Some Hints on Writing
Diana could address any audience, from a gathering of learned academics to keen schoolchildren. Here she provides advice to young would-be writers. This piece was written in 1999.
About Myself
I think I write the kind of books I do because, when I was five years old, the Second World War broke out and everything went mad. Perfectly sane neighbors began crawling about in the field by our house with bushes tied to their heads, training for the Home Guard. The time was dangerous as well as mad. Airplanes, barrage balloons, and searchlights filled the sky. People you knew died suddenly when a bomb hit the end of the street. Ordinary life became unsafe the whole time. Anything could happen.
Our family life became just as strange. I was sent with one of my sisters to Wales, where my grandfather was minister at a chapel in Pontardulais, but this didn’t last long because—as far as I could tell—there was a massive family row and my mother went back to London with us. But London was very unsafe by then, and we were sent with a school to a big house in the Lake District. This was not safe, either. When the docks over the mountains were bombed, a German plane was shot down and the pilot bailed out and hid in the mountains for weeks. One night he raided the pantry of the house where we were and stole an enormous cheese. This was enough for the school people. They left, but we stayed on with my mother and the mothers of some of the other children.
This house was the home of the children in Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (they were real people), and Arthur Ransome himself lived in a houseboat on the lake nearby. He got annoyed by the noise some of the smaller children made playing on the lakeshore and stormed in to complain. This is how I learned that writers were real people (up till then, I had thought books were made by machines in the room at the back of Woolworth’s). Beatrix Potter lived not too far away and she was real, too. She smacked my sister and her friend for swinging on her front gate. But the same house had also belonged to the secretary of the writer and artist John Ruskin—and John Ruskin was obviously real, too. The lofts were stacked with thick paper on which the man had drawn pictures of flowers, hundreds of them. Now, at this stage in the war everything was in short supply and there was no drawing paper. So one afternoon I climbed into the loft and fetched down a big pile of the drawings and started to rub them out so that I could use the paper to draw on myself. John Ruskin drawings fetch thousands of pounds these days. I must have rubbed out several hundred pounds’ worth before I was caught and punished.
I started writing when I was married and had children of my own, and I think one of the things I wanted to tell people in my books was how to cope with the world when it goes crazy around you. It does that even without a war on, of course.
Hints about Writing a Story
Everyone is different, and that means that everyone is going to need to write a story in a different way. You have to discover how you need to do it. There is no easy way. You can only discover how to by doing it. These hints are to help you find your own way.
Planning It?
Most teachers will tell you that you need to make a careful plan of your story before you start. This is because most teachers do not write stories. Professional writers divide into four different ways:
1. Those who do make a careful plan. These are the rarest. Even writers who write detective stories often only have jotted notes about what order the clues come out in. You do a careful plan if it makes you feel safe. Otherwise, try one of the other ways.
2. Careful realistic writers. These writers have little cards written out with descriptions and past histories of all the people they might want in the story, and the same for all the places. This is quite a good way to work, because the story often falls into place in your head while you are discovering the things on the cards. But it takes a long time, though it can be fun. You will often find you have far more information on the cards than you will ever get into the story, and if this is so then DON’T try to get it all in. You will drown your story.
3. Back-to-front and inside-out writers. These writers start by writing chapter eleven and then chapter twenty. Sometimes they have no idea what the story is and have to put the chapters away until they see what the story is that they fit into. A writer called Joyce Cary had a whole chest of drawers filled with chapters out of books that he never got round to finishing. When he did write a book, it always started this way, with a chapter from the middle. I sometimes work this way, but I warn you, it takes a very clear head to sort it out in the end. It is a good way to get started, however.
4. My way. If you’re the kind of person who gets stuck writing a story, try this. When I start writing a book, I know the beginning and what probably happens in the end, plus a tiny but extremely bright picture of something going on in the middle. Often this tiny picture is so different from the beginning that I get really excited trying to think how they got from the start to there. This is the way to get a story moving, because I can’t wait to find out. And by not planning it any more than that I leave space for the story to go in unexpected ways. Sometimes things happen that I never would have thought of, just because the story wants them to happen.
The important thing is that you should enjoy making up your story. If it bores you, stop and try something else.
Beginning It
To start, you have to have an idea. I can’t help you there. Whatever idea you have, and everyone has ideas, it has to be something that really grabs you. Think of the thing that most excites you in a story and the kind of thing you most like to read, and take it from there. One part of it is going to make you much more excited than the rest. To get started, try to begin as near to the exciting bit as possible. That way, you will want to go on. You can do the rest as flashbacks, or change the middle to the beginning afterward. Above all, don’t try to write something you think you ought to write.
Whatever you think of, DON’T make it too neat. Stories need loose ends to move. A girl wrote to me once that she could only get to chapter one of her book. She had two sets of identical twins who lived on two identical small islands and they had both just discovered buried treasure. It was not surprising she was stuck. It was just too neat.
Places In It
The places your story happens in are very important. For instance, if you want to write about a vampire, you might want him stalking someone in a narrow street by the docks. Or you might want him to attack at a picnic in the country. These would be quite different stories. A lot of people worry about having to describe places, but there is no need to worry at all. What you have to do is to see the place where this part of the story is happening, in your mind, as if you were there yourself. By the docks, you would see the shapes of the houses and sheds, and the stone or wood they were built of, and seagulls and boats and machines, and the paving you were walking on. At the picnic, you would see the grass and the insects and the shapes of the trees and the hills, and exactly where each person was sitting round the food. Then you simply write what happens. You don’t need to describe. It will come over as you tell it. You could ask someone to do a drawing and they would draw it just as you had seen it. Promise.
People In It
People are even more important. They are the ones that make the story happen. You have to see them even more clearly than places. You have to know the shape of them and if their breath smells and how their hair grows. In fact, you have to know twice as much as you put in the story. Sit and think and see them before you start. And hear them too. Everyone has their own special way of talking. Make them talk like they should—and do remember that people don’t talk in proper sentences and that they shout or they mumble, and try to get them doing this. If you have trouble, put a real person in your story. If you have an aunty May or an uncle Joe whom you don’t much like, use them as the vampires and they will come out wonderfully real. You won’t need to describe them, just do the way they talk and move. (You don’t need to tell your aunty or your uncle either.)
Feelings and
Actions
Some people get stiff and unhappy writing because they think they can’t manage to write how it feels to have an adventure, or to be in the middle of very fast, exciting action. This is nonsense. Everyone knows. What you have to do, if you are stuck this way, is to stop thinking in words and then shut your eyes and think how it would be if you were the one having the adventure, falling down the cliff, or being attacked by a vampire, or whatever. You’ll know at once. Then you simply put down what you know. It may come out queer, but queer is good where actions and feelings are concerned.
Finishing It
It is important to know you can finish a story, so you should if possible. Just bash on and do it. Endings are not easy. I find them the hardest part. You don’t know whether to stop with everyone just at the end of the adventure, and not knowing what really happened to Aunty May or Uncle Joe, or to make sure that the right people are going to be happy and the wrong people not, or even whether to go on and tell what happens in the next twenty years. This is really up to you. If you want to know what happens in the rest of the lifetimes of your people, go ahead and find out and put it down. If you think you’re done when you’ve got a stake driven through Uncle Joe’s heart, then stop there. My feeling is that the best stories leave the reader trying to imagine what happened after the story stopped, but that is only one opinion.
Doing It All Over Again
If you want to make your story as good as you can get it, you have to go over it and get it right. Professional writers never write a book just once. They do a second or even a third rewriting. Even if you don’t have the time for that, you must go over it for bits that have gone wrong (if you know you’re going to do this, you can get on with the story the first time round and simply promise yourself that the bit that went wrong will get put right later). First, you must read your story as if you had never seen it before. Yes, this is difficult. You are going to read it and admire all the bits you like instead. But, while you admire, you will come across bits that make you sort of squiggle inside and say, “Oh, I suppose that will do.” That is a sure sign that it won’t do. So, secondly, think hard about these bits, what is wrong with them and how they ought to go to be right. If the wrong bit is supposed to be funny, think hardest of all. Funny bits have to have exactly the right words, or they are like jokes where someone has forgotten the punch line. But even serious bits can be like that, too, if you get them wrong. If you think hard enough, your story will be much better.
Giving It a Title
Sometimes this is harder than writing the ending. You have only a few words for a title; you don’t want the same title as someone else; you want to say what the story is about, but not give it away; and you want to make people interested enough to read it. You probably want a snappy title. Difficult. If you are very lucky, you will have thought of the title before you wrote the story. Then you have to make sure it still fits when the story is finished. It sometimes takes me six weeks to find a title. I hope you have better luck.
Good luck. Enjoy yourself.
A Whirlwind Tour of Australia
In 1992, the recently published Black Maria hit the bestsellers list in Australia. In association with the British Council, Diana’s Australian publishers, Mandarin, arranged a whirlwind tour for her in Australia, fitting in three lectures about writing children’s fiction, along with signings and interviews. (See “A Conversation with Diana Wynne Jones” for one incident on her Australian tour.)
Lecture One: Heroes
Diana’s first talk in Australia was at a conference in Perth organized by Magpies Magazine on the topic of heroes. Diana considered that this lecture was a continuation of the themes she had begun in her 1988 talk in Boston. See “The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey.”
When I started thinking about what I should say here, I was just finishing the final draft of a very complicated book. It was so complicated that I had to break my usual rule and make a chapter-by-chapter plan of parts of it. It was a relief to find that the Wimbledon tennis tournament was on and that I could stagger away from time to time and watch a game and listen to the phut-phut-phut of the tennis balls. In fact, it wasn’t a relief—it was a revelation. It dawned on me that tennis stars were perfect models of heroes—all kinds of heroes—folktale, myth, comic book, and above all, modern fantasy. And I found myself attending closely and thinking very hard indeed.
For a start, they all had that larger-than-life quality. They stood out among other people even if you didn’t know that one was the star—and this is very like the way everyone follows the hero of a story, even if he or she is only designated the prince, or the youngest sister. And though they defeated the villain on the opposite side of the net, they didn’t save the world, they simply won a tennis match. It is very unidiomatic to consider that a hero saves the world. What gives a hero his/her universality is the fact that the gods, or God, or the Fates, or some other supernatural agency is on their side. And tennis stars have that, too. If one of them is in trouble in a match, their ball is sure to start just flipping the net and rolling down the other side, or they get a lucky call—or it rains.
Of course some of these people don’t have much brain, which qualifies them for the Hercules, Superman type of hero, who are mostly notable for deeds of strength. But those with brains do have enormous individuality and a larger-than-life personality—not always a very nice one. They sulk, they stamp, they throw racquets, and they insult the umpire and the linesmen. But then, very few heroes are like Sir Galahad. Achilles sulked worse than a tennis star—he was also vengeful and whined to his mother. Theseus made unscrupulous use of Ariadne (whom he left on an island, where Bacchus later found her—I always think that really meant she took to drink, poor girl), and Jason made similar use of Medea. Then there were those Irish heroes whose main heroic aim was to rustle cattle, the Welsh hero Gwydion who took pride in cheating people, and the Brave Little Tailor who started out, at least, as a complete fraud. I think my moment of revelation came when I saw this young man come on court in the most flamboyant clothes. He had a sweet smile and questionably blond hair and a generally chirpy glamour that in fact concealed huge skill. When he was interviewed he confessed to hating to get angry—and it was also said that he slithered out of winning when it came to the big matches. And I thought, My God! This Andre Agassi is the image of Howl in my book Howl’s Moving Castle!
What I am saying here is not simply that heroes are usually flawed characters, which is true, nor that my books tend to come true on me—which is also a fact—but that the big, heroic things which we respond to are exactly the same nowadays as they always were. This was one of the things I was trying to say in Eight Days of Luke. The days of the week are named after the Norse gods and, just as Woden’s Day and Thor’s Day are part of our everyday lives, so are the big things for which these gods stand. And we respond to them as people always have done.
We respond to heroes, I think, not so much by identifying as by following, partly as disciples follow and partly by cheering on from the sidelines. Watching the crowd at Wimbledon, I concluded that people’s response to heroes is a muddle of these two things, and it gets more muddled when we talk about a narrative rather than a tennis match. Perhaps this gets easier to see if you think about following the fortunes of a hero who is of the opposite sex from your own. You can never assume this hero is you, but you follow him/her just the same.
This fact has been very important to me. For a long time I couldn’t write a story with a female hero. The identification was too close, and I kept getting caught up in the actual tactile sensations of being a girl—which meant you towered over boys the same age, were forced to wear your hair so that it got in the way, and that your chest flopped embarrassingly—and I knew that in order to see my hero as a real person, I had to be slightly more distant than that. There were other factors here, too. First, my own children were all boys, and I knew not only how they felt and behaved but what they needed in a book as well. Second, at that time—tw
enty years ago—neither my sons, nor any other boy, would be seen dead reading a book with a female hero. It really was absolute. They would not. But girls—partly out of necessity—didn’t mind a male hero. But I think the third, hidden factor was the most important. According to the psychologist Carl Jung—and I think he is correct—every person has an open, fully acknowledged personality of the same sex as their own, and a submerged half which has all the characteristics of the opposite sex. Twenty years ago I was still learning how I wanted to do things, and what I wanted to do was to write fantasy that might resonate on all levels, from the deep hidden ones, to the most mundane and everyday. If I chose a male hero, I could go after my own submerged half and so get in touch with all the hidden, mythical, archetypal things that were lurking down there. Over the years I’ve grown to trust this primordial sludge at the bottom of my mind. I know it’s there now, and I know I can get in touch with it as soon as I start writing hard enough to forget to eat or go to bed.
But to go back to those flawed heroes playing tennis. It was quite obvious that people in the crowd loved them for their faults. Some of it is, certainly, that the faults make the heroes human, and people can say, “Oh, he/she is not so unlike me.” But when a hero swears at the umpire and the slow handclap starts, you see that the star is also a scapegoat, to be blamed for doing exactly what you would do yourself with that same prig of an umpire—the star carries your sins, in a larger-than-life, jazzed-up way, and you express your disapproval. The fact is, people can think of a hero in both ways simultaneously—that hero is me: that hero is not me, out there, being awful—and this is exactly the way in which people react to a narrative. Reading a story, you can have your cake and eat it too. For instance, while I was writing The Ogre Downstairs, I was certain that readers were going to enjoy Gwinny baking the gray cake in order to poison her stepfather, even while they utterly condemned it. And I think I got that right—you wouldn’t believe how many adults have tiptoed up to me and confessed that when they were children they had baked just such a gray cake for an aunt or child minder or parent that they hated.