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.

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: Fairytale Detective

If you want to explore red herrings, to keep the reader distracted from the true reveal you’re actually working towards, I’ve got a lovely playful Writing Skill for you: Fairytale Detective! Red herrings are always a skill worth exercising, whether or not you’re writing detective / mystery fiction, as you never want the reader to see the real ending coming.

So give yourself the gift of ten minutes writing time, curl up with your notebook, pen, and a cuppa, and have fun!

To start, pick a fairytale. If your memory of fairytales needs refreshing, here’s a lovely site which gives you heaps at a glance. And then, as this is detective fiction, you need to pick someone who’s been killed – a main character, ideally, if not the main character.

Next, choose your detective. This can be someone from within the same fairytale or you can borrow someone from another fairytale: the gingerbread man perhaps, or Rumplestiltskin, or the Beast, whoever you fancy.

Now that you’re prepped, you’re onto the main bit: assemble the cast of everyone else in the fairytale, and work out everyone’s motivations to murder the dead character! Only one of them will have actually done it (or more, if they’ve been acting in cahoots) but all of them need an apparent motivation.

You can do this planning-style, if you’re planning-inclined, or just start freewriting to discover. As for tone – you can keep it super-playful / po-faced tongue in cheek, but there is also room to go seriously dark here, in a Gothy/noir way. Think of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories and how richly literarily dark some of those are.

The main thing here is to practise exploring everyone’s motivations, so once you’ve done that, you’re done! You’ve stretched that skill. But you can absolutely take this further, if you’d like to. Here’s some suggestions of what you could write:

• The dialogue from the interviews your detective holds with each suspect
• Character cameos of each suspect plus description of how they present themselves
• Action snippets of the suspects doing suspicious things
• Action of how the detective investigates each suspect
• All four together, writing the full story!

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: Unjudge

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

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

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

Part One

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

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

Part Two

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

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

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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: Sexy Letter

Sex scenes and sexy snippets aren't just the realm of bonk-busters, Soho bookshops, hide-from-my-history sub-reddits, and excitable fan-fic: heaps of mainstream and literary fiction includes sex, often very explicitly, for excellent reasons. Sex matters in characters' lives. It can change their lives, reshape the plot, even play a role in the revolution. Three of the most mainstream / classic / Respectable novels we'll look at in the workshop are AS Byatt's Possession, Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale (the positive consensual sex scene in that, not the awful "ceremony"), and George Orwell's 1984. They include the sex scenes because they matter. They also include the sex scenes because the authors knew that it mattered and included what was right for the story, instead of stopping where embarrassment dictated or vocabulary failed.

It's worth expanding your writing repertoire to include the sex scenes. It's also extremely fun. And here's an especially fun, freeing way to get started.

One character is writing a sexy letter to another character. A very sexy letter. The character writing may or may not intend to send the letter. They might change their mind while writing it, perhaps even several times. It can be a confessional letter in a newly blossoming relationship, or writing within an established relationship. But it is very definitely a sexy letter.

So who are the characters? 

• If you have a story in progress, you can use your existing characters, if it suits them. 
• If you've done any of the other writing skills, you can use the characters from those. Most recently, we've had two skills focused on romantic relationships: Deluded Diary, for exploring new love, and Prove It's You, for exploring established love.
• If you don't have any characters from your work or previous skills, you could jump into either of the two above, spend ten minutes on that to discover the characters, and then come back to this.
• If you'd rather dive straight into writing a sexy letter, you can use this quick character gen to whisk up two characters. (Feel free to adjust the ages!)

Then decide which character is writing the letter to the other, grab some pen and paper, and start writing the letter, detailing – in plenty of detail! – exactly what they're imagining, remembering, longing for, hoping, fantasising, fixating on... Remember: they might not send the letter. So they can say whatever they want. (And you don't have to show what you write to anyone. So you can have them say whatever you want.) Give yourself permission to enjoy it, to get hot under the collar, even to giggle in shock at yourself. And have fun!

This is a delightful way to approach writing sex scenes or sexy snippets, because the nature of a letter means that you're focusing on the desire, not the instruction-manual mechanics. It's the desire that makes a scene zing – which is not to say keep it abstract, desire is wonderfully specific, just trust that the form of letter-writing will take it in the right direction. Plus, it's the character writing all this, not you, so through their (eager, ardent) voice, you can find the freedom to say all sorts of things that you might hesistate to write in your own voice.

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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.