Advent calendars and story - one window at a time by Tracy Darnton

Have you got an advent calendar ready for next month? Feeling you need a daily treat to get you through? Or maybe, given all that's going on, you've opted not to bother this year and wait for 2021. Either way, I'd like to talk about my love of advent calendars, how I used one in my latest book and the parallel with slowly revealing a story.  

Getting ready to post some out 

A school librarian review awarded me the 2020 prize for Best Use Of an Advent Calendar in YA. Thank you, Flying Librarian, and thanks to my agent, my family etc, etc. Next best thing to the Booker Prize, obvs. While I chuckled, I was also really pleased that someone had spotted and appreciated the geeky time I spent playing around with the advent calendar and making it work in the book.

So why's there an advent calendar in The Rules? It grew out of a short story in I'll be Home for Christmas, which took place on 1st December in a bowling ally with Spotty Paul on shoe duty dressed as an elf and a sickly smell of stale mulled wine. 

So when I came to write it into a full-length thriller, the run up to Christmas seemed a good idea for a tight timescale for the story. A ticking countdown is always helpful in a thriller to keep a sense of pace so; ta-dah - why not use an advent calendar to tick down the days? And, as I'm a pantser not a planner when I write a book, the advent calendar idea gave me a much needed day-by-day chapter structure to work with.

Girly swot that I am, I loved choosing the image to be revealed each day and working out how to subtly reference that in the chapter. 

My sister made an advent calendar to match the one in THE RULES

Amber receives the advent calendar from her social worker, Julie, who's kind and well-meaning, in the face of being constantly pushed away and insulted by Amber. Julie sees that Amber is vulnerable and alienates anyone who tries to help her or get close so Julie, bless her, perseveres. Amber is not impressed with the gift asking Julie if she's eaten all the chocolates. But deep down (and with Amber you have to go very deep) the gift means something because when she has to bugout and go in a hurry when she thinks her dad might have found her, she packs the advent calendar in her Grab and Go bag.

As the novel grew, I thought more about why it mattered to Amber. She isn't counting down to any idealized Christmas from the TV adverts and glittery advent calendars. She links up with Josh, also drifting about on the margins, and the pair of them don't even know where they'll be at Christmas. If he's lucky, Josh will be dependent on the kindness of semi-strangers again. The calendar is a glimpse of a glittery world and traditions they don't know at all. 

Amber and Josh half-joke that it acts as a fortune teller and, although they don't really believe it, when Amber is at a very low point, she does look to it for help. Maybe there's a nod to the locked doors and windows she encounters in the past and the present. And I liked playing around with time and dates - we're never truly sure of Amber's past timeline and how much time elapsed in her different experiences. By the end of the novel, we see that she always needs to know the time and date and the calendar represents that for her. Finally (*mild spoiler alert*) we know that the biggest door - number 24 is still to be opened. What will it reveal of Amber's future?

So, the advent calendar turned out to be useful in ways I hadn't anticipated. I liked the parallel with the novel and its structure being a gradual reveal of what happened in the past to Amber, and seeing where each of these calendar days is leading her now. We get a little piece each day. And that was very satisfying to write - and hopefully to read.

The calendar in the book, brought to life by my sister during Lockdown, is based on the ones I used to get as a little girl, showing a typical Christmas or snowy scene and shedding non-eco glitter throughout December. I've continued the tradition of advent calendars with my own kids and my goddaughter. And I sent one to my lovely editor when she was doing edits on the book last December. 

We've had the full range of novelty ones across the years - LEGO, Playmobil, stationery and toiletries. And I've done the lovingly curated homemade version too - once! That was a lot of work. 

And, of course, there's always chocolate. My youngest has been known to scoff the lot in the first few days which was completely horrifying for me and my lifetime of delayed gratification. You absolutely cannot open a window early! No! And eat the chocolate!!! No, no no! It's partly superstition on my part growing up with the ultimate superstitious mother who was always saying 'Hello' to magpies and chucking salt over her shoulder. I put a tad of that superstition into the book. 

So what's my advent calendar this year? If money was no object, I'd be going for the full-on feasting Fortnum and Mason version:  

Or maybe the gin one, given the way 2020 has turned out. 

And I'd be up for The White Company mega beauty one:

Maybe there's a book one...And if there isn't, please make it, somebody. 

But alas, all my fantasy advent calendars are rather pricey. And the Scrooge and sentimentalist in me has pulled out of the cupboard a simple cardboard bookish one I bought from the Bodleian Library shop in 2018 - when the world was rather different.  I've squashed down all the windows and it'll do for 2020. 

So I wish you much joy in the opening of your advent calendar, whether it's LEGO, chocolate, teabags or just a picture of a polar bear. Day by day, window by window.  

Tracy Darnton is the author of The Rules, winner of the prestigious "Best Use of an Advent Calendar in YA 2020" award (Yes, it's a thing). You can follow Tracy on Twitter @Tracy Darnton.

*This blog updates one used in my blog tour for THE RULES and kindly hosted by Sarah and Sophie @TLCCBlog which you can read here

What versus How: chicken & egg or plotting duet? - by Rowena House

The other day, while re-reading notes from a 2017 Arvon week on writing non-fiction, an idea for the structure of my fictional work-in-progress suddenly jumped off the page.

Why not start with Act III, where the conflict is at its most direct and life-threatening for the protagonist, and reveal the build-up of Acts I and II during the final climactic days of the story?

Up till then I’d been wedded to a linear, chronological narrative so this was radical stuff. But, like many writers, I’ve learned to trust flashes of inspiration; they’re not necessarily the answer to a creative problem, but usually they flag up something important, like signals from the subconscious warning of trouble ahead.

Now, it turns out that the ramifications of such a major structural shift are far wider than I’d anticipated (more about that in a bit) but what helped most in terms of understanding my own writing process was a second eureka moment.

This second epiphany came courtesy of Emma Darwin’s PhD thesis which I’ve downloaded from the British Library to flesh out her excellent introductory guide and aide memoire, Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction.

In her thesis, she quotes David Lodge’s introduction to After Bakhtin: Essays in Fiction & Criticism published back in 1990. In it he says creative decisions about structure and voice are taken “prior to, or at a deeper level than, the articulation of the text in a sequence of sentences”.

Emma Darwin links this to “problem finding” as discussed by Richard Sennet in his 2008 book The Craftsman: “Formulating a rational question is one method of problem finding, since the answer may be supplied from the deeper level by intuition.”

Thus, being aware of the need to find problems is a way to combine rational thinking about a story with the intuitive creative process which taps into our deeper levels of consciousness.

As a story planning technique, problem finding is therefore neither plotting nor pantsing but a fusion of both.

Which sounds pretty damn useful to me.

To test out this intriguing approach, I decided to apply problem finding to my Arvon-inspired, intuitive structural ‘solution’ and see where it led.

The first step was to turn the issue at hand into rational questions. So here goes...

1^st rational question: if my subconscious is offering me a solution to a problem which I hadn’t even begun to think about consciously, what is the problem?

Answer: a linear narrative will take too long to get to the central conflict.

2^nd rational question: OK, accepting that for the moment, is starting at the final act necessarily the best solution to this problem?

Answer: I haven’t a clue.

3^rd rational question: Can I find out?

Answer: sure thing. Back in a bit…

Now, it’ll take quite a while to work through the plot implications of reworking the action of the story into a series of revelations, plus flashbacks, within a tight timeframe.

Perhaps more importantly, however, exploring these two structural options is highlighting major questions about the core of the story itself.

For example, for my Story Grid (thank you, Shawn Coyne) Voyage and Return is pencilled in as the internal plot/genre. The Voyage is my protagonist’s journey of discovery and his Return the consequences of what he’s learnt.

I had imagined keeping the reader close to his lived experience of this journey, learning ‘truths’ alongside him. This would be Plot A.

The external genre, an Historical Why-dunnit, was in some respects meant to be a feeder plot to the primary story, providing the specific historical context for a timeless psychological journey.

In other words, the real story would be in the subtext, rather than the obvious historic events.

But what if a revelatory, unfolding plot could deliver this story in a more compelling, dramatic way than a slower, linear journey? Should the psychological narrative be the main story after all?

Certainly, whydunnits are mystery plots and therefore natural habitats for revelations and unfolding, unravelling stories. And my 17^th century mystery is rich in political machinations, desires and betrayals, especially among characters other than the protagonist.

 And aren’t desires, machinations and betrayals more fun that tortured inner journeys?

What if [scary rational thought] my subconscious knows a lot more about storytelling than ‘I’ do, and is wildly signally at me to stop being so bloody pretentious?

Which makes sense really. *every other writer rolls their eyes at this point and mutters, Just get on with the damn thing* [Which I would do had I the time and headspace as per the last ABBA blog.]

Anyhow, whatever the outcome of the structural debate, this episode has resolved a perennial chicken-and-egg dilemma: which comes first, content or structure, the What or the How of the story?

Neither, it turns out, not for this work-in-progress at any rate. The What and the How are a duet. Definitely. 100%. I just need to find out what song they’re singing.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Website: rowenahouse.com

Facebook: Rowena House Author 

Five Lessons To Combat Book Two Blues - by Rowena House

The new work-in-progress isn’t progressing very quickly – which is hardly newsworthy. What Book Two ever went well?

In fact, in common with most debut friends of mine, this isn’t Book Two at all: rejected pitches litter my computer files, abandoned story ideas clog up my Creative Folder, and an entire 88K manuscript sits somewhere on an old hard drive.

Being fore-warned of the time it will take, the labour and love required, the commitment, the research, the inevitable disappointments, and (if I’m really, really lucky again) another long wait between completion and publication, isn’t the same thing as being fore-armed.

Frankly, part of me thinks it’s madness to start again.

Yet another part of me keeps whispering that what I now know about editing might (just might) make the whole business of producing another publishable manuscript less overwhelming second time around.

So what lessons has hindsight taught me?

First, write with passion and instinct initially. Over-plotting is a killer. But at the same time bear in mind that sooner or later we do have to answer the big questions: what is the heart of this story? What one scene/idea/moment would I save if I had to erase the rest? And what does that say about the story I think I’m trying to write.

A lot of writing gurus say the answer to that last question about the core of a story – its underlying meaning – only emerges at the end of a first full draft. I don’t know about that. I think I had a sense of what I was writing much earlier than that with The Goose Road. But it certainly did require time and distance from the first draft to look back with sufficient perspective to discover that a lot of what I thought I’d written wasn’t actually there.

How much time & distance? For me, it took a full six months, working pretty intensively on another story, one I murdered by over-plotting.

But I also believe it was the very act of over-plotting – of analysing “story” objectively – which brought into clear relief the formal structures that were missing from The Goose Road. Okay, I had an Inciting Incident (several, in fact!) but also great dollops of irrelevant junk, and no proper character arc. I rewrote Acts 1 and II almost completely over the course of the following six months.

So I guess Lesson One for me has been: write with passion, then somehow find the headspace to be ruthlessly objective, and the patience and self-belief to rip Draft One into pieces.

Lesson Two: be honest. Editors want stories with a big heart and universal appeal, so if I’m simply riding some personal hobby get off it pronto. Then go find the universal in my protagonist’s journey.

Lesson Three: read good structural guide books. Structure is good. Structure is our friend. Don’t waste time re-inventing the wheel. My personal recommendations are James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure, combined with his over-priced but truly enlightening Writing Your Novel from the Middle, Robert McKee’s Story, and John Yorke’s Into the Woods.

Lesson Four: don’t take to heart every writing maxim you see on Twitter, Facebook etc. Some are gems (I love all the variants of “First drafts are sh*t – but manure is great stuff from which to grow something better”) but I find others toxic, including exhortations to write every day, which is fine and dandy if you don’t have an actual, you know, real life, with bills to pay and people to care for, but if you do, they’re a source of misery and self-doubt.

Lesson Five (and this is the one I’m still coming to terms with): with average advances so low these days, for most of us writing will remain an art, a craft, a hobby even. Not a career. After eleven years of striving to get published, I’m very glad that my book did find a traditional home. But I don’t think writing is a particularly clever lifestyle choice; it’s more important to take care of yourself and those you love. A book with your name on the spine isn’t any kind of substitute for living life to the full.

 

 

 

Man Booker, BBC2 & Robert McKee: guiding lights for self-editors – by Rowena House

Last week, as I was explaining to a local writing group a selection of approaches to self-editing, I basically talked myself into a corner and reaffirmed (at least to myself) a truth about revision.

That is, after the big developmental overview, when you nail down that elusive concept of the “heart” or soul of the story, and decide, for example, whether you’ve got too many subplots or characters, the natural focus for re-writing is the scene.

Not voice, not sentences, not even structure as such. The scene.

From their expressions, I’m not sure I convinced my students, perhaps because the example I used of an ideal scene was old and rather lame, and taken from Robert McKee’s Story, which is brilliant in my opinion, but rather too rooted in black-and-white films to be self-evidently relevant to today’s novelist.

Then, later than week, cuddled up with our cat on the sofa, watching the BBC 2 drama, Effie Gray,  “Bingo!”

From now on, whenever I need to define an ideal scene it will be the climax to that story, with Derek Jacobi as a lawyer confronting the odious John Ruskin (played superbly by Greg Wise), preparing to bring his entire world crashing down with one word.

Before looking at that one word, and how the scene builds up to it, here’s some context from George Saunders, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize. He has been interviews all over the place, but these quotes come from this article in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write

In it he says, “We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he “wanted to express”, and then he just, you know … expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully ... An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art.”

His self-editing method is a binary process, which he describes as a meter in his forehead flicking from positive to negative as he imagines how each passage he’s written will be received by a first-time reader, and then editing his work “so as to move the needle into the [positive] zone.”

He describes this process as repetitive, obsessive and iterative: “watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose … through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments … Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.”

Beautiful prose, isn’t it? I’m really glad he won this year’s Man Booker prize, and I look forward very much to reading Lincoln in the Bardo over Christmas.

However…

What if you don’t have time to steer your ocean liner through a thousand incremental adjustments? What if you have a full-time job and/or a family to raise, and no milk in the fridge and a deadline to meet, and… and… and..?

In other words, what if writing isn’t your whole life?

For me, in the trackless oceans of imagination, structural advice books are star charts, and the solid possibilities of a well-crafted scene as essential as a life-raft.

So, back to Effie Gray … via Robert McKee.

If I had to keep just one book from my library of writing advice guides, McKee’s Story would be it. Despite his focus on film, the understanding he’s given me about storytelling is unequalled.

In a nutshell, what he says about scenes is this: every scene should build, beat by beat, to a Story Event, by which he means a meaningful change from positive to negative or vice versa in a fundamental human value (or a Story Value as he terms it).

Examples of changes in a Story Value include: cowardice to bravery, hope to despair, fear of commitment to commitment, happiness to sadness etc.

For McKee, such switches should be achieved by pitting a protagonist with a clear objective against an equal or more powerful force of antagonism with a diametrically opposed goal. Via progressively escalating confrontations, the scene should culminate in an unexpected pivot point that alters this Story Value for a central character.

All of which the climax scene in Effie Gray, written by Emma Thompson, does to perfection.

SPOILER ALERT: Do watch the film first if you want to experience the deliciousness of the denouement in full. It is available on iPlayer for the next few weeks. I’ve skipped over some elements of the plot for the sake of brevity, which does a disservice to the richness and complexity of the sub-text, but anyhow, here goes.

 

Events	Structural beats
Effie Gray’s lawyer gets out of a carriage and opens his legal document case. Earlier scenes have established Effie’s desire to escape from her unconsummated marriage with abusive & sexually-repressed John Ruskin.	The protagonist’s objective is established: to deliver a legal letter. In this scene, the lawyer is both Effie’s proxy and also a representative of Victorian social values & the law.
Inside the house, the interfering parents of self-satisfied grandee John Ruskin excessively admire a new portrait of him by an eminent pre-Raphaelite painter.	The antagonists’ objective are established: the Ruskin family seek to enhance John’s social standing via the portrait.
Servant George enters with news of an unexpected caller for John.	The inciting incident. An external force interrupts the domestic status quo.
Effie’s highly respectable male lawyer, kept waiting on the doorstep, announces he has a citation to court for John.  John’s parents stand between John and the lawyer.	The lawyer communicates his scene objective. The parents, by blocking the doorway, form a physical barrier between the lawyer & his objective.
John & his mother question the purpose of the citation; when the lawyer says it is a petition for divorce from Effie, the father snatches the letter.	A force of antagonism strikes directly back at the lawyer.
The lawyer insists the letter must, by law, be delivered to “the defendant”. The father reluctantly relinquishes the letter to the lawyer, who gives it to John. While taking it, John remains composed, and questions Effie’s grounds for divorce.	The protagonist’s proxy defeats the father’s desire to protect John by calling up the power of the law, i.e. society’s power over the family.  Effie wins round one, although John’s disdainful pride & self-confidence remain apparently intact.
When the lawyer refuses to answer John’s questions, citing the delicacy of the matter, John presses him for an immediate explanation, culminating in his demand for an answer. In response to this demand, the lawyer states that her grounds for divorce is John’s impotency.	This beat of questions and rebuttals builds to the pivot point of both the scene and the entire story. The word “impotency”, delivered in Derek Jacobi’s magnificent voice, challenges John’s manhood. Effie is calling down on him not only the full weight of the law, but also Victorian society’s expectations of a man and his sole duty to his wife. With one word, she has countered all of John’s malicious threats to ruin her reputation through false allegations of wantonness.
The horror of the impending scandal slowly dawns on the mother, but more quickly on the faces of John and his father. As their expressions turn from shock to comprehension to shame, the father shuts the door in the lawyer’s face.	John’s cold, imperious pride (his Story Value throughout the film) is quenched. Henceforth, he will be humiliated, while Effie’s Story Value switches from enslavement within their marriage to the freedom to live as she wishes and to love another. Well done, Effie! And well done to the film makers. A fantastic scene.

@HouseRowena

 

PS Publication date for The Goose Road  is now April 5th next year - after a brief shimmy to March!