Learning Creative Writing

A few weeks ago I went to my first Creative Writing class. My first one as a student, that is… I’ve been teaching them for a while now.

There were 16 places on the ‘Novel Writing – Advanced’ course in Listowel Community College. As I locked my car outside, I took stock of the strangers passing me on their way to the door. They looked much cleverer than me. I was unnerved.

Inside I discovered that there were several other courses taking place at the same location. When I found the classroom I realised that none of the clever strangers was studying advanced novel writing. Instead, my real fellow-students were highly intellectual looking. I turned tail and ran. Mentally. Physically, I stayed put.

Our teacher was well-known writer Eoin McNamee who has written several novels, some of which explore real crimes in the North of Ireland in the fifties and sixties. They assess the political influences brought to bear in the investigations. Eoin was a kind and helpful guide and mentor through the three days of the course. Thank goodness.

After the shuffling and murmuring and apologetic late arrivals, he asked us to write a summary of our novel (or novel idea) and then to write about the novel’s structure, breaking it into three acts and identifying the plot points. He gave us 20 minutes.

I have spent a year encouraging my own students to write for 20 minutes and read out the results at the end. Now the tables were turned.

I’ve written and rewritten the blurb for the book so many times that the descriptive paragraph gave me little trouble. The structure was harder. It’s four and a half years since I started the book, and about three since I first announced that it was finished. (Ha! Dream on!). Some of the details eluded me, such as for example when the second murder happens. Observing much clutching of hair and possibly hearing a few groans, Eoin gave us an extra five minutes. Then, as I was at one end of the horseshoe-shaped desks, he asked me if I’d like to start.

I had a very good reason for saying yes. As I explained on that first morning “My novel is very frivolous and I’m afraid I’ll be too intimidated to read it after I’ve heard all of your work, so I’m quite happy to start.”

I had decided that there was no point in trying to make the book sound serious and heavy-weight. It is what it is. So I forced myself to read the following:

“Oops! Cynthia Hegarty gets a shock when she realises her boss has been murdered in his office behind her. She’s the chief suspect. Ok, the only suspect. Feeling like Bridget Jones plunged into the middle of an Agatha Christie, she sets out to find the real killer. Meanwhile she has to juggle the victim’s amorous son and her psychotic ex-boyfriend. Her boss isn’t keen on his “resource” sleuthing instead of working. And the investigating Superintendent is far too attractive for Cynthia’s good. Cynthia’s in big trouble.”

I didn’t get the reaction I had expected. I had anticipated being frog-marched out of the room by an indignant teacher, perhaps with the parting words “This workshop is for real writers!” Alternatively I’d imagined a polite, bemused silence. Instead I got a warm, curious, supportive swell of feedback from the other writers.

I went on to read the three-act summary:

“Cynthia is working late when she notices her boss has been murdered in his office behind her desk. She is questioned by the London Metropolitan Police and allowed to go. She goes to stay with a colleague as she is too traumatised to go home alone. The action is interspersed with flashbacks to the events of the previous week. Does everyone working in Airwolfe have a motive to kill Nathan Boyle?

II
Cynthia’s friends James and Liz help her to investigate. She manages to persuade fellow Irish person Ronan, who runs the IT Department, to slip her a copy of Boyle’s emails and she trudges through them in the evenings. Zorr, who runs the security company that monitors Airwolfe’s offices, tells her that due to a CCTV glitch anyone could have done it. Her new boss keeps hassling her to work. Harold the victim’s son keeps taking her out to dinner.
Too scared to go home, she is living in the local Holiday Inn, but one night she’s so full of good food and champagne that she does go home. Her apartment has been trashed and a photo of her torn up. She keeps the photo and James and Liz help her to fingerprint all the suspects. Then James’s 8-year-old niece uses a CSI Miami kit to find the culprit but the results are inconclusive.
Cynthia has about ten suspects but the police don’t seem to have any.
Except her.
Just as she thinks she’s about to be arrested she’s kidnapped and wakes up adrift on an Oxford canal near a dangerous weir. She escapes and sees Harold, the victim’s son, on the river bank.

III
Cynthia is cleared and discovers Harold has been working undercover to detect embezzlement at Airwolfe. She gets police protection and goes back to work since the project is still late and her boss is still hassling her. One of the victim’s mates, Sam, is found dead. The Superintendent and Cynthia set up a Poirot-style dénouement scene and Harold is arrested.
Leaving the office, Cynthia is attacked and nearly killed but rescued by the Superintendent. Harold’s arrest was a sting for the real killer that went wrong. The real killer is arrested. Cynthia goes to the pub with James and Liz and explains all the loose ends. Harold appears and there is a romantic conclusion.”

I didn’t reveal the villain because I felt it would add some suspense if any of them ever read it. Pressed, I said that it didn’t really matter who did it in the context of the small amount of information they had. Eoin questioned whether I’d introduced a new character at the end, who turned out to be the villain. This is a real no-no in this type of detective fiction. The perpetrator should be accompanying you through the story but undetectable. Then, due to the writer’s cunning use of clues, the reader should feel at the end that the murderer couldn’t be anyone else.

Frankly, I was quite indignant that he might imagine I didn’t know this.

I reassured him that the murderer was one of the characters mentioned in the outline. But I still refused to say who, which broke the ice in the class as they all laughed at me.

Eoin, who had read the first few chapters of my work in advance, was very positive about it but had some questions about atmosphere. Do I create a distinctive world as e.g. Raymond Carver does? Do I build up an atmosphere with my writing? Here are the notes I took after the ensuing discussion:

Pace – too fast
Concentrate on atmosphere
Too much plot?

Eoin said that sometimes the character needs to take a cigarette break or have something to eat to give both themselves and the reader a rest. (Incidentally, he said that when he gave up smoking all his characters gave up smoking). However, he added that he thought it was very good and I shouldn’t be self-deprecating about it. So on the whole I felt I came out well. At least I was still in the room.

Then the others took turns and as I had suspected each of them was better than the last. There wasn’t a single writer there that I didn’t feel was publishable. The most noteworthy characters were:

• a charming, lively woman in her late forties writing about the outwardly civilised breakdown of a marriage
• an American, probably in his seventies, writing about his reckless progression through nineteen-sixties Belfast with two lifelong friends, also American
• a poised, beautifully dressed woman in her fifties writing about alcoholism, its arrival and its consequences
• a young American woman writing about a woman coming to terms with having assisted her brother, fatally damaged by Vietnam, to end his life
• an extremely tall, stubbled man in his forties writing about a series of bombings in the near future that propel the nations of the Earth towards another war
• a woman in her forties writing about a man who dies alone in a bedsit in England, far from his family in Ireland, and isn’t found for three weeks.
• a Dublin woman in her fifties with long white hair writing about a tragic love affair in late nineteenth-century Russia
• a woman in her forties, already a published poet, about to start a novel about a man in nineteen-thirties Ireland whose wife dies and who subsequently leads a long and empty life
• an English woman in her fifties writing about a boy whose family are taken into care and who is separated from all children including his siblings, and about his social worker
• a man in his thirties writing about a woman who forms a band in Belfast in the sixties, abandoning her child, then comes back to meet her child again in the eighties
• a woman with a complicated but brilliantly-plotted thriller about a woman whose mother dies, propelling her into exploring the mystery of her father’s identity
• a woman with a book (which she has been told is so long it should be a series of six books), about a man who makes good during the Celtic Tiger then loses all his money again
• a New Zealand pharmacist writing a murder mystery set in Scotland, whose Kiwi pronunciation of Scottish dialect was the aural highlight of the course

and my neighbour, a very nice woman in her thirties who missed the second day, so that I can’t remember what her book was about

Having read through this again I notice that the ‘more memorable characters’ include everyone on the course bar one person. It was a class that really gelled, where everyone made a strong contribution.

I wish I could remember who that last person was!

On the second day we each, in random order, read out a sample of our work. It was tempting to find the best bit and read that. However, I felt I’d gain most from reading the first two pages. If the first two pages aren’t close to being the best bit then there’s something wrong and you need to find out what.

I was extremely nervous. I have sweated blood over this scene. While I’ve got feedback from friends who’ve read it, I’ve never read it out to anyone before. It went well. I got one good laugh – which I was happy about as the novel is supposed to be funny. A few people said they’d like to hear more. There was some debate about my using a cliché in the first paragraph. I’d taken it out and put it in about fifty times. After this session I realised that the whole sentence can go and the first paragraph will be better. Progress!

Someone said that the narrator doesn’t describe what she’s feeling. I said she feels stuff in the next sentence and I’d happily keep reading all day but I’d better let other people have a turn.

As the others read their work I was awed by how good much of it was. The woman writing about alcoholism moved me to tears with a simply-drawn childhood scene. The apocalyptic man wrote an amazing dialogue, where a man on a psychiatrist’s couch watches an oil-rig exploding through the window behind the unaware psychiatrist’s shoulder.  The Kiwi wrote a fabulous description of an overweight policeman perched on the back of a drunken Scottish farmer’s tractor on the way to discover a body. The American described how his drunk friend on a bus in Belfast had a machine-gun pointed at him by a squaddie and might have died had the bus not pulled away.

On and on it went, a brief, intriguing immersion in world after world, interspersed with the collective encouragement and wisdom of the group.

Some of the more general advice from Eoin that I wrote down as the three days passed:

• Think about structure
• Organise your material
• See something before you write it down
• Don’t let the confines of a particular period constrict the story or the characters.
• Stubborness is the most important quality in a writer
• Followed by craft
• Find art in your story or your exploratory work

To put the last one in context, Eoin said that he knows some writers who say that they hate writing. This is terrible. Surely you should at least get some satisfaction from the knowledge that you have created a piece of art, even if the process was very difficult.

Eoin also said that successful writers need to develop a thick skin. Later he mentioned the danger that this could lead to numbness.

He discussed how the core of writing lies in seeing what’s around you, but the core of dialogue lies in listening to what people are saying. Everyone has an element in their voice that’s unique, and when you learn to pin this down you write better dialogue.

When the three mornings were up I was reluctant to part from this group of interesting and positive people who I will probably never meet again. I mentioned this to one of them who said, somewhat wryly, ah they usually turn up again, you’d be surprised.

What did I take from the course?

A greater confidence in the opening scene of the novel.
A better handle on my dilemma about how to handle flashbacks in the opening chapters.
A renewed enthusiasm about the work
A desire to get back to it and eliminate its greatest weaknesses as soon as possible
A confirmation of my belief that the support of other writers is one of the best things about writing