Guest post – The Weird and Wonderful man himself, Mr Jonathan Pinnock

First of all I’d like to thank Sandra for inviting me in as part of my Never-Ending World Blog Tour to promote my new book Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens (available at all the usual online places and in all branches of WHSmith, if you’re in the UK). I was wondering what on earth I could talk about when it struck me that Sandra has very kindly asked me to run a workshop at next year’s Get Writing conference (launching soon, check here next week) . The workshop currently has the working title of “Weird and Wonderful” and this seems like an ideal opportunity to give you a flavour of what it’s going to be about.

However, if the truth were told, right now I only have the barest idea of what shape and form the workshop’s going to take. But I’m not sure that matters. Because part of what I’m going to be saying is that the best way to release the weird and wonderful stuff inside you is to take a step into the unknown. You don’t need to know where you’re heading in order to start the journey.

If you don’t know quite where you’re going when you set off, your readers certainly won’t, and this will give your writing an extra edge right from the word go. Of course, you do have an implied contract with your readers to deliver an ending – LOL RANDOMZ is, generally speaking, not an acceptable conclusion to a story (although there are a few geniuses who can pull something like it off) – but the point is that your subconscious is utterly brilliant at making sense of things. Consider the way in which it takes the stuff floating around inside your head whilst you’re asleep and builds a narrative out of it.

I hesitated for ages before starting to write Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, because while I was fairly certain that it was a viable concept, I had no idea where to take it. I’d written a lot of short stories by simply sitting down at the keyboard and seeing what emerged, but I’d never considered using the same technique for a full novel. It seemed crazy. But in the end I did just that: I simply sat down and started to write a few scenes, one at a time, just to get going.

Now the amazing thing about the human brain is that if you do sit down and write without any fixed plan, you introduce some unexpected democracy to it. The creative right-hand side suddenly finds itself on an even footing with the logical left-hand side and an interesting tussle starts to take place. The right-hand side will start throwing out all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff whilst the left-hand side is frantically trying to impose some discipline on it. And if you get the balance right, then you’re in business.

I don’t want to over-analyse (we are, after all, talking about a book called Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens here), but this process happened time and time again when I was writing it, both at the micro level in individual scenes and at the macro level when considering the overall story arc. Whether or not it’s worked will of course emerge over time as the sale figures come in.

Anyway, to get back to where we started, that’s the kind of thing I’ll be talking about at Get Writing: bringing democracy to the unliberated portions of your brain. Power to the cerebellum, eh?

[Links:

Mrs Darcy: http://www.mrsdarcyvsthealiens.com

Where to buy: http://www.mrsdarcyvsthealiens.com/buying.php

Wickhampedia: http://www.mrsdarcyvsthealiens.com/wiki ]