This is one of the areas that I struggle with the most. I love to read thrillers and I’m in awe of people that can create compelling plot-driven stories. How do you even begin to create something that is a page-turner while also weaving in all the other strands such as the great characters, setting and prose?

I’m still learning and it remains challenging for me (except for dialogue – I hate that with a vengeance and even typing this is making me annoyed LOL). However, one of the key things that’s helped with my plot and structure is my first book recommendation.

Into the Woods by John Yorke
This book breaks down story into acts and goes through the different act structures that a story can have – most commonly three acts or five acts. It’s primarily about film and television there are lots of interesting and useful techniques that can be applied to novels and even short story. Into the Woods talks you through the different elements of a story from inciting incident right through to resolution. Some of the films used include Thelma and Louise and the Godfather but he also uses examples such as Romeo and Juliet. Yorke shows that no matter how distinctively different two stories seem to be from each other on the surface, they all have similar structures. And this structure applies to chapters (or episodes in the case of TV) as well as scenes. There’s lots more including how to create cliff-hangers and how to avoid sounding too expositional when you’re trying to convey information to a reader through dialogue, which was particularly useful for Kololo Hill. It’s still my favourite book ever on writing, I’ve re-read it with each new novel as I write a zero draft.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Now on to a book that is brilliant in many regards, but in particular, it’s clever structure. This is also one of my favourite novels (OK I know I say that a lot). There’s only one main character point of view but there are lots of factors at play because the story is all about would happen if we could go back in time and change the past. There is far more to it than time-travel but the thing I like most is the way interesting way that Atkinson tells the story.

Plotting timelines
This tip will be particularly useful for those of us who have complicated plots with numerous characters and timelines. I read that an author (I’m really sorry because I’ve forgotten who it was now) writes their key plot points out on a long piece of paper. I take it one step further because my stories tend to be quite complex. You can basically plot the points of key moments in the novel. You can start by plotting out the key moments for your characters for example when the inciting incident, then mid-point and so on. Then you can overlay that with other factors such as the timeline of key political events or other things external to the characters that need to happen at particular moments. I added these along the bottom of the chart. The reason that this approach worked particularly for me was that it enables me to see the story arcs for more than one character at a time. It’s also more interesting for the story where the story arcs of two characters aren’t in symmetry. In fact, the most interesting stories will be those where the characters vary so where one character is down on their luck while the other’s fortunes are rising. You could also try it with your main plot versus your subplot.

If you want even more book recommendations take a look at my latest YouTube video.

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When I first began writing, I thought that characters had to be larger than life and jump off the page. Despite the fact that some of the books that I’ve loved most have featured characters who are unusually quiet or have interesting inner lives, I felt that in order to capture the attention of a reader, agent or publisher, my own characters needed to be the life of the party, show-stopper, grab-the-limelight types.

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This week, I’m focusing on reading like a writer. I’m going to tell you more about one of the books that have most helped become a better writer and provide some novel recommendations that illuminate the topic.

Close reading

Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean sitting on a packed train during rush hour with someone’s armpit in your face as you try and finish Crime and Punishment. This is a technique that is broken down fully into the one book that helped me with my prose and taught me how to be a ‘better’ reader too. It’s called Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. And yes, it’s her real name. I recommend it not only to writers but to any book lover who wants to appreciate an author’s writing fully.

The book is chaptered based on the various elements of writing, starting with words, then sentence, then paragraph followed by chapters on dialogue, narration and character among others. I thought that I paid attention when I read a book but in fact, until I read Reading Like a Writer, I’d only been reading at 50% capacity. Francine Prose eloquently argues that in order to become a great writer, you must ‘close read’ other authors’ work. Why did they choose one word over another? Why is this paragraph so much longer than this one? What does this detail tell us about the character or story?

If it sounds a bit dull, I promise you it’s anything but. Throughout the book, she chooses different passages by various writers and analyses them in microscopic detail. This gave me a much better understanding of how to choose words, construct sentences and create dialogue.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

Wide reading

I’ve interpreted reading like a writer a little wider than simply ‘deconstructing’ novels. I’ve found that reading memoirs and other types of non-fiction has also been beneficial. The same elements mentioned above generally apply to this type of writing too. Word choice, sentence structure, character development are still just as important.

And this links to my next point: reading beyond your genre. As well as reading historical fiction, memoirs and non-fiction, I love to read crime and psychological thrillers. I’m not great at plotting and these types of novels provide a masterclass in page-turning plot. This helped me at the macro level while close reading helped me at the micro level. Work out what areas you think you need most help with and seek out books that you think do those things well. They are a great way to learn (as long as you’re not copying of course)!

In the meantime, here are a couple of the may books Francine Prose recommends you ‘read immediately’ and that will give you a chance to practice reading like a writer.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is my all time favourite novel, I vividly remember missing my stop on the tube when reading it. While you’ll be reading this in translation (unless you know Spanish), it’s masterful at narration and character.

The Things The Carried by Tim O’Brien

This is a collection of short stories linked by their characters, who are all fighting in the Vietnam War. The writing is stunning, the characters’ inner worlds brought to life through the extraordinary use of language. It’s rare for me to cry when reading a story but this one managed it…

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I read many novels about the British immigrant experience including Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and one of my favourites, Andrea Levy’s Small Island. But they focused on those who’d arrived on these shores, leaving a single country behind, one where they belonged completely.

It was different for people like my grandparents, the so-called ‘twice migrants’ who had roots in one country, built a life in another and moved to a third! Where were their stories on the bookshelves?

There was also a wider story, one that very few British people seemed to even know about, unless they recalled the news reports from the early 1970s. 80,000 Uganda Asians were expelled by brutal ruler Idi Amin with only 90 days to leave. This story always fascinated me. I’d often wondered, even as a child, what it would be like to leave everything you know and love behind, to start again. When children at school told me to ‘go back to my own country’, I spent a lot of time wondering where my ‘own country’ was? I’d think hard about what my family would do, where they’d go? And decades later, I finally had the opportunity to explore those questions through my writing.

The excitement of knowing my novel Kololo Hill is going to be published hasn’t gone away. And yet, as thrilling as it is, it is nothing compared to a little girl who taught herself to read, who later sailed across a sea, from India to Kenya with a young baby, whilst the lights of the steamer ship were blacked out to protect them from the war raging across the world, that little girl who went onto build a whole new life in a country so different to her own, where she had to learn to speak the language, just like my Nani did. Putting pen to paper, fingers to keyboard is not really anything so extraordinary. Leaving one world behind to create a whole new one, sometimes twice over, that’s the truly amazing thing.

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Rush Oh! by Shirley Barrett, narrated by Merridy Eastman

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, narrated by Bahni Turpin

Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott, narrated by Deborah Weston

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