Submissions are now open for our Autumn 2021 issue, a collaboration with ‘Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss’, a special themed book digging deep into the culture and mindset of extractivism – deadline 30th April

Congratulations to former CWCC student Lee Farnsworth, whose novel Odd Bird, published today by Farrago, takes a light-hearted look at the battle of the sexes, drawing on the surprising parallels between the courtship behaviours of humans and birds.

Lee said: “I learned so much from the CCWC tutors and also from the other students seated around the table. Most valuable of all was the opportunity to hear feedback in real time about my work from talented authors and peers. I also learned a lot by critiquing the writing of others. Plus, and this is important, I really enjoyed the sessions and the sense of community. After all, writing can be a lonely old business. The quality of my writing quickly improved when I started attending the CCWC and that, along with a big old dose of determination, is the reason that Odd Bird finally made it. ”

1. Go for a walk

I can’t say this enough times: go for a walk.

You are not a brain in a jar. Your mind and your body are not separate things. Sometimes we have to do something with our body to change our brain, and vice versa. 

A multitude of writers swear by it, and there’s evidence that bilateral movement stimulates certain sorts of brain and emotional processing. 

Don’t believe me? Have a wander around Hampstead Heath, you can hardly throw a stone without hitting eight novelists. 

2. Leave that bit you’re working on and move on to another section

You can come back to it. Obviously you can’t do this with *every* bit, but used sparingly this is a perfectly reasonable option, particularly on a first draft

3. Check the pace

Read the scene out loud. It is much easier to spot problems with pace when you read your work aloud. Sometimes when a scene isn’t working but there’s nothing obviously wrong with it, it’s simply wrongly paced. 

Are there huge slabs of description or backstory slowing it down? Could they be broken up with action or dialogue?

Alternatively, is it speeding by too fast? Is there too much action for us to follow or remain interested in without more description or exposition? 

Particularly in scenes with multiple characters or lots of action (a big fight, for example), is it clear enough:

• who is speaking?
• who is doing what to whom?
• where each character is in space and time, in relation to the other characters or his or her surroundings?

4. Think about narrative distance

Here’s an example of five degrees of narrative distance from an omniscient narrator to one firmly rooted in the experience of a character:

• It was 1853 and a woman stepped out of a doorway in London and into the snowstorm.
• The woman in the blue dress stepped out into the swirling snow and shivered.
• Lucia stepped out of the shelter of the doorway and shivered with cold as the snow lashed her bare legs.
• How Lucia hated the cold, and how biting it was as she steeled herself and stepped out of the doorway and into the snowstorm.
• Snow, tormenting the bare skin of her legs, down inside her shoes, freezing her lips, and she felt certain, her miserable soul.

Often if a scene falls flat and there’s nothing technically wrong with it, the narrative distance – our distance from the perspective of a character – is too large, leaving us feeling detached from the character and action. 

Less often but occasionally, we are too close in, leaving us feeling inappropriately claustrophobic and needing to zoom out to give the reader a better sense of the overall picture and what’s going on. Experiment with this. 

5. Write the scene from a different point of view

Maybe this scene is part of Sally’s story, not John’s, and you just haven’t understood that yet. Start writing it in Sally’s voice and from Sally’s perspective and see whether it springs to life.

I can’t tell you how many times this has turned out to be the solution to a problem that has stumped me for weeks or months, when a scene just doesn’t work but has nothing obvious wrong with it. I finally tried writing from another point of view, and it practically writes itself! (This is why I’ll probably never write a novel from a single viewpoint, I can’t afford to lose this option when I come up against a scene that lacks vitality.)

6. Try writing the scene in a different tense

If you’re in present move to past tense, if you’re in past move to present tense. 

(But do consider whether you are at a point in your project to do this. If you’re on the final draft of a full-length novel with an antsy editor waiting, drastic changes with ramifications for the full manuscript are not necessarily a good option) 

7. Create a timeline

Sometimes we get tangled up with timelines and our brain fritzes every time we try to work out what needs to happen next. 

Write it down. Create a clear timeline. This will untangle those knots and show where our problems with time or chronology are.

8. Create a plot summary

Write down the most important points of your plot. What do you want to happen? What scenes will you need to write in order to get from the beginning to the end? List them.

I usually create a spreadsheet for this, one row per chapter, but for a very complex novel or a short story you may prefer one line per scene.

9. GO FOR THAT WALK

10. Remove distractions

Deactivate your social media. Yes I’m serious. I have wasted years of my life and brain power on that stuff. I could have written at least another novel in the time I have spent on Facebook. 

Install Freedom on your phone and your laptop, an app specially for writers that disables the internet for a fixed period of time of your choosing. 

Leave your phone in another room or in your bag. Go to a café or library where you cannot possibly convince yourself of an urgent need to put the washing on or clean the architraves. 

11. Leave it till tomorrow

This is not an exhortation to procrastinate – if you’ve allocated time to work then use it on another project. But our subconscious is a wonderful thing, and keeps working away on problems in the background without our being aware of it.

Have you ever woken up knowing the answer to something that seemed impossible or impenetrable the day before? Thank you, Subconscious. 

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night with a thought or idea or story you just had to write down? Thanks, Subconscious, my friend. 

So, if all else fails, set a sincere intention to come back to it, and then hand it over to your friend Subconscious.

12. Manage your psychology

We are all afraid of disapproval and rejection. But you cannot write fiction without making yourself vulnerable. How much do you want to do this? Enough to make it worth it? Good-o. Crack on. You can decide what stays in and what comes out in the edit, but not in the first draft.

You are not the judge of the value of your own work. You simply do not have the objectivity. Your job is just to get on and do the work.

It’s not just you. For most writers the process of writing is an emotional rollercoaster that veers from grandiosity to self-loathing and back – sometimes in the space of ten minutes. Experienced writers know that this is just background noise and tune it out.

Ignore the little voices in the back of your head. Your writing is not useless or worthless and in any case, your value as a human does not depend on whether your writing is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which is itself deeply subjective anyway.)

13. Read a book

I usually work in coffee shops, and I always have a book in my bag. If I get stuck, or before I begin writing, I often read a few pages – it seems to lubricate my brain, and the better the book the more it reminds me of what I’m doing and why. 

Try not to read anything too wildly different to what you’re writing as it may seep into your work, particularly if it has a strong style/voice. Be aware of this and make sure it doesn’t take you in any directions you really don’t want to go, or that your work becomes too imitative/derivative, but generally it’s not a bad thing to be inspired by other writers – we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. 

14. Meditate

Works for some apparently, and it’s a good way to get familiar with the experience of sitting with your thoughts without trying to distract yourself. 

Most of our brains feel like a bucket of eels when we do this and it can be intensely uncomfortable, hence our addiction to distraction: phones, social media, sugar, music, whatever your poison is.

But you can’t write without learning to sit with your thoughts, and I’d hazard it’s pretty good for your mental health generally.

15. GO FOR THAT WALK!       

This week we launch a call out for our next spring issue, an exciting new collaboration with art.earth, whose summit, Borrowed Time: on death, dying and change, also has a call for proposals today. art.earth is a loose collective – a family – of artists, writers and researchers, redrawing understandings of what it means to be alive in times of ecological unravelling. 

This summer’s theme: Garden Stories

Many of us have spent the last few months in various forms of social isolation or quarantine, and our worlds have been a little smaller than usual. We covered homes and housing as a submission theme last year, so now it’s time to step outside.

This is a call for stories involving gardens. Private gardens, public gardens, or shared gardens. The neighbour’s garden, or gardens of the rich and famous. Secret gardens, exotic gardens, well-kept gardens, forgotten gardens, haunted gardens, dangerous gardens, gardens of the past or of the future. What do they mean to us? How do we use them – or not use them? What might happen in them – or not happen?

Your story could be specifically about a garden, or gardens could be part of the background, adding context and depth. To encourage a diverse selection of stories, you should feel free to interpret the theme as tightly or loosely as you like: any stories that stray too far will still be considered as general submissions.

Find out more about our new theme on our website right here.