Writing - Current Affairs

 Do you ever feel that sometimes you could do with a collapsible soap box available to you when you come across an issue that winds you up? You could just do with getting onto the soapbox and spouting  your opinions about the issue. As a writer, you have the ideal platform. 

There are a couple of ways in which you can broadcast your feelings from your metaphorical soapbox when you’re writing. You can actually write the whole story, weaving the current affairs issue into the narrative. This could involve your characters taking positions that you identify with yourself. Or you can insert relevant paragraphs that express your opinions literally. In Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune, he uses the latter strategy very effectively.

As I have written about on many previous occasions, it is your duty as a writer to produce some commentary on current affairs. It certainly fits into the category of writing from where you're at, and as such, you are providing information for future historical reference.

 

In fact, it can also be a great deal of fun to indulge oneself in this type of exercise. (Unless you live in Russia.) In fact, some such commentary remains relevant almost 200 years since published. Try Dickens writings in the 1840's and more recently 1984 by Orwell, which have attitudes reflected in what is going on in the USA currently. 

God Bless 

 

 

Writing - Mood

 Have you ever started to watch a film (movie) and turned it off because it was too ... dark, miserable, obscure, confusing etc? Your emotional response to a story, whether on film or written, is in the hands of authors and directors. Sadly, you cannot control the emotional response of an audience, but you can consider the level of negativity or positivity you're trying to convey when telling your story. 

In the case of the written word, description of setting is one method, as well as the interaction between characters. This is the point at which you need to consider the audience for whom you are writing. 

It is at this point that you decide whether you have a calling to be a storyteller or whether you just need to make money and believe that this is a method at which you can be successful. If it is the former, then there will be groups who may not be attracted to your subject or style. (You can't please all of the people all of the time.) If you want to be popular, you may drive yourself to distraction trying to please everyone. 

My advice would be to establish your mood and be aware of the need to move on, ensuring that your readers remain engaged and re-energized by a change. One of the most striking examples for me was the musical Les Misérables, and the role of the innkeeper and his wife. The mood of the show is dark, full of pain and pathos, but the directors of the show produced this comic moment, which almost created an audible sigh. They managed to maintain the greedy and heinous nature of the couple later in the show, but for just that moment, there is some light relief. In fact, having read the Victor Hugo novel, there is no such light relief. 

Be true to yourself and your style. 

God Bless 

Writing - Silence

 Silence is golden and speech is silver.

The phrase originated in Arabic culture and became popular in English through translations in the 19th century.  It emphasises that while speaking can be valuable, there are times when remaining silent is even more advantageous. So it is true in story writing. 

It may seem obvious to say that there should be periods of silence in your story writing, the enigma being that you are describing silence with words. It is quite simple to think of examples where authors have enjoyed themselves describing haunting and mysterious episodes in their work, but it may not be as easy to produce as one would expect. 

When describing action scenes and interactions between characters, the vocabulary used is possibly easy to describe as 'ordinary', as those activities are 'ordinary'. Whereas the words used to describe silence are 'softer' and tending towards the passive. Also, it may be that you want to create darkness in a piece of writing with tension and menace. 

Practising using the silent words can be made easier by looking at suitable pictures like the above. In that case, you would be describing attitude, expression, and body language, a feeling of threat, and the accompanying adrenaline surge. 

Then there are the scenes where no human input is planned or required, but there is an atmosphere that adds value to a piece of writing. The view is of a wild and confused sea whipped into a frenzy of action and irrepressible violence that is well out of the control of any human. Alistair Maclean, in HMS Ulysses, spends a couple of pages describing the sea at night on a convoy route north of Finland during the 2nd World War. It is brilliantly done. 

Charles Dickens' description of the marsh near Pip's home in Great Expectations is haunting. 

There will be hundreds of such examples, and it is worth reading other writers' work to enrich the development of your own. 

God Bless