Arthur Piper

Characters, who do they think they are?

There are no hard and fast rules for writing interesting characters for the stage, but if actors are to have something to get their teeth into they need to be fully rounded, said the writer Amanda Whittington at a recent Year of the Writer workshop at the University of Nottingham.

Whittington, who's play include Amateur Girl and Be My Baby, said that writers should ask themselves three questions about each of their characters: Who does the character think they are? Who do other characters think they are? And, who does the audience think they are? 

The different answers to these questions should reveal dramatic tensions and character conflicts that can help writers create believable and complex stage personalities. She said that another way that writers looked at character development was to track the journey that each person in a play travelled. "All characters should fundamentally change on their way through the story," she said.

Participants were asked to write some dialogue - then rewrite it as a parody. Surprisingly, the more exaggerated writing seemed more believable. "What you get is rhythm and truth when you push your writing to extremes," she said.

Stories in sound

If you can imagine a beach in winter, what do you see and hear? What colour is the sea? Is it windy or calm - are the waves gentle or wild? Everyone's answer is likely to be different, which is what makes radio broadcasting so powerful.

"The more mind pictures you can make, the easier it is for listeners to concentrate," Catherine Adams told attendees at a recent Year of the Writer Programme event at the University of Nottingham's Arts Graduate Centre.

Adams, who lectures in radio at Nottingham Trent University and works for BBC radio, said that if anyone doubted the power of radio to persuade, they should listen to the original broadcast of H.G. Wells' story War of the Worlds, which sent American listeners rushing for the hills.

Radio writing uses a wide range of effects, from direct reporting, to interviews, sound effects and live action material. Adams asked attendees to write a simple news story, making sure that all of the important details were present in the first line. Later they wrote a short "package," which is a piece using multiple sources of information.

She advised those aspiring to a career in radio news journalism to work in a newsroom for at least a year. The BBC's Writers' Room offers advice to those looking to write drama.

Short films need big characters

In writing short films, scriptwriters need to develop characters who are strongly drawn and who have clear objectives, according to Graham Lester George, the award-winning Nottingham writer. His films include the BIFA-nominated Washdays, which was awarded best film at Rushes Soho Short Film Festival 2009.

While the world in which a film takes place and the plot are also central, beginners could start creating ideas for films by focusing on character, Lester George told delegates at a recent Year of the Writer workshop at the University of Nottingham.

In one exercise, delegates were given a few minutes to sketch a brief outline of two characters, including their names, age, physical appearance and general temperament. As soon as the participants starting thinking about how those people might interact, they began getting ideas for stories. “The more you know your character,” he said. “The better they come across in the story.”

He also said that every character should have a problem, or be involved in an event, that is explored by the film. And that the stakes should be high: “Don’t wimp out on the story,” said Lester George. “Make it powerful, with an event that is important relative to the character’s life.” 

Keep on writing

Even if you are writing an academic dissertation, or a technical report, you can still be creative in how you approach it. For example, you can try some "free writing." 

Here's how. Just write down the first thing that comes into your head about your subject and keep going for as long as you can. Don't get uptight, no one except you has to read what you have done. It is surprising how quickly you can get into your stride and how many ideas it can give you for your finished piece. If you want to read a book about how to develop free writing into something more comprehensive, try Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer.

Students at a writing workshop I gave this month on the Year of the Writer Programme at the University of Nottingham managed to write about 150 words in just a few minutes. 

Click here are some ideas for keeping writing and some pitfalls to watch for: Download Starting writing and staying writing

Write now

 When people talk to the Nottingham-based novelist Nicola Monaghan about her fiction, the most common questions they ask are: How do you get ideas? And, how do you start writing?

“What they don’t realise is that for me they are the same question,” the award-winning author of the Killing Jar and Starfishing told attendees at a workshop on writing a novel held in January on the University of Nottingham’s Year of the Writer Programme.

She said that as she writes new ideas occur to her and as the characters and story develop the whole project starts to become more substantial. “The best thing to do is to put you pen on the paper and just write,” he said. 

Several of her pieces started out as exercises on creative writing courses, including the Killing Jar. One piece was inspired by a suggestion by the late Julia Casterton, who encouraged Monaghan to revisit scenes from her childhood, although the published story was eight years in the making.

Monaghan said that her own method of creating fiction relied on a lot of trial and error. Once she has an idea for a novel, she likes to write an unplotted piece of up to 15,000 words. This helps her develop the central characters, their world and provides episodes of the story that may appear in the finished narrative, she said.

She then plans out the whole work and starts again, keeping a flexible approach about how the story is to develop. A lot of people get stuck because they try to edit their work before they have finished a first draft, she said. She expects to spend at least as much time on the editing of each of three of the drafts she makes until the manuscript is ready. “Don’t edit too early,” she said. “Just keep going forward.”

Fact, the drama of first resort

While documentary makers often consider the restaging of factual events in dramatic form a device of last resort, the Nottingham-based writer Michael Eaton has taken the opposite view.

“When people ask me why I choose drama, it is because these real-life stories are dramatic. And telling them as stories helps us makes sense of the world,” Eaton told attendees at a talk in January at the University of Nottingham’s Year of the Writer Programme.

Eaton, whose docudramas include Shipman, Shoot To Kill and Who Bombed Lockerbie?, explained that while he was happy to put words into some of his characters’ mouths, the script had to remain true to the facts and events that actually happened.

“I have a pact with the audience,” he said. “If they ask ‘did this happen?’, I have to honestly believe it.” He said that in some forms of speculative drama, such as the type made by director Oliver Stone, this pact was broken. In the lively discussion that followed, he said making any documentary involved selection, editorial intervention and adding a personal slant.

While constructing a script out of the real sources available to him, Eaton said it helped for him to focus on one of the five possible facets of the play: character, narrative journey, the world of the story, the theme and genre. “I start with one of those, then it’s up to me to find the other four,” he said.

Urban, but not edgy

When the award-winning novelist Jon McGregor wrote If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things in 2002, it was partly as a reaction against the sort of urban sensibility that dominated British literary culture at the time: poverty, drugs and crime - the urban as edgy.  

"I wanted to write about a different urban, about people getting on with their lives," he told attendees at a recent talk hosted by Nottingham University's Arts Graduate Centre as part of its Year of the Writer Programme. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things engages with the experiences of ordinary people and the events that befall them in the street of a provincial town over the course of a single day.

So it might at first seem surprising that his imminent third novel Even the Dogs starts with a man who is found dead in a flat. Many of the characters in the novel are homeless and take drugs. The novel's structure, which McGregor said was more of a writing aid than an aid to readers, revolves around the scenes played out around the dead body's journey to the grave. 

The remarkable, panoramic extract that McGregor read at the meeting traces the passage of drugs through many hands: from the fields of Afganistan, to the arteries of a provincial UK town and its drug users. While McGregor researched the facts of this aspect of his story - using YouTube and Google, among other sources - the narrative remains rooted firmly in his characters and how those wider themes and issues manifest themselves in their immediate worlds. 

Could this be a change of direction for the author? "Hopefully, it's not written about drugs and crime, but about the people in the book," he said. "It's definitely not edgy. It's not urban in that way." Readers will be able to judge for themselves when the novel is published by Bloomsbury in February 2010. 

To read McGregor's thoughts on writing Even the Dogs click here. 

Desperate rhymes for desperate times

Is it still right to use rhyme in poetry, or is that just desperate? Or are certain rhymes desperate, such as love and dove? And when might it be good to use rhyme - in desperate times? And what sort of poetry does it produce?

These were some of the questions posed by the poet and writer Mike Wilson at a recent Year of the Writer workshop at the Arts Graduate Centre at the University of Nottingham. Instead of looking at traditional rhyming schemes, he asked, why not explore the poetry of writers such as Walt Whitman, which relies on repetition and rhythm, or poems that almost rhyme, but not quite? 

One example that Mike suggested is from the beginning of Wilfred Owen's poem Strange meeting.In it, Owen rhymes "escaped" with "scooped," "groined" and "groaned." 

Mike shared some of his own poems, which used different techniques. In one, the word "back" appeared in every line, another had no letter "e" anywhere in the poem. Others had more familiar structures, such as a pantoum in which lines 2 and 4 in the first four-line verse appear word for word as lines 1 and 3 in the next. The students had fun coming up with their own versions: "The point is to play around, see what happens and enjoy the words," he said.

Mike finished by reading something from his recent collection Desperanto. You can read a small selection from book here: Download Smokestack - Desperanto.

Start writing and stay writing

Students at a recent workshop I gave at the University of Nottingham's Year of the Writer programme found that they could easily write over 100 words in five minutes - some managed over 250. So why not write a PhD dissertation, novel, or feature film script in six months?

The problem, it seems, is keeping it going. 

Luckily, there are a few simple things that you can do to improve your chances of success. Find a regular time and place to write, and find out what things knock you off track. I find that keeping a writing diary can help you monitor progress, or lack of it. 

Here are some ideas to keep you on target: Download Start writing and stay writing. If you've got your own tricks or tips, please feel free to share them using the comments section.

Pathways to freelance writing

Want to get into freelance writing, but don't know how? Here are a few take home ideas to get you started from the talk that James Urquhart and I gave at the University of Nottingham's Year of the Writer programme in October 2009. 

While the ideas are in no way comprehensive, they should help you get that essential first cutting on your path to success. 

Download Pathways to freelance writing