On Getting In to a Story

Some Useful Quotes

Alongside yesterday’s quotes about keeping going, I have collected some — I hope —useful ones about how to get started.

All first drafts are awful.

That’s what the American poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns said during the Q&A Session after a poetry reading at The Troubador, 1997. And I can’t tell you how relieved I was.

I believed this awfulness was my private shame. Everyone else was like the kids I sat next to at primary school, the ones who put circles above their i’s. When the teacher asked the class to write something, they did it without my crossings out, inkblots and snot stains. Somehow, for them, the words were already there, and they were just copying them out.

Also, strangely, from 1997 — when I must have been scouting around more desperately than usual for wisdom — is what Björk said on the South Bank Show.

I think people are always scared of new things. If you want to make something happen that hasn’t happened before, you’ve got to allow yourself to make a lot of mistakes. Then the magic will happen. Cos if you play it really safe you won’t get any treats.

Stu Hennigan, writer of the amazing Ghost Signs, gave me his version of this over on Bluesky:

Seen mine attributed to Stephen King and [Terry] Pratchett: "the first draft is just you telling yourself the story". If i'd seen that in my early 20s i wouldn't have given up writing for 15 years. SO obvious but transformative for me, whenther it's fic, nf, poetry, whatever, long or short form too.

By contrast. Here is Henry James. If someone ever advises you Write What You Know, this is what you need to come back with. Immediately. Word perfect.

Clearly, that’s not what I do. But how I wish I could.

I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her direct personal impression, and she turned out her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas into concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consist of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalising monition if I were not immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’

Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, Penguin.

The next quote is so familiar that you can probably sing along with the chorus.

Get in to the scene as late as possible and get out of the scene as early as possible.

It’s what Malcolm Bradbury told us in his screenwriting class, passing on an old piece of Hollywood advice. It’s always worth thinking of when you find yourself writing characters saying hello to one another.

Which brings me to the controversial:

When two men say hello in the street, one of them loses.

I used to think this quote came from the hypermacho American writer Norman Mailer. For years, I used it when teaching dialogue, then someone helped me track it down online. What Mailer said had the same meaning but was less quotable. He said:

If anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H. Somewhere in Hemingway is the hard mind of a small-town boy, the kind of boy who knows you have a real cigar only when you are the biggest man in town, because to be just one of the big men in town is tiring, much too tiring. You inspire hatred, and what is worse than hatred, a wave of cross-talk in everyone around you. You are considered important by some and put down by others, and every time you meet a new man, the battle is on.

This is from the book Advertisements for Myself.

Dismiss Mailer as hypermacho nonsense, but do ask yourself What’s changed in the page I’ve just written? Did anyone gain or lose? Even if that’s gaining an insight or losing two minutes of life. For me, it’s a good explanation for why there is a scene there in the first place. A moment of chance, a moment of change or a moment of the chance of change.

I’m becoming aware that quite a few of the quotes here are from male American writers. Perhaps because they’re the ones going round telling everyone else what they should do.

If you want the best model I know of doubting your writing, but still doing your writing, then read Virginia Woolf’s diaries.

Doris Lessing said:

What I did have, which others perhaps didn’t, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.

For myself, I’ve varied this by saying, To write a novel you need the intelligence to start and the stupidity to finish.

My final quote is from hardboiled writer Jim Thompson and I found it in Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson.

There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot — things are not as they seem.