What does it take to be a great storyteller?

I have a theory that I first applied to music some years ago. And that is there are only two types of music – good and bad. It doesn’t matter if it is rock, pop, soul or classical, there is good and bad in every genre. The same is true of fiction. No one genre is better than another; what we must look for and strive to achieve is not only good writing but also great storytelling. 

From talking to people who read as well as write, I have been looking at the traits that make up the most effective storytellers. These are the people who write with energy, who create light and shade in their writing, who surprise themselves as well as the reader and avoid the perils of monotony.

Great storytellers remember that, whether it is the writer’s desire to provoke, shock, amuse or scare, he must also entertain. They must have fun with their readers as they carry them through the story; with them, not at their expense.

The great storytellers are emotive in their writing. They pose questions for us as readers to ponder, they create characters and scenarios with which their readers will identify and care about, and are engaging enough to draw their readers into the story and the worlds which they create. They make us hang on their every word. They build suspense as they write; are consistently unpredictable in the ways in which their stories unfold, and they reflect the way life is as well as we might wish it to be. After all, how predictable is every twist and turn in life?

“To Kill A Mockingbird” is a classic example; it addresses important issues but carries us with it because we care about the injustice being served on Tom Robinson and we invest emotionally in Finch’s morality and determination to provide him with a defence against the odds. It is written with sensitivity, humour and with warmth; it entertains yet it also asks questions our priorities and values. It is as relevant today as it was when it was written. It is a pattern that was used to equally great effect more recently in John Boyne’s “The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas”. Another story of global proportions personified in the simplistic eyes of two small boys, we begin to sense what may be about to happen to both characters. Yet what reader cannot sense the heartbreak rising within them for both Bruno and Shmuel as the story’s denouement leaves them both as victims.

Of course, knowing this is no guarantee of being able to carry it off. As writers all we can do is strive to do our best; to write with honesty and with humanity and, of course, the most beautiful aspect of it all, is that only our readers can ever say whether we have achieved it or not.

You don’t have to be mad to be a writer, but maybe it helps!

A study published this week by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden reported that creativity is often part of a mental illness and that writers are particularly susceptible. Apparently, those of us who write are at higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, depression and even substance abuse. We are almost twice as likely as the general population to kill ourselves.  Sobering but unsurprising stuff.

Indeed there are ample examples from our literary past to support this. Virginia Woolf, Hans Christian Andersen, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene all suffered from mental illness, though whether, if you take the universe of writers as opposed to a few well known examples, the premise stands up remains open to question.

But if the findings are correct, why should that be? What is it in the make-up of a writer that makes them prone to mental illness or, to be more accurate, what is it in the make-up of a depressive that makes them likely to be a good writer?  Certainly we can all identify with the moment when we convince ourselves that everything we have written is terrible and that we’re not really good enough to be a writer at all. Self-doubt and writing go hand in hand.

Perhaps it is because writers need to see the world from a different point of view. They need to take themselves out of the mix and view the world from a separate place. Maybe it’s not in the writer’s nature to take every incident, relationship or new person at face value but to turn our inquisitive minds instead to where each fits in to the patchwork of life. It’s the writer’s pre-occupation to see whatever happens to them or around them as the potential starting point of a new story. It’s the writer’s pre-occupation to be more aware of human frailties and human mortality in setting our behaviours and our values in context. And for awareness of human frailties and mortality, you can read awareness of our own individual frailties and mortality. This means we ask ourselves the challenging, difficult questions of life that we want our characters to confront and answer, which in turn means we must confront and answer them for ourselves. And it is this that can make us prone to introspection and depression.

How many of us have found the things we say or feel being out of kilter with the views of our friends? Perhaps our thought processes are genuinely different. I remember observing that if this was essentially as good as life was going to get and then we die, why not cut to the chase sooner and kill yourself? To me this was a legitimate question. Why put up with the crap that life throws at you and struggle when you can just go straight to the end game? I was genuinely shocked how many people found this a shocking question to even ask, let alone a shocking position to adopt. I still am.

Writing instead can become an escape from this depression. Writers can create the world and the characters that help them work through the self-doubt, to find the answers that our inner voice or inner critic poses of us and, as Edgar Allen Poe famously said, use our ability to write as a “desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”

A window on our world or a route out of it?

In a fast-moving digital world, where CGI and 3d can create and transport us to environments and worlds we previously had to use our own imaginations to visit, I am not sure anything has yet been created with a greater power to move than the written word.

Throughout the last couple of centuries time and again writers have successfully peeled back the veneer of society and cast a light on things that have disturbed us, shamed us, empowered us and, often by revealing the power of the human spirit at the same time, moved us. The thought of a society without To Kill A Mockingbird highlighting the racial injustice of America in the xxxxs is inconceivable. How clear would be our knowledge of Victorian England, the poverty and the hardships, without Dickens and his searing descriptions of Victorian workhouses? What reveals more about our ability to become feral than Golding’s Lord of the Flies? And more latterly works like The Lovely Bones, We Need To Talk About Kevin and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time have enhanced our understanding the human condition but in a way that has never been at the expense of the intent to entertain. The two are not and should not be mutually exclusive.

This is how I like to write. I enjoy the challenge of taking ordinary people and placing them in extraordinary situations and then working through the process of how they – and therefore how I - would react if confronted by such extremes. 

Sometimes, though, we may not want to open a window onto our world; we want instead to find an escape route from it. And here again great writing has the capacity to transport us. The likes of Rowling, Pratchett, Tolkein and others have created worlds away from our own where, through the power of their imaginations and subsequently our own, we have been able to build parallel worlds for us to inhabit in our minds. Subsequently, of course, movie adaptations have removed from us the responsibility of viewing those worlds purely through our own mind's eye but that merely reflects the the undeniable fact that the source of all entertainment is the power of great writing.

So I am firmly in the camp that breadth is best. As with music, where I don't believe that rock is better than pop, or soul better than rap, I only believe there is good music. The same is true of books. Whatever the genre, whatever the story, no-one approach is supreme: there is merely great writing and less great writing and all writers strive to be in the former. The beauty and the beast of it, of course, is that it is never us who decides whether we have achieved it.

Retain the power to surprise

I haven't had the chance to read JK Rowling 's new novel The Casual Vacancy yet but, like many, I've scanned the reviews which, predictably perhaps, were circumspect at best. How much of the tepid response, I wonder, was down to the novel itself and how much because it wasn't titled Harry Potter and The Casual Vacancy?

Rowling was always going to be on a hiding to nothing. When you have created a world as imaginative and era-defining as Harry Potter's which, for many will represent their childhood the way Roald Dahl does mine, any new work is going to suffer in comparison.

But that's not the point. Rowling has committed herself to do what every writer should: to take the reader on a journey, to make the reader work just a bit and to retain an element of surprise. And that doesn't just mean in terms of story line or character, but in subject matter too; in addressing issues and themes that perhaps you would not expect to read from that particular author. She has resisted the temptation to slip into a formula purely because it has worked spectacularly before. Nor has she decided to retreat into retirement, count her cash and leave her reputation intact. The Potter series ended at a natural break in the characters' school careers and Rowling resisted the urge and indeed the calls to keep writing new Potter stories simply because she could. She took the step instead to take herself and us with her into a new and very different environment, knowing that many would find the transition a difficult one to make. But that's no bad thing. Rowling knows more than most that, done effectively, challenging the reader can engage and involve them in a way that spoon feeding every answer and tying every loose end rarely can.

I had an email from somebody who had read my first book, The Bitterest Pill. Towards the end of that book one character cuts his wrists. My correspondent told me that she felt it seemed right that the character in question should have taken their own life. My response was that I never made up my mind that they had; I left it open ended because I didn't necessarily think it was my decision to make But I loved the fact that the reader was so challenged and engaged with the characters that she had reached her own conclusion completely unaided. Her view and indeed mine may well be different from yours.

So let's not resort to the easy option of knocking The Casual Vacancy or judge it out of context. It may be impossible to do so but lets read it instead as if Harry Potter had never existed and make up our own minds. Kids and kids at heart owe JK Rowling nothing less. And who knows, it could be magical.

Leave a little piece of yourself on the page

I love the movies and, I’ll share a secret, I have always been a little bit fascinated by Alfred Hitchcock; not just for the palpable sense of suspense he managed to create but more for his trademark of always having a background walk on part in each of his films. No matter what the story, you knew as a viewer that there was literally a little piece of Hitchcock in the movie somewhere.

It's not dissimilar with writing. The best piece of advice I was given was to put together the story that I would want to read. Don't try and copy the trademarks of one genre or another, write for myself and tell the story that I want to tell. Not everyone will love it, but more will than won't because it will carry with it an authenticity that is hard to fake.

Authenticity is crucial in good writing. It creates a distinctive voice as opposed to delivering just another me-too novel. And writing should be about the individual, the quirky and the distinctive. We should always be looking to give our individual take on the world.

But it requires more than that. It requires the author to leave a little bit of themselves on the page. Sometimes that's tough. It requires us to explore our own emotions, to ask ourselves how we would react to the situations in which we place our characters and in some cases to delve back into our own past and experiences which may be uncomfortable and even painful. But it's worth it. In the book I am currently writing, I am working through an event that happened to me nearly 40 years ago when, aged nearly 8, I was present when one of my friends drowned whilst we were out swimming together. The event had been pushed to farthest corners of my mind, many of the details suppressed by the subconscious of my eight year old self but I have brought it back to the front. I wouldn’t say it is cathartic necessarily but it is taking me on a journey. The story will ultimately help me make sense of what happened that day, is my small way of acknowledging that friend and keeping his memory alive but, just as importantly, it should provide authenticity in the story telling that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.

I have said many times that I enjoy taking ordinary characters, placing them in extraordinary situations and exploring how they and others would react. To achieve that - if I have achieved that - I have to first do the same to myself. Only then can my voice and the voices of my characters be authentic and can I genuinely say I have left a little piece of myself on every page.

Like an expectant father....

So that's it, you've done it. The final word, on the final line, of the final paragraph in the final chapter of your masterpiece. You close the file down and sit back, more in relief than excitement. You've made it to the end of a journey that started, often years before, with the germ of an idea in the back of your mind.

Except, of course, it's not the end of the journey. It is really just the start. The next step is certainly more daunting than writing the book in the first place and, frequently, far more difficult. Until now, likely as not, you will have kept your manuscript to yourself, protecting it from prying eyes, tweaking and fine tuning as best you can but you know the moment is coming when your baby has to make its own way in the world.

The moment that you hand over the manuscript for the first time is slightly surreal. You want honest, independent feedback, but you also want it to be good. And if it's good and you've given the script to somebody you know, you'll convince yourself that they're only being nice because they like you. They're not going to really tell you what they think, are they?

Those closest to you tell you it's an achievement. But you know different. You know that without finding an agent, you won't find a publisher and where's the achievement in an unpublished book? But does it go further, I wonder. Is publication an achievement or does it have to sell well? If it sells well, is it an achievement of does it need a second novel to be accepted? Does it need to be made into a move or a television programme to be an achievement?

Achievement, for me, would be people who don't know me and may never know me, reading my work and enjoying it enough to let me know. That's special. Everything else would take care of itself.

So comes the moment when you embark on the hardest process of all, finding the needle in the global literary haystack that is the agent that has enough faith in you and your writing and enough interest in your work to offer you representation. Sit back and watch as the polite "thank you but no thank you" emails roll in, some formulaic, some more polite and genuine.

Then there is the one email - the one that shows genuine enthusiasm and interest who requests the whole damn manuscript. They have no axe to grind, no reason to say nice things without meaning them. Your baby is despatched for them to pore over and appraise. You know, deep down, the odds are still against you, yet even though you said you wouldn't, you dare to dream. And so you wait, checking the email, hoping but daring not to believe that, like an expectant father, something special may just be about to happen.

Things you do in the name of research

I don’t know about other writers, but for me, at least half the fun in the book writing process is in the research. Creating a world that is so vivid and realistic for the reader that they can almost picture themselves alongside you watching events unfold is critical. As a reader, it draws you in and allows you to invest something of yourself in the characters and their situation.

That’s why when I am researching I have to physically find the places that I want to use to create my world. For “The Bitterest Pill”, I needed to set part of the story on an inner city housing estate that conveyed poverty and threat in equal measure. It’s not good enough to try and summon this up in my mind, I need to go there, find it, touch it and smell it and describe those senses to bring the place to life. For me, this turned out to be an estate in Erith in South London where I spent an afternoon, walking, observing, feeling fearful, making notes and trying to capture the atmosphere which I hoped I would then be able to pass on.

Perhaps the most extreme version of this was getting myself arrested…by prior arrangement, of course. Nothing frustrates me more than reading a book where clearly guesswork has been the primary source of research for the author. When my main character, Paul, in The Bitterest Pill is arrested for drink driving and subsequently for causing death by reckless driving, I needed to know what he would be going through, how he would be treated.

So it was my good fortune to be able to present myself at a South London police station one Saturday morning as if I was Paul, to be breath-tested, to be cautioned, charged and locked in a holding cell and then to be able to talk through the events of the book and to see how the police’s treatment of this juvenile would be handled. I believe, and others have been kind enough to remark, that it adds a degree of reality to the narrative that helps the reader buy-into Paul’s situation.

To tell you about the research for the book I am currently completing would be to give too much away at this stage, though I hope that the challenges it gives me as a writer will transfer into a more authentic and satisfying reading experience for those who choose to read the books.