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.

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Want to explore writing poems more? 30 Days of Writing lets you explore a huge variety of poems and/or flash fiction (very short stories), with guidance to explore different aspects of poetry and over 30 optional poem forms to play with. Try the first three days of 30 Days of Writing free.

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The live Meddling with Poetry course 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. It runs about every three years: you can read more details 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 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.  

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

If you want to practise writing dialogue, here's a lovely free-form way to approach it, which also helps you separate out their voices, and explore the effects on their characterisation: Voice Argument.

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.  

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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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: 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.  

Writing Skill: Register Mismatch

 

"Register", in language, is how formally or casually we speak, in different situations and to different people – for example, the way we speak at work is different to how we chat with friends to how we address a cat. Playing around with register is a great tool for humour, whether you're writing comedy or just want to include some lighter moments. One of the ways of doing that is to mis-match the register with the situation.

So, first off, spend a couple of minutes brainstorming a) very sophisticated actions, and b) very crass actions. For example, sophisticated actions might be…

• sweeping up to the red carpet at a glamourous award, greeting the crowd and fellow red-carpeters
• meeting the king at a Buckingham Palace garden party
• graciously hosting an elegant meal
• waltzing around a ballroom with the cream of society

And very crass actions – I'm thinking of that New Year's mayhem in Manchester photo for inspiration, to start with. So that might be…

• being absolutely hammered and trying to ask someone on a date while fighting the police off with a bin lid
• dumpster-diving in your dressing gown and slippers for something important you lost, and trying to explain it away to a passerby
• taking the wrong route home, climbing through a hedge, tearing your clothes to distressingly revealing degrees, walking through a bog, losing one shoe to it, and also falling faceforward into it at one point (only some of which I've done making my way across Port Meadow in winter!)

Once you've brainstormed both lists, pick one item from each list, to describe in the most opposite way possible. Start with the "crass" action: describe it in the most elegant, formal, and sophisticated language possible: "Enamoured by his charm, I once more thrust my distressing shield, still fragrant with kitchen discards, at the officer of the law, thus buying me time to beseech..." etc. And then for the elegant action, describe it in the most casual, slangiest, vernacular way possible: "I ponced my way up the long rug, with a proper arse wiggle for the gawkers, grinning at my chums in their penguin get-up..." etc. If you'd like to keep this to a 10-minuter, spend 4 minutes on each.

Then reread, share with your writing buddies if you can, and have a good giggle!

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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: Dark Beauty

First off, choose a location that you think is just stunningly beautiful. Not creepy at all: gorgeous, soothing, filling your soul with beauty. Somewhere you've been on holiday perhaps or somewhere you've recently visited – a picturesque village, beautiful gardens, the inside of a college if you went to Oxford Open Doors. It can be just one building, if you like: standing at the bus stop one evening, I was blown away by how picture-perfect the Royal Oak on Woodstock Road looked. Anywhere, wild, rural, suburban, or urban, that you think is unequivocally beautiful.

Next, you're going to describe its beauty – but with the most menacing verbs you can find. Let things loom, creep, snake, throttle, seep… (Verb: a doing word. Test it by putting "to" in front of it: to loom, to creep, to snake, etc.) I suggest you spend ten minutes on this, though you could do more if you fancy a longer writing session. And have fun with it!

When you’re done, type it up and schedule an email to yourself for a week’s time – without specifying that you were practising using creepy verbs. When you reread it with fresh eyes, you’ll be surprised at how effective your verb choices are and how much subtler it feels to read than to write.

What you're doing in this prompt is called writing around a semantic field: your semantic field is "danger" and the verbs you're choosing all reflect that. The actual thing you're writing about isn't dangerous – it's beautiful! – but the way you're writing about it creates that sense of danger. We all know how powerful description and sense of place can be for creating a mood in a story. That doesn't limit you to places that echo that mood exactly, though: by playing around with your semantic field like this, you can make any place reflect any mood that you want it to! That gives you a lot more freedom to choose more original and exciting locations, which itself helps the story live on in the reader's mind.

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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: A Fond Farewell

In the run-up to the Story Elements course, I'm posting a trio of Writing Skills, one a week, to get you exploring the different ingredients that go into story creation: premise • characters • place • time • plot layering • tension & stakes • plot point of view • beginnings • themes & symbols • subplots • detail & dialogue • endings.

Bookings close in just three days!

This week's Writing Skill is A FOND FAREWELL, to play with the final four topics of the course: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. It's also a delightful way of using epistolary fiction (stories told through documents) to make a short story, with a side-helping of exploring subtext, reveals, and voice.

Your character is writing a farewell letter – in which they are (rather badly) hiding that they're in love with the person they're writing to. Their badly-hidden love becomes increasingly clear to the reader, but they remain convinced that they're managing to hide it.

If you prefer writing to discover, you can just leap straight in and find out the rest through writing. Start "Dear H—," and just keep writing. If you get stuck at any point, then have a glance at the suggestions for planning below, to feed in further ideas.

If you prefer to plan a bit first, then take a few minutes to brainstorm / jot down notes around these three things:

• How they're leaving (eg ship, train, plane, etc: whatever appeals to you for vibe / time period)
• Why contact will be difficult once they're gone
• How they know each other (eg visited town, holiday, friend of a friend, roommate, working together on something, went through some hardship together, etc)

I suggest you start writing once you have those bits of info, and let more details emerge through the writing. Planning can be useful to give us enough of a springboard to start writing, but never plan so much that you don't get to make discoveries through the process of the writing itself. Discovering through writing is part of the joy, and what we come up with that way is often more organic. Don't worry if your letter seems to go "off topic": follow it and see where it goes.

If you need more ideas of what to write about, then you could include... 

• their supposed purpose in writing (eg to thank the person, clear something up, info they forgot to pass on when saying goodbye)
• reminiscences of particular moments, objects, etc that they treasured
• things they discussed together before leaving
  
• references to people they both know
  
• their current surroundings and the contrast of that with where they've left
  

Sometimes we can find a story's end through pure writing-to-discover; sometimes we need to step back a moment and do a bit more planning. So...

Towards the end: To make it a short story, you need some sort of pithy ending. Some possible endings you might consider are:

• a reveal (to the reader) that the other person loves them too, though the character writing the letter remains unaware (SO TRAGIC 😭)
• a postscript of how / when / where the letter is found, and by whom (that could be tragic, untragic, or anything in between)
• a factual detail that gives the reader foresight (eg if the ship they're catching is The Titanic) – that could be a date, a place, a specific transport with a famously disastrous end, etc (the delicious chill of prescience)

or anything else that occurs to you!

Why this skill?

This Skill is a lovely organic way to explore the final four elements of stories: themes & symbols, subplots, detail & dialogue, and endings. A letter written by someone in love immediately gives you its theme, whichever approach you take to it, and the intense focus of love, how it latches onto and treasures the smallest objects, will spoil you for choice with symbols. That same focus also allows you to explore detail & dialogue, because every texture of every moment and every word of the beloved's means so much, when a character is smitten – and, of course, the letter itself means you're using the character's voice. Making it a short-story of a letter also lets you explore the possible endings. And through that ending, the letter itself can become a subplot of a larger context: of the person who finds the letter, or the factual detail that tells us the inevitable end.

These are the final four elements we explore in the Story Elements course: live online classes OR in person in Oxford, your choice. Read more about the course and heaps of reviews, and book your place here.

Writing Skill: Scene Bookends

This week's Writing Skill is SCENE BOOKENDS, to play with plot layering, tension & stakes, plot point of view, and beginnings. Scene Bookends are those first and last lines of scenes that drive the tension leading into the scene and create DA-DA-DAAAA! moments at the ends of scenes. What's the question that's driving the scene? What changes as a result of what happens? What does the reader hope or fear will happen next? That's what the starts and ends of your scenes should flag up, and here's how to make that happen.

For this, you need a story to work with, so you have a couple of options:

• Grab a chapter or two of your work in progress, if you have one,
  OR
• Pick a fairytale whose shape you know pretty well and jot down five key scenes. For example, for Cinderella: 1) Weepily cleaning while sisters plan ball, 2) Day of ball and Fairy Godmother does her thing, 3) Ball itself from arrival, 4) Fleeing at midnight, 5) The next day's true-love-by-shoe-size discovery.

Now you're going to write the first and last lines for those five scenes. Don't worry if you don't have the rest of the scene written, that's absolutely fine! You just want to make your first and last lines as dramatic as possible. You can do this completely by instinct or, if you prefer, use some of the tricks and techniques below – up to you. Sometimes it's helpful to go by instinct first, then compare with the tricks and techniques, to see what you can refine.

Tricks and techniques

If you're using a work in progress, look near the starts and ends of your scenes: what are your most dramatic lines? Could you move those up/down to bookend the scene? Could you start the scene a bit further down, with that dramatic line, and end it a bit sooner, with a dramatic line? Some writers (me included) tend to have a bit of "throat-clearing" at the starts of scenes, and carry on writing a bit longer than necessary.

For the first lines, think, What's the narrative question that's driving that scene? In the first scene of Cinderella, maybe that's Will anything nice ever happen to her? or Why are the stepsisters so awful to her? or Will she survive their brutality? Most of the time, you want the first line to flag up that question. For example,"Cinderalla edged into the kitchen, hoping the stepsisters wouldn't notice her this time." 

Alternately, you can play a little guess-who/what game with the first line: "A foreign princess approached her, dripping with diamante, more elegant than Cinderalla could ever dream of being." And then it turns out, a few lines into the scene, that she's seeing her reflection.

For the last lines, think, What's changed as a result of what's just happened? What does the reader hope or fear will happen next? You want your last line to flag that up like a giant arrow pointing to continuing the story. You have a bunch of different techniques you can draw on here:

• cliff-hanger (end at most dramatic point) eg The clock clock strikes 12 and Cinderella's gown starts to fade into rags
• dramatic irony (we know something the character doesn't) eg "Behind Cinderella, unseen, the clock stood at one minute to twelve."
• false dawn: ("What could possibly go wrong!?”) eg The Fairy Godmother sending Cinderella off, confident everything will go exacty as planned 
• near miss: (“Whew, that was close!”) eg Cinderella panicking about time as the clock chimes – no it's okay, it's only 11. If she then relaxes, that can also become more dramatic irony: as readers, we know she mustn't relax, because she'll forget the time again! We know how the story goes; she doesn't.
  
• straight-up plot plan: Use the last line to set up what the character's planning to do next. eg a dirty tired Cinderella, just finished cleaning the kitchen, resolves that whatever happens, she will go to the ball.

Have fun!

Why this skill?

This Skill plunges you right into four key elements of stories: plot layering, tension & stakes, plot point-of-view, and beginnings. By separating out your scenes and working on the first and last lines of each, you're paying close attention to the plot purpose of that specific scene: that's part of your  plot layering,. And by creating strong narrative drama in those lines, you're highlighting the tension & stakes of each scene. 

Some of those techniques also highlight the plot point-of-view vividly: dramatic irony, for instance, can jump outside the character's point of view (us seeing the clock that Cinderalla doesn't) or can rely on the character's restricted point of view, compared to the reader's knowledge (her relaxing when it's only 11, not knowing the story because she's in it). And plot plan explicitly centers their point of view as protagonist.

These hooky lines to start and end also build the skills we need for beginnings of stories: ways to draw the reader in, before they know what the story's all about or what's going to happen.

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 Pretence

In the run-up to the Story Elements course, I'm posting a trio of Writing Skills, one a week, to get you exploring the different ingredients that go into story creation: premise • characters • place • time • plot layering • tension & stakes • plot point of view • beginnings • themes & symbols • subplots • detail & dialogue • endings.

This week's Writing Skill is THE PRETENCE, to play with the first four topics of the course: premise, characters, place, and time. You have two characters, each of whom is pretending to be something they're not. They might be pretending they have a different job, status, class, nationality... whatever you fancy. I suggest you choose a different type of thing for each character. And both characters are trying to impress the other. For example, the CEO of a big finance company is pretending to be the janitor, to seem more practical and down to earth, and the new hire is pretending to be French, for reasons I haven't quite yet worked out, but which might emerge in the writing. NB: The reader already knows the truth about both characters, so we know they're lying, and we're giggling away and half eating our hands with the tension.

To start, spend a couple of minutes deciding what each is lying about, being reasonably specific. For example, if they're lying about their job, what's their actual job? What are they pretending is their job?

In choosing their lies, you'll also be generating the setting for the scene (the place and time). For example, with my CEO of a big finance company, I've immediately got a setting of the City of London, a towering glass building, a corporate environment, and I can keep that present day or jump back a bit in time. How about 2009, when bankers were deeply unpopular? That would give my CEO added motivation to hide their real identity!

You don't have to stick to your own lived timeline either: one of the characters could be a pyramid builder, lying about being the pharoah, or indeed the pharoah, lying about being a pyramid builder.

Once you've got your two characters through their lies, and the setting, spend the rest of the time (about 8 mins if you're doing a ten-minuter) writing their interaction. You can stick to dialogue mostly, throwing in action/description where it's relevant, as this is very much first-draft stuff. And play it for laughs!

Why this skill?

This Skill gives you a swift, nifty way in to the first four elements of stories: premise, characters, place, and time. I've given you the premise: two characters lying to each other. That's enough to start you off writing, and how you develop it is what will make it unique. Your characters are created through their lies: an unusual start to character development, but a fun one to loosen up your powers of invention, and it instantly creates character complexity. And those lies in turn give you your setting, your place and time, which immediately makes it easier to start writing and suggests new avenues of story and character possibility – such as my CEO's lie being in the context of the global economic crisis.

These four are the first four elements we explore in the Story Elements course: live online classes OR in person in Oxford, your choice. Read more about the course and heaps of reviews, and book your place here.

Meddle with a san san poem

The san san is a lovely variation on the repeating forms - instead of repeating exact phrases or lines, it repeats the imagery, which can be reworded and reused however you please. Each image appears three times, in any order. With just eight lines, that's rapid repetition! It also has a rhyme scheme of abcabdcd. When I'm writing, I break that down into abc abd cd, to help me keep track, and sometimes write it with those line breaks as well. Later, when I type it up, I remove the extra line breaks. Here's an example san san:

Rosebay Willowherb

Arms overflowing with twirls of seed-head froth
as white as the hair of the man who stopped me, said,
“In the blitz, that purple grew in the rubble, throughout,”
arms overflowing with memory, voice like a moth,
“It grows in purple cones in summer – our dread
couldn’t survive the flowers.” November’s white
seeded the broken places, a growing shout
of purple and arms overflowing in white nights.

Here it is again with the imagery in bold and colour-coded, and the line breaks added to help you see the rhyme scheme:

Rosebay Willowherb

Arms overflowing with twirls of seed-head froth
as white as the hair of the man who stopped me, said,
“In the blitz, that purple grew in the rubble, throughout,”

arms overflowing with memory, voice like a moth,
“It grows in purple cones in summer – our dread
couldn’t survive the flowers.” November’s white

seeded the broken places, a growing shout
of purple and arms overflowing in white nights.

As you can see, you can repeat the words or not to repeat the image: "arms overflowing" is repeated exactly; "purple" interchanges with "purple cones"; and the white seeds are "seed-head froth of white", "white seeded" and "white nights".

Have fun with it!

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The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms, as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. Absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.