Writing Skill: Memory Hook

The right descriptive detail can act as a powerful anchor for the reader, the hook on which they hang their memory of a particular character, place, or moment – often even a combination. That's incredibly useful when you want to remind the reader of a key scene from earlier on in the story. And it's essential if your story has lots of characters or storylines for the reader to keep track of.

To work as a memory hook, the detail needs to be…

• unusual
• emotion-provoking / richly sensory
• specific

For example, these are three of the descriptive details I’ve used as memory hooks in one of my novels:

• A giant spider under a trapdoor, between the water and the raised floor of a house: legit terrifying, and a very helpful reminder of a character and situation we don’t see often. 
• Dried-up lemons: one character, for complicated past reasons, insists on always having a lemon, but can’t be parted from the old ones. So everywhere he goes, he carries the musty scent of dried-up lemons, and is usually visibly carrying a lemon.
• Sickly-sweet jasmine perfume: a complete overload of it, and also a handy signifier when the wearer is en-corpsed!

The first couple times your detail crops up, you want to describe it in full sensory richness as well as the character’s emotional / physical reaction to it, to really embed it in the reader’s memory. After that, you can often just reference it briefly, to trigger that memory. So, here’s what you’re going to do, to play with this technique.

If you have a story you're writing

• What’s a pivotal moment, character, or place that you want the reader to remember? Think especially of ones they have to hold onto in their memory for a while before it comes back into play.
• What pivotal detail can you add that’s unusual, emotive / sensory, and specific?
• Spend five minutes writing rich description of the detail for yourself, then five minutes looking at where you could weave it into that scene. (Feel free to spend longer on each half if you prefer.)

If you don’t have a story you're writing OR you want to try it out first

I’m going to give you the ultimate challenge for a reader’s memory – and for a writer’s writing: a CONVERSATION IN A ROOM. Little to do, little striking to see, often the bane of our writerly lives. So we need that descriptive detail to do some heavy lifting for us. (Both the jasmine perfume and the dried-up lemons were originally used for this.)

Here’s your situation: A and B are in the room together. A is telling B about a difficulty C is having – that could be romantic, financial, work-related, family, psychological, up to you. Spend five minutes first writing just their dialogue, to get a sense of the story and the context through writing to discover. If you’re writing by hand, draw a line vertically down the middle of the page and write the dialogue on the left-side only.

Next, think: What pivotal detail can you add that’s unusual, emotive / sensory, and specific? Write a rich paragraph of description at a key point in the discussion, as near the start as you can get it (this is where the space on the right-hand side comes in). Then look for other places in the dialogue where you can weave in further detail or references, jotting those in the right-hand column and using arrows to say where they go.

Either way

Find / imagine a point much further on in the story, where you want to remind the reader about important character / conversation / event. Drawing on your original scene, pick two or three of the most striking descriptive details to reference again, in a line of description.

Have fun!

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Want to explore more nifty techniques to keep the reader clear on everything in your story? Orientating the Reader will give you heaps of tips for handling flashbacks and multiple characters, plot threads, or time streams, so the reader stays thrilled, never confused. Click here to get it now.

Writing Skill: Play with a triolet

The triolet is a fabulously compact repeating poem form, where the first two lines make up most of the poem. If you've got two good opening lines, why not make the most of them?! Part of the fun, too, is seeing how much you can shift their meaning around each time they're repeated, by using words with two meanings, or with the different lines that lead in, or by punctuating them in different places. That said, the lines can also be repeated for the sheer force of repetition, the insistence of it.

FIRST LINE	a
SECOND LINE	b
new line, rhymes with first line	a
FIRST LINE	a
new line, rhymes with first line	a
new line, rhymes with second line	b
FIRST LINE	a
SECOND LINE	b

The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-a-a-b-a-b, but because of the repetition you actually only need 3 a-rhymes and 2 b-rhymes. For the metre, people often use iambic pentameter, but you don't have to.

As always with a new form, it's helpful to see an example, and also take it out for a few spins with doggerel, to get a feel of it. So here are three examples. The first is the very first one I wrote, taking it out for a spin with some doggerel, using what I had around me:

Afternoon wine at the Plough
in the chilly new warmth of the sun
and the first leap of laughter is now
afternoon wine at the Plough.
The canal parts, a narrowboat prow
pushes forward, and summer’s begun:
afternoon wine at the Plough
in the chilly new warmth of the sun.

Here's one I wrote in May 2020, which plays with the repeating lines more. You can see how I've changed up the punctuation on the repeating lines to play with the meanings:

We’re used to the daily death toll
now. The government is vague
on why, but we’re to blame – a role
we’re used to. The daily death toll
rises. Just show some self-control
and return to work despite the plague.
We’re used to the daily death toll
now the government is vague.

And as that's a glum note to end on, here's a cheerier one, of flirty birds in April, which plays with the repetition's meaning a little, but mostly uses it to echo the birds' repetitive movements:

A sudden flapping leap – the blackbirds part.
If one has flown too far, the game is done.
The branches bounce. A haughty tail – a dart –
a sudden flapping leap. The blackbirds part
and settle, back to back – by turns, restart
their line-dance, left then right. One takes a run –
a sudden flapping leap. The blackbirds part
and one has flown too far. The game is done.

If this is your first-ever triolet, absolutely take it for a spin with doggerel first, using whatever you've got around you as content: the weather, the view from the window, anything at all. The first go is just to get the hang of it. 

If you've written a triolet or similar repeating forms before, or you want to try another after your first go, think of things that repeat across your own life or days, and pick one of them to play with in a triolet. 

The triolet is also known as a French medieval rondeau, and it's part of a group of repeating forms that all have almost the same name and slightly different lengths and patterns: the rondeau, rondine, roundelay, roundel, rondeau redoublé...! So if you find repeating lines fun, there's a ton more out there to play with.

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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: Play with a cinquain

The cinquain is a concise and wonderfully versatile little poem form. If you're new to writing poems, it's perfect for trying the notion out; if you're an experienced poet, it's a lovely way to hone your concision. It also has some delicious variations if you want to settle in for longer. ("Cinquain" is basically Frenchified poetry-speak for a "fivey".) It's super simple: no rhyme scheme, no set metre, just 5 lines which steadily increase in length, then abruptly jump back down:

Line 1: 2 syllables
Line 2: 4 syllables
Line 3: 6 syllables
Line 4: 8 syllables
Line 5: 2 syllables

For example...

I walk
the Erl-King's wood
of beechmast, berries, ripe
decay, and golden pools of sun
that lie.

It was invented by Adelaide Crapsey around the turn of the century. She used iambic metre (de-DUM) and my example does too, but you can use whatever metre suits you, or none.

Then you can also spin it through all sorts of fun variations, if you don't feel like stopping at just one. You can write a cinquain "chain", where the last line of one cinquain is reused as the first line of the next. You can also write a "cinquain swirl", which is a bunch of them linked together, sharing the two-syllable line as the last/first, and the two-syllable line is the same each time.

Here's a cinquain chain I wrote, from the prompt "falls to the soul" (a snippet from Pablo Neruda's poem, "Tonight I can write the saddest lines"). In each stanza, the last line becomes the first line of the next stanza. Right at the end, it ties in a circle by using the first line of the poem as the last line.

Frost-dark
falls. To the soul
tiny stabs of light are
constellations, a sparse dot-to-dot
promise.

Promise
five dots can make
the big dipper, nineteen
are somehow Orion, and that’s
the sword.

The sword
of Damocles,
hanging by a horse hair
above the throne, mocks what you wished
on stars.

On stars,
we pin such shapes,
wildly drawing contours
of beasts and gods, between dots, on
frost-dark.

And here's a cinquain swirl, showing how the same two-syllable line is used throughout. 

Grinning,
arrange the toys
(yes, we have toys) holding
birthday gifts, all excited, all
grinning:
people thought I’d
outgrow my silliness
or gift it to kids, but I’m still
grinning,
carefree, kid-free,
seeing lichen, pebbles,
moss-forests, how the ripples are
grinning
at the sun, all
the grass-blades’ chatter, their
stems squeaking when tugged: my world is
grinning
with things that I’m
supposed to have lost and
only glimpse again through children
grinning.

For something to write about, I suggest trying it out for the first time with a descriptive poem: simply describing what's around you or what you've seen today, as I did in my first example, using that day's walk. If you want to take description further, describe an artwork. (That's called ekphrasis, in poetry.) Minimalism seems a good fit for a five-liner, so this article on Minimalism from the Tate could be useful for inspiration.   

Start with a cinquain or five, try it out, see how it feels, and then chain or swirl to your heart's content!

Note: To respect copyright, my blog posts only use my own poems as examples. On taught courses, I'm licensed to give my students copyright material, so you'll see lots of other people's work.

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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: Awe and Ah

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

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

Part One

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

Here come the don't-scroll greenery:

🌿 Don't 

🍃 keep 

🌱 reading 

🌳 till 

💚 you've 

🌲 done 

🌳 that 

☘️ bit 

Why you're doing this

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

Part Two 

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

Want to play with this more?

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

Enjoy!

Why this Skill?

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

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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.

---

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: 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.

---

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.

---

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!

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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.

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Writing Skill: Social Peril

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

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

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

1. Pick a society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Writing Skill: Bringing It All to Life

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

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

Start with character description 

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

Here's an example from my freewriting:

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

If you're using this skill as your starting point

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

If you're using your own story

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

Turning the description into action

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

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

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

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

Here's an example of my own reworking:

Description through action

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

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

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

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

Have fun with it!

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

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

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Writing Skill: Ideas Into Scenes

Often in the early stages and first-draft, we have reams of exciting ideas in our writing, but not so much stuff actually happening on the page. We have swathes of exposition, backstory, info-dumps, and zoomed-out storytelling. That's fine: that's how we capture ideas, in first draft.  

But things actually happening, in close-up, in "real time", is what makes stories come alive. So when we rework our first draft, we want to turn all those ideas into Stuff That Happens, in scenes. In this Writing Skill, you're going to play with exactly that: turning ideas into the stuff of story. With options to use this as a starting point, OR with your existing story if you have one. You can do this as a ten-minuter, to try out the principles, or spend longer on it, as you prefer.

First up: an all-important definition.

SCENE: A scene is a section of story where things happen in close-up, in continuous time. It’s often in a single setting (but if the characters move somewhere else in continuous time, it’s still one scene). It usually includes action, dialogue, description, and sometimes character's thoughts.

To practise this, we're using the Random Plot Generator. (NB: That's a generator drawing from a database, not AI.) Click the "Situation" button to get a random situation. (You can add the other things as well, if you want more ideas.) The situation I got is "Someone is leaving prison after 20 years." So, that's my idea. Now I want SCENES.

1. Anything we need to know or understand the situation: make that a scene.
2. The thing is happening: make that a scene.
3. What happens after / as a result: make that a scene.

For example:

1. We need to know my character's been in prison for 20 years. So I'll have a scene of them giving a new inmate a tour around the prison.
2. The thing is happening: I'll have a scene of them actually being released.
3. What happens after: I'll have a scene of them sitting with family, maybe struggling to reintegrate.

For each of your three scenes, brainstorm

• Action: What are they physically doing? If this were filmed, what would you see them doing?
• Dialogue: Who's talking? What are they talking about?
• Description: What's around them? What are they noticing / interacting with? What does stuff look, smell, feel, sound like? How does that add to the scene?

For example, in my first scene, my character is moving from room to room through the prison (I'm assuming they can roam a bit during the day in rec rooms, work rooms, etc) pointing things out. So that's their action. The dialogue is them explaning stuff to the newbie, all of which indicates how long they've been there. "Yeah, that telly broke back in 2011," etc. Description: What they'd notice about the prison, having been there so long, is the changes to stuff, and maybe see some things through fresh eyes, because they're touring people round. The description could also contribute a sense of confinement, as well as familiarity, and set the atmosphere.

Importantly, at no point am I having my character say "I've been here twenty years." That's a) as part of the discipline for this exercise: characters telling each other information is still exposition, and b) to make it more memorable. Readers aren't memorising, so one line might fly over their heads, even if I did include it. If it's important for the reader to know it's been twenty years, I want to create a sense of all that time.

If you’re using this Skill as your starting point

Pick your situation, any other details you want from the generator, and spend ten minutes brainstorming your scene(s)' detail. If you want to spend longer on it, go ahead and write the scenes.

If you’re using your own story

I suggest you do this with the generator first, as a ten-minute exercise, just the brainstorming and mapping-out parts, not the actual writing. You can then apply the same principles to your own story, for any ideas that aren't being acted out in scenes yet.

Scene 1, giving us the info we need to understand, can often be layer into an existing prior scene, rather than have a whole scene just for one snippet of info. That said, if your draft currently has more ideas than events, go ahead and make it a whole scene. 

Either way

Have fun brainstorming / scene-mapping, and happy writing! 

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: What Happened?

Want to keep the reader on the edge of their seats in a scene, quivering with suspense as they turn each page? I’ve got a thrilling Writing Skill for you: What Happened? This is a splendid skill for creating slow-burn thriller-style tension, and for weaving in purposeful atmospheric description that becomes part of the action, makes the events memorable, fills the scene with atmosphere, and makes the reader feel like they're living inside the story.

So if you want to stretch your suspense skills, have a play with this. Steal ten minutes for your writing, grab a pen, a cuppa, and your notebook, and curl up to write.

To start with, you need two things: an empty public building + something very very wrong.

The empty public building

It might be empty because it's after dark. It might be deserted. It might be in ruins, ancient or modern. As for what kind of public building, it could be a library, CERN, a medical facility, a shopping mall, a college, a pavilion, a church, a school... Wikipedia has a helpful list of public and institutional buildings if you want more ideas. (An aquarium, perhaps?)

Something very wrong

As for what's wrong, well... We're playing with thriller mode, here, which opens up an inspiring range of sub-genres: action, crime, political, spy, legal, science fiction, medical, archaeological, mystical... Do you want them finding evidence of a new disease? A priceless artefact missing? Gothic powers at work? Glowing fish that almost certainly shouldn't be glowing?

You don't actually have to decide what's wrong in advance, mind. You can consider possibilities, then shrug, dive into the writing, and discover alongside your character.

Start writing

You're not mapping out the whole story, in this Skill: you're diving into writing the first scene. Your character (who they are can gradually come clear through writing them) is exploring the empty building. They know something's wrong, but they don't know what yet.

Include plenty of multi-sensory description as they move through:

• What are they seeing? They're hunting for what's wrong: we're looking through their eyes.
• What are they hearing? Sounds are particularly evocative for creating a tense atmosphere, because they also emphasise the underlying silence, and what we can't see.
• What does it smell like? Smell is brilliant for making us feel like we're really there, inside a scene, because it's not easily reproducible, unlike visuals and sounds.
• What sensations are they having? Is the air warm, cold, humid, dry? Do they touch anything? What are the textures? This brings us right into the embodied experience of the character, so we feel like it's happening to us.

All of this will create maximum creepy atmosphere. It'll also be inherently purposeful: they're hunting for clues to find out what's wrong, so every snippet of description is more information about that, for them, and for us as the readers.

Then end the scene at the most dramatic moment. That may or may not include the reveal on the page – up to you. At the moment you gasp, end the scene. (If you can't bear to stop writing, grab another page and continue the scene on that, as a new section. Leaving the reader on that cliff-hanger!)

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.

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