What Is Narrative Tension?

We’re all told that a story needs “narrative tension”, a “central conflict”, and that’s true. The problem, though, is that in this context, “tension” and “conflict” don’t mean what they usually do – so when people apply that advice, it can end up ruining the story.

The most striking example I’ve ever found of this was a “castle” – I shan’t name it, to protect the innocently hapless. We’d chosen it for a mini-adventure visit mostly because it promised Talking Portraits. After the wonderful storytelling on HMS Victory, in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, we were all up for audio story tours!

The “portraits” were large vertical flat screens, with characters posed as paintings which then come alive and chat to you – basically videos that start moving when you enter the room. The characters were the castle’s owner, his wife, and their daughter, discussing the history of the castle. It started off fine, if a little dull… And then the characters started to argue. Mostly the couple berating their poor daughter, but sometimes they quarrelled with each other, too.

It fast became clear that someone had told the script writer that the story needed some tension, some conflict – and they’d gone for the garden-variety, not the narrative sort. Straight-up interpersonal tension and conflict.

The result? Cringing visitors were chased from room to room by this bickering family, flattening themselves on the furthermost walls to avoid setting the portraits off, warning each other on the sill of each room. Nobody wanted to witness the endless family quarrel, however many titbits of Useful History it included! Rather than giving the story energy, the tension and conflict ruined it, and we all scuttled away, dismayed.

I often see the same thing in early drafts, when people want to create narrative tension but end up with characters bickering. That makes us want to read it less, not more. It also often makes the main character less sympathetic – after all, they’re constantly sniping at people. That in turn makes us care less about their aims, which in turn makes us less interested in whether they do the thing or not. In short, it undermines the exact narrative tension which it’s trying to create.

That’s because narrative tension and conflict are not tension and conflict by our usual definition of the words: they’re much wider. In fact, I’ve stopped using the words “tension” and “conflict” in much of my teaching, and instead talk about narrative drive and interest. In the Story Elements course, we open it up to discussion of all the things it can mean, such as…

Casting a wide net of all the different kinds of narrative interest gives us a much richer repertoire to draw on, so we’re far less likely to fall into the bickering-characters trap.

It’s much more than those individual various drives, though: it’s the thread that draws the reader eagerly through the whole story. So the most helpful way to distil it, I find, is this: What does the reader hope / fear / think will happen next or want to find out?

That question is so useful that I’ve now added it to my template for my writing-group-instalments, so I always remember to ask them. And asking it sharpens my storytelling immeasurably. We always want the reader to be able to answer that question, 100% clearly: there is a definite reason they’re reading on. And if the reader can’t answer that question, we need to make the reason clearer – or, sometimes, invent it!

In each scene, in each chapter, in each act of the story, ask yourself, “What should the reader hope / fear / think will happen next or want to find out?” That’s your narrative tension, your narrative drive.

 

If you’d like to work on your narrative drive and plot interest in your stories, I have a brace of resources for you, now available as any-time Evergreen Resources: Narrative Drive and Plot Tension Map. 

With Narrative Drive, you’ll distil that all important question for a story, including the crucial component of backing the character through the story. With Plot Tension Map, you’ll pace and layer that across the whole story, so every part is equally gripping: no slow starts or soggy middles.

Both are self-paced videos that you can use any time, taking you through the process in an hour. You can use them to plan a story, troubleshoot it, or redraft it, whichever stage you’re at. Click here to get started with your Narrative Drive.

Writing Skill: A Magical Scientific Instrument

Happy Valentine's! And to celebrate, I've got a writing skill for you about a very different kind of love, as well as a love poem, inspired by Oxford's glorious History of Science Museum. (Which I am, yes, in love with. That picture up top is my phone background!)

You can use this skill for flash-fiction (very tiny short stories) or for a poem, whichever you prefer, to write about a scientific instrument. This could be any kind of scientific instrument: ones from astronomy, like telescopes, astrolables, orreries; ones for weather, like barometers, thermometers; ones for navigation, like compasses; ones you'd find in modern laboratories or ancient apothecaries...

If you want a list to get your mind mulling it over, here's the Wiki list sorted into categories and here's a breaktakingly extensive list of 418 instruments + their uses. Personally, I love the older instruments, especially astrolabes, so here's a wonderfully rich resource for that. The Oxford History of Science Museum has explanations and short videos on 8 different kinds of instruments in their collection: armillary sphere, camera obscura, gregorian telescope, medicine chest, octant, orrery, wimshurst machine. So if you fancy five minutes of discovery first, choose which one you fancy, read the text about it, watch the little video, and then settle into turning that discovery into your writing.

Once you've browsed and absorbed a bit, scroll down to choose whether you want to flash-fiction it or turn it into a poem. You can decide whether you feel the instrument is already thoroughly magical to you, or whether you'd like to add magical properties to it.

Flash-fiction It

This is the very stuff of story, as Philip Pullman's series His Dark Materials illustrates with Lyra's wonderful alethiometer. (Which is also in the History of Science Museum!) You could follow the links to write a fictionalised story about a real scientific instrument OR take a leaf out of Pullman's book and give your character an invented instrument.

If you invent an instrument, use these questions to inspire you: 

• What does it do? 
• Did they invent it or did they find it? 
• How do they use it? 
• Does something completely unexpected happen when they do?

To keep it very short, you could focus in on just a couple of things: them using it and what they expect; what actually happens. If you want to write a longer piece (flash fic goes up to 1000 words), you could also include more beforehand about them finding / inventing it, and possibly a second character's responses to it.

Poem It

You could write this as free verse or, if you fancy a type of poem to write, how about a villanelle? 

Line #	Repeated line	Rhyme
1	A	a
2	xxxxx	b
3	B	a
4	xxxxx	a
5	xxxxx	b
6	A	a
7	xxxxx	a
8	xxxxx	b
9	B	a
10	xxxxx	a
11	xxxxx	b
12	A	a
13	xxxxx	a
14	xxxxx	b
15	B	a
16	xxxxx	a
17	xxxxx	b
18	A	a
19	B	a

A villanelle uses two lines that keep repeating throughout: they start and end the first stanza, then they take turns ending the next four stanzas, and then both of them together end the last stanza.

• Stanza length: The first five stanza are 3 lines each; the last stanza is 4 lines
• Rhyme scheme: the first four stanzas are aba; the last stanza is abaa. 
• Repeating lines: The table shows where the two repeating lines go, that's A and B. They can have slight variations, changing words or tweaking punctuation, so the meaning shifts throughout the poem. Read the example further down, to see how it works.

Practical tip: When you’re writing a villanelle (or any repeating form), it helps to mark out the structure in your notebook, and each time you write a line that will repeat, jot it down in the places where it’ll repeat. You can always tweak the wording and punctuation when you get to it, but it’s much easier to write if you can see what lines you’re heading towards, instead of trying to hold it in your head.

Here's a love villanelle I wrote inspired by the History of Science Museum, with the repeated lines marked:

So many devices, copper and brass, to divine
the movements of planets, celestial angles, and time.
Trajectories of hearts and whether your love will align

again, its elliptical orbit completed, with mine
are hardly more complex? They built, drawing metal from grime,
so many devices, copper and brass, to divine

the shape of the oceans by peering down holes for the shine
of a singular star. Is it harder to plot out the prime
trajectories of hearts and whether my love will align

with yours as it swings into view? I’ve been stiffened with brine,
my ship lost at sea; I’ve been trying, through gathering rime,
so many devices, copper and brass, to divine

the path of your vanishing love, its return, and the sign
if it’s comet or star: Enlightenment’s cool paradigm.
Trajectories of hearts and whether a love will align

are surely the stuff of academies; measures define
Newtonian laws. I polish, through rhyme after rhyme,
so many devices, copper and brass, to divine
trajectories of hearts, and whether our love will align.

And if these magical instruments inspire you as much as they do me, my favourite museum and I are running a special combined event: a workshop on Tues 24 Feb, to explore ancient astrolabes and poetry, after dark, in the museum.

It's fully booked, but they've opened a waiting list so you can nab a space if anyone has to cancel, and get first dibs on any future events we do. Add your name to the waiting list here.

PSA: Don’t Use AI In Your Writing

More specifically, don’t use AI in your stories or poems if you want to get them published. (And even more specifically: by “AI”, I mean “generative AI”, aka Large Language Models – ChatGPT, Microsoft Clippy Co-Pilot, Claude, Gemini, etc. Obviously you’re not going to use a specialist AI that spots particular cancer cells to write, but it’s worth remembering that all those other kinds of AI exist.)

There are heaps of arguments about generative AI at the moment, but I don’t want to get into the weeds of all that. I just want to give you a heads up about this:

3 Lobed Magazine

Air and Nothingness Press

Arachne Press

Asimov Magazine

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Black Beacon Books

Clarkesworld

Cosmic Horror

Death by TBR Books

Horned Lark Press

Interzone

LBA Books Agency

Litro Magazine

Livina Press

Moss Puppy Magazine

Podcastle

Rogers Coleridge and White Agency

The Dark Magazine

The Fiction Desk

That’s not a cherry-picked selection. I check submission guidelines a lot – not just for my own work, but also for the Sending Writing Out list I keep updated for the Writers’ Greenhouse Community. Over the last few months, I’ve been seeing those notices everywhere. These are just the ones I happened to screengrab over a few days, as I updated my spreadsheets.

As you can see, no-one wants AI-generated writing. Not literary journals, not genre magazines, not agents, not publishers. Many don’t want you to use it for research and idea-generation either. Some even say not to use it for grammar checks. A couple years ago, I suggested using it for punctuation, which after all is a formal system, but we found that even with the strictest instructions not to change the words, it still did. And several places dish out lifetime bans for submitting writing that’s used AI.

To avoid using AI for research and ideas, I have a few tips.

Add “-ai” to your Google searches

That removes the AI summary at the top and gives you search results instead. I’ve found I get much better results when I remember “-ai”, and often they contradict the AI summary. Even when the AI summary gets it right, the pages written by actual human experts contain a ton more info that you might not have thought to research. Always, when we’re learning something, we don’t know everything we need to ask! The AI summary will only tell you what you know to ask.

Use the Writers’ Links trove of sites

I have a lovely curated list of very useful sites for writers, organised into Words words words • Characters • Places • Plot • World building • Historical research. It also contains lots of rangens, to help you come up with ideas. These are random generators using databases, not AI. Bookmark the Writers’ Links page!

In the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, every fourth weekly Writing Skill features a useful online resource, to help you explore these. I’m steadily adding all the sites I feature there to the Writers’ Links page as well. 

Remember Wikipedia

Free, vast, accurate, up-to-date, human-written, with heaps of info on every subject, and all its sources meticulously cited if you want to delve deeper. Ah, how times change, from "You can't trust Wiki!" You really can, now. Human passions for their specialist subjects have created the wisdom of crowds. Bookmark Wikipedia – ideally on your browser toolbar. 

Block ChatGPT & co on your server

Did you know you can block websites on your own server? If it’s your internet account, you can! If you struggle not to reach for it, that’s a lovely hard-core solution. And if you’ve been paying for ChatGPT, and you’re going to stop using it, what about slinging that money Wikipedia’s way, instead?

* 

I have many, many more opinions about this – of course I do, everyone does right now – but this isn’t about My Many Opinions, it’s just a PSA: don’t use AI in your stories or poems if you want to get them published.

Writing Skill: Surprising Fact

Creativity loves novelty, the element of surprise, and what could be more novel and surprising than those lists of Surprising Facts that do the rounds? They're always tempting to scroll, but somehow we end up just threading them through our eyeballs, then forgetting them. Creativity 0, Ennui 1. It's definitely not generating the inspiration we want. 

But those surprising facts can take on exciting life and spark creativity. A couple of years ago, one Sunday morning, I was putting away the supermarket delivery with Radio 4 on in the background. It was Sunday Worship; I was about to change stations, but the priest's Scottish accent, his voice, and the music were so lovely that I left it on. At one point, he started speaking about seals and said, memorably, "They always come if you sing." 

The Story Elements class had just come up with a story about seelies, so immediately my mind leapt with the fact. I should tell them that, I thought. And what a beautiful overlap between seals and mermaids, which seelies are halfway between, that they come if you sing. And weren't tales of mermaids sometimes attributed to a particular type of seal that looks extraordinarily human? And how could that be used in the story...? 

As soon as there's a story for a fact to land in, it comes alive. But sometimes we need to find a story, and we can't always rely on life and random Radio-4-listening to hand us exciting facts: we need to seek them and make stories from them. Through that, we sensitise ourselves more to noticing them. Then, even if the particular facts we seek out and take for a tiny story-spin go nowhere, we're honing our alertness for other surprising facts, sources of stimulus, creative food. 

So for this Writing Skill, the idea is not just to read through surprising facts, like munching popcorn, but to pick a few that you can really imagine and integrate. The fact itself is just the spur for creativity: the creative boost comes when we use it.

To find your surprising facts, here's a really lovely list of genuinely delightful information. It's helpfully arranged into categories: Animals, History, Travel, Music, Sports, Human, Funny, and Miscellaneous. You can pick your favourite category or choose a cross-section. However you approach it, pick three facts and write them down.

Then, for each of your three, write one of these, whichever suits the fact or you best:

• A brief snippet of it happening, like an excerpt from a story or a scene
• A 2-3 line story teaser or blurb (think Dramatic Hollywood Voice)
• A tiny poem – perhaps an elevenie?

And just as the surprising facts come alive when you use them, so do the Writing Skills. So give yourself the gift of ten minutes, curl up with a cuppa, your notebook, and a pen, and take three facts for a quick writerly whirl. 

Have fun with your facts, and enjoy the week ahead of increased alertness and creative sparkles!

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: Voice Argument

To whet your appetite for the Writing Dialogue workshop on 13–14 December, I’ve got a lovely freebie Writing Skill for you: Voice Argument. This is a great one for practising writing dialogue in a very free-form way, separating out their voices, and exploring the effects on their characterisation.

So give yourself the writing-gift of ten minutes, grab a cuppa, your pen, and notebook, and curl up to scribble.

To start with, you have two people arguing. You don’t need to worry about who they are; you’ll find out as much you need to from what position they take in the argument. Pick something light for them to argue about, so it’s not too stressful. (Especially if you’re a non-confrontational bunny like me!) For example...

• whether one of them saw a fairy
• when blackberries are best
• the ideal route between point A and point B

or what you will.

Once you’ve chosen the topic, spend five minutes speedwriting just their dialogue: the actual words they speak, not all the "he said / she said" and other bits that go around it. Make it up as you go along and allow their disagreement to generate the content. That’s the wonderful thing about arguments, in writing: once you’ve set up the disagreement, they pretty much write themselves!

Then, once you’ve written for five minutes, pick one voice to make super formal, and the other very casual. If you already have distinctive voices, I’d suggest you change the more formal one to a casual one and vice versa. It’s fascinating to see what happens when we reverse our instinctive choices! Spend the next five minutes rewriting their dialogue, into the two extremes.

For example, my speaker A said:

“No ways! They have to just fall off in your hand or they’re shit!”

Now I need to make that super formal. So…

“Nonsense! If they don’t come away quite easily, they’re simply not edible."

Or I could go right up into the rafters to make it super-super formal:

“I must disagree in the strongest possible terms. The blackberry must yield with not the least particle of force, or it will be entirely unpalatable.”

My speaker B, meanwhile, needs to become super casual. They said:

“But you want some firmness, or they’ll just turn to mush.”

So to make that way more casual...

“Ah, c’mon, they're crap if they’re all squishy like that!”

When you’re done, sit back and reread it. Aloud, if you like: that’s always a great way to hear dialogue. Look at how distinctive they now are. At how the change in register (formality) changes how they come across.

Have fun! 

Why this skill?

This is a great exercise for several things:

• Writing dialogue: It's often helpful to stick to just the spoken words, in the first draft, and add the other stuff in later. That way we can really hear the flow in conversation.
• Separating voices: It's common, when we're writing first draft, to start using similar voices for both characters in a conversation. Afterwards, you can separate them out more consciously.
• The effect of voice on characterisation: As well as making the voices distinctive, it makes such a difference to how we see them! Are you more sympathetic to the formal voice's argument, now, because they sound more educated? Or less so, because they sound pompous? And so on.

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.  

Parlour Games

To add to your collection of festive writerly games, decor, and joyous silliness, I have a lovely new brace of parlour games for you, perfect for large groups. One of them is ideally suited to us of a literary disposition (but equally enjoyable for those who aren't!) and the other is really just a matter of joyous chaos. We tried them both at my birthday party last week and they worked even better than I'd hoped. Let the games begin!

Poem Enactments

This is best with a really good-sized group, at least ten people, ideally more. You'll also need enough space for people to sit around the edge and leave the centre of the room clear. 

Anyone can read or recite a poem. Before they do, though, they assign people to act out the parts. (Or ask for volunteers.) It's very important to cast before reading. 

While they read / recite the poem, the actors play their parts, following whatever directions come their way. I did The Walrus and the Carpenter, casting a sun, moon, walrus, carpenter, oldest oyster, and all the other oysters. My brother in law, as the sun, did a truly majestic job of trying to make the billows smooth and bright. My sister, as the moon, was splendidly sulky about it. The sight of most of my friends fervently pretending to be oysters, trotting behind the walrus and the carpenter, will live with me forever. Especially when they started making oyster noises. 

In someone else's poem, I volunteered to be the pond. It turned out the poem was Daddy Fell Into the Pond, so I got heftily landed on! In The Owl and the Pussycat, many of us were bong trees. When someone else did The Jabberwocky, Gwendi (the Jabberwock) collapsed to the floor in death so dramatically that the thunk was audible.

Nursery rhymes, picture books, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, and Doctor Seuss are all great contenders for poems, as well as dramatic ballads like The Highwayman.

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The (Brief) Singing Of Many Songs

Everyone needs to be briefed to think of their favourite song to sing. A hymn, a carol, a pop song, a protest song, a lullaby, a folk song, whatever they know and is dear to their hearts.

Before The Singing, everyone firmly fixes their song in their mind, and lightly hums the opening note. Then everyone sings, all at once, for two minutes, and may the loudest voice win!

We didn't have a prize, but we totally should have, and the winner was 100% my sister with her passionate rendition of Toto's Africa, drowning out even her husband's and Will's combined Jerusalem. Glorious! Half the cacophonous choir collapsed in giggles after the first minute, but the remaining roar was still award-worthy.

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And if you want more silly or writerly festive things to do, I've got heaps more for you already up on the blog:

• Four Writerly Party Games (these work well with 4+ people)
• Zoom Party Games (the same four games plus two extra, all converted for playing over Zoom)
• The Present Game, for a chaotic and increasingly random present exchange
• How To Make a Christmas Star, which you can do on your own as paperly decor or as a group with everyone contributing spokes to the star
• How to Fold a Little Book, if you want to fill your Christmas tree with tiny books (You could use richly decorated Christmas paper so they look even more splendid.)

Wishing you wonderful, creative, silly fun! 

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Looking for present ideas? Get a gift voucher for courses, workshops, resources, or support, from £15 to £345.

Autumn Writing Food: Mushroom Bake

Hearty cheesy mushroom bake with red lentils, succulent inside and crispy on top.
Gluten-free | Veggie

Ars longa, vita brevis, as I said to one of my students at the WolvLitFest last weekend: art is long and life is short. It's always a struggle to find enough time for all the projects. 

At least, that's what I meant to say. I said the first word, paused because my head was full of another Latin phrase (memento vivere: remember to live), so... basically I just said, with full thoughtful confidence, "ARSE" and then looked around for a bit.

I don't think she's going to let me live that one down. 

Anyway, the brevity of time (ARSE!) is why I send you these seasonal writing food recipes. We need to carve out time for our writing, often from already busy lives, and we need to remember to live. Perfect writing food is quick (either to make or to double up another day's cooking) so it doesn't steal your writing time, low-carb so your writing time isn't sabotaged by sleepiness, and as much a treat as writing itself. 

This autumn's is one of my absolute favourites for a chilly writing day, easy to double, triple, or even quadruple, and freezes beautifully (and without wasting freezer space, if you use my nifty tinfoil trick). It's one to make on a non-writing evening, in extra quantity, and then freeze the rest for future writing time.

Mushroom Bake

Serving and times

Prep & active cooking: 25–30 mins
Oven time: 35 mins
Serves: 4 (This scales up very easily; always round up the number of eggs, as they hold it together. There's a scaling-up table at the bottom for easy reference.)

Ingredients

For spicy tomato sauce (optional)

• 1 small onion, thinly sliced
• 2 chillies, sliced
• 1 tsp of hot chilli flakes / powder (optional)
• 1 tin of tomatoes (400g)
• 1/3 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon black pepper

For mushroom & lentil bake

• 175g red split lentils
• 350 ml vegetable stock (I use powdered bouillon and hot water)
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 175g mushrooms, chestnut or portabello chopped / sliced
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1 stalk rosemary (5”), finely chopped
• 125g cheese, grated
• 1 egg, beaten

To serve

Baby spinach leaves (approx 50g per person) or side salad

Method 

Spicy tomato sauce

If you’re making the spicy tomato sauce, get this on the go first so it has plenty of time to simmer down (1 hour, ie the same time as the rest of the cooking)

• Thinly slice 1 small onion and 2 chillies.
• In a small pot, fry the ½ teaspoon black pepper, onion and chillies on a medium-high heat, for about 10 mins (you can start the other cooking meanwhile).
• Add the 1 tsp of hot chilli flakes / powderchilli powder if using, 1 tin of tomatoes and 1/3 teaspoon salt.
• Turn the heat down and let it simmer gently, uncovered, to reduce for about an hour.

Mushroom & lentil bake

• Heat the oven to 180 C.
• Chop one onion.
• In a pot, put the 175g lentils in the 350ml hot stock to simmer, covered, until soft (10 mins). When they’re done, just turn them off and leave them on the side for now.
• Meanwhile, slice the onions.
• Melt the 2 Tablespoons butter in a deep wide pan (the wider it is, the faster this goes; deep is helpful for when you’re stirring in the mushrooms)
• Add the onion to the pan and fry on medium for about 10 mins.
• Meanwhile, slice / chop the 175g mushrooms (you can just hack them all up – no need for finesse) and finely chop the stalk of rosemary
• Add the mushrooms and rosemary to the onions, turn up the heat, and fry till they’ve released all their water and the water has evaporated (5–10 mins)
• Meanwhile, beat 1 egg in a bowl large enough to contain all the ingredients and grate 125g cheese into the same bowl. Grease a baking dish (approx 20 x25 cm for this quantity).
• Mix the cooked lentils and fried onion & mushroom into the bowl with the cheese and egg.
• Pour it into the greased baking dish: we like it about ¾–1 inch deep, to get more crispy surface. Deeper is also fine, up to about 1.5 inches deep. Bake for 35–45 minutes.
• Serve on a bed of baby spinach with the spicy tomato sauce dolloped on top.

Want to freeze it? Fridge it overnight then wrap each portion size (eg for 2) in tinfoil.

Scaling Up

Onions	1	2	2.5	3	4
Mushrooms	175g	350g	450g	530g	700g
Cheese	125g	250g	300g	375g	500g
Lentils	175g	350g	450g	530g	700g
Stock	350ml	700ml	875ml	1 litre	1.4 litres
Butter	50g	100g	125g	150g	200g
Eggs	1	2	3	3	4

And a generous stalk or two of rosemary!

A note on quantities: The red portion fills a 20x25cm dish and serves 3-4, so the orange and green quantities need two of those or something twice the size. (You can also make it a bit thicker.) The teal and purple are going into wild quantities: you'd need the actual oven tray for those, or several dishes. (The oven tray also works well to do loads and cut it into smallish squares as part of a family buffet or picnic.)

Freezing Tip

If you're freezing bakes, you don't want your whole tray to disappear into the freezer and waste space. Put the bake in the fridge overnight so it goes nice and solid, then cut it into meal-portions and wrap each portion in tinfoil, pinching it shut at the top so that the tinfoil doubles up as their "baking tray" for when they're reheated. Masking tape for the labels doubles up to seal those folds. (Air-exposure in the freezer would give it "freezer burn".) Then you write the food name and date on the masking tape in Sharpie.

Happy writing! And remember: whenever you say "ars longa, vita brevis," finish the phrase. 

Writing Skill: Unjudge

Creating and getting to know our characters is one of the most joyous parts of writing. It's also an area where we easily slip into habits or rut, without realising. This Writing Skill, UNJUDGE, is a lovely character-creation tool for developing more unexpected characters in a way that ducks around our habitual thinking. So give yourself the gift of 10–20 minutes writing time, grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and curl up somewhere comfy.

For this skill, you'll use the site This Person Does Not Exist. It's an AI-generator that creates wholly convincing photos of people who – like it says – don't exist. Though they really, really look like they do! Each time you press refresh a completely new image is created. So the first thing you're going to do is choose your character. Remember, refresh means it creates a new image: you can't go back to a previous one! So I suggest you allow yourself a maximum of 3 "refreshes", to choose your character, and make sure you screengrab each one, cos once it's gone, that's it.

Important note for screengrabbing on a computer: If you right-click and say "copy image", it doesn't copy the image you're looking at! It generates a new one and copies that. To save the picture you're looking at, use the Prt Sc (print-screen) button and then paste it into a document. You can also use a screen-snip tool.

Part One

Once you've chosen your character, study their face and spend half your time (five minutes, if you want to keep this a ten-minuter) making up what they're like: their personality, their job, their hobbies, their relationships, whatever comes to mind. Go completely with whatever comes to mind; don't worry if it seems an obvious choice, a bit cliched, even a bit judgy. It'll be fine, trust me.

I suggest you don't scroll down to Part Two until you've done that bit. 

Part Two

Now that you've got your character fully described, generate ONE more "photograph" by refreshing the site. That's the person you've actually been inventing! Everything you've just made up gets reassigned to the new face. Make sure you screengrab your new character, then spend a couple minutes more making up additional details. The only catch is: you can't change any of the details you've already made up.

When we're working on our own from a photo, it's often easy to slip into rather judgy and prejudiced character creation. We can fight like crazy against our own biases, but that often means we're spending most of our creative energy on batting away the biased choices, or making the exact opposite choice instead. By doing a switcheroo with the photo instead, none of those judgements came from the person's face, and the new identity is often an unexpected fit for our inventions. The disjuncture also leads to fresh ideas.

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Writing Skill: Magic Power Backfires

Magic is a joyous aspect of fantasy, but without limits, magic will scupper your plot or leave giant plot loopholes. Some ways of restricting magic are that it’s…

• addictive
• drains the person using it
• creates an imbalance
• built-in limits of the aid (eg potions)
• dangerous for the world or the user
• comes at a cost
• the resources to make it are limited

Having the magical power backfire, though, creates a lovely new dimension to it, following law of unintended consequences. This Writing Skill gives you a lighthearted way to play with it, to explore the story possibilities it opens up. I suggest you spend 10–20 minutes on it, whichever suits. Grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and curl up somewhere comfy.

If you’re using this Skill as your starting point

What superpower or magical power have you always really wanted? (For me, that's breathing underwater or flying.) You're going to give someone that magic power – and then explore all the ways it backfires and all the problems it creates.

If you’re using your own story with magic in it

Pick any magic that appears in your story.

Once you've got your magic

That power might seem like such a wonderful thing to have, but it's going to backfire, in all sorts of unexpected ways. For the user, for those around them, in other ways... 

I suggest you do this as a freewriting exercise, to explore all the ways it goes wrong. Freewriting means writing continuously and completely non-judgementally, without caring about good / bad ideas, grammar, non-sequiturs. Write anything that comes into your head; just keep writing. Follow it and see where it goes. You’re creating raw material, like weaving cloth which you can later cut up and sew together.

That freewriting might include talking out loud to yourself on paper, writing snippets of dialogue or description, summarising events, dipping into storytelling whatever comes out of your pen.

Allow yourself to discover, and have fun!

The skills you're developing

Freewriting: Freewriting is a wonderful way to create raw material, to develop and explore ideas you might otherwise cut back earlier, and to discover voices and subject matter you would never have consciously planned. It could turn into any of the different kinds of writing. Equally valid and valuable, it could simply be the beautiful art of forming sentences on paper, or an exercise in writing more freely – a freedom you can carry into your other writing.

Constraining magic: As I said at the start, we always need to constrain magic, in fantasy, so it doesn't ruin the plot. Using the magic's own inherent properties is an especially satisfying and uncontrived way to do that.

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Writing Skill: Soundscape Sliders

My two favourite soundscape sites for writing, MyNoise and Ambient Mixer, both create soundscapes of different places and situations by mixing a bundle of different sounds. Each sound has its own slider, and the listener can play with the sliders to adjust it. For instance, MyNoise's "Medieval Village" has ten sliders: Watermill, Pastoral (birdsong and brook), Rejoicing bells, Fire bell, Trotting horse, Carriages, Market, Animals, Blacksmith, and Fanfare. Ambient Mixer's "Victorian London" has eight: Colombia Road Flower Market, Horse Whinny, Church Bells, Pre Thunderstorm, Steam Train, Rain on Umbrella, Rain on Cement, and Carriages at Night.

This Writing Skill uses that idea for a lovely exploration of sounds in your writing. I suggest you spend 10–20 minutes on it, whichever suits. Grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, curl up somewhere comfy, and have fun!

If you’re using this Skill as your starting point

Pick a genre you like, any genre: cosy detective fiction, romantasy, Gothic, historical, space opera, near-future science fiction, epic fantasy, mythology, paranormal fantasy, dystopia, alternate history, folklore, steampunk, urban paranormal, or anything else you fancy.

Each of the genres in that list will create its own sense of place and the sounds you might expect. For example, if you choose mythology and go for Viking mythology, then your sense of place might be on a longboat or a coastal village in Scandinavia. If you choose folklore, you're likely looking at an old-fashioned rural village or farm. If you choose cosy detective fiction, that's likely to be an English village (but it could also be a Caribbean island). If you choose steampunk, that's definitely Victorian era, but it doesn't have to be London; it could be anywhere you choose. If you choose urban paranormal, then what urban spot are you picking: Oxford? Cheltenham? Croyden? So pick your genre and let that dictate what kind of place you're imagining.

If you’re using your own story

Use the main setting in that. If your characters move around a lot, pick the area you'll be using the most, or one that you want to imagine in more detail.

Once you have your place

You're going to plan a soundscape for it, featuring ten sliders. What key ten sounds would you pick out to create the complete atmosphere of being there? Brainstorm all the possible sounds you could include. If you want more ideas, spend 5 mins or so browsing MyNoise or Ambient-Mixer. (If you've come on any of the courses recently, I'll have sent you soundscapes each week, to look back at.) Save the rest of your time for inventing your own soundscape, though.

Already, that will have given you a much more heightened awareness of sounds, to include in your writing. If you want to play with it more, I have two suggestions:

• Actually make your soundscape in Ambient Mixer! Here's the details on how. It's limited to eight channels, so you'll need to pick your top eight out of your ten. If you make one, do share it in the comments. Massive bonus here if you have an ongoing project: you can enter the sound of your world, using your own soundscape, any time you're writing. It's a time-consuming adventure, mind, so only choose this option if you're looking to fritter away several hours!
  
• Write a sound description of your place: a good ten minutes' or so writing, so you really stretch your writing legs with it, giving us everything in terms of the sounds it makes and exploring your sound vocabulary.

Have fun!

The skills you're developing

Part of the joy of stories, for both readers and writers, is imagining ourselves into different places and times. That's especially true of the genres I listed: the sense of place is central to the story. That full-body immersion works best when you give readers all the details their bodies need: not just the sights, but the sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations. It's easy to forget the non-visual senses when we're writing, though. With sounds, we're often pleased if we can muster up one or two to mention. Soundscapes are a wonderful way to remind ourselves just how rich and varied the landscape of sound actually is and how many different things we're hearing at any one time.

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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: The Market

Markets and their ilk are a lovely moment in writing: a rich opportunity for description and world-building, filled with sensory potential. The only hitch is that as you cheerfully launch your character into this wealth of stuff, you suddenly have to invent all the stuff! Your writing flow suddenly grinds to a halt as you start googling "types of fish" or "ornamental stuff" or "tropical fruit"... Enter Reverse Dictionary.

Reverse Dictionary gives you words that use a word or phrase in their definition. For example, if you look up "ornamental", you won't get synonyms (decorative, showy, etc) but a list of ornamental things: lampshades, figurines, beading, doilies, etc. It also works well with phrases, eg "tropical fruit" brings up heaps of names of tropical fruit. If you struggle to get the exact slew of results you're after, think of one example of what you want (eg "figurine") and put that into an actual dictionary, eg dictionary.com. Look at the definition for a key word, then plug that into the Reverse Dictionary.

This Writing Skill gives you a lovely way to play with this, and hugely enrich your writing. I suggest you spend 10–20 minutes on it, whichever suits. Grab your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, curl up somewhere comfy, and have fun!

• If you’re using this Skill as your starting point, pick any time or place setting you like – historical, contemporary, your country, another country, somewhere completely imaginary, whatever appeals.
• If you’re using your own story, use your own time and place setting, or your own imaginary world.

Spend a few minutes brainstorming the categories of things they'll sell there. For my imaginary world, that's fish, fruit and veg, fowl, spices, and assorted snacks. For a realist story in my home town, I'd also have clothes stalls, knickknacks, second-hand books, and so forth.

Next, spend the rest of the time using Reverse Dictionary to look up types of that thing, and jotting down the examples which catch your eye.

That's it! A brief but thorough trial-run of the Reverse Dictionary, and a much expanded sense of a story's world. To take it further, launch into some writing: have a character enter the market and encounter all these stalls and things, including as many senses as you can.

The skills you're developing

Specificity: Moving from generalities and categories (eg ornaments) to specific detail creates a much richer sense of your story: the details are what bring it alive for the reader.

Sensory description: Markets are inherently multisensory: visually busy, noisy, and an opportunity to include tastes and smells, which are often harder to weave in. This makes the story far more immersive to read.

World-building: Markets are a fantastic chance to showcase your story's world in all its richness and idiosyncrasy, especially if it's a world your readers are unfamiliar with: a foreign country; a historical setting; an imaginary fantasy or science-fiction world. Spending time delving into everything it contains will also enrich your world beyond the market square: next time someone's munching on street-food, buying another character a present, or preparing dinner, you have a much wider repertoire to draw on.

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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.