The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

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right, organic . . . and that is the direction in which you should go . . You just have to allow your imagination enough range to discover what works 99)
Conflict and crisis
When reading novels as a writer, you will immediately notice the importance of conflict as the engine of fiction. Fiction, especially novels, depends on situational conflict – a moment of chance or change – as a triggering event.
Characters are thrown into this predicament as into a whirlpool or maze, and your job as a writer is to observe them work themselves free, and not to assist them. With your first story, selector, if ambitious, combine) two types of situational conflict. Your characters might find themselves in a crisis which they did not choose, and which requires their action, or they may find themselves in a self-made predicament. Remember that, for most people, it is only during a crisis that we discover how little we know of ourselves, and of others, and basic qualities of character are always the first to emerge. Your story reveals the flaws and revelations, and the rapidity with which characters react to unfolding events. Thus, danger and crisis allow you to get into characters,
but they also throw a reader headlong into your story. Use your notebook as a repository of crises and conflicts, in your personal life and in the wider world.
Setting and time
Although setting is a stage for character, it is four-dimensional and can be used as a character – that is, it must convince it can never be generic or a backdrop.
Even if the setting is fantastical, Pullman argues, It isn’t interesting to write about if it isn’t real, if there isn’t a dimension of reality there, particularly a psychological reality Place is more than location it is mood, history, other people’s lives. A recognisable cityscape is something a reader understands;
gaining their trust, they move towards your story. You may then choose to make that city a place of strangeness, or to allow it to offer your story local colour. A carefully observed and vivid natural landscape carries its own precise connotations, edges for wildness and the unpredictable. In some fiction, you might write the setting as an antagonist. Time and weather affect setting, and will affect character, but they are not the machines of the gods. Do not use them witlessly. Nevertheless, as the creator of the place’s weather and time,
you will learn when best to use them to move your story forwards or to shade its atmosphere without playing God. Remember, the place, time and weather

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may be inessential to your story but you, as the writer, must know where your characters are and what conditions they inhabit what year it is and even what the time on the clock is. That information may never even enter the text, but it will implicitly affect the behaviour and mood of your characters, just as it affects you.
Rewrites
We explored rewriting in Chapter
Five
. With fiction, once again the best testis to read it aloud, and read it to somebody (Flaubert would invite friends and admirers to marathon sessions of this type. This will reveal problems and longueurs it will also test whether speech and dialogue is alive on the ear, and if it animates your story. If you find that some of the writing seems flat, shift sentences and paragraphs around to see what sounds more true to character;
what order of words makes characters more emotionally honest and what intensifies description. If this does not help, begin thinking about altering the verbal tense of the piece, or the point of view. Ensure that the narrative moves forward, and that you excise cliche words and cliches of feeling, or mutate their language into something fresher.
Your next step is more drastic to let the story rest to put the story aside fora considerable time and not to look at it again until you have almost forgotten you wrote it. As Stephen King explains, How long you let your book rest – sort of like bread dough between kneadings – is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks This will give you the necessary distance to edit your story into some final shape, as King believes it is like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin perhaps . . . It is always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own (2000: 252–253). Annie
Dillard in The Writing Life remarks, It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away . . . Painters work from the ground up . . . Writers, on the other handwork from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.
The latest version of a literary work begins somewhere in the work’s middle,
and hardens toward the end (1989: 5). When you look again at your story, do so with a cold eye. It is very likely you will soon be deleting some of it, so it is best not to get too chummy with your old friend. The novelist Ursula Le Guin comments in Steering the Craft:
Anton Chekhov gave some advice about revising a story first, he said,
throw out the first three pages . . . I really hoped he was wrong, but of course he was right. It depends on the length of the story, naturally if it’s very short, you can only throw out the first three paragraphs. But there are few first drafts to which Chekhov’s Razor doesn’t apply. Starting a

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story, we all tend to circle around, explain a lot of stuff, set things up that don’t need to beset up. Then we find our way and get going, and the
story begins . . . very often just about on page 3.
(1998: 148)
The end
Writing on why even great novels can have disappointing endings, the critic
James Wood (
2005
) cites the Russian formalist critic Viktor Schlovsky’s praise for Chekhov’s negative endings, which frustrate our sense of tidy form by refusing to end And then it began to rain Wood states that the novel is a form that doesn’t want to end and that generally contorts itself into unnatural closure. How often we feel of long novels . . . that their last 50 or so pages are mechanical and overwrought, that the rhythm of the book is speeding up as it reaches home . . . Perfect endings of the open Chekhovian kind, or of the positive and closed kind, are rare Some novels offer more than one ending. I
suggest you keep your objective simpler.
When completing your story it is sound practice to have written several versions of the final page before you reach it. You might have an ending that offers closure and conclusion, or an open Chekhovian image, or something else. As you approach the harbour of your story’s close, you will probably know which of these permutations best suits the rhythm of your narrative’s journey. It will also mean that the rhythm of these closing pages is guided by the simple necessity to furl your sail, as it were. You can then tack the gap skilfully by knowing beforehand the nature of your landfall and the speed of the story’s currents.

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