On Writing

by A. L. Kennedy

  Used imaginatively, the workshop can address both vaguely tedious but necessary points – how to compose a covering letter, how to find an agent – but can also engage with the kind of powerful metaphors that can alter and permanently strengthen someone’s craft. I fully intend to run a workshop using horses at some point. Horses are powerful, beautiful, frightening animals, which magnify the rider’s emotional state, yet which respond readily to moderate discipline and carry the rider where they wish to go. They are useful as a metaphor for writers who also know about horses, so why not make them available to other writers?

  The workshop can create the icons, the good-luck charms, the positive habits, the strength to carry writers through. The workshop can help writers to appreciate that inspiration and support are ubiquitous; it can challenge and nourish both tutors and participants and make mature, independent and confident voices ready to move beyond it. The workshop should aim to make itself redundant, not to render writers dependent.

  And all of this does take effort. It is more difficult and does take more planning and negotiation than doling out photocopies of work and sitting in a circle while not quite addressing our work, or each other, as we grow older but not wiser. I would argue that any effort expended tends to be more than repaid. A positive and open approach to group work allows the energy of the group to be released and harnessed, rather than ignored or wasted.

  Have you addressed all the necessary technical issues?

  This is the tedious bit – but it does reflect another layer of respect for yourself, your participants and the people who are paying your wages. I feel that the buck stops with us. We may not be in our own building, the disasters playing out before our horrified writers may have nothing to with us and everything to do with the shelter for dysfunctional leopards across the road, but we should try our utmost to control those elements that we can, for everyone’s convenience and comfort.

  It will take a while to get the feel of how long it takes you to deal with the points you wish to address in any session – and groups vary massively in their ability to grasp concepts and move on. It may be fine to spend two hours on a small area. Or it may mean you have lost control and not provided the session as advertised. Try not to overrun massively – even if people are enjoying themselves, they have lives and buses to catch and want to feel their experience has come to a proper conclusion, rather than ended with treats they couldn’t share because they were running for a train.

  And I take this opportunity to say that I am prone to overrun.

  It is now possible to give groups satisfying and impressive multimedia experiences. This probably does mean that you have to familiarise yourself with a variety of technologies, and the ideal would probably be to travel with your own equipment. Even this will not save you from unsatisfactory power supplies, lack of tables, poor sightlines, inadequate blackouts, lost batteries and the unforeseen. Try to foresee the unforeseen.

  Do try to establish realistically what the context for your workshop will be. If you are working in one place for any length of time it’s best to come in with something amounting to a contract, or bullet points giving people an idea of what you will provide, possible pitfalls and the support that you will need. I feel that the group should always be protected. If they write a musical, it should be possible for it to be produced, not just put on a shelf. If they express opinions, it should be possible for them to be received and taken seriously. If they produce work, it should be possible for it to be shared and celebrated. If they can be published at some level, or helped towards editors and agents, then this shouldn’t be (although it usually will be) dealt with as a series of scrambled favours out of hours. Generally, if you have misgivings about individuals and institutions it’s best to walk away, rather than betray your group and/or yourself later.

  Are you genuinely achieving your aims?

  Any writer should be able to look at their work and offer it the benefit of serious criticism – the same should apply to our workshops. Writers attending workshops can be kind and may be unfamiliar with how much they could get out of a workshop – their comments may not be accurate. It is best if we check regularly to see if we are continuing to develop our ideas, or if we are stagnating. Perhaps in some areas we have found pretty much the best way we can deal with this or that set of points, but maybe with a different type of group we might come in differently; maybe there are still improvements to make; maybe our opinions have changed slightly and we are not reflecting that fact. When was the last time we tried an entirely new workshop? What have we learned from the last year of workshops that we can use and take forward? Are we improving, or are we complacent? Are we working within institutions and organisations that stimulate our work, or that encourage despair? The despair may not be our fault, but shouldn’t we try – if we can – to move somewhere that can mean we have joy in our work again? As our writing progresses, has our use of workshops kept pace? Are we serving our own needs effectively when we workshop? These questions shouldn’t be accusatory, they are merely a way of ensuring a level of professional contentment for ourselves and as good a workshop experience as possible for others.

  In closing, I would thank the students of the 2009/10 MA in Creative Writing at Warwick University who asked me for a workshop on workshops, from which much of the material for this essay came.

  And I will offer one last question.

  When is the last time you gave a workshop and knew something special had happened, that you would never forget it, that a life had been changed?

  We may always fail a little, sometimes more than a little, but I believe that if we commit ourselves to the pursuit of writing’s qualities and their transmission, to the care of our craft, then we will do no harm and may do a great deal of good.

  When a workshop works, you remember. When a workshop works, you learn. When a workshop works, you leave it with faith in the efficacy of your craft and yourself as its practitioner, in its ability to transcend itself, in humanity’s ability to transcend itself. It’s something to aim for.

  Character-Building

  IT WOULD HARDLY be fair if a reader was asked to expend mental energy and invest their interest in a fiction inhabited by characters who seemed unfeasible and frankly less interesting than the genuine, human people they could be meeting and interacting with, if they weren’t suffering through this or that dreadful book. Hopefully, the effect of a finished character will be convincing, involving, idiosyncratic, natural – in short, real. There are, of course, schools of thought which maintain that providing fully formed characters is just pandering to the reader.

  It is.

  And it should be.

  We, as writers, are intimately intruding upon the reader. We set our words inside their minds. Whatever else the reader could have been doing with themselves – the daydreams, plans, happy memories, erotic fantasies, all the fun a person can have with their own head – we want them to leave that and read us instead, listen to our voices, our stories, meet our people. It’s not unlikely that, in addition, the reader will have paid for our work, or at least have gone to the trouble of stealing it from a shop, finding a library that still contains books, or picking up our volume from where it would otherwise have been languishing, perhaps under a vandalised bench, or stuffed down the back of something with a back. The reader deserves our best attentions; without them we would simply be indulging in extraordinarily florid episodes of self-love. We need the reader. The reader needs to be convinced. So we should surely try to offer them illusions that convince.

  As readers ourselves, we can appreciate these illusions as something wonderful: an opportunity to do the impossible, to see through another’s eyes, experience another’s world. Perhaps because of this very sense of wonder, the process of creating characters can seem mysterious, if not a little miraculous, even to those who have already begun to write. Consideration of any working narrative makes it clear that a character’s identity and psychology will almost invariably influence tone,
voice, imagery, the whole fabric of a piece, so it’s clear that the stakes are very high, that a grasp of character is essential for an effective writer. Nevertheless accessing, exploring and then making a character manifest can appear to be an overwhelmingly difficult task. It need not be, but a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings may stand in our way.

  Personal experience may, for example, be suggested as a handy source of authenticity, perhaps because of the tediously repeated ‘advice’ imposed upon new authors: ‘Write about what you know.’ Many people are still unacquainted with the unabridged version of this advice: ‘Write about what you know. I am an idiot and have never heard of research, its challenges, serendipities and joys. I lack imagination and therefore cannot imagine that you may not. Do not be free, do not explore the boundaries of your possible talent, do not – for pity’s sake – grow beyond the limits of your everyday life and its most superficial details. Do not go wherever you wish to, whether that’s the surface of your kitchen table or the surface of the moon. Please allow me – because I’m insisting – to tell you what to think.’

  Rather better advice – should it be absolutely necessary to offer any – might well be: ‘Write about what interests you. Write about what excites you. Write about what speaks to you. Write about what obsesses you. Write about what you need to. Write about what outrages you. Write about what alarms you, but won’t leave you be. Write about what you love. Write about what you feel you may come to love. Write about what you can come to know.’ All suggestions that can be useful when we begin to work with characters.

  A few readers – and a percentage of journalists and academics – believe that a character’s reality comes from a type of theft. They feel that the writer must wander about, stealing the attributes of relatives, friends, lovers and so forth and then passing them off as inventions, or – indeed – parading them about as comments on relatives, friends, lovers and so forth. Of course, there are such things as romans-à-clef and they are a very good reason for never marrying a writer. Then again, the fact that they have a special, French name might suggest that they are in some way unusual and that there is a method of building fictional personalities which does not rely on a variety of body-snatching, followed by some more or less ugly sewing and patching, à la Victor Frankenstein. As writers, we must all make our own personal decisions about how safe the secrets of those close to us will be, how private others’ privacy will stay, whether we want to keep our relatives, friends, lovers and so forth, treat them well and not utilise them as subject matter.

  We may also consider how merciless we will be with the material of our own lives. I would suggest it might be a good thing if – forgive me for being frank – the choices we make don’t mean we eventually become soulless and rapacious shells, pumping all and sundry for sordid incidents, the centre of our personalities and experience translated into no more than material. There’s a fine line between paying attention, being stimulated and inspired by reality, and simply using it as something to cut and paste. Naturally, whether any of us is always absolutely on the right side of that line is sometimes questionable. There may well be days when you catch yourself staring inappropriately, noticing. And then there’s non-fiction – but we’re not dealing with that here.

  Fiction or non-fiction, I would hope that being a writer never overrides being human. I would hope, in fact, that writing is a vocation which can enhance our humanity and sensitivity and our ability to celebrate and explore what it is to be human and in this world. I have made what I regard as ethical choices in this area, which I like to think are comfortable for me and those around me. But I have to say that choosing to work imaginatively, rather than recycling and/or distorting fact, was primarily an instinctive and practical act, because it is both easier and more fun to make things up.

  Endlessly paddling in the lukewarm pool of your own self is not necessarily as exhilarating as reaching out and trying to be someone else, someone who has never existed, someone who almost seems to summon you to help them be expressed. (This reaching out coincidentally allows the writer to take advantage of what I might call a meditative absence of self, should he or she wish to.) And even the most devoted narcissist might do well to consider whether the undiluted joys of their interior landscape really are absolutely all a discerning reader could wish for from a piece of prose. Abandoning oneself as subject and simply gathering together scraps of existing people has its own perils. People who exist are already grubby with very specific emotional and intellectual associations. They either tempt the writer in towards the setting those real individuals would usually require, or add a huge amount of alteration work before the task of assembling a whole, coherent, organic narrative can even begin – trying to trim and tailor them to fit a narrative which should be developing its own alphabet of associations, imagery, incident, its own life. I repeat: it is both easier and more fun to make things up.

  And making things up allows us to take advantage of our love of fantasy and a powerful and fluent energy that we may not have accessed since childhood. It makes use of our desire to have more than we can, our delight in playing and play-acting.

  But how do we make our dreams available to others, how do we make them articulate, how do we create the illusions that seem true? In answer, I will try to look at my process (which may be useless to you), but also look at the principles that underlie it.

  First, I think it is necessary to spend some time examining how you relate to real people – something I would assume you have been doing since an early age, something familiar, something about which you can feel relatively confident. How do you remember someone? What is it that you respond to most strongly? Do you remember faces, voices, postures, scents, mannerisms of speech? To give me an idea of your invented character, you can use the skills and areas of speciality you already have. I, for example, remember people by smell. It is hugely important to me that I ask myself what the character smells like, or can smell. This is a powerful way into their experience for me, even if I ultimately don’t use it. So perhaps it will be useful to think about how you understand people, what sense you usually use, what senses you neglect, and how to bring them all into play.

  Second. What do you already have? Presumably you didn’t just wake up this morning thinking, ‘I need a character.’ It’s rather more likely that you had a sense of them doing something, or that you had a fragment of plot that involved someone, a line of dialogue that someone said, an impression of a face, an action . . . the possibilities really are pretty much endless. Even if you have just decided to build someone from scratch, the investigative process you can go through will be the same. It’s not complicated. You simply ask questions. You can even just repeat the one question ‘Why?’ if you can think of nothing else. Beyond the very early tipping point, answers will suggest questions that will produce further answers. Any question can generate more information, even if it’s a negative. With nothing established you’ll have to make at least one decision to get rolling – for example, ‘Is this an adult or a child?’ ‘Is this a man or a woman?’ ‘Does he have red hair?’ You’ll notice he’s now male – according to me – although we don’t know if he’s old or young, a post-operative transsexual or, indeed, a man trapped in the body of a middle-aged lady. If we add ‘Why?’ even to something as bland as ‘Yes, he has red hair’, then you can begin to link information into more coherent chains, rather than just having a list.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because his dad has red hair.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  ‘So he looks like his dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has he done this for a long time, or a short time?’

  ‘A long time – he’s forty-six.’

  ‘Does he like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he like looking like his dad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he look like his mum, too?’

  ‘His mum’s dead.’
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br />   ‘Did that make him sad?’

  ‘It made him happy.’

  These are not complicated questions, they haven’t taken long and they are already suggesting certain options that are more and less likely, avenues to pursue. If we already knew, for example, that this gentleman was our protagonist and would be involved in a violent incident with a number of youths, we could add this in. Half an hour spent asking questions is rarely wasted, often enjoyable, sometimes frustrating. If you are thoroughly stuck, of course, stop and try again later, and/or try some of the other approaches I will suggest. Even if you are stuck, you will have the distinct impression that you are bombarding somebody awkward with questions and they are being uncooperative – that’s a step forward in itself. You are thinking of the character as a person who needs to be found, not as an extension of your own mind. It is useful to believe this. Without actually buying them clothes, or insisting they have a place set for meals.

  The question game can also be played with, for preference, two other people. If they are writers, too, then they’ll be able to take part fully – this will mean that person A can be asked questions by persons B & C, then B can be asked them by A & C, then C can be asked them by A & B. It is very important that whoever is being asked questions answers I rather than he or she. This is a simple, but very effective, way of bringing the character closer to the speaker. There are many variations on this game – you can alter the positions of interrogators and interrogatees; you can be still or move . . . With two people asking questions, the pace tends to keep steady and the person being questioned will find that they are slipping easily into decisions that simply feel right. They are getting into character, in fact. And do pay attention to the words and phrases used when answers are given – which is why doing this out loud is so useful – as you will find they become coloured with the character’s voice almost automa-tically. With one person asking, the pressure to come up with questions can be too great and there can be awkward pauses. Three or more interrogators can leave the interrogatee feeling harassed. This game – if we were actors – would be called Hot Seating.