We kick off 2025 with a brilliant special guest! Nicola May is a hugely successful bestselling author renowned for her heartwarming and humorous …
Join Nicola May on the Creative Differences livestream
This month’s special guest Zoë Richards reveals the biggest mistake in her writing career…
MARK: What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your writing career?
ZOË: Doubting myself. So, many years ago, and I’m talking. I think, around about 22 years ago,
Writing Magazine had an offer from an agent that you could send in up to 3000 words. So I sent off to her 3000 words, and she came back. And now I reflect backwards and it’s like, oh, she gave me such incredibly good advice, but I didn’t get the “Well done, Zoë, you are a Gold Star student.” So because because I was brought up with the coercive control of “you are not good enough unless you are the star student.” When I came home second in the year, I’m sure you can guess where this is going. Second in the year out of 145 kids and I said I came home I came second in geography,
and my dad’s answer was, “What are you going to do next year to be first?” And there wasn’t a smile
in that response. So I was always expected to be the best in class. So this agent didn’t
make me best in class. So I believed I wasn’t a writer and I didn’t write for a few years. So I would say, anybody who gets rejection, remember, first off, if they give you a nuggets, store the nugget. You might not be able to accept what they’ve told you today, but at some point you’ll be ready to accept what they’ve told you. And she told me, was write what you know. I can tell that you’re writing something now that you don’t know anything about it. So either write something
you already know about or go and research what you’re trying to write about. And I took it as being, I’m no good at writing. She wasn’t telling me I was no good at writing. She was telling me it was obvious I didn’t know what I was writing about. And they’re are two distinctly different things. So anyone listening who’s thinking, oh, I’m useless because I’ve had a rejection: what are they telling you? And then secondly, it’s only their opinion. And if you are 100% sure you’re right
and you’ve written good stuff, keep going. But I think we’ve always got room to improve.
MARK: Now, listeners, if you’re thinking this is incredibly good advice where I can get more of this? You have a podcast, don’t you? So let’s give that a quick plug. Zoë, tell us about Write, Dammit.
ZOË: Well, yeah, it’s called Write, Dammit because I needed to remind myself to write, dammit. And I actually did the podcast because the government created something called Integrated Care Boards, and the one I worked for was told it was over establishment and needed to reduce its numbers. So a load of us were made redundant. Nobody’s ever made redundant in the NHS, so it was a bit of a shock to us all. And I was doing a job I loved with colleagues I adored. And so I thought, well, I can’t sit around and do nothing whilst I’m looking for a job and bear in mind; my kind of job, I was the only one in the country, so not the kind of job that you can get lots of work doing. So it was very, very difficult for me to find an identical job. I was having to reinvent myself. So what I did instead was start a podcast, and I learned what I could and discovered that if I could do seven, no, if I could do eight podcast episodes I was doing better than most because the majority of people stop at seven episodes or three months of running a podcast. So I said, right, I’m doing it for four months, and I’m going to do eight episodes. So we’re now on episode 127 and it’s 18 months old.
MARK: Yeah, this is episode three and I’ve still got the will to live, so I think we’re doing alright.
ZOË: Yeah, you’ve done one before though. I think you’ll keep this one
going for sure.
Welcome to Mark Stay’s Creative Differences, a monthly livestream where I talk to writer friends about those little things that make a big difference to their craft and careers in the hope that we can give readers some insight to the creative process, and writers and other creative folk some practical advice that they can actually use!
For the next livestream recording on TUESDAY 19TH NOVEMBER, 2024, I’ll be talking to MIKE SHACKLE! Mike is the author of the LAST WAR fantasy trilogy and he writes crime thrillers as Michael Dylan. Originally from London, Mike Shackle has lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, New York and Dubai before settling down with his family in Vancouver. In that time, he’s sold washing machines, cooked for royalty, designed a few logos, and made a lot of ads. Ideally, he’s happiest day dreaming over a cup of tea. I hope you can join us live!
Zoë Richards reveals the small thing that makes a big difference to her writing…
Or watch the whole interview on Youtube..
Mark: What small thing has made a big difference to your creative process?
Zoë: Just sitting down and writing? The only thing that ever stops me because I find I get more creative the more I write.
Mark: Yeah, yeah.
Zoë: It’s a bizarre thing, isn’t it? So if I sit there and don’t write, the writing doesn’t get done. And the creativity doesn’t happen either.
Mark: You can’t just sit down, not do anything, get up and walk away. It’s just embarrassing for all concerned, even if you’re completely on your own. So yeah, turn up sharp, tap some keys, see what comes out.
Zoë: I couldn’t think of anything to start today, and I actually wrote Need Something about Hunter and his gang days, and perhaps something about when his dad used to beat him up. And that’s all I’ve written into one of the chapters, but it immediately made me go, oh, in that chapter there, I need to do… And I just went off then and couldn’t stop writing.
This month’s special guest, Zoe Richards is unusual in that she loves writing a synopsis. Here, she gives us a few top tips…
Mark: You recently tweeted, “Am I weird in that I quite like writing a synopsis?” Yes you are.
Can we discuss what it is you like about writing synopses and any top tips for writing them?
Zoë: Again, I think it might be my career that helps are the reports I would write. I always had to write an executive summary to the report, so that meant that I had to take something that was anything from a three to six page report. So we are talking short compared to a novel, but often
my reports would start at twenty pages, and then I’d whittle it down to what’s the real crucial information these exactly need to read. And then I’ve got to produce something like about a one-hundred word, a summary synopsis of what the report’s about, but one that is going to make them
want to read the rest of the report. Because they receive so many reports, they’re not going to want to read it. So I do have an advantage, don’t I? Do you use, Scrivener?
Mark: I do indeed, yes. Big fan.
Zoë: So, you know, on the way I’ve set mine up, you know, on the top right corner
it has a little box that says synopsis when you’re writing each chapter.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Zoë:So I just write a sentence or two in there about what’s the purpose of this chapter. And then once you’ve got all of your chapter one or two sentences, I mean, the idea of it being
there is for the corkboard, but actually forget the corkboard. It’s a place for you to then gather…
So I’ve just written a chapter today, and the chapter is to to raise the emotional stakes in the story. So I’ve written a couple of lines in, into that little corner box that’s headed ‘synopsis’ and then when I come to write the synopsis, I just pull all of these sentences out. If I can’t necessarily add anything to the synopsis through adding in what that chapter is about, then it doesn’t need to go in the synopsis. So is it moving it forward? But also if it’s not moving the story forward enough, do I need the chapter? So it helps me to do that kind of thing as well.
Or watch the whole interview on Youtube:
Zoë is the author of Garden of Her Heart, and host of the podcast, Write Damn It! An experienced coach with more than 35 years working on mindset, Zoë shares a ton of practical advice for writers including how to deal with self-doubt and rejection.
WE DISCUSS…
How stand up comedy helped Zoë’s writing
How to rethink your attitude to resilience
Great tips for writing a synopsis
Writers’ flow and getting started each day
Building characters using their childhood trauma
How to get people to show up at book events, and much more…
Some of the following are affiliate links and may earn me commission…
THE MOON’S A BALLOON BY DAVID NIVEN
ME IN CONVERSATION WITH BEN AARONOVITCH AT OXTED LIBRARY
Thanks to: Emily Stay for production assistance, Kai Newton for the edit & Dominic Currie for the jingle
A couple of months ago I started a little forum for Writers called The Green Room. We meet twice a month over Zoom: writers send me questions in advance on the craft and business of being a writer and it’s all relaxed and fun and chatty and there’s a great mix of writers: some just starting out, others are published and experienced and it’s all recorded exclusively for folks who support me over on Ko-Fi.
Here’s a little taster from last week’s session with a great question on how to write believable and unpleasant antagonists…
I hope you found that that little taster helpful. The sessions are supposed to run for half an hour: they’ve all gone on for a good hour so far. I love chatting about this stuff with writers like you. If you’d like to try it out, pop over to my page on Ko-Fi and become a Green Room supporter. Untill then, happy writing!
How do you write a believable and unpleasant antagonist? I have tried looking at antagonists I like from other books, but I can’t put my finger on why some get under my skin and some don’t. Where do you begin?
Fantastic question! And I’m going to take my time with this one, because this is so important…
An antagonist is a person who actively opposes or is hostile to someone or something. This means your antagonist isn’t just a black hat villain who is evil for the sake of it. They have historical or psychological motivations for what they’re doing. And that’s a great place to start when creating a great antagonist.
Look at Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, set in a world where books are banned and burned – the antagonist is Captain Beatty: he hates books for their contradictory facts and opinions and that they encourage dissent and unrest. But he’s also well-read, which makes him a hypocrite, but he has made a choice to destroy outlawed books that might encourage people to think. As far as Captain Beatty is concerned he’s providing a public service, and Montag — our hero who saves books — is a renegade who must be stopped.
Antagonists are often in a position of power: Captain Beatty, Uriah Heep in David Copperfield becomes secretary and business partner to Mr Wickfield, allowing him to deceive Mr Wickfield. Mob bosses, corrupt officials, powerful businessmen and women all make for great antagonists because of their position and the power they hold over others.
Antagonists are a dark shadow of the hero. Moriarty is a match for Sherlock Holmes’s wit and deduction, but he has chosen a life of crime. He is what Sherlock could become if he made the wrong choices. Same goes for Luke/Vader, Harry/Voldemort, Batman and the Joker etc.
Create the right Antagonist for your Protagonist
The antagonist’s role in the story is to force your protagonist to change. They will torment your hero so much that they have to rise up and overcome them or be defeated. If we think of our story as: thesis, antithesis and synthesis – the antagonist is the antithesis: they represent the opposite of what your hero believes to be true. That’s not to say that the antagonist is always wrong. A good baddie will have their own agenda that might even seem reasonable to others:
Shere Khan in the Jungle Book: turns out he was spot on about men hunting tigers to extinction!
Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: a care provider who maybe lets power go to her head.
Javert in Les Miserables has a slavish devotion to the law and righteousness which drives him to pursue Jean Valjean tirelessly.
Each of these represent the antithesis to our hero: Mowgli wants the freedom of the jungle, but with none of the responsibility. He will learn through his encounters with Shere Khan that freedom is hard won.
McMurphy challenges institutional power in the form of Nurse Ratched, but discovers that institutions can be more powerful than the individual.
Jean Valjean epitomises how a man who has done something that society sees as wrong can be a good man, but Javert refuses to show any leniency.
With all of these, the stories would have been much shorter and less satisfying if the villains had been just a little bit reasonable… Imagine if Shere Khan had accompanied Mowgli to the human village instead of trying to kill him, what if Nurse Ratched had acknowledged her own tyranny and relaxed some of her rules, what od Javert said, ‘Y’know what, it’s a loaf of bread and those kids were starving. I’m going to look the other way this time…’
But each of these villains refused to bend and why? Because they have power.
Think about their POWER
If a villain is too easily overcome, then it will be unsatisfying for the reader. If they’re overpowered (and this happens a lot in SF&F) then you might find yourself reaching for some deus ex machina solution at the end.
NOT ALL VILLAINS ARE CREATED EQUALLY… and do you even need one?
So far we’ve discussed the traditional kind of antagonist: the dark shadow of your hero that must be overcome, but not every baddie needs to be Darth Vader. Here are some other examples…
A Force of Nature
Yes, it doesn’t even need to be a person. Your hero could be trapped in a storm, or tormented by a shark, Robinson Crusoe was surrounded by an unforgiving sea. The world around your hero could represent the antithesis of who they are.
A Rival/Opponent
Rather than an out and out evil bad guy, your antagonist could be more of an irritant. The kind of antagonist we’ll meet in real life: the annoying boss or co-worker, the strict parent
They’re simply someone whose goals are in direct conflict with the protagonist’s.
A Many-Headed Hydra
The antagonist doesn’t need to be just one person. In Mean Girls you have the alpha females
Most villains have henchmen who in some way embody an aspect of their ethos and as the hero overcomes them they will learn something essential about the villain that will help them overcome them.
The Protagonist Themselves
Ever been told you’re your own worst enemy? A character’s own failings and doubts can stop them from reaching their goal. Holden Caufield in The Catcher in the Rye, the narrator in Fight Club, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is delusional, insecure and volatile
Describing villains…
Uriah Heep, for example, in David Copperfield:
When we first meet him, he is described as a “cadaverous” man, “who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat; and had a long, lank, skeleton hand.”
‘As I came back, I saw Uriah Heep shutting up the office; and feeling friendly towards everybody, went in and spoke to him, and at parting, gave him my hand. But oh, what a clammy hand his was! As ghostly to the touch as to the sight! I rubbed mine afterwards, to warm it, and to rub his off.’
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
Annie Wilkes in Misery (she gets a long description, essentially one of only two characters in the book). Here’s an excerpt from p8 of my paperback edition…
Most of all she gave him a disturbing sense of solidity, as if she might not have any blood vessels or even internal organs; as if she might be only solid Annie Wilkes from side to side and top to bottom. He felt more and more convinced that her eyes, which appeared to move, were actually just painted on, and they moved no more than the eyes of portraits which appear to follow you to wherever you move in the room where they hang. It seemed to him that if he made the first two fingers of his hand into a V and attempted to poke them up her nostrils, they might go less than an eighth of an inch before encountering a solid (if slightly yielding) obstruction.
Misery by Stephen King
A lot of this initial description de-humanises Annie. It’s broad and derogatory, and as the novel goes on Paul Sheldon and the reader discover more and more about Annie and her motivations. I won’t give too much away, but it’s a masterclass in writing a psychopath.
And here’s how Holmes describes Moriarty in The Final Problem:
“His career has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearance, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and to come down to London, where he set up as an army coach. So much is known to the world, but what I am telling you now is what I have myself discovered.”
The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
No mention of his physicality at all.
Here’s how Watson describes him in the same book:
He was extremely tall and thin, his forehead domed out in a white curve, and his two eyes were deeply sunken in his head. He was clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders were rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and was for ever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.
The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Hannibal Lecter, ch7 of Red Dragon: he’s mentioned 29 times before we meet him, and he never leaves his cell, doesn’t kill anyone for the duration of the narrative, and yet he is Will Graham’s antagonist.
Dr Hannibal Lecter lay on his cot asleep, his head propped on a pillow against the wall. Alexandre Dumas’ Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine was open on his chest.
Graham had stared through the bars for about five seconds when Lecter opened his eyes and said, ‘That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court.’
‘I keep getting it for Christmas.’
Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points. Graham felt each hair bristle on his nape. He put his hand on the back of his neck.
‘Christmas, yes,’ Lecter said. ‘Did you get my card?’
‘I got it. Thank you.’
Dr Lecter’s Christmas card had been forwarded to Graham from the FBI crime laboratory in Washington. He took it into the backyard, burned it, and washed his hands before touching Molly.
Lecter rose and walked over to his table. He is a small, lithe man. Very neat.
Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
There’s more in the subsequent chapter, a drip-drip of little details that send a chill down your spine. It’s brilliant and Harris basically repeats it for The Silence of the Lambs…
My special guest on the podcast this month is LJ Shepherd, author of the stunning debut novel The Trials of Lila Dalton. We discuss first lines and …
Episode 2 with LJ Shepherd
Join me live with author LJ SHEPHERD on Friday 20th September.
Join me live with author LJ SHEPHERD on Friday 20th September
LJ Shepherd is author of the stunning debut novel THE TRIALS OF LILA DALTON, which has…
Last night saw the launch of the first episode of MARK STAY’S CREATIVE DIFFERENCES: a monthly livestream where I talk to writer friends about those little things that make a big difference to their craft and careers in the hope that we can give readers some insight to the creative process, and writers and creative folk practical advice that they can actually use!
You can join me and my guests live and ask questions and get in on the conversation. Or you can listen back to the audio podcast. Here’s the first episode with my special guest SC Gowland, curator of The Law of Consequences, a brilliant fantasy short story anthology. Other topics include the big mistakes we’ve made, happy accidents and Japanese all girl punk bands. Yes, really…
Please subscribe here or on Youtube for details of the next episode, or find me on your preferred podcast provider…
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