lot more weeding and pruning required, as well as tactful planting.

A reasonably-sized paragraph can convey actions that took place, sometimes more naturally than having characters discuss it. This also establishes narrative voice: how does the story’s speaker sum up what’s happened? Same with world-building. Since I’m writing Eve’s story, her observations about the setting in Eden versus exile are key. But she’s not about to spend time going on about it when she has heaps of children, grandchildren, and so forth to keep an eye on.

Part of my editing process is to look at paragraph patterns. Check narration isn’t a litany of subject-led sentences (“She did this. He did that.”) Avoid extended conversations, which can sometimes feel like watching a tennis match. (She said this. He said that.) I look for short, quick paragraphs to give way to long, and for longer reflective passages to be punctuated with pacy interaction.

That’s probably something I need to do better in life as well: accept the occasional quiet moment without freaking out about the next, sometimes self-imposed, deadline.

A Few Favourites

I revel in rich descriptions, particularly when they don’t travel in packs. They can be threaded throughout a piece. Here are some methods I love:

Make it multisensory: Readers will hardly be immersed if using only their eyes. We need to know how it sounds, smells, feels, as well. Some of us might not have full command of our senses! I enjoyed helping elderly, sightless Eve identify people by their voice and sometimes odour. These provide extra hints to secondary characters: “Her voice was softness on a flinty foundation.” “I listened to waves whisper like sighing logs, tossing seashells like crackling sparks.”

*Graveyards are spectacular to describe…*

Metaphors drawing on everyday life: Even the grandest sights can be relatable. What we decide to compare things to says a lot. The poet Simon Armitage provides a gorgeous example of balancing the spectacular with the mundane in “The Civilians:”
“The golden evenings spread like ointment through the open valleys,
Buttered one side of our spotless washing.”

Stand-in for character turmoil: I often prefer setting descriptions to character ones. Character-driven stories rock my world, but while doing all that driving, said characters probably won’t have much time for self-analysis. They can project ourselves onto their surroundings; any description of place will indicate something about its people. Not just cliched rainy funerals or sunny meet-cutes, I mean places of isolation and toughness, or chaos or tenderness. People trying to make it in deserted rural settings in Lulu Allison’s Salt Lick. The depressed town in Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and the few inner chambers or the out-of-town lake that transcends this.

The fast-forward: I love time passage marked with carefully-selected details squished right up together. JK Rowling was great at this in Harry Potter; using the helpful device of plotting by school calendar, the holidays marked a chance to fill in story detail in a fun way. Harry’s first Christmas at Hogwarts, for example: “The lake froze solid and the Weasley twins were punished for bewitching several snowballs so that they followed Quirrell around, bouncing off the back of his turban…” I do this with my chapter beginnings at each new generation Eve witnesses.

I aim to be better at appreciating the Pause function of observation and description, not just the fast forward. How do you feel about long paragraphs and slow bits? What sorts of description do you enjoy reading, and put to use in your writing?

Trouble of Our Own Making

This Week’s Bit of String: Saturday morning movies

One of our family traditions was letting Mom stay in bed on Saturday mornings, and we’d watch a movie. This sounds simple, but we had to choose from our videotapes, mostly random stuff recorded from basic cable, plus Disney feature cartoons. I’m the oldest of four kids, with five years between myself and my youngest sister. Certain parties objected to anything in black and white, and it couldn’t be too “mushy,” and one gets creeped out by films with talking animals.

Whenever I vetoed a movie, my siblings would roll their eyes and admit annoyed defeat. “Oh sure, because they get in trouble.”

*This movie’s still a nope from me. But the local vet’s window display was very cute!*

It’s true, I was super sensitive about misunderstood characters in kids’ films, from Anne of Green Gables to Pete’s Dragon. Lady and the Tramp—I couldn’t bear that one (plus, it had talking animals so it was out anyway). It was the same with books: Curious George, for example.

I was petrified of getting in trouble for something I didn’t do, or even worse for something I did. I was the oldest child in a religious family, sensitive by nature, also traumatised by abuse. My dread of getting in trouble was so severe I couldn’t read or watch things where that occurred.

Causation vs Correlation

Lucky for me, in quite a few children’s films, things just happen. We ended up watching Peter Pan a lot (not the cartoon, but a slightly fuzzy tape of Mary Martin performing the lead in the Broadway musical). Plenty happens in that without the characters necessarily causing it.

It’s different as you get older. Characters must be autonomous, reflecting our quest for independence. This means everything that happens stems from protagonists’ decisions, overreaches, and failures.

Every crime-busting film from Miss Congeniality to Hannibal starts with the heroic detective disgracing themselves, and they must salvage their reputation. Every superhero film first establishes them as fallible; their powers are their only shot at redemption.

*We love wonky, flawed characters. But do we have to make them responsible for everything?*

Recently while I finished retyping my entire novel with new edits, I streamed Paddington and Paddington 2 to get through the copying. When I mentioned it to my youngest sister, she was like, “Wait, how do you watch those? Paddington gets in trouble all the time!”

Yeah, I kind of got over that. I had to, or else I’d never read or watch anything. Nor would I be working on my current novel, about possibly the most famous Character Who Gets in Trouble of all time: Eve, the original sinner.

As I edit the book, I’ve been reading about story structure. John Yorke in Into the Woods presents the prototypical story structure as a process of awakening. Initially, the protagonist does not deal well with revelations and things continue going wrong. I just finished Nikesh Shukla’s Your Story Matters, in which he emphasises the importance of causality: the plot springs from a main character’s action or deliberate inaction when faced with new knowledge.

In other words, the main character is SUPPOSED to make it all happen. It’s all their fault. They have to fall a long way in order to teach us how to get back up. Every protagonist, in a sense, is the author’s sacrifice.

Agency vs… Real Life?

Now that I recognise how it works, it’s stressing me out and reviving my aversion to characters getting in trouble. I put a film on and wait for the character to completely blow it. I’m anxious while reading because I know the protagonist is destined to screw things up.

*There are a lot of things bigger than our characters and us.*

I do like a domino plot, though, where each detail causes another; the way John Irving or Margaret Atwood spin massive tales of intricate characters and everything’s interconnected by the end.

As I go through my Eve book yet again, I’m wondering how to cohere the trajectory, Eve’s actions (or inactions) and their consequences. This is a myth retelling, so not everything is strictly in Eve’s control. She has God, Lucifer, and most chaotically, other humans to deal with. Plus, part of my reason for writing this is to repudiate millennia of condemnation. Maybe bucking the traditional structure is acceptable, or am I a bad writer if Eve doesn’t trigger every consequence herself?

I noticed that in Dune 2, the protagonist never fails at any new trick he tries. The developments in the plot are not of his own making—different from a Marvel film. Indeed, Nikesh Shukla notes that the character-triggered consequence story structure is a Western tradition. It makes sense, I guess, that main characters from other, more faith-based cultures have less agency to affect the plot.

We Westerners are obsessed with individuality—the downside being we can be persuaded that any trouble is our fault. In real life, it’s not. Not every time. How tightly do you like your plots linked to your character’s actions? Does it ever cause you anxiety, knowing a character is destined to get in trouble?

Checking the Story

This Week’s Bit of String: Sudden appearances

During a research project on Brazil, my Year 11 student enjoyed quizzing me with each fact he found. We learned it can rain up to 394 inches per year in the Amazon, and that the rainforest covers twice the size of India. He also took a few side quests with Google: the deepest hole in the earth, the biggest airplane.

Then he asked, “You know that Boeing 747 that disappeared?”

“Um… which one? Do you know what year it was, where the flight was from?”

“I don’t know. But they’ve just found it; look! Here’s the plane.”

*Don’t believe everything you think–street art in Cheltenham*

He angled his laptop screen to me. He’d put “Boeing 747 disappeared” into Google and then gone to the images tab. For all I knew, every picture was of a different plane and completely different circumstances and who could say from each photo whether that plane ever had, in fact, disappeared.

I follow political news avidly (it’s a not-particularly-healthy habit of mine) so I hear and worry about the spread of misinformation influencing elections, and about voters being in their own, social media-cultivated bubbles. But what I witnessed here drove it home in an entirely new way.

Suddenly it hit me, anyone can Google, for example, “Joe Biden senile” and the algorithms will present them with exactly what they want to see. And thus the course of human history could be affected.

Refining Terms

When we factor in the literacy struggles which some people have–why search for information to read when a picture will do? The problem is, a picture could depict anything and be from anyone. Someone could Google “Israel terrorists” and I hate to imagine what photos would come up.

The intent can be ambiguous, too. “Israel terrorists” could mean terror acts against Israeli persons, or terrorist acts committed by them… And viewers of Google images might get both but assume all confirm their viewpoint. Sites label photos with whatever fits their agenda.

Intent matters… Online algorithms are desperately trying to work out what we want to see, and it’s on us to return the favour by investigating the motives of people who post and share content.

Writers are infamous for spending our time on side research. Sometimes, it’s easier to check what wallpaper would be accurate for a time period than to actually write some plot. I generally don’t have much time to spare, so I keep my search terms precise. This is useful in following current events as well.

Just Asking Questions

Along with honing our queries to ensure we get the right information and checking the reliability of our sources, it’s crucial to interrogate our own motivations. I think we have an instinct to villainise certain people and idolise others. Once we’ve selected someone for those roles, we exclusively seek evidence supporting our decision.

*An image is only a confined window from a greater story. Selfridges, London*

Last week I had to resolve an altercation between a Year 13 student and a teacher. She calls him Scary Man and she and laughs about it with her friends to cover her fear about his shoutiness, and how it made her cry in one of his lessons.

When I talked to the teacher about her difficulties, he was spectacularly morose. “I don’t want to make children cry,” he kept saying. He knows they call him Scary Man. He tries to be gentle, and when they don’t appreciate this he snaps. They’re each as insecure as each other.

“It’s exciting to rally with our friends against a villain,” I said to my student in our discussion later. “But an inanimate one would be preferable.”

Goodness knows I’ve been guilty of the same thing, not least when I was her age; I signed someone’s yearbook thanking them for hating one of the same girls I did. Not very graceful or empathetic of me, but that too would have come from insecurity and from wanting to form a particular connection.

Humans tend to construct narratives. We like to see an arc of justice, and it’s reassuring when good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated. We love being right so much, we’re perversely happy to sniff out confirmation of our most bitter suspicions.

Real life doesn’t often fit into these binaries and these smooth tracks, though. If things are lining up too well with what we expect and what we want, it may be worth looking deeper into the story, and looking behind the scenes of the presented picture.

Pivotally, let’s try to keep sight of what underlying insecurities motivate those who seem like villains. We wouldn’t write a completely un-nuanced character without backstory, would we? We can’t assume real humans are without them.

Befriending Darkness

This Week’s Bit of String: Black, feathery carnage

On Tuesday, I came home from work raring to finish a story. I’d been unsure about it for the last month, aware I didn’t have the voice right and possibly insufficient trajectory, but just before my shower early in the morning, it suddenly came clear. I knew exactly what to do, I just needed to get through the busy schoolday before I did it.

Our cat Oberon, however, had other plans. As soon as I opened my front door, I saw that writing would be delayed. There were feathers all over the living room floor. Hundreds of little, downy, charcoal-covered feathers, sometimes in clumps. I froze in the entryway. Was a live bird trapped inside?

Obie quickly appeared, ecstatic that I’d finally arrived at his epic battle site. He’s ten months old, our lithe black beauty, and he’s a Mumma’s boy. He rubbed up against me, again and again, purring lustily. He ducked under the sofa and retrieved a blackbird corpse that was already starting to smell, thus answering my initial concern.

It took me a while to even face cleaning up, although I removed the bird and threw open the windows. By 9 p.m. I did finish the story, as I wanted to. By 9:30 Obie was curled up like a little dark foxlet on our bed, where he stayed snug between us for the night.

You wouldn’t have thought he was a vicious killer.

Dark Sides

Humans too are quite multifaceted, although hopefully most of us don’t prey on and then rip the life out of other creatures. We all assert control and manipulate circumstances, to varying extents.

Over the weekend, we had our annual outing to Cheltenham Literature Festival, and attended events pertaining to this complexity. David Mitchell (the comedian and actor, not the Cloud Atlas author) spoke about his book on historic royals, with his special brand of humorous pessimism. Progress isn’t necessarily linear; you never know when things might get a whole lot crappier, and there’s only so much power humans have to do anything about it. Not exactly cheery, and yet many laughs were had. It’s all in the telling.

*To get to the light at the end of the tunnel, you have to go through the dark…*

Then we listened to Carmela Ciuraru interviewed about her book Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages. This examines authors like Kingsley Amis and Roald Dahl, and their relationships with their wives (Elizabeth Jane Howard and Patricia Neal, respectively) who were talented writers/ performers in their own right. However, these towering male geniuses didn’t often treat their partners with the respect befitting, well, a partner. They were actually quite tyrannical.

Ciuraru doesn’t believe in ‘cancelling’ these figures, because she points out that we all have people in our lives who we love despite their flaws. Can’t we then love just someone’s art despite their flaws?

Furthermore, Ciuraru doesn’t think the work should be censored–we should be able to see the full evidence of the writers’ attitudes so we can make up our minds. For example, if the instances of Roald Dahl’s children’s books referring to characters as fat or other derisive terms are removed, people won’t see the evidence of his sometimes bullying nature.

Keeping Nuance Alive

It depends on your experiences of course, what you feel you can overlook in somebody, and it depends on what else they offer you. I remember being uncomfortable with some of Dahl’s books as a child, like George’s Marvellous Medicine and The Twits. The characters were so loathsome to each other. I loved James and the Giant Peach, but in that book no one intentionally harmed the villainous Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge–they got flattened by accident.

When I’m writing stories, sometimes people do awful things to each other. Because that happens in real life, doesn’t it? I’ve had my work called dark before, such as my story The Apocalypse Alphabet, about a mum and a boy and an encroaching invasion that feels like the end of the world. Sometimes I feel bad about coming up with these things. What does it say about me as a person, that tragedy and grief come out of my head? But it’s usually counter-balanced with moments of warmth, even humour, and strong relationships.

There’s very little that’s entirely dark, just as my kitten isn’t just claws and fangs. The story I finally finished drafting this week is a triptych with three scenes set in different graveyards. The main characters seek them out because they feel safest in gloomy, forgotten spaces. When you’ve faced how dark life can get, you may not feel comfortable in the light.

Funnily, I’ve always been afraid of the dark at night. Not the darkness outside, if I’m on one of my early morning hikes, but the darkness in houses, where you can so easily be cornered. When I was little, I tried treating darkness as a separate character. I told my mom I’d make friends with it, and we’d share jelly beans. Didn’t coax me out of my fear, but maybe writing dark stories now and then is a different way of befriending darkness.

How would you characterise your relationship with darkness? Does it work to counterbalance difficult subjects in our portrayals or should we let them be?