Advice Code - A.L.Kennedy 1

INTRODUCTION TO THE ADVICE CODE

WITHOUT READING THIS FIRST, THE CODE WILL BE OF LESS USE TO YOU THAT IT COULD. WHY WOULD YOU WANT THE CODE TO BE OF LESS USE TO YOU THAN IT COULD ? YOU WOULDN’T. NOT UNLESS YOU’RE UNSURE ABOUT HOW MUCH YOU CARE FOR YOUR WORK, OR ARE SELF-DESCTRUCTIVE. WHICH WILL BE UNHLEPFUL FOR YOU. YES, I DO KNOW YOU’RE BUSY AND YOU SKIP THINGS…

DON’T SKIP THIS.

This code is designed to help you become a better writer. Although you have now embarked upon a course of study which will give you access to other writers’ help and insights, you are the one person who can truly help you improve. If you think you have nothing to learn – and some people do – then you are probably wasting your time being here and it’s highly unlikely that your work will prosper.

If you cultivate an attitude which seeks always to find what can be made better, then you will always grow in your craft and you will have the best possible chance of doing well in a very hostile and competitive field.

The code is a diagnostic tool to help you examine your writing – word for word – and to see where it is not yet fully serving its purpose in a given context. Examining your writing in detail is the key to improving it. There is only one magical solution to bad writing – making it better. You can do that. The more often you do that, the more effective your skillset will become. Making your work better is hard unless you understand what you’re trying to write and what has gone wrong. It’s up to you to decide what you are writing. These pages are mainly about what may have gone wrong. But they are nothing to get sad about. We are dealing here with work in progress - wrong and right are nothing to concern us emotionally. Everything can be altered. We remove the wrong, we improve the right, we build prose which is functional, beautiful and communicative and then we give it to others.

During your time here, you will receive all kinds of stimuli and challenges. Sometimes these will seem immediately helpful and sometimes they will simply baffle. Sometimes they will produce periods when you write very little but grow a good deal. My role will be to provide you with information, offer workshops and material to read, but – above all – I will be acting in an editorial role. I will read your work closely and comment on it and then we will have opportunities to talk through what you’re doing and hopefully find ways for you to move forward. I will not be speaking from a position of infallibility, but I do have considerably more experience in the area than you - that’s why I’m on the staff. If there is additional material or advice that you feel I could provide, please contact me. Many of the workshops/seminars I now give have arisen as the result of student requests.

You can submit your work to me three times in any year.I will read sections of approximately 3000 words. Please don’t submit a whole novel. Please use this page format if you’re writing convetional prose: justified, indented paragraphs, no meaningless double line spaces.

This sumission process is intended to help you to assess how your work changes while you’re on the course. Sometimes these changes will be monumental, sometimes very minor – neither situation is necessarily a problem and both will relate to many complex, interrelated variables. When I meet you in one-to-one sessions I can discuss my notes, or anything else which you feel would be useful to you and your work as a writer. The opportunity to discuss a novel as a whole is often fruitful, if you’re working on one.

We will also meet in group sessions of various kinds, usually tertulias and workshops. Do make requests for particular areas to be covered if you wish. Fields which will certainly be explored are general control of text, the writer’s relationship with voice andworking with character. There can also be a workshop on workshops for those of you who plan to lead them with others.

The most valuable investigations you make will be of your own texts. I will aimto assist you in your pursuit of perfection. Perfection is, of course, impossible, but its pursuit can be very beneficial.

As you will see from the title above, I am choosing to call my notesadvice. Having looked at your writing, I will givemy opinion on what works and what doesn’t work and what could be improved. As you will see below (although you needn’t look just yet) my notes also suggest solutions to what I have identified as the probable sources of your problems – hence advice.

Advice is a friendly word, designed to make you feel more comfortable about the notes, which will be detailed and frank and therefore might otherwise seem uncomfortable. If I were not detailed and frank I would fail in my duty as a writer trying to assist another writer. My assumption is that – like me – you are not necessarily fully aware of how good a writer you can be, or how hard and in what areas you will have to work to move forward. You may well be handing over work in progress, early drafts, or attempts and experiments, and may be unable to see clearly how your work can best be developed. The Advice Code with its little numbers is here to aid your progress.

I do not suggest that my comments will always be correct, or that my solutions will always be the ones that will be right for you. I do suggest that you consider my opinion – not simply because you’re the student and I’m not, but because open-mindedness and flexibility are very useful to a writer. In a way an abilitt to stay a student is essential.(Just as much as steely determination and single-mindedness are very useful to a writer. Yes, that is a contradiction – part of your progress will involve deciding when to be malleable and when to be dogged.) If you agree with a comment, try to remember to ask yourself why. Likewise, if you disagree – why ? If you have an emotional reaction – why ?

It may be that you get entirely contradictory and confusing notes from a number of tutors and readers and that workshopping a piece produces an even greater range of different responses.In time, you will form (or uncover) your own opinions on the proper direction for your work. You will also hopefully learn to distance yourself enough from criticism to be able to make use of it – esepecially your own. There are many questions, conflicts, adjustments and decisions which may be helpful to you as you pursue your craft and widen your knowledge of yourself as a writer and as a human being.This is a good thing and makes being a writer the work of a lifetime and therefore consistently interesting. Other people can help you, but in the final analysis, your voice is your voice, your concerns are your concerns, the ways you plan and think and are the ways you plan and think. Your work is your responsibility - and can also be your joy - but if your name is on the page as author, the buck stops with you, not your tutors or your workshop, or your friends.

On the following pages you will find The Code that I have developed so that I can mark up your work without writing all over it. More importantly, the code will also allow you to look, over time, at whether you seem to be repeating mistakes or moving on to new ones, and/or improving. It also may identify deeper difficulties, which could be throwing up symptoms of literary ill-health. If you solve one deeper problem, many more troublesome symptomsmay simply go away.

This may seem mechanistic – and if I does, I apologise – but I do feel it’s a way of making very clear the overall trends in your work. And you might pause to consider how it is that I can sit here and predict failures and weak points in advance. As writers, there are certain mistakes we all make. When we begin writing, our errors tend to be highly predictable. As we grow and mature,and as our work matures,our failures become interesting, individual, even magnificent. They are always educational. By the last time we meet, I would hope that you will receive lighter notes from me and that I often can’t use the code because you have moved outside its limits. Your voice should have become unpredictable.

Please also bear in mind – as I mentioned above - that you will probably be showing me very early drafts of your work. The third or fourth draft of a piece is very early. This bears repeating. You are moving from an academic context and/or a personal interest into the real life of a writer.This is when your writing stops being a hobby or a game. Apart from anything, else this will involve you in rewriting on a scale you may not ever have contemplated. Drafts will almost certainly be in double, if not triple figures. This takes a little mental adjustment on your part. Do not be downhearted if you haven’t produced perfection on your third try.(And, if you like, bear in mind that this is by no means the first draft of The Code and will certainly not be the last…)

The code will also allow you to see your strengths.

Don’t be dismayed if you get very few of the positive numbers – I don’t give out many. I do mean them when they’re there.

If you lose this key, then my notes will be incomprehensible, so if you need me to send you another copy, please let me know and I will do so.If you need this as an .rtf , then that can be arranged.

ADVICE CODE

We’ll start with the happy numbers. You’ll notice there are only 8. You’ll probably also notice that you don’t get many of these. You may not get any of these. That’s okay. That’s because writing well is difficult. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like you, that you won’t improve, or that everyone else is covered in 8’s.

If you want to get into competitions about your numbers, feel free. But it will make you crazy and the only person you need to compete with, and be kind to, is yourself. Aim to get better than you were before – the other people can do what they like.

THE VERY RARELY DEPLOYED GOOD NUMBERS

  1. Strong/good detail.
  2. Strong/good dialogue.
  3. Strong/good description.
  4. Strong/good phrasing
  5. Strong/good title.
  6. Good use of humour.
  7. Good depiction of emotion.
  8. Strong section. (Then the section will show an 8 at start and finish.)

Obviously, if your piece receives a high number of 1 to 8’s then it’s – in my opinion – doing well. This doesn’t mean you can’t work to make it better. The points at which you push yourself from good to excellent are always informative and exciting – they are when your voice takes off and really becomes itself.In case you forgot - perfection is unattainable, but its pursuit is educational and enlightening. In my opinion.

The following code numbers for weaknesses have headings which suggest what may be their source, although we can – and usually do - always discuss the specifics of your work if we meet. Looking closely at your text will allow you to realise that various influences and difficulties interact constantly to produce good and bad features, so do please only take the headings as suggestions of what is most likely.The headings mean that you can use the code yourself on your own work more usefully, should you wish to. Eventually, you will develop a robust method of examining your own work and this will continue to grow along with you.

Many of the following flaws may simply be caused by stress, nervousness, insecurity, in short FEAR.

It is, of course, perfectly natural to be anxious, or even afraid, when you start to write – but it is also a complete waste of energy and a huge distraction. Try to set your fear aside (see, it’s no longer bold or in capitals… already shrinking…) and/or use it to sharpen your critical faculties later, when you rewrite. Make fear work for you,or make it go away. In this, as in many areas of writing, the same rules apply as you would find in speech: it is very hard to talk to someone if you are nervous, it’s easy when you feel at ease. So make yourself at ease. You write with your mind - training your mind to provide a useful and constructive environment will be helpful to you.Sound planning will always remove anxiety, because it will prevent you from having to tell someone a story when you don’t know what that story is – something you would only do in life if you’d had a brain injury or were drunk. Why not do the thing you find easy in life – tell a story you understand, are excited by, love and want to pass on in a good form, because it’s worth knowing.

LACK OF BORING TECHNICAL FORETHOUGHT

  1. Wrong layout. PEOPLE VERY OFTEN HAVE THIS PROBLEM. IT IS EASY TO SOLVE AND DOES NEED TO BE SOLVED.Don’t use email or business letter layout in a piece of prose- editors reading it will be used to conventionally presented text. Using anythingelse makes your work harder to read and makes you look unprofessional. Indent paragraphs and don’t have double line spaces unless they mean something. I know your word processing programme probably won’t automatically give you the layout you want – but it’s not your boss. You can change it. After which, you can use double line spaces to actually mean something, like the passage of time, or a new location, or a new character point of view. The standard layout is used for a reason – it helps you to be clearin a simple, practical way. You can diverge from the norm, but you’ll need to be hyper-clear to compensate. I’m aware that some competitions request special layouts – in that case, you’ll do what they tell you, but otherwise try to get experience with the appearance your text will have on a finished page.
  2. Use standard layout / your own comprehensible layout for speech.

Very occasionally this isn’t necessary and

sometimes it can feel that speech marks and reparagraphing are somehow

intrusive, but they are simply there to help you be coherent to the person

reading you. You will read authors who don’t use them, but they will only get away with that if they are excellent at character and its establishment through voice. Are you excellent ? Will someone else really know what’s going on ? If you’ve got a 10, then at least one person is feeling a little tired by having to work out who’s speaking, rather than enjoying your text.

  1. New paragraph might help.
  2. New sentence might help.
  3. New page might help. Don’t be afraid to use space. It can be overused, but giving your prose room to be read and revealed as impressive can also be a very good thing.

TENSION/FEAR/PANIC/LACK OF CONFIDENCE

14.Tautology. (Which is to say, saying what you’ve said and then saying it

again – and possibly again – and then some more…)

15.Unhelpful multiple description - a) and b) and then c)It’s often best to nail it once and move on. Multiple, fading tries are a sign that somewhere in your process, you know the whole thing isn’t working.

16 Digression into unnecessary detail, aimless detail.

17.Vague, fugitive description.

18.Over-worked phrasing.We know you’re the writer, don’t rub our faces in it – we’re trying to read a story.

19.Cliché ?Generally a sign that you haven’t worked out your way, or your character’s way of saying this. Obviously, some characters and narrators talk in clichés – if it seems that’s what you’re going for, I promise I won’t object.

20.Contradictory description/action.

21.Opening paras don’t seem to relate well to the rest of the story – a sign that you wrote your way in and then forgot the remove the results.

22.Lack of emotional detail.This probably means you don’t know your characters well enough, but it’s filed under FEAR because fear can make us unwilling to explore that part of narrators and psychologies. Just relax – in the real world, the reader won’t know who you are and is desperate for emotional connection. Let ‘em have it. Don’t worry too much – if you are – about being emotionally manipulative. You’re supposed to be. In way that isn’t perceived as manipulative. Be subtle, but be there. Absence isn’t that much use unless its deliberate and very carefully presented.

23.Summary of detail which should be allowed to breatheand written out fully.In the movie it would be the montage… how many montages are really that interesting and how are you even going to get that much detail in if you just skip through something – if it’s interesting, tell me about it – if it’s irrelevant, why is it here at all ?