Quietly Life-Changing

Writing poems regularly is quietly life-changing, in a way that goes beyond any other kind of writing. I’ve always been a journaler / notebook scribbler, I did “morning pages” for years, I’ve been writing fiction consistently since 2006, and from age 13 on, I’d write poems when they struck.

But when I started writing poems regularly (daily, in fact), it transformed me. And my poetry, and all my writing, but the biggest sea-change was how I lived in the world and in myself.

Why is writing poems so different? Journaling provides the same self-reflection, morning pages the same catharsis, stories the same sense of creative achievement. Writing poems regularly is more than the sum of those parts, though.

Something in the nature of poems lets us explore our feelings without getting stuck in them. The shape of a poem becomes a container, so we can reach into the feeling and still stand outside it: finding the exact image or shade of an emotion, while another objective self is also counting syllables, working out how to start the next line with a “p”, or planning to end this line with the word “exist”. And as I said in You Are Not Ark-Fleet B, afterwards, “where the emotion is, there’s also a poem.” The thing you’ve made continues to hold the feelings.

If writing stories is getting characters to act out our ideas, writing poems is finding imagery to speak them: so at the moment that we’re most focused on an emotion or thought, we’re also thinking intensely about things we can feel, smell, see, touch, hear. It becomes both mindfulness and sensory grounding. We’re not just wrapped in our feelings: we’re alive in our bodies.

We don’t always want to write about our feelings – so we can write about the whole world of marvellous and curious things. We reach out into the world, to write a poem about spores, and the world reaches back with an insight about hope and creativity. We write about clockwork machines and discover our own feelings about having a complicated body, and a way to navigate that.

Those are the poems that resonate, from writing poems regularly, but the beauty of writing them regularly is that you don’t know when that will happen. You’re not sitting down with a knotted throat and a tissue box, ready for the poem like for a counselling session. Some of them are just playing with words, or a strong opinion about a fairytale, or describing a painting you love, or grumping about Ian McEwan’s opinions on sci-fi, or a joke in rhyme, or trying out a technique. Even the resonant quietly transformative poems don’t always seem like it, at the time: I really thought one poem was just about spores, until I typed it up two weeks later. Now its final line shines for me in dark places like the light of Eärendil.

Writing poems regularly means you discover the joyful, light-hearted poems too. When we only reach to poems in moments of urgent need, that need is usually about heartbreak, loss, grief. Poems make excellent containers and carriers for those. But our lives are also full of delight, wit, fun, good food: all of those get to be in poems, too, and they live in our sense of self all the more vibrantly for being written about. Grinning at some bluebells in spring becomes a roundelay of joy that lives on year-round. One perfect June afternoon on the green is framed as a timeless part of your life in its sestina. A hasty haiku is forever your cousins laughing in the firelight. The sheer regularity of writing poems regardless invites our wholeness in, including our happiness.

Writing poems regularly definitely improved my writing. My poetry vaulted in quality and at last was regularly, near-routinely accepted by journals and magazines. My fiction brightened with musicality and more powerful word choices, and sharpened with my newfound concision. But those are fringe benefits, compared to the quietly life-changing process and practice of simply writing poems, regularly.

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If you want to explore writing poems regularly, the Meddling with Poetry course this Oct–Nov will introduce you to heaps of different poetry forms, approaches, and facets of language, all through playful workshop-style classes.

Join online from anywhere (Thurs evenings UK time) OR in person in Oxford (Wed evenings). Plus each week’s Poem-A-Day booklet gives you everything you need if you want to try the transformative poem-a-day practice, during the course or afterwards.

Click here to find out what you'll explore and to book your place.

Writing Skill: Awe and Ah

If you fancy doing a bit of writing but you're not sure what about, or you want to dabble the way an artist might play with mixing colours / making marks, this is the perfect Writing Skill for you: the magic of writing where you discover what it's about, instead of deciding in advance, and some very special creative constraints that'll shape it in surprising ways for you.

So give yourself the gift of a cuppa and ten minutes, grab your notebook and pen, and set off on a mini writing adventure into the unknown. And in the spirit of the unknown, I'm going to ask you to trust me for a bit and not scroll down to read the whole Skill before you start. It works better that way and you'll be able to brainstorm more freely. So do Part One, then I'll explain the rationale, then do Part Two.

Part One

For half your time (five mins if you want to keep this a ten-minuter), brainstorm all the words you can think of with "aw" and "ah" sounds. For example: aw: baulk, caught, Lord, etc. ah: mark, party, harsh, etc. Do that before you scroll further.

Here come the don't-scroll greenery:

🌿 Don't 

🍃 keep 

🌱 reading 

🌳 till 

💚 you've 

🌲 done 

🌳 that 

☘️ bit 

Why you're doing this

The first thing we all learn in linguistics is that words don't inherently mean anything: there's no reason why a pen is called a "pen", and so on. And that's why languages are different. BUT there are some exceptions to this. Certain vowel sounds have instinctive meaning for us, which runs across languages. Awe and Ah sounds, in particular, have associations of things being slow, large, and heavy. So if you use heaps of those sounds in a passage or a poem, it'll create a mood of slowness, largeness, and weight. Even if that's not the meaning of the words you write. Nifty, huh?

Part Two 

Now, for the rest of the time you've got, draw on your collection of slow, large, and weighty feeling words, to write either a poem or a passage of description. Cramming as many of those in as you can will decide your subject matter for you, and also what you say about it. And whatever you're writing about, the words will set the mood for you. So let the words take the lead, write to find out what they end up saying, and have fun!

Want to play with this more?

• For a companion piece of small light sounds, use the vowels /I/ and /i:/ - the vowel sounds in ick and eek.
• And for an interesting exploration, try the same brainstorm-then-write approach with words beginning with "gl". (This one only works in English, but it's super fun to discover.)

Enjoy!

Why this Skill?

Writing to discover new approaches, angles, and even thoughts can be wonderfully illuminating. We get to find things out through the process of writing, rather than deciding in advance with what we already know. Adding creative constraints is a great way to do that: through a group of words we're fitting in, like this, or through another nifty patterns like using specific letters, rhythms, etc. And creative constraints are always great for inspiration.

The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Writing Skill: Tell It Slant

Emily Dickinson wrote “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies.” The same is true in writing, especially when we’re including a more familiar or tropic element. A slant-wise description helps you dart around any sense of cliche. It’s also very handy to have up your sleeve when you want to avoid repetition, whether within a scene or when you need to describe the same space repeatedly and there’s only so many words to say “bare wood”.

So for this slantwise exercise, you’re going to describe light: two types of light, five minutes each. The first is wincingly bright glaring light – from an angel descended in all its eye-stinging glory, or a beach at midday, or a very brightly lit room, up to you. The second is darkness – near darkness, total darkness, or underground pitch black, and whether it’s in the woods, in caves, at home, in an unfamiliar room, in a spaceship drifting through darkness, whatever, is also up to you.

But here’s the catch: in the first description, you’re not allowed to mention the light. That means also no words like “glare”, “dazzle”, etc. In the second, you’re not allowed to mention the dark. That means also no words like “shadow”, “pitch black”, etc. So in each case, you have to go in slantwise. (Top tip: in both cases, it’ll help to have a character in the scene whose point of view you’re writing from.)

So grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, spend five minutes on each half, then have a lovely time rereading them, gloating, and praising yourself for all the clever strategies you found! If you’re doing this with a writing group / buddy or they’re doing it too, share your writing with each other to identify the different strategies you each found.

Why this Skill?

Slant-wise description is one of those poetry techniques that hugely improves our fiction writing as well. Perhaps because we so often want to write poems about things that have been described a thousand times – heartache, new love, grief, lust – and we want to express it the way we’re experiencing it: as if for the first time ever. Then, when familiar things crop up in our stories, we find we’ve already honed the skills to do exactly that.

The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, vivid imagery, and other facets that bring poems to life. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.

Writing Skill: Implicit Colour

Berries in the snow.
Chocolate flecked with hazlenut.
Lavendar crowded with bumblebees.
Daisies on the lawn.

In each of those, I don't need to tell you the colours for them to leap into your mind's eye: they each create vivid colour palettes, just through the things themselves. And there are heaps of things that will do that for us.

That's what we're going to play with in this Writing Skill: making your writing burst with implicit colour. So give yourself the gift of ten minutes' writing time, grab your pen, notebook, and something to sip, and let's start.

For colour inspiration, we're using the handy resource, Hex-Hub. Originally designed to give you the hex-codes of colours for websites, it has fantastic colour names. It divides them into five palettes: neutrals, warms, greens, blues, and purples. Ignore the neutrals and just focus on the four colour palettes.

On some paper or in your notebook, devote a page to each colour palette. (If you want to keep it a ten-minuter, allow 2.5 minutes per palette as well.) Then click on a palette and scroll through the colour names, jotting down all the names of things that catch your eye. For example, under warms, I swiftly get snow, rose, salmon, coral... Make sure you only write down names of things, not fancy colour words like "azure". Go through all four colour palettes like that, gleaning things with implicit colour.

The newly heightened awareness from just doing that exercise is enough, if you're using this as a warm-up and hankering to dive back into your work-in-progress. If you want to play with it further, then I suggest writing a poem or a short passage of description inspired by your favourites things you've gleaned, letting their inherent colours fill the page without an adjective in sight.

One side note: In my examples at the top, you almost definitely saw red berries, even though berries also come in white, orange, and black. Likewise, "apples" usually suggests green, despite all the other colours available. But some imaginings will vary. I can't control whether you saw pale English lavender or deep purple French lavender. I'm more likely to picture a big white daisy with a yellow centre (the ones I grew up with) than the little white-and-pale-pink ones more common in England. I saw dark chocolate; you might have seen milk chocolate. That's okay. Part of letting things come alive in the reader's mind is giving space for them to imagine it, not controlling every! last! detail! lest they inadvertently stray from our vision. We want to give them just enough detail that the rest can come alive in their mind, not constrain them to ours.

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: Story Pitch

Writing a story pitch gives most of us a wobble. You're excited about your story, and then suddenly you have to "pitch it" to an agent or editor, and your words wither to husks. Fair enough! Doing something new is always a bit scary, a bit of a challenge. Doing something new when what's at stake is the future of your beloved story? That's terrifying!

So in this Writing Skill, we're going to practise it with non-existent stories, absolutely nothing at stake, just a lot of fun and Hollywood-Voice mimicry. Plus, I have suggestions to turn that same bold confidence to your own beloved story if you have one, and ideas of how to use this with your writing group / buddy. Give yourself the gift of ten minutes' writing time, grab your pen, notebook, and something to sip, and let's start. 

For our non-existent stories, we're going to use the handy ran-gen, Big Huge Lab's Plot List. Plot ran-gens are always useful for practising key skills when using our own story puts too much pressure on us, so this is ideal for practising story pitches. It throws out a selection of 6 randomly generated plots (NB: randomly generated, not AI-generated), which you can then play with, gleefully and carelessly, to try things out. In this case, story pitching!

First off, head to Big Huge Lab's Plot List, and from the six one-sentence plots it gives you, pick three. I chose these three:

• A cold-blooded assassin meets a strange beggar woman on a voyage to a new land.
• A convicted murderer comes to life in Los Angeles.
• Hercules escapes from prison.

Next, you're going to write three quick story pitches, one for each plot: fast, bold, exaggerated, with your marketing hat on, using the Hollywood Voice for added drama and silliness. The bigger and bolder you go here, the better! Each pitch should include:

• The main character
• The "inciting incident" - what starts the story moving
• The aim / goal
• The problem / what stops them
• A sense of the setting

The generator will give you some of those; the others you can make up. (And if you get stuck on naming the characters, remember you've got Behind the Name up your sleeve: go to Behind the Name, click your language from the home page, click "more filters", and then choose "community impression". And don't forget all these nifty links are on the Writers' Links page on my site.) So bound into your pitch, no-holds barred! Here goes... (I'm writing this at speed, no planning!):

Cold, deadly Natasha has left a discreet trail of corpses across her career, but her most challenging assignment yet sends her across the desert to a new land. When a strange beggar woman persistently haunts their caravan at every oasis, she begins to suspect she's been unmasked - but the truth may be even more terrifying.

There we have it!

• The main character: Cold deadly Natasha, who has left a discreet trail of corpses across her career,
• The "inciting incident" - what starts the story moving: a strange beggar woman persistently haunts their caravan at every oasis
• The aim / goal: complete her assignment; find out what the strange beggar woman is about
• The problem / what stops them: also the strange beggar woman
• A sense of the setting: a desert, and far back enough that we don't have air travel

Off you go! Three big bold brave pitches! If you're keeping this a ten-minuter, give yourself three minutes for each.

If you have an existing story

Write three big bold brave pitches for the Plot Lab stories first. Then, while you're on a roll, throw your own story in the mic and give it the exact same treatment. You can always de-cheese it later: for now, full Hollywood-poster pulp-fiction stuff!

If you have a writing buddy / group

Once you've each written three pitches, swap, and each tell each other your favourite from each person's batch. Often, stuff we think is too over the top ends up being the one that works better than we expect! When you've chosen your favourites, also make notes on nifty strategies / useful turns of phrase from all the pitches.

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Time & the Angel with a Flaming Sword

“Waiting for the muse” is how many of us start our writing lives. We wait for inspiration to strike, then rush to the page. At that stage, the idea of planning to write feels workaday, even distasteful, a betrayal of an enraptured state.

I believed in this approach, sincerely, for years. It just doesn’t really work. Stories peter out. Novels inch along so slowly that we’ve outgrown them before they’re halfway through. Poems are rare as hen’s teeth. And as adult responsibilities build up around us, it gets even less viable.

I thought it was impossible to write at set times. It’s not: it’s hugely inspiring. I thought it was unromantic to have set writing time. But I found a new romance: writing time is the Garden of Eden. And like the Garden of Eden, it needs an angel with a flaming sword to protect it.

The truth is, writing will never be urgent – not unless you get a two-book deal, and you have to put in a lot of non-urgent time to get to that point. Meanwhile, the rest of life is clamouring with urgency. So it’s up to us, and only us, to prioritise our writing.

This isn’t about “should”s and all those ghastly shouldn’t-you-be-writing memes. Writing is play, a joy, a delight. We do it because we want to. I believe in never setting plans or goals based on “should”s: drill down from the “should” to find the “want to” within it. If you can’t find any want-to at all, is it even worth keeping that plan? If you do want to, then like a relationship, you can commit to it and set clear boundaries for that commitment. Because you want to.

And the best commitment you can make for your writing is writing time: to set, protect, and use the time.

Setting the Time

Setting the time means calendar time. Block the time off in your calendar; talk about it as a fixed calendar plan: “I’m writing on Thursday evening.” When the time is, and how much time, is completely up to you. Some people work well in small sips: one of my students catches the bus to work half an hour early and writes in a coffee shop opposite. Some people (me included) can’t concentrate with other tasks rapidly approaching and need a swathe of time: the whole of a weekend morning, or all the time from finishing work until bedtime on Tuesdays. Some work best early in the morning, while the world’s asleep. Some (like me) are stupid blinking owls in the morning, but can write on into the evening. Some people like to write every day; some don’t. Set the time that works for you.

Once you’ve set the time, keep checking in with yourself regularly, to see what’s working and what’s not. If it’s not working, don’t just blame yourself: dig into why it’s not working and see how to fix that. If you’re too lonely to lock yourself away that evening, then your writing time needs to be when you’re already socially topped-up. If dinner prep stole two hours of writing time, then look up some quicker or batch-cooking recipes. If you felt despondent and uninspired because you had PMT, consider writing around your cycle. If you were too overstimulated to settle into it, think about ways to soothe yourself, like spending time near water.

And if all the adjustments still fall short, check if your plan is realistic and fair. For ages, I tried to write two evenings a week, and consistently only managed three evenings a fortnight. Eventually, I deduced that with the best will in the world, that was how much I could actually fit in, so I changed the plan: three evenings a fortnight.

As I explained in Writing Habits Are Like Punting, it’s about gentle continuous course correction, not Big Pushes. Bit by bit, tweak and adjust when, how often, and how much time works for you. To start, I suggest you check in with yourself weekly. Take five minutes to look at what worked, what didn’t, and what you can tweak.

When you have your writing time, the rest of the time is not writing time. This is equally transformative. So many of us live in a constant fog of “I should probably be writing” guilt, which in turn sours our relationship with writing. Deciding when we’re not writing means we get to look forward to writing and enjoy all the rest of life in the other time. No more guilt.

Protecting the Time

Once you set the time, everything comes rushing in to try and steal that time. It’s like blood in the water for time-hungry sharks: chores, work over-running, interruptions, tiredness, overstimulation, even very lovely people and people you dearly love.

That’s why you need to protect the time like an angel with a flaming sword. As Lucifer says in the TV show, “the Flaming Sword, the weapon that guarded Eden, the weapon that can cut through anything, even the Gates of Heaven itself,” – yes, that sword. Or to continue the Lucifer metaphors (I’m watching it for the first time and just love it), like the scene where Amenadiel has to block the hospital door to save Lucifer’s life, and remain completely immoveable no matter what. We’re writers; we’re storytellers. Go mythic with your metaphors; go Gandalf “You shall not pass”; whatever works for you. Remember what I said at the start: writing time will never be urgent. It’s up to us to protect it.

Keep checking in with yourself, reflecting, and adjusting. Keep looking for practical solutions. Did work overrun? Well, if your writing time is earlier in the week, work doesn’t have a chance to overrun yet. Did people interrupt you? Maybe you can write somewhere they’re not. The more you practise protecting the time, the better you get at it.  

Using the Time

My complete saying is, “Protect your writing time like an angel with a flaming sword and within the time be free.” Once you’re inside the writing time, there’s no clock-watching, list-ticking, word-counting. I think of it as a clock without hands: the time is contained and protected; inside, it’s timeless. You are under no pressure to use the time as productively as possible or to be efficient. Writing doesn’t respond well to those, anyway. The measure of good writing time is time spent writing.

Time spent writing doesn’t even have to mean you produced new words: heaps of valuable writing activities make no difference to our word counts. If there are writing-things you need to do “before you can write”, like research, brainstorming, plot musing, character invention, etc, do those in your writing time. They’re part of the writing. So long as you’re protecting the time from all non-writing things, you can use it for any writing-y thing at all.

To make it easier to use the time, and to stay inside the writing time, think about your writing space and sensory cues.

Your writing space

Lots of people find it easier to write away from home, especially if they’re responsible for the bulk of chores and mental load of home. Plus being away from home means that you stay in writing-space even when your concentration span lapses and you need a break. See what your area has to offer: cafés, pub gardens, community spaces, libraries (if you’re in Oxford, we have lots of libraries available), etc. In good weather, you can write outdoors in parks and meadows.

If you’re writing at home, set up your writing space so it works well for you. Maybe it needs tidying and decluttering, maybe nicer lighting. If it’s the same space as you work at, how can you change it up? (In my twenties, when I worked from home and home was a single room, I switched on fairy lights, lit a candle, and sat on the opposite side of the desk, for writing time.) The same way you’d make an effort with the space to delight someone you fancy, for a date, make it special for your writing. And part of that is..

Sensory cues

Sensory cues make it so much easier to slip into writing headspace, and into flow. A writing playlist. A candle that smells of freshly-cut grass. A mug of Lapsang Souchong, which you only ever drink when you’re writing. An age-soft sarong thrown over the table. The side-lamp and the fairy lights instead of the big light. Think about sounds, scents, textures, lighting.

Whatever sensory cues work for you and your space, use them whenever you’re writing, and only when you’re writing. As the association builds, they become more and more effective as a shortcut into your writing state of mind. I’ve been using that writing playlist since 2020, never playing it unless I’m writing or rereading my writing, and at this point it activates me like I’m a sleeper cell. Music on: Megan writes. Choose your sensory cues and let them develop with time.

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Writing time is your Garden of Eden and you’re the angel with a flaming sword. You’re not on your own with this, though – the obstacles, the need for practical strategies, the delight.

Want more writing advice? In The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get expert advice on tap, help developing your writing, and the chance to connect with your writing community.

Find out more and join here.

Happy writing!

Writing Skill: Sound of Water

When we’re dealing with writer’s block, whatever the cause, we need to start by being gentle with ourselves. List exercises and specific description are two of the gentlest ways to get our pens moving and start finding our way back to the place of ideas. They’re also both perennially useful for writing, even when we’re going great guns: lists help us cast a wider net for ideas, without pre-judging them; and we always benefit from practising description, as it’s the writing skill we use least in the rest of life.

As an added bonus, given the heatwave, this is themed around water. Writing is a joy – or at least, it’s meant to be. It’s our play space, our escape into secret worlds, and if what we need is somewhere cool and watery, we get to make that up!

So find your notebook and pen, settle yourself somewhere cool with an iced jug of something (people in cooler climes: feel free to substitute appropriately for your current weather!), and give yourself the gift of ten minutes’ writing. Or longer, if you want: this is your world.

Part One: Lists of Watery Places

You can give yourself 5–10 minutes for the list (five if you want to keep the whole thing a ten-minuter) OR you can write the numbers 1–20 down the side of a page. Some people prefer a time limit; some people find time limits stress them out and prefer a quota. You choose whatever suits you best. Then write a list of watery places. For example:

• the sea 
• rock pools on the Garden Coast
• a cave with dripping water
• that cave we visited in Greece with a lake and a boat 
• the weir by the canal

You can be as general or as specific as you like. Don’t worry about whether ideas are "good enough" or not: the joy of a list exercise is that you put down a bunch of ideas, so they don’t all need to be good. A lot of them end up being part of our thinking – eg in my example, "the sea" was what reminded me of those specific rock pools, and caves in general reminded me of a specific cave. Everything you think of goes down on the list.

Part Two: The Sound of Water and Watery Words

Now you’ve got your list, spend the rest of the time (five minutes if you want to keep the whole thing a ten-minuter) listening to and describing the sound of water. Adding sounds always makes a story or poem much more immersive, and water is one of those things we have heaps of onomatopoeia for – ie words that sound like the actual sound, like "glug", "slosh", and "trickle". Plus water tends to be pretty ubiquitous anywhere humans settle or hang around, so having water-words in your sound repertoire is always handy!

For listening, go to MyNoise.Net: very high quality soundscapes, professionally recorded and very lovingly put together by Dr Stefane Pigeon. He’s got heaps of watery soundscapes, so use your list as inspiration for what kind of water you’d like. (I’ve been listening to Icelandic Shores all week.) Once you’ve clicked on your water soundscape, do check out the presets below it as well, to play with, and the slider animation button which varies the sound as you listen.

While you listen, describe the water. You can write full sentences or simply brainstorm words, whichever you prefer. If you want more words, look at Reverse Dictionary’s sound-of-water words for extra inspiration.

That’s it! Your list’s given you more ideas of story locations, where interesting things might happen, and you’ve expanded your description repertoire to include the often-underused sense of sound. And you’ve spent ten minutes writing. Hurrah! (How’s that jug looking? Need a top-up?)

If you’re enjoying yourself, though, and want to take it futher, here’s a serving suggestion for you:

Optional: Moving through the watery place

To play with this futher, add someone moving through the watery place: a character through whom we’ll get all the lovely description. With all your water words, as much as possible, you want to use them as nouns (thing words) and verbs (doing words) not describing words or ___ing words: that keeps the writing lively and active. So if I braintormed "sloshing" and "glugging", I can say "The waves sloshed over the sand and glugged between the rocks".

• If you’re using this as a starting point, I suggest you write a descriptive passage / poem about exploring your watery place and moving around it: that’ll give you plenty of variety of water-sounds to describe. And have another look at those presets in MyNoise: they’ll give you a sense of moving around as the sounds change.
• If you want to use this with your own story, I suggest you pick the places where water sounds could be prominent, and then write a passage of description for each one. You might not use that passage as-is straight in the story: you’re sharpening your awareness of what the water sounds are, and expanding your repertoire of water-words by using them. Though some snippets might go straight in!

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: They Both Know

When we're writing dialogue, we want it to sound natural – but actual natural speech, in real life, is freighted down with tangents, filler words, dead-end sentences, and an astonishing amount of general burble. If you've ever transcribed real-life conversation, like I had to do at uni in Linguistics, you'll know what I'm talking about! It makes for a dreadful read. So in stories, we want to give the flavour of natural speech, without quite as much clutter. 

We also want to give a sense of the relationship between the characters: dialogue's a dynamic between people. And a sense of their individual points of view, what they know or don't about each other and what's happening, how they feel about it.

This Writing Skill is perfect for practising all of that, and you can use it with your story in progress OR with fresh characters, plus I've got a suggestion for writing groups / buddies. So give yourself the gift of ten minutes' writing time, grab your pen, notebook, and cuppa, and scribble away!

To start with, you need two people who know each other well, and are equals. They can be best friends, partners, siblings, whatever works for you. You can pick two from your story in progress, or whisk up two new characters with this quick character generator.

Something seismic has happened for Character A. How seismic you want to go depends on their age. It could be that they got / lost a job, the person they liked asked them out, they discovered their parent isn't their bio parent, they're moving city, etc.

• If you're using your story in progress, see if you've got anything like that already to use; if not, just make up a scenario that fits them, as a way to play with their voices – you don't have to put this bit in the actual story.
• If you're not using a work in progress, you can pick any of my suggestions above or anything else that appeals to you.

For the actual writing, assume that the reader already read the scene when the Seismic Thing happened, so there's no need to recap. Character B doesn't know it's now happened, but does already know all Character A's hopes / fears about the whole situation.

Write their dialogue / any physical reactions (eg whistling, etc) as elliptically as possible. Some possible starting lines could be…

• "So… I got it."
• "It's happening."
• "She asked."
• "It's time."
• "They admitted it."

A tells B it's happened, but super elliptically, because B already knows so much. They're both reacting to the news / each other, they're discussing repercussions / next plans, etc. 

Some tips for writing super natural dialogue here:

• Give as little extra explanation as humanly possible.
• Sentence fragments are great.
• Casual language / slang are great.
• Opaque references are great.

Writing groups / buddies: If you want to do this exercise together, each do your own then swap. See what you can work out about what's happened without the scene before. If you're working in a group, each write down your guesses for everyone before you confer. It's always amazing to see how little exposition readers actually need!

Have fun!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: Charming Fool

A comic character, especially a central character, needs two really important features: they need to be flawed; we also need to like them. We're laughing at them, yes, but also with them, and it's affectionate, not mocking. Think of Bertie Wooster, in the Jeeves books; Sergeant Colon and Nobby Nobbs in the Pratchett books; Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones's Diary; Arthur in John Finnemore's Cabin Pressure series. This matters even if they're not the main character: we don't want our comic bits to slip over into simple nastiness: instead, we stay on the character's side, even when we're doubled over laughing at them.

So if you fancy stretching your comedic skills, to write fully funny fiction or just throw a splash of humour into your stories, this ten-minute Writing Skill will help you shape a perfect character for it. You can use it to whisk up a new character and possible story or use it with your existing story to turn a character comic.

To start off your character, pick something they think they're brilliant at: they think they're a brilliant _____, or they think they're brilliant at _____. Maybe they think they're a brilliant cook,  detective, or chess player. Maybe they think they're brilliant at understanding people, fossil hunting, or mountaineering. Spoiler: they really, really aren't. 

• If you're inventing a character, start inventing them through this, then give them a full name, age, and a day job, to round them out a bit more in your imagination. 
• If you're using your own story, pick a character that you'd like to make comic, and add that delusion of brilliance.

Next, based on your character's blithe delusion, pick an event to match. For example, if they think they're a brilliant detective: there's been a high-profile theft from the Ashmolean, which they're determined to solve. Whatever the matching event / challenge is, they'll set at it absolutely brimming with enthusiasm and confidence, to gleeful disaster at every stage.

A couple tips before you go further: first off, remember that we need to like them. They're deluded and confident, but not off-puttingly arrogant. Second, comedy and tragedy are a whisper apart and we want to stay on the side of comedy. That means they absolutely musn't be crushed by their failure: they remain gung-ho throughout, or at least still hugely optimistic about the next time and terribly knowing (deluded) about why this one went so badly. (This principle is called "no-harm", the same principle that slapstick uses.)

Now that you've got your character, their delusion, and the event, you can dive in! You can launch straight into the writing for ten minutes, as they cheerfully set off on their challenge OR spend ten minutes brainstorming / mapping  out the coming twists and disasters. (Some people prefer writing to discover; some prefer to plan. You do what suits you.) When ten minutes is up, you can carry on if you want or stop there, having tried out the new skill and tucked it into your repertoire.

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Write by Hand if You Can

Before I launch in, a big caveat: write by hand if you can. If you can’t, don’t even bother reading this. I vividly remember a phone GP telling me in 2016 to “go for more walks” – clearly missing the bit on my notes that I needed a wheelchair to leave the house. No-one needs to hear the benefits of something they can’t do. So if that’s you and writing by hand, read The Joy is in the Doing instead!

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Still here? Then I’m assuming you can write by hand, so here’s why you should!

Why writing by hand is such a wonder

The research I used to quote on this showed that people wrote faster, better, and more by hand than typing. But that study looked at children and was in 2009. We’re adults and we’re even more digital now. So should we still write and plan by hand?

Yes! This 2025 research round-up shows an astonishing array of benefits:

• You process information more deeply.
• You retrieve memories better.
• You’re more creative.
• You can regulate stress better.
• You’re more mindful.
• You draw out more nuanced feelings.
• You increase your agency.
• You increase your focus.

Exactly what we need for stories, especially novels, and poems: full focus and concentration, a clear memory, creativity, subtlety. Everything we want from and for our writing: immersion, mindfulness, a sense of agency, a flow-state.

(Btw, that article’s written in a weird “Well done you for being a Better Person” way, but you don’t have to be Already Superior, you can just write by hand more and enjoy the benefits.)

And this 2025 study, The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing—Who Wins the Battle? found that “Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.”

Writing by hand has other practical benefits, too:

• You can write anywhere. Leave your work desk and write somewhere else in the house. Leave the house, if chores / people are distracting, and write in a coffee shop or pub garden. If the weather’s lovely, write outdoors. (My Tips for a Summer of Writing has heaps of suggestions on that.)
• You escape digital distractions. Paper has no incoming notifications. No tempting buttons just a click away. No thesaurus, search engine, or (heaven forefend) genAI as a flow-stopping crutch for every momentary doubt. It’s just you, the ink, and the paper.
• You can’t word-count. Word-counting is the enemy of focus and flow: it takes you from the joy of doing into measuring the worth of writing with a ruler. When you can’t word-count, your focus stays inside the writing itself.

The immersion, joy, and focus of planning and writing by hand transforms the experience. I bloody love my laptop, but it’s not for composing on. I will hammer through my inbox on the keyboard, for speed and convenience, but for poems, stories, even this blog post, I pull out my pen.

Your pen

You absolutely need a good pen to write by hand, but that doesn’t mean forking out a fortune. As I wrote in my Top Ten Tips for Students, ballpoints rely on friction to pull the ink out, which is why they tire your hand so much. Fountain pens don’t use friction: they just glide, and they don’t have to be expensive. With the pricy ones, you’re often paying for a brand name and a more expensive case: even the cheap ones have perfect nibs. I use a £10 Helix and it’s a dream. 

If you’re left-handed, try fineliners or gel pens. To test a pen, hold it lightly between two fingers and drag it gently across the page. If it leaves a clear line, it's a good ’un: it doesn’t need friction to work.

Your paper

What you write on is completely up to you and will often vary from project to project. For novels and short stories, I write on A4 lined paper, which I staple together as I go. For extended freewriting or poems, I use hardcover Paperblanks or A5 notebooks, which fit in my handbag. (I like a hard cover to press on.) People with pockets often like Moleskin journals, as they fit easily and comfortably into pockets.

If you use notebooks, make sure they’re ones you’re not afraid to use wantonly. I used to stick to “Black n Red” notebooks or the plain-coloured WH Smiths ones, as the pretty ones felt too special to use. These days, whenever someone asks what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I say “A hardcover Paperblank notebook, just a bit bigger than A5, with lined paper, ideally one of the Medievalish designs”: I now have plenty, so I can use them fearlessly!

If it’s an artisanal notebook, make sure the paper is hot-pressed. Often, handmade and craft-fair notebooks use cold-press paper: the fibres will catch on your pen and the ink will bleed. Apart from that, write on whatever's easy for you to write on and to carry where you want it.

Typing up

You want digital versions of your writing, of course. You can type up whenever suits you. You can type up when you’ve drafted a scene, then print it and redraft or edit by hand, or write the whole story then type it up. You can use typing to warm you up at the start of a writing session or for low-brain parts of the day. (I have a 4pm brain-slump I often use.) You can plan your typing around your hormonal cycle or moods. Whatever works for you and your process.

Just as you want a pen that doesn’t hurt, you want a typing-up arrangement that doesn’t hurt. At minimum, that means putting the handwritten text vertical: use a recipe-book holder or balance it against a heavy jar with a crocodile clip and cardboard to hold it in place. If I have lots to type, I also raise my laptop with a couple of thick books, so it’s at eye level, and use a separate keyboard at desk level, for maximum ergonomics. When I was too ill to sit up at my desk, I contrived a cunning armchair arrangement with a lap tray, side-table, recipe stand, and a very thick book.

You can make your typing-up easy and enjoyable, too:

• Put on a playlist. It’s entertaining and also helps with the rhythm of typing. Ideally, a playlist with no vocals in a language you understand, so the words don’t distract you. I love it as a chance to listen to all the music that I’ve still got stashed on iTunes which I can no longer carry about with me.
• Hide the screen distractions. Switch off any notifications and switch to full screen, so you don’t see that familiar task-bar with all its workish associations. In Word, you can also hide its distracting bottom bar that keeps counting words, pages, etc, so you can just focus on typing.
• Type fast and free. Change your settings to not underline any spelling or grammar errors. Switch your autocorrect on and let it autocorrect misspellings. Don’t backspace if you misspell something: just do a spell-check at the end.
• Add your own autocorrect shortcuts: I have dozens of these now. Pa = pirate accordionist. nihs = New Inn Hall Strait, and so on. As well as phrases you type often, you can add your own regular spelling mistakes: my most common one is “catpain” for “captain”.
• Make templates and shortcuts for easy layout. You can follow my techie tips to make your own or download my templates for novels and stories.

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Writing by hand and then typing up may seem like a waste of time when you “could’ve just typed it in the first place”. But when the writing itself is faster, easier, richer, and more joyous, when you can hold onto so much more of the story, be more creative, and write with so much more nuance, when you can write anywhere, when uncapping your pen becomes stepping into flow, it’s so, so worth it. 

What's more, when you discover how much more freely you write by hand, how much more you  produce when you’re focused and in flow, you realise this actually is the faster way. As so often, the scenic route of the path of joy ends up much more efficient than the “efficient” way.

And yes, I did write this by hand!

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If you want to dive into writing by hand and you’re looking for a regular practice or a notebook project, the 30 Days of Writing will be just perfect for you: inspiring writing guidance for poems and/or flash-fiction (very short stories), to use daily or at whatever pace suits you. Including suggestions for how to manage the word-count of flash-fiction when you’re writing by hand!

You can start here and try the first three days for free. Happy writing!

 

Writing for Wellbeing

Writing is a quiet wonder for mental health. There’s a reason so many teenagers dive into writing journals, diaries, and poems, during those years of so much hormone-and-identity upheaval. As we emerge into adulthood, though, we mostly ditch that. We forget what a wonderful help it can be, and we think everything we do has to be “good”.

Here’s a secret: writing can be good and good for us. Sometimes turn by turn; sometimes at the same time. Sometimes just good for us and we turn it into something good later.

I’ve written here before about how much writing can help our wellbeing. In The Wheelchair and the Cushion of Art, I described how it’s helped me navigate heartache, depression, and living with a chronic illness. In The Joy is in the Doing, I wrote about how process-focus brings back the joy (and the productivity!) and how I wrote myself back to health from a massive stress crisis. You Are Not Ark Fleet B explored how during the pandemic, everyone took refuge and respite in the arts – the films, TV, books, music, that helped us hold on: ”We can call it respite. We can call it mental health. We can look to the physical health benefits of easing stress, and how much that heals, how much it wards off. We can look to the societal benefits of not going berserk with cabin fever…” And why “even if no-one ever reads what you write, society is better for you writing.”

That’s because writing is amazing for wellbeing.

• Writing gives us respite. Whatever we’re dealing with – stress, heartache, grief, anxiety, illness, crisis, or even high-octane brain-fizzing excitement – we need a break, so we can be strong again tomorrow.
• Play, creativity, and flow-states protect us against stress. They literally physically protect our brains, and help us grow new neural connections, so we can respond more flexibly.
• Writing helps us process things. Instead of staying stuck, writing can hep us move through the emotions and thoughts, and emerge from it.
• Making something supports our sense of self. Crying on the sofa because you’re in so much pain that you can’t even put a ready-meal in the oven sucks. Writing a poem about it doesn’t get the ready-meal in the oven, but now you’re someone crying on the sofa and someone who’s written a pretty spiffing poem. And where the emotion is, there’s also a poem or story there now, as a container to help hold the emotion.
• Writing offers us free self-expression. Our full, varied, and wild selves can emerge on the page. That’s especially useful when our inner self feels constrained by work, by public face, by caring for others first, all the things that adulthood requires of us. From the page, it can even creep more into the world: a freer more playful sense of self.

All of this is good for us, and good for those around us. We’re not being selfish or indulgent by taking time to write. How much better, for our partners, families, friends, colleagues, even people who cut us off in traffic, if we’re rested, unstressed, flexible, able to process our feelings, and whole in our selves? (And it’s easier to ask for help with the ready-meal if you’re not a snapping resentful ball of rage. IME.)

Writing’s not a cure-all or a replacement for all mental-health support. After years of writing a poem a day, when “the blue curtain” kept cropping up, I finally booked therapy for my medical PTSD. Six sessions of EMDR therapy sorted that out, but its presence on my notebook pages took it from the shadows to booking an appointment.

Writing is an amazing power tool in our tool box. So here are my best tips for writing for wellbeing, from an amalgam of research, my experience, and my students’ experiences.

• Write by hand if you can. This has so many benefits that I’ve written a separate blog post about it.
• Don’t wait to feel okay – do it anyway. The same way we don’t wait for a headache to pass before we take a painkiller, you can sit down to write joyfully, grumpily, relaxed, or stressed. It still works.
• Make it a little treat. You don't want to drag a notebook onto a table cluttered with breakfast dishes or open another document straight after work for yet another chore to tick off: treat yourself a little. Sit somewhere you like, make your favourite drink, maybe put some music on. Take yourself out for coffee in a café or pub garden, if writing outside your home helps. Whatever modest effort makes it nicer, even if that's just putting the dishes behind you where you can't see them!
• Drop your standards. This is always true for writing: we need to let ourselves write badly and go for quantity over quality, not so we churn out rubbish, but so we let ourselves experiment. You can still develop as a writer, try new techniques, and write amazing stuff that way. You’re more likely to, if you’re not rigidly demanding perfection from every word. It’s even more important to drop your standards when you’re writing for wellbeing. In that stress-state, I literally muttered “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” on repeat while I wrote. The measure of good writing time, here, is time spent writing. Stun your inner critic with “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” and just write. That’s where the flow lives. It might turn out good later, but let it be rubbish now.
• For fiction, don’t write about you. The more clear blue water between you and the main character, the easier it is to step through the magic doorway into writing-land, as I wrote about in The Characters That Let Your Stories Fly. Try out new characters, new genres, new approaches: variety breeds joy and creativity. It will always be self-expression, because it’s still you writing, the self will out, but of a much freer kind.
• For poems, mix between you and not-you poems. Sometimes you need to blurt or to shape acidic little ditties about exactly what you’re experiencing and feeling: that’s healthy and good. Sometimes you need to take a break and write about spores: that’s also healthy and good. As with stories, the you still emerges; the self will out. My spore poem ended up actually being about my tenuous relationship with hope and a disappointment I feared. It was a stronger poem for being ostensibly about spores, and when the disappointment came, I had the exact poem I needed.
• Try poems with formal constraints: syllable counts, rhymes, metre, specific end words, a refrain to work in, and so forth. Something marvellous happens when you’re excavating a grief but also counting syllables: new objectivity, a you inside and outside the feeling.

In early 2020, I was planning a series of thirty daily Poem Skills to coincide with national poetry writing month (NaPoWriMo) in April. When the pandemic hit in March, I redesigned it to support mental wellbeing, to help people find respite in calm absorbed flow, and ran it on the blog for free. I took all my experience of writing for wellbeing and made sure every topic offered people somewhere interesting, relaxing, or uplifting to put their minds. (The other things we need to express will emerge when they need to – like spores.) I alternated between poems with formal constraints and free verse (with optional forms), for the best of both worlds. I got so many lovely private messages from people who were finding, as I did, how much writing helped. In 2023, I ran it again, inside the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, this time adding flash-fiction (very short story) options in the same spirit of discovery, fun, and mental wellbeing.

And I’m thrilled to offer it to you now: reworked, spruced up, and expanded, as 30 Days of Writing. Whether that’s 30 days in a row, or every few days, or whatever works for you. It’ll teach you loads about poems and stories, because it’s me who made it (I’m a teacher: the self will out), but the sunlight flooding it all is writing for wellbeing. Because writing can be good, and good for us, and a joy.

So if you’re looking for something to write, or an added regular practice, and especially if you want to write for wellbeing, you can start here and try the first three days for free.

I hope it brings you joy, peace, and delight.

Writing Skill: Social Peril

Social peril is a fantastic tension point in stories of all genres and styles of writing: Bridgerton-type society romance and drama, the precise contemporary observations of literary fiction, pacy commercial fiction, historical fiction from last year to the Ice Ages, fantasy and science fiction... Basically, wherever you have a society, you have the opportunity for social peril. 

It’s something that we personally feel as an intense threat, it’s about as bad as threats can get for a human, but it’s hard to explain to others why it would be so bad. It’s hard enough to explain in our own lives, even harder when the society you’re writing about is removed in time, place, or imagination, or simply in sub-culture.
   “But Mu-um, everyone will look at me!”
   “So?” says Mum.
I mean, really: what’s the worst that could happen?

Good question! Exactly the question we, as writers, need to be asking – and answering. So here’s a plotting exercise that’s great for turning internal fears and existential crises into tangible events. It’s also very helpful for creating a richer sense of society in story and for practising story shape. So give yourself the gift of 10 or 20 minutes’ writing time, grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and let’s explore that.

1. Pick a society

Pick your society: Regency high society, the Stone Ages, a ship’s crew, a small English village, a secondary school, the magi in your epic fantasy, a fast-paced law firm, whatever. If you have a story in progress, you can use this to explore it. If you don’t, pick whatever tickles your fancy.

You can do the rest as a 10-minuter or a 20-minuter, as you prefer; just follow the shorter or longer time suggestions.

2. Brainstorm: what are the very real and practical ways someone relies on the group? (3 or 6 mins)

Be as specific as you can, at this point. If you’re using your own story, you’ll be drawing on the specific situtation of one of your characters. If not, let the character details emerge through the brainstorming. For example, if I chose the Stone Ages, a Stone-Age hunter needs others to hunt with, and also needs gatherers for other food, etc. 

There are a lot of ways that we formally and informally rely on each other. Brainstorm as many different things as you can.

3. Brainstorm: What are the very tangible, practical consequences of social disgrace? (3 or 6 mins)

If they’re outcast, whatever that means in your society, what happens? For example, my Stone-Age hunter can only hunt small game if they’re working on their own; they might not have access to a fire, so they’ll be eating it raw, which is more of a health risk and less nutritious; they won’t be getting the gatherers’ food, so will probably start getting scurvy, or might poison themselves gathering the wrong thing; the furs from their small game would rot because they don’t know how to handle those properly... and so on. 

Use the ideas from your first brainstorm and anything else that emerges. As you brainstorm, more details about both the character and the society will start to emerge and sharpen.

4. Turning it into story (rest of the time: 4 or 8 mins)

Now you know exactly what’s the worst that can happen, it’s time to whisk all that together into story, with five questions:

1. What could cause social disgrace? (eg in my Stone-Age society, that might be stealing food, killing a pregnant animal, etc.)
2. Who specifically would turn against them? This needs to be the majority, but think of some specific influential people, to show it happening. (If you’re making this all up as you go, you can just jot bare details, eg “tribe leader”.)
3. How might you stage out the disastrous consequences? You don’t want all the bad things to happen at once, so arrange them in order of what happens. (You can just number your brainstorm in order of size of disaster / logical order)
4. Who might stay on their side, even a bit? This is definitely a minority, and they might not be able to speak out, but they do care. Think of one to three specific individuals.
5. What could restore their name? 

Et voilà! Social peril, that so-human but so amorphous fear, is turned into stuff that happens. Which is exactly what we want to do, as storytellers.

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.  

Writing Skill: Bringing It All to Life

The four key elements that bring a story to life, as something readers can lose themselves in and feel like they're living inside, are rich characterisation, purposeful description, a compelling plot, and live action on the page, telling the story through scenes, not explanation / exposition / etc. All of those are things we can work on individually, as we develop and draft our stories. In the final draft, they all weave together – and that's what you'll play with in this Writing Skill.

You can keep this to ten minutes, as a quick exercise to stretch those skills, or spend longer on it, as you prefer. And you can use it as a starting point for invention, if you don't have a story on the go, or try it with an existing story. Whatever you choose, grab yourself a cuppa, a notebook and pen if you can write by hand, and settle in for some fun!

Start with character description 

We're using character to start with, here, so first off we want a paragraph of description about a character: their hairstyle, accessories, clothes, habitual expression, etc. Feel free to include their habits as well. As much as possible, we want things they choose about themselves: that tells us something about their character, whereas their height / eye colour / natural hair colour / etc gives us nothing about their personality.

Here's an example from my freewriting:

He keeps a wool hat pushed down on his head in all weathers, he shuffles and slouches along in a big old coat that hangs down to his hips, and he sees the world a different shape to most folk.
    When that oversized coat came down to his ankles, its capacious pockets held the purses he lifted. Now it holds scraps of paper and pencil stubs, and if you emptied them all out and lined up the phrases, why, it would read just like that poetry they make so much of at the uni. 

If you're using this skill as your starting point

First off, write that paragraph of description about a character, making up the details as you go along, focusing on the things they choose about themselves. Allow yourself to invent freely and wildly, with whatever comes to mind. If you want a starting point to invent your character, use this lovely quick cameo character generator. Spend five minutes on this if you want to keep it to a ten-minuter.

If you're using your own story

Flip through your writing for any static descriptions of your characters. If you have any, use one of those. If you have no static descriptions, check if you have any description at all of your characters: do you give the reader any visual hooks for them? If not, write a paragraph of how you imagine one of your characters, focusing on the things they choose about themselves. Spend five minutes on this if you want to keep it to a ten-minuter.

Turning the description into action

That paragraph gives us description and characterisation woven together already. Now we want to plait that into action, as part of a compelling plot. Quickly jot down:

• Where is your character?
• What are they doing and why does it matter? 

If you're using this Writing Skill as a starting point, you can just make those up. If you want some extra inspiration, try this quick plot generator and just click on "Setting" and "Situation". If you're using your existing story, look for the first scene that really features that character.

Then, for the rest of the time you have available, rewrite the paragraph, only mentioning what the character does with all those aspects of their appearance. Something can only be mentioned if they interact with it to some purpose (so not idly lifting and putting stuff back down).

Here's an example of my own reworking:

Description through action

• Where is my character? On a rooftop, at night.
• What are they doing and why does it matter? Spying / eavesdropping on a meeting for the head of the guard.

The next night, he had a new spot: perched on a narrow roof ledge above the curtained window, the bone flag tickling his very toes. He watched the moon scud through the clouds with a faraway gaze as if he were only trying to see the sailor who poles it across the skies. But he pushed his habitual woolly hat up above his ears and strained for three things: how many voices were in the room; whether any could be identified; and whether their words could be discerned.
    In time, he reached into his raggedy oversized coat and pulled out a scrap of paper, an old label from one of Culpeper’s bottles. It bore the solemn injunction to ‘inhale thrice daily but not to drink thereof’. He turned it over, sucked his pencil stub thoughtfully, and wrote by moonlight, ‘A hand of voices turns to fists.‘ He pushed the paper back into his pocket and continued to stare at the moon. The head of the guard would understand its meaning.

All of the detail comes to life, when it's being used as part of the action. And how much more fun, to read one of his mysterious notes, than just to be told that they read like university-admired poetry?! As you can see, I didn't fit in his childhood history: that's fine, we can't ram everything into one scene. We dripfeed info across a story.

So now, decide where your character is, what they're doing, and why it matters. Then write them in that place, doing that thing, weaving in as much of the descriptive detail as you can.

Have fun with it!

Want more Writing Skills? As a member of The Writers' Greenhouse Community, you'll get a new Writing Skill every week: quick fun activities to develop your writing across plot, character, description, style, genres, and poems.

Plus you'll get expert advice on tap, a friendly supportive writing community, and help sending your writing out.

Find out more and join here.