Allow me to talk a little about words, those lovely, jumping, laughing, eager little marks we make on paper or tap onto a screen.
Words gather around a proposition or an idea or story willingly. Some wag their tails, others stand back a little shy, but they’ve come to work, some shuffle as they stand in line, others stand to rigid attention while you can almost hear some of them tap dancing. But the big ones and the small ones, the extroverted words and the shy words all want to be part of the action, part of your narrative. They all want to get into the act, all are anxious to make your writing just the very best it can be.
If you love words they force you to use them intelligently, they don’t merely want to show off – in fact, they love working hard. Nothing echoes more loudly than a hollow word or lacks meaning as does a lazy one.
Some words run softly, on tippy-toe, almost soundless, others clump around like an under-fourteen football team milling around on the cement floor of the dressing shed. Some soothe like cold cream on sunburn while others can set your blood pounding. Expletives are a part of our language and they too can be used well or simply wasted, thrown together in a sentence to denote little but an inability to think or pause meaningfully in an attempt to find an appropriate adjective.
There are words so rounded at the edges and softened by wear that they are no longer words at all but the sounds that people make for confusion, despair, joy or anger. There are words that are randy (old-fashioned word) or sexy but not dirty or foul. And sacred words that have become expletives, their meanings soiled with improper, unthinking and careless use.
Some words stick like burrs and punish at a touch. They are words we never forget, insults and denigrating words that destroy our egos and sometimes even our lives.
But then there are also words that nurse the ego and heal the heart.
There are words joined together in common phrases we barely notice as we employ them in everyday use, yet if you pause a moment to think, they are so beautiful that they elevate the human race. For instance, here is a phrase so common we use it without a moment’s thought, yet it is a miracle of invention. How it ever came into being is a marvel and a mystery. Who was it to first use our language with such finesse? The phrase: ‘Beyond a shadow of a doubt.’ Just pause for a moment. Beyond meaning a way ahead, a shadow a dark area covering light, a doubt, a hesitancy in belief. How blithely we employ this phrase, yet how exquisitely beautiful it is in its thought and structure. Our language contains hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar miracles of expression that lead to deeper understanding or emphasis.
Though there are also phrases that clunk, or do for me. Here is one, ‘I mean this from the bottom of my heart.’ In my mind’s eye I see a heart with a large bottom and anything, even a sentiment, coming from it is not to be trusted. Any person ‘heart bottoming’ me is suspect.
There are also phrases that smack you in the mouth. ‘He was found stone cold dead.’ Whack!
There are even some words that remain forever unspoken, clamped in a throat that aches to let them out . . . and often they are the most meaningful words of all.
Words are the most of what we have to solve just about everything. The new social media is the most powerful medium for words ever invented. It means you can possess an opinion that can reach around the world without the media or the government putting a spin to it. Your opinion coupled with countless others can stop wars and destroy tyrants. Use it, and if you choose the right words, inequity and hardship – even poverty – can be solved forever.
The choice is ours, words spoken, on the screen, recorded, written, lyrics. If we use them well and care how we put them together, if we think before we open our mouths, tap the computer keys or unclip a pen or compose a lyric or write a poem or even a note to the supermarket, we will do more than simply rescue language, we will begin to communicate meaningfully to with each other as a collective force that can’t be stopped. When we talk with purpose and pleasure to each other in this marvellous language we have been given as our birthright then anything is possible and most of it will be very good.
You are a person with a point of view that counts – use it! Find the right words and change the world.
THIS TALK IS ABOUT WORDS. About loving, touching, reaching out and grabbing copywriter words. Words that spread as smoothly as whipped cream on a silk bedspread. And words that jab hard and suddenly, leaving your lip stinging and your head ringing. Words with big, round, soft, open vowels. And words with tight, hurtful little arseholes. Like ‘sneak’.
New York ad people are fond of claiming that the best copywriters come from where the vowels are broad and the broads are loud. It could also be true that here in Australia the best copywriters come from playing cricket on the pavement rather than the playing fields of Cranbrook or Melbourne Grammar.
Australia’s earliest settlers, unlike their American counterparts who left England to the promise of a richer and freer existence, were dragged kicking and screaming from the dungeons of Newgate to the living death of an isolated and barren land. They had no time to check a copy of whatever the equivalent of Fowler’s Modern English Usage was at the time. Their language bore the marks of shackles and carried the inflection of the shanty Irish. And it matured in a harsh land with few niceties, so that little white pantaloons do not belong on the end of an Australian lamb chop.
Our language is laconic and often recalcitrant but it has a blunt vigour, a lust for life that is not being included in much of our work. While we suffer from the ‘English disease’ in our layouts with pictures and type neat and arranged and prissy as an English garden, we cannot blame the Poms for the language of our advertising. The limp words that fall joylessly onto the page like cold spaghetti. Frantic words that soil white space. Sycophantic, self-indulgent matey words that plop into headlines like fat grey groups. They are all our own work.
We use words as though they were unimportant people – and they are not. They are very important people indeed. If you can get them on your side they will take you everywhere.
Let me put it to you this way. If you love words, if you try to use them well and treat them right, if you respect their function, if you can see their colour and feel their texture, if you understand their constraints, if you know their weaknesses and are aware of their strengths, then you simply cannot write a bad ad.
Let me tell you about words. Words are, in the final sense, all we’ve got. Words are the beginning of most communication’s joy and the root of most of its evil. Man’s greatest inheritance has been the gift of speech. Not only because it allowed him to understand, but also because it could put pictures into his mind. The gift of speech is simultaneously the gift of imagination. And it all begins with words.
Advertising is largely the business of words. Yet every day in every agency in this big country there are copywriters and art directors who grab handfuls of words and carelessly bundle them together with baling wire and lay them out in small heaps of semantic garbage across a field of pristine white paper.
Words are most of what advertising has to use. Words on paper, words on tape, words as lyrics, words as captions. It is very rare indeed to find an advertising picture that does not need to lean a little or a lot on words. It is damn near impossible to find one that is worth a thousand good words . . .
If I am beginning to sound a little precious about words, let me dispel very quickly the belief that advertising is an art form in itself. Of all the asinine beliefs that we carry around in our mental grab bag, this little gem has the greatest basic flaw. Advertising is not, nor ever will be, an art form answerable only to itself. Advertising is a commercial subdivision of two basic human skills: communication and persuasion.
Advertising communicates not when copywriters and art directors have satisfied their basic urges. Advertising communicates only when people see a self-interest in reading it, or viewing it, or listening to it. And advertising persuades only when people see a self-interest in doing what you want them to d
o. Advertising is no more an art form in itself than the frame is around a picture.
EDITED EXCERPT FROM A PAPER PRESENTED BY
BRYCE COURTENAY AT THE 1980 CAXTON AWARDS
I’M NOT ONE WHO EXPECTS THINGS to come easily and when, at fifty-three years of age, I decided to attempt to fulfil a lifetime ambition to become a fiction writer I didn’t dare hang up my boots in advertising. As it was compulsory that I retire at the age of sixty, as was customary at that time, this gave me five to seven years to get underway.
I telexed every creative director in the eighty-strong worldwide Bates advertising agency network to ask each one to let me know the number of novels the leading fiction writers in their country completed before they were published. After I’d crunched the numbers it turned out to be the fourth.
I decided that I would do the same. I gave myself five years in which to write four novels. The first three would be practice books I’d complete in exactly a year each (you have to have a deadline); the fourth novel, the one that would hopefully be published, I’d lavish with attention over a period of two years. Cheeky, I know, but there you go – you have to have a dream.
So, I climbed out of bed early one morning in 1986, headed to my study and began what was to become The Power of One. ‘This is what happened’ seemed a good place to start, and I wrote about what I knew – growing up in South Africa. I’d had to pull myself up by the bootstraps, so I believe in the capacity of every human being to triumph and to achieve anything. Peekay, being a fictional character, is larger than life. While there is some crossover in his story and mine, he is a better character than I ever was.
I completed my first practice book in one year and two minutes. While I was on deadline, it didn’t occur to me to show it to anyone – my wife included. The kitchen screen door had been banging annoyingly all year, so I tied what amounted to a fairly hefty manuscript with heavy twine and used it as a doorstop. The following night I started the second ‘practice’ book. By the way, the doorstop worked brilliantly.
Almost a year later, with my second book almost completed, a friend mentioned to Jill Hickson, then one of Sydney’s leading literary agents, that I had written a novel. I guess Jill must have concluded that as an advertising copywriter I might have a flair for words, and she phoned to ask if she could see the manuscript.
‘No, no!’ I cried. ‘It’s a practice book – I’ve used it as the doorstop.’ I then explained my five-year plan and promised her the fourth book. ‘It’ll be good, I promise,’ I added, somewhat arrogantly.
‘No, please, send me the doorstop,’ she urged.
‘It’s a thousand pages, all brown and badly battered, ma’am,’ I protested. ‘Certainly it’s not worth making a clean copy.’ This was all before the advent of the desktop printer, and printing my doorstop would take a couple of hours to complete on the office copy machine.
‘Can you send me the manuscript just as it is? I’d really like to read it,’ she urged.
A few days later Jill called to say she loved the story. She told me she was soon to attend the American Booksellers Association annual conference, and wanted to take my manuscript with her. To encourage me to agree, she said, ‘I’ll have a clean copy made at my own expense, Bryce.’
That clinched it for me. I warned her again not to be too hopeful and reiterated my offer to give her my fourth book. ‘I’m sure it will be worth the wait as I think I’m slowly getting the hang of this novel-writing business,’ I urged, dropping into my accustomed advertising selling mode. In truth, I was beginning to despair. Writing competent fiction was proving no easy task even for a so-called top advertising copy bloke.
Some weeks later, at 3 a.m., the phone rang. It was Jill, calling from the States. ‘Bryce, I’ve just sold the doorstop to an American publisher for six figures!’ she yelled down the phone in excitement.
I was absolutely staggered somebody wanted to publish my manuscript. Now, twenty-three years later with The Power of One still in print the doorstop edition has reached a total of fifteen or so million copies and has been translated the world over. In 1992 it was made into a feature film directed by John Avildsen, and starring Stephen Dorff, John Gielgud, Morgan Freeman, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Daniel Craig. As they say in the classics, you never know until you give it a go.
Since The Power of One was published in 1989 I have written twenty-one books. Penguin Books, my brilliant publisher, recently announced that together we have achieved total sales of more than ten million books purchased by readers in my own country, and countless millions more around the world – both in English and in seventeen other languages, including Japanese and Chinese. What a huge thrill.
Throughout my writing life I have been mindful always that without readers, a writer doesn’t amount to much. As Penguin prepares for the publication of this beautiful commemorative edition of The Power of One, may I use this occasion to thank you for your trust in me as a writer. In the ensuing twenty-three years since the brown and tattered doorstop was elevated into a worldwide bestseller it has been my pleasure and a privilege to entertain you.
FOREWORD TO THE COMMEMORATIVE EDITION
OF THE POWER OF ONE, OCTOBER 2012
ONCE OR TWICE EACH YEAR for the past twenty years I have conducted what has become known as a masterclass teaching writers how to write a popular novel. Over this time I have conducted these classes in several countries, including Africa, Asia, America (Maui) – and, of course, at universities in Australia.
This year we have conducted two such classes at the National Library in Canberra. The course stretches over five days from 10 a.m. until 4.30 p.m. with at least four hours homework every night. Each class consists of an average of only twelve writers, though not necessarily published writers. The idea is to give people who are prepared to put in the long, hard, lonely hours at their desks at home a final nudge towards that grandest of all moments when they hold in their hands a story they have written that has been published. Or, in the future, they see it as an e-book with sales coming in from all over the world. Either way, for a writer, it is truly one of the great moments in life when someone unknown to you spontaneously and willingly reads and enjoys your work.
While it isn’t quite the same thing as being part of a masterclass, I have put down what I believe and have practised over twenty-one books are the components of a popular novel. That is, those elements that should exist if a work of fiction is to appeal to a mass readership.
If you are a writer or aspiring writer you might like to consider the notes I leave with a class of writers after what is always an intensive week of writing. Let me say right off, these notes won’t make you a great storyteller – that is a gift. But if you follow these guidelines and you have a good story to tell they will take you a fairly long way down the road to gaining a readership of your own. In the end, if you want to become a popular writer success is decided by readers and not by agents, publishers or critics.
I wish you luck, for without writers a country becomes mute and while the new social media is a revolution that has the potential to change the world, writers of honest, thoughtful and impassioned words in the process of telling a story will help to make the world free. When a country seeks to control what its writers say it inevitably becomes a dangerous and corrupted place. Viva le scribe.
As I have practised them, these then are the most important considerations in writing a work of popular fiction.
THE FOURTH PROTAGONIST
Although there may be a host of minor characters and lots of semi-important ones in a work of fiction, generally speaking there are three major characters who are likely to dominate your story or narrative, and we’ll discuss them in particular under another headline later on.
However, to my mind there is a fourth character or protagonist – and that is the reader. She or he must be regarded as being a major part of your book. I shall refer to the reader as ‘she’ from here on, but of course I mean readers of both genders (although in most Western soci
eties the majority of people who read fiction are women over the age of thirty-five). Should the book you’re writing be essentially intended for males, then exactly the same rules apply. Simply substitute ‘he’ for ‘she’ as you read these directions.
She, the fourth protagonist, starts initially as a minor character, in a sense playing a bit part to see if the action is to her liking. So it’s up to one or all three of the main characters to prove she is about to undergo a significant experience. In other words, most readers venturing into a story by an author they don’t regard as an old friend first knock on the front door. It’s up to one or all of the major characters to get her into the hallway and into the kitchen to help with cooking up an exciting story – to become involved in the plot.
Once she is committed she brings an essential element into your fiction – she brings her experience, excitement, knowledge and speculation (future action). In other words, exactly the elements with which you have to equip your major characters to make them come alive on the page. Without a fourth protagonist or your reader, your book is incomplete. Or put more bluntly, if it ain’t gonna be read by a lot of people it ain’t any damn good as a work of popular fiction. So, don’t neglect your reader, she is an essential character. Your reader also has an attribute your other characters don’t possess – she can step out of the pages and tell others enthusiastically about the new characters, both good and bad, to be found in your book.
The fourth protagonist once she has agreed to take part will now refer to your book should it be temporarily misplaced, ‘Has anyone seen my book?’ Her sense of participation is what makes the difference. Write knowing who you want your fourth character to be. If you don’t have a clear picture in your mind of who she is, it may be brilliant prose, a literary accomplishment, in fact, written with a quill from an angel’s wing, but all it will end up being is a huge accomplishment. Somewhat like completing a very difficult jigsaw puzzle, you reward a great deal of personal gratification and delight or relief that you got all of the elements or pieces together. But then what? Almost inevitably the cat jumps onto the jigsaw tray and scatters the pieces beyond further interest. Rejection letters from publishers are never much fun to receive.
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