Literature & Spoken Word Community | Southbank Centre

By Anita Sethi

The wonderful thing about the festival is that the whole spectrum of the writing process is accounted for; alongside established names, there are also inspiring writing workshops run by Greg Mosse exploring the very inceptions of the creative writing process.  It’s a topical debate whether writing well can be taught at all, and, curious to learn more I attended workshops exploring how to plot happy and unhappy endings.  ‘Graphs of happiness’ are sketched on pieces of paper, illustrating in skeletal form the emotional arc of a narrative. The writing workshops I attended X-rayed a novel to its structural bones and examined how one of these mysterious things is put together.

Here’s an overview of some of the points we discussed:

Character

“Character is destiny, but not the whole of destiny”, wrote George Eliot, which remains one of my favourite quotes. How to create a convincing character was something we explored.  Mosse described how “in a good novel, the only people allowed to change are the principal characters”. Whilst discussing the difference between a secret and a betrayal, he pointed out that a betrayal is in character whereas a secret can be an event outside of character. The author must also strike a balance between events what arise out of character and events that impact on characters; the balance between them defines what kind of novel it is (for example, thriller/children’s).

Misunderstandings. 

Unhappy endings occur because the mysteries and misunderstandings were never cleared up.  In a comedy, the mysteries clear up and everybody gets married.  They are the same sequence of mysteries but not all are cleared up in the same way.

 Timing   

Timing is crucial; for example, deciding when to introduce new information in such a way that it makes you understand in a new light everything that has come before.

Thoughts versus Action

It’s crucial for a novelist to show a characters’ thoughts in their actions (I guess this is the old adage of “show not tell”).  This is particularly true for a character which is not the “Point of View” character, one whose thoughts the reader should not have access to.  What the novelist does, insists Mosse, is translate thought into dialogue and action; the skillful author even finds a way of depicting neurosis in action.

“Always be in the current moment is my advice”

“When you come up with a story it’s always in the form of a moment”, said Mosse. “When you imagine that moment you have the story in embryo that leads to that moment”.  Although a poet or photographer might render solely that moment, the difference with a novelist is that they create the whole journey to that moment.  Some people are more comfortable with writing poetry since that is ‘the moment for the moment’s sake’; whereas a narrative is the whole story, and not, for example, one still from a movie.

Writing exercises                                   

The unique thing about a workshop is the writing exercises.  These included the interesting technique of devising a story in a group, and playing something like ‘musical stories’ where the designated scribe within the group moved along to the next table where the story was fleshed out and so on.

Then, we were set the task of devising a story on our own, with the formula of overcoming obstacles to reach a happy ending:

• Establish who the character is through their actions
• What does the character desire?
• What obstacles prevent them from getting that?
• How do things turn so that they achieve their desires?

- The novelist’s job, we’re advised, is to build the sequence of events that form a crescendo towards the happy ending.

 Events: ‘beads on a string’

When write a story, events must be linked together; the fourth event must arise from the 3rd, for example, or else it is not a story but simply a list of things that occur. Stories are like beads that are threaded together, not just the beads in disparate order. Moreover, the beads get bigger, as the story swells towards its crescendo.  It must seem less and less likely that the happy ending is going to get achieved; until some clever thing happens where it switches from impossible to possible.

A happy ending is good if it is something the protagonist has struggled for sufficiently – how engaged we are with a happy ending reflects how engaged we have been with troubles that preceded it.
That’s the ending of this blog post.  But happily, not yet the end of the festival, so please call back soon from more dispatches from the heart of the London Literature Festival.

Story: to be continued . . . 

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2011, Misc | Tagged: Anita Sethi, Greg Mosse | Leave a Comment »