Writing by Numbers 1

by Adrian Glamorgan

The Power of One

Ever written a piece that seems, for the moment at least, just right and says what you mean it to say? It's a mild and harmless bliss, a sense of having peaked a look, perhaps, into the spiritually transcending truths. Like most glimpses of enlightenment, we quickly get over it, but for this moment, before our next scan of copy, we are one with the world.

Let's begin with this unity: out of which whole lifetimes and histories can be described. As writer you have before you a universe of possibility. See your unshaped work as a block of marble to be hewn and cut open, abraded, smoothed and polished into form, a matter of reducing and dividing the unity of what is around you into smaller, observable, more manageable pieces.

Really, do you want to risk the alternative view, to stare at a blank page and wait for the whiteness to say something back to you, a puzzled writer wandering lost into angst and abyss? You may never come back. (Of the zen pleasures of nothingness, we will wait for another time). Zero, after all, will get you nowhere.

As you hew into this unity, this rock of everything, the characters emerge, blinking at the bright light of day, their own inner natures becoming revealed. You are on your way, but already problems emerge. These characters want to have a say. They want to move around. They want to redecorate the house, or worse, the plot. They want to land themselves in the desert, and can't find their way out, they want to go to Lagos, not Paris, and haven't you always said you wanted to establish an Australian theme, and write about Cockburn? Who's in charge here? Get me the writer!

There are different schools of thought. Some well-established authors will say, keep your characters tightly reined. You're the boss: this is your universe. There are others who say: let your ideas freely range. You'll find some treasure.

The answer is not geographically centred between these poles: rather, a good story comes out of a lively, creative tension that springs and dances between both your own intellect and your own intuition. Limber up both, to find the one.

As writer, it's your duty to discover what your story is about. In playwrighting terms, what's the through line? If your story is "about" your Nona who lives in South Lake, and how she went back to the old country and met an old love..., well yes, that's the surface stuff, but more deeply, what's the underlying theme? Is it about the poignancy of old age discovering what if? Or the folly of love? Or what your Calabrian heritage has bequeathed you? How mothers never understand daughters but the love flows anyway? All those things can pop up, but unless you want to sprawl in different directions and lose your reader and draw yourself into baffled "what am I doing?" kind of talk and chuck it in, establish the unity of the tale, and let it shape everything. Once you know: don't tell anyone, least of all your readers. It's been said many times: Show, don't tell. A theme is, by the best definition, not expressed directly.

Oh, and one more thing. Write once a day. We know that writing is often a solitary activity, and sometimes a singular pleasure, but the only way to write, is to write. Eye the oneness of nature. Go for it.

Try this:

1. Draw a map of a village, street or house and populate it with characters.
2. See who interacts with whom, where the trouble starts.
3. Pick out a couple of characters and write one scene of them interacting a third of the way into the book.
4. What have you created?

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