Karen's blog

Craft Development: Writing amazing settings

Making the descriptions in your stories matter

Sep 7

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

― Anton Chekhov

Photo by René Riegal on Unsplash

Hello friends,

I don't know about you but often when I read novels and short stories where there are lengthy descriptions of rooms, clothes, movements, views out of windows, landscapes, things on tables, I end up thinking "So what?" and often skip over these elements.

That's because the writer isn't making their descriptions matter. I love writing that immerses me in the worlds being created. That makes me see, feel, hear, taste and smell what the characters can. But the descriptions also have to mean something.

So how do you make your descriptions matter? There are several things to think about when writing setting descriptions, or should I say editing as this tends to happen in the polishing rather than the first draft.

Firstly, ask yourself if you are writing purely from the character's experience. If you are writing it purely as part of character in action then the descriptions automatically start to mean something as they will be imbued with your narrator's voice, viewpoint, feelings, motivations, take on the themes.

How do you layer this in?

It's about:

word choice;
what you choose to describe;
what you say about it; and
when you focus on it.

Layering it in

Layering in these elements is how you really give your writing texture and atmosphere to make your work really shine.

Look at this example, which is an extract from a tutorial in The Novel Creator Course that I designed and teach with C.M. Taylor (aka Craig). It's from Lesley Glaister’s novel, As Far As You Can Go, which is the story of an English couple, Cassie and Graham, who accept a job in Australia to try and get their lives, and their relationship, out of the rut they feel they've got stuck in. Although the Australian landscape is captured so vividly, and the claustrophobic home they find themselves living in, it is always purely as part of the characters’ experiences, rather than just descriptive writing to let the reader know where they are. It's description that matters.

These two sentences from early in the book when Cassie and Graham first arrive in Australia and are feeling overwhelmed by the alien landscape and intense heat, as well as the decision they've made to live on a remote ranch for a year with two strangers, illustrates this really well:

“The gorge appears, at last. A crack in the red earth, zigzag patterned cliffs rearing up to one side, white gums against the blue and red and startling green of the rushy grasses.”

Here you can sense their alienation, from each other and the Australian landscape, as well as how overwhelmed they feel by the situation they have got themselves in. All through Glaister's use of crack, rearing, startling, without her ever having to tell us that they are feeling these things.

What she's chosen to describe and what she says about it also foreshadows and references much of what is to come. Gorge - this hints at the problems with food obese Mara, who they are there to look after, has; as well as several food scenes in the story to come and the climax of the story (I won't reveal it!). When this scene appears shortly after Cassie and Graham arrive at the ranch, it is doing the job of setting up an atmosphere that veers between increasingly sinister and idyllic.

So those two sentences are working really, really hard!

What novels do you know of that feature descriptions that matter in this way? Do let me know in the comments below.

Descriptive writing tools

In the Novel Creator we go into great depth on the tools you can use to deliver writing that works as hard as that and look at the senses, seasons, societies and more, but I’ve summarised some of the elements we look at here:

But to write the best novel or story that you can and engage your readers in the world you've created, you need to do a lot more than the minimum.

So as you write on, think about how you can use these elements in your writing to make sure that the world you're building is not just a backdrop to the action. And always ask yourself the following questions:

If you think about all of these elements then your landscape and setting writing can shine while working with you to create the feeling you want your readers to have.

Happy writing and editing!

With love,

If you know of any writers who’d enjoy this post, please share it with them.

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Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching

A new Substack from Amanda Saint

Sep 5

Hello friends,

Inspired by the online course I created at Retreat West, my latest Substack is a new home for writers who want to explore Taoist philosophies and take their writing to a deeper level.

We find ourselves living in tumultuous and fast changing times and I believe that as storytellers, we have to start to change the way we portray humanity and the world to bring more positivity and love to the universe. I also write The Mindful Writer where I have other posts related to this. You can read one here. And I run The Slow Story Club there too.

I believe that by writing our stories with the chapters of the Tao Te Ching as inspiration we can start to heal ourselves. And if we heal ourselves, we will start to heal our planet too.

Each month I will post a chapter of the Tao Te Ching along with associated discussion content linking the chapter to our world today, a short story reading, craft development section, and a writing prompt.

The Tao Te Ching is a Chinese classic text which is the basis for the Taoist philosophy and religion. It is believed to have been written around 400 BC by Laozi, who was a Chinese philosopher and writer. Also known as “The Book of the Way”, as Tao Te Ching translates roughly as “the way of integrity”, it is considered to be one of the most important books of spiritual literature and is thought to have been written to help restore peace and harmony to a kingdom where discord and disorder were rife.

In the short course, I used a selection of chapters but here in this new publication, I am going to start at the beginning and work through them all. I am excited about the prospect as writing the initial 8 workshops was a joy and helped me develop my own writing practice too. The first post inspired by Chapter 1 will be posted in September.

Here’s a sample of one of the course workshops to show you what kind of thing I’ll be sharing:

Chapter 2

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

Balancing Act

At the heart of Daoism is the concept of balance, which is expressed through the belief that you cannot have light without dark, happiness without sadness, slow without fast, day without night. The yin-yang symbol is the embodiment of this and the black and white portions of the symbol are equal to one another.

In the book Qigong and the Tai Chi Axis by Mimi Kuo Deemer, she explains:

"The original meaning of yin and yang, however, referred to the shady and sunny side of a mountain. Ancient Daoist and shamanic sages observed that as the sun rose and crossed the sky, one side of the mountain would be in sun while the other was in shade. By afternoon, the light on the mound was the opposite. This non-hierarchical idea came to reflect the notion that the world exists in a harmonious balance of opposites; if something contracts it must first expand."

Storytelling

What I want to look at more closely for storytelling from the ideas in Chapter 2 and how they relate to the time we find ourselves living in now, is this part:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

This part of the chapter seems to me to be showing the world as out of balance and to reflect our times. We are living in a time of division — the them and us mentality seems, to me, to be growing by the day. People splintering into different groups and aligning themselves with that group's ideology only. Demonising other groups, and even people who are in no groups and are accepting of all, as they're not saying what the people in that group want to hear. We see it in politics all the time.

Anyone who has seen any of the news from the UK over the past decade in particular will know about the demonisation of 'others' by the media and politicians. Those others take many forms depending on the stance of the media outlet, or political party. In 2016, the people living in the country were divided into Stay and Leave and the repercussions of that are still reverberating now.

In 2022 I spent a few months travelling to Turkey, Mauritius, Thailand and Malaysia and in all of these places (bar Thailand), people I spoke to told me how their government marginalises people based on their religion and/or ethnicity. I have seen the fast-widening gulf between the haves and the have nots, and the fast-growing numbers of have nots. These social issues are wrong and upsetting, they are not the harmonious balance of opposites at the heart of the Tao. But they are the kind that make for interesting stories.

Conflict is at the heart of storytelling — both external in the world of the plot, or premise, that starts the story off and internal in the mind of our main character. That conflict doesn't have to be huge and explosive, but it does have to be there.

So for this first week's workshop, I want to look at the idea of the 'other' in stories.

Reading

Useful Sister

Weike Wang

Read it here

Story Analysis

I chose this story because the conflict isn't huge and explosive and becasuse it seems to me to have the 'other' within it in different layers. It's present right from the start with the youngest sister, Veronique, being named differently and parented differently, and subsequently, as our narrator believes, behaving differently. Then there is the otherness of being a Chinese immigrant family in America and, all through the story, the narrator lists the ways in which Veronique is not doing things the way they should be done.

Also, these passages in the story have a Tao Te Ching kind of feeling to them:

Blend in just enough but also aim for the top.

Stand out too much and you will inevitably be cut down.

Save and live frugally so you can be rich.

Throughout the story though, it feels to me that it is the narrator who really feels, fears, that she is the 'other' and I believe that feeling lies at the heart of everyone driving division and splintering into groups today. That people are afraid they don't fit in so they have to join a group, or create one, where they can try.

What did you think of the story and it's sense of otherness? Let us all know in the comments below.

In this extract from the craft book, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc, Dara Marks talks of the "Eternal Story" and that at the heart, all stories are about life and death. Not always a physical birth or passing, but of hopes, dreams, ideas, judgements, all of the things that make up a human life and psyche.

Inside-Story-Extract.pdf

So as you approach the writing for this week, think about how you introduce this life and death into your story and how it is tied to the conflict at the heart of it.

Writing Prompt

This week I want you to write a story that features 'the other' and a character that has to confront their assumptions about them.

When you write the story, think about how you can also bring in this element of the Tao chapter as part of the character's emotional journey.

How does someone teach without saying anything? For me, this is all about actions speaking louder than words. What ways do you think this can be expressed in a story?

Things to think about when drafting/planning your story:

How can the otherness be present in the story in layers?
What changes for your narrator during the course of the story?
What is the overarching message of the story?

All of the posts will be free to all but comments and sharing of ideas and responses to the prompts will only be for paid subscribers. I do hope you’ll join me in exploring this ancient wisdom to inspire stories that can help change us today.

With love,

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UPDATE TO PROMPT FOR September Monthly Micro!

Apologies for sending the wrong prompt!

	Sep 4

Hello friends,

So sorry, I shared the incorrect prompt in the previous email. The Monthly Micro is back after the summer break in August and the prompt is DIFFERENT.

Send us your tiny 100-word stories by Sunday at 23.59 UK time to be in with a chance of winning the cash prizes and the People’s Prize vote.

We look forward to reading stories that have lots of different takes on DIFFERENT!

Good luck! Get all the info and submit your story here.

Please share this with any other writers you know who may be interested.

And subscribe to our emails for regular updates on all things writing!

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The September Monthly Micro is live!

How will you interpret the prompt?

Sep 4

Photo by Sierra NiCole Narvaeth on Unsplash

Hello friends,

The Monthly Micro is back after the summer break in August. This month’s prompt is MOON.

Send us your tiny 100-word stories by Sunday at 23.59 UK time to be in with a chance of winning the cash prizes and the People’s Prize vote.

We look forward to reading stories that have lots of different takes on MOON!

Good luck! Enter your story here.

Please share this with any other writers you know who may be interested.

And subscribe to our emails for regular updates on all things writing!

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A Word With...Amy Barnes

Our monthly interview series

Sep 1

A Word With… is our monthly interview series in which we chat to writers, journal editors and indie publishers about words, stories and life.

We are delighted to welcome Amy Barnes this month. Amy is the Co-Editor at Gone Lawn, an Associate Editor at Fractured Lit and was a reader at Retreat West for several years. She is also the author of three collections: Mother Figures (ELJ Editions, 2021), Ambrotypes (Word West LLC, 2022), and Child Craft, forthcoming from Belle Point Press this month. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, longlisted for the Wigleaf Top50 in 2021 and 2022, and included in The Best Small Fictions 2022.

So here’s what she had to say to my questions…

Amy, to me you seem to be a prolific writer with stories being published regularly online and also your third collection coming out this month, which makes it three years in a row to have a book published. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process and how you find inspiration to create so many stories?

Thank you so much! The pandemic had a silver lining when kids switched to online “learning” for a year and we couldn’t go out and do things. While the education was not what it could have been, we were together 24/7 and our usually-packed schedules went away. I’ve actually steadily written for decades, mostly for lifestyle magazines. I still haven’t quite figured out how to merge the literary and non-fiction side of things but that’s a story for another time and also why I don’t have a website.

However, no hectic schedule and with most lifestyle magazines on tight budgets, I had time to write fiction. And I did. While my kids read books and wrote essays, I wrote and took online courses that I didn’t have access to when they were strictly in person –a translation conference in France where Lydia Davis spoke, a course with Sabrina Orah Mark, wonderful SmokeLong Quarterly community meetings, Word West courses. And I wrote and edited a lot (including reading every month for Retreat West!)

It also felt like submitting online for digital publications opened up more in the last five years, with an influx of new journals and online publishing at print journals too. I’m from the camp of writers that slowly submitted with postcards and stamps so the adrenaline rush of submitting online was new to me. I still found myself loving print-only journals like Bath Flash Fiction and National Flash Fiction Day anthologies. I found myself with enough loosely-linked stories to submit as collections and repeated that formula three times – submitting and getting flash and micros published, organising into collections, and then submitting the collections, over and over again.

You are currently an editor for Gone Lawn and Fractured Lit, and have previously been a reader for many other journals and for the Retreat West competitions, can you tell us what you think these roles bring to you as a writer, and as a reader of stories?

The benefits are multifold. I am able to see the level of talented writers that are getting accepted and rejected - this helps me deal with my own rejections easier. I get to read wonderful stories that are like sparkly gems. I get to read stories that make me all shivery and jealous that I didn’t write them or invent a particular turn of phrase, character or setting. I love reading new tiny or big stories and also seeing them published. For me, reading and editing for journals feels like a natural extension of submitting to journals; I would feel weird if I wasn’t doing both.

Your stories are often surreal and strange, and I always read them more than once and get more from each reading. Did you deliberately set out to develop this kind of writing style or did it emerge naturally?

I don’t set out to confuse anyone but I think I have always walked a blurred line of surreality. Sometimes to soften tough topics a little, other times to twist a fairy tale. I’m a “pantser” in terms of writing and editing – a lot of my writing takes place in my head so I think my style developed “naturally.” My earlier and longer fiction is written in the American South and I think some of that genre tends to be odd or quirky, maybe in part because of character development. Of course, it could just be because I’m a little strange in real life too.

Many of your stories have really arresting opening lines that instantly draw the reader in and let them know that the world they are about to enter is probably not like the one they experience every day. When you're writing first drafts do you have these lines already and build the story from there, or do the openings tend to come later when you have drafted and edited and got to the heart of the story? Or does it change every time?!

It changes a little every time. Especially in flash or micros though, I mostly do come from the first (or sometimes last line) or title as a starting point for the story. I often work backwards from those three options to write the main body. However, I have written stories with no title and a first line that went nowhere; in those cases, I went searching in the text for a better opener. I think in shorter pieces especially that “unpacking the suitcase” of the title/first line is especially imperative.

I do love choosing odd or obscure words for a title and then “defining” the title word with the story. While I do write what might be labeled as more traditional fiction, I do also approach writing fiction as what you mention above, a framing of the text – to let readers know that the world they are about to enter is probably not like the one they experience every day.

Your collection, Mother Figures, looks at the mother-daughter relationship in depth and from many different angles, and your new collection, Child Craft, also focuses on the ways mothers and daughters push and pull against each other. Can you tell us what motivates you to keep writing about this sometimes loving, sometimes fraught, relationship?

Honestly, I went into writing fiction with a directive to myself: don’t write about mothers or daughters, or mothers AND daughters. As you can see, I failed or succeeded – brilliantly or miserably depending on the day. I continue to write about those topics in the midst of fraught-ness and being a mom to a daughter. Sometimes, the stories are reminders to myself on how not to act, cautionary tales but I think I’m also fascinated with the dynamic overall too.

My perpetually-in-progress novel actually focuses on a father-daughter relationship but again, I veer into the theme somehow. the mother figure is not around and that comes into as a relationship in absentia.

What can we expect from you next?

I’m kind of in book promo mode right now, but I’ll be doing a Zoom launch (details to come) and some other events like a course tied to the collection. I haven’t written or submitted much this summer, but plan on getting back on track. And speaking of that novel-in-progress – that’s my “next” project, corralling all the loose ends and chapters in the huge Google Doc.

Thanks so much Amy for your time and insights. Hopefully lots of us will now find the inspiration to pull together our stories and form a collection!

Next up, we'll be having a word with Ingrid Jendrzejewski who as well as being a writer of short fiction, is Editor in Chief of FlashBack Fiction, an editor at Flash Flood, and a flash editor at JMWW, and is one of the co-directors of National Flash Fiction Day (UK).

Thanks for reading. If you know of any other readers and/or writers who would enjoy this interview, please do share it with them.

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Fiction Writing Course: Experiments in Flash

Workshop 5 - Fractal Changes

Sep 8

∙

Preview

"All great changes are preceded by chaos."

- Deepak Chopra

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

As we saw in the first workshop of this course, fractals are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. These fractal repetitions play out in our lives over and over again and there's a theory that there's a point between each repetition that is the optimum moment for change. We'll look at these moments in time and how they can be used for characters to make the changes they need to, or not.

Looking at the quote from Deepak Chopra, in storytelling terms the changes that our characters go through are always preceded by some form of chaos, usually in the physical world of plot, which precipitates upheaval in their mental/emotional/spiritual world and brings about the change that stories hinge on. This is done in a quick, subtle way in flash and over a longer period, and more in depth, in novels.

In this video, Gregg Braden looks at these fractal patterns in our lives, what can cause them to occur, and describes the moments where change can happen. Click on the image to play.

I think the idea that changes made in these choice points are more potent, and have bigger impacts in our lives is a great narrative tool to play with. On his website, Gregg Braden has created a Fractal Time Calculator so that you can figure out when patterns might repeat based on a seed event occurrence, and when that "Choice Point" will come around. I have had great fun playing with this for my characters in my longer narratives to figure out when things happened in their past for what I'm writing in their present.

Choice Points in Storytelling

I think this idea of choice points also ties into the cycles we've seen in play during Workshop 2 and our characters breaking out of them. In terms of character psychology, it also ties into the concept that 'what came before creates the now' which is, when you think about it, what we are always writing about.

Even in flash, when we meet characters very briefly in a pivotal moment, once we start digging deeper in the editing of the drafts we create we always think about what led them to this point. And the idea that the choices that come at this point are more potent, have more lasting impact, is the stuff of storytellers' dreams. These impacts, both positive and negative, can reverberate out, from our character into the wider world of friends, family, lovers and colleagues.

Do we always have to be clear on what the choice they've made is? I don't believe that's always necessary and we can just have a story that is at that point and leave it open to interpretation.

Like in this story in Cheap Pop: ...

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