3 Lessons from Margaret Atwood’s Masterclass
Intro
In 2020, my life got disrupted by two unprecedented and unrepeatable events; I discovered Margaret Atwood, and I turned 30. Oh, right; let’s say three events. As soon as I finished The Handmaid’s Tale in January last year, I fell desperately in love with Margaret Atwood, and just a few months and a few of her books later, she had already become my favourite of all time. 2020, as you might have noticed, hasn’t been exactly like any other year of the past few decades, and thus my friends and family had to be creative to celebrate my 30th birthday with me. Believe it or not, my mother-in-law hit the jackpot, gifting me Margaret Atwood’s Masterclass on writing.
Although it can be described as a beginner’s course, listening to her words and looking at her witty face when she makes a joke is worth your time. If you’re a fan, as I am, you can’t miss it. It’s divided into 22 lessons of digestible length, with loads of anecdotes and case studies from her bibliography. I ended up with pages and pages of notes and I decided to share 3 lessons (plus a bonus) I’ll try to incorporate in my writing life. I hope you’ll find it useful, or at least enjoyable.
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1. Build a Toolkit of Stories
Everybody should read, and everybody should read fiction, in my opinion; but in a world where most writers prefer scrolling their Instagram feed instead of reading a novel, I’m glad Margaret Atwood addresses this problem directly. Nothing is completely original; (as Austin Kleon says in Steal Like An Artist) to such an extent that the best fiction often relies heavily on references. As an example, allow me to introduce you to my favourite show; Rick and Morty, (if you’ve never heard these names, get out from under your rock and watch the show. You’ll thank me later) which basically uses pop culture references to ignite the narration engine and subvert every rule of visual storytelling. Not a fan of vulgar adult cartoons somewhere between sci-fi and surreal? No problem. Margaret’s examples are much more literary. As she points out; without knowing the Bible, most of the 18th century literature would go straight above your head. You need to know about Chekov’s gun to understand Samuel Beckett, and so on, and so forth.
If you need to know the references to consume some stories, imagine how useful it is when you’re writing them.
Margaret Atwood calls it the Toolkit of Stories, because once you have it, you can pick the best tool for your specific needs. Once you know a story, you can have fun—and success—turning it upside down, like John Gardner’s novel Grendel, which re-tells the epic tale of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster.
Think about what you read and consume as building materials. If all you have is ice, you’re not going to build anything more than an igloo, but if you implement wood, steel, concrete, glass, carbon fibres, plaster, then you can access much more interesting projects.
2. To make something good, first, you have to make something
“The waste paper basket is your friend. It was invented for you by God.”
Don’t be afraid to bin what you’ve written. The practice of writing, the habit of it, is what count in the short term. A book is not a performance; it can be reviewed as many times as you like. People say that writing is more like a marathon than a sprint. Well, I think it’s neither. I might be biased, because I was a long jumper when I was a teenager, but I think that writing a novel is like a summer's worth of long jump. In a season, you’re going to enrol in many competitions, and in each one you get many jumps, and among all those jumps, you only keep the best one.
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Think of every competition as one of your chapters. Some are going to be better than others, of course, but you want to get at least one good jump in all of them. Your final draft is your best jump, and the best part is that, unlike in athletics, nobody has to see your bad ones. Your fouls, the ones where you were running against the wind, or even that time you got injured. All of the above remains perfectly concealed in your laptop, unless you want to disclose it.
To maintain high quality though, you need to work every day. Some days are going to be brilliant, and you bring what you’ve learned or produced to the big stage. Others are going to be horrible, or painful, or both; but those are the days when you can afford to experiment and make mistakes. It doesn’t matter if a paragraph is unreadable or out of place, it doesn’t matter if you trip and fall before a jump, what’s important is that you showed up.
Whatever needs to be binned has already done its job.
3. Formulas are only useful in math
“Likability is a factor when you’re choosing a roommate, but is not necessarily a factor when you are creating a living character.”
“There is limited space on a pedestal”
Beware of easy formulas when writing something. Copy and paste, other than being illegal, doesn’t really work. Characters become real through mistakes and flaws, and if you put a character on a pedestal, they won’t be able to move freely throughout your story. Worry about being engaging and exciting. It’s useful knowing some classic structures like the 3 act or the hero’s journey, but never, never bend your story or your characters to fit a structure. Bend the structures, the archetypes, to fit your characters.
Bonus
“You’re always dealing with readers, with what you think they may already expect and how much of that expectation you are going to resolve.”
My wife usually reads my manuscripts as I write them. This is because we both have full-time jobs and it takes me so long to get to the end of a decent first draft that I physically can’t wait all that time to have her feedback. Halfway through the 1st draft of my 3rd novel, I realised I had forgotten my wife’s expectations. Every reader, consciously or subconsciously, is going to have some expectations about your work once they start reading it. How much you resolve, how much you leave, how much you respect their expectations and how much you’re going to surprise them will affect their satisfaction, and, in a lesser measure, your success.
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This is a big topic to analyse, because what you want to do with your ending or climax will depend massively on a lot of factors: your genre, your audience, similar works, your culture, your background etc, etc... and although everything has been done successfully, there are trickier paths than others. I don’t have a suggestion yet, but what Margaret says is simply to have one reader in mind. You can deal with one reader. Bloody hell, you might even make them happy.
Alla prossima.
