By JJ Somerville

At the start of a writing day many writers find themselves staring at a blank white page. It can offer a whole universe of possibilities or it can be a form of torture to the blocked writer.

As we sit down to that blank page sometimes we only start with an opening sentence, or we know something has to happen, and our fingers hover above the keyboard waiting for the words flow and the scene takes shape.

Other times we stare off blankly into space.

This is when our inner critic pipes up (or even sometimes our partners!) and says “I thought you were supposed to be writing.”

Now unless you are thinking about how badly your team went in the football or what you are going to cook for dinner that night, you are writing.

You’re part of a creative process called daydreaming. It’s something we often do as writers whether we are aware of it or not.

Daydreaming is an important part of the writer’s arsenal. It’s as important as any of the other tools but we often ridicule ourselves for taking the time to imagine our scenes before we write them.

Don’t succumb to this. The time you spend thinking about your story is just as valuable as the time you spend writing it.

The single best thing about daydreaming is; we can do it anywhere. If you’re waiting in a queue, stuck in traffic (or even in a boring meeting!) You can open that mental notebook and walk your characters though their upcoming scenes.  You can daydream back-story that might never make it into the story just to see how your character reacts to life changing events.  Or you can work through the climax of the book for a glimpse of how your character needs to grow and what they have to learn before they can play their role in the story.

I often find myself daydreaming scenes near the climax of the book when I’m still writing the first act. I do this because it informs me where the story is heading and how my characters are going to develop. I probably won’t write those scenes yet; I’ll make some notes of any clever dialogue or important points, but just because I’ve thought about them doesn’t mean I need to write them yet. It also doesn’t mean I won’t change them later.

You may even find that the scene drags, that your daydream is boring you, you’ve learnt something valuable before you sat down and stared at that blank page. If it’s boring move on to the next scene and see if you can work the information you thought that scene was supposed to convey into the next scene in your sequence. Let’s face it, it’s often said; “If it’s boring to write, then it’s going to be boring to read”. The same applies to daydreaming.
 
So now we’ve talked about why we might daydream a scene Let’s try it.

The first time you try daydreaming you may want to find yourself a quiet spot. Grab a notepad and pen and make yourself comfortable.

You’ll probably want to close your eyes

Immerse yourself in the world of your story. Let the setting come to life around you. Use all your senses to see, hear, smell, taste & touch the world of your story.

Then bring in your characters. Are they waiting for the catalyst of your scene to arrive? Or are all the players in the room, each with their own agendas and foibles. Watch how your characters react to the challenges you throw at them and those they throw at each other. Listen to what they say to each other and how they say it.

Open your eyes and jot down some notes.

Now find your keyboard and start typing.

You’ll be surprised how quickly your characters fill that white page. If you feel like the scene is missing something, close your eyes again. What do your senses tell you? Can you weave those delicious details into your scene? Watch your characters interact with the space they are in, is the setting intrinsic to the scene? Bring all that back to the page.

You may need to take a few dips into your daydream to flesh things out.

Look down at your writing and realise that what once seemed like a roaring expanse of white space is now filled with the complex and beautiful world of your story.

You’ve done it! Now do it again.

By Anna Cowan

I’ve come to this conclusion: sex scenes are so difficult to write because sex is the opposite of words. It is visceral and complex and a form of vulnerability that goes beyond what we can speak, even to ourselves.

There’s a lot of fantastic advice about how to write a sex scene – how to use it to forward character and the dramatic arc of your story. But what interests me is the language we can use to come close – and somehow never close enough – to a human experience of the act.

If words can never accurately pin down what sex is, then I’m interested in what can happen between words. If you bring two contrary words together, the reading mind will try to find meaning in their pairing – and will create something wholly new in the process. In A Lady’s Lessons in Scandal, Meredith Duran strings together words to describe her hero, when he begins kissing his heroine: Hot and desperate and gluttonous and hesitant and uncertain and tentative as a boy with his first woman: this moment, this simple bedding, was turning into something strange. For me, it’s the word “gluttonous”, seemingly out of place, that evokes a real human feeling. The same feeling couldn’t be described head-on, because it isn’t concrete.

Language can also be used as touch. The sounds words make – even the shapes letters make on a page – can be used to reach out to a reader and seduce them into a certain frame of mind. Fragments of one word attached, bright and surprising, to another.

I want to be clear that I’m not talking about euphemism. I’m a big believer in calling a body part by its name.

The best example I can give of the kind of language I’m trying to describe is the poem Epithalamion by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I'm not a huge reader of poems, but this one grabbed me. It goes beyond an overabundance of words – pours words out until they sit in dense clusters of meaning and images that create something altogether new. A sensory world arrived at by the mind.

I encourage you to read the poem – out loud if you dare – and let yourself feel how, beyond language, there is a free, fierce, movement-filled world. If you take the words at face-value many of them are nonsense. Taken together they come close to something that is entirely beyond words.

Epithalamion
Hark, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe

We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured,
    where a gluegold-brown
Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between
Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and
    water-blowballs down.
We are there, when we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer's sovereign good.

By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies
    huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by
    turn and turn about.

This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast
Into such a sudden zest
Of summertime joys
That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best
There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;
Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild
    wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood
By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on
    the air,
Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels
    there,
Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots
Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: offwith - down he
    dings
His bleached both and woolwoven wear:
Careless these in coloured wisp
All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks
Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp
Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots
Fast he opens, last he offwrings
Till walk the world he can with bare his feet
And come where lies a coffer, burly of all blocks
Build of chancequarried, selfquained rocks
And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy
    quicksilvery shives and shoots
And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still
    brims,
Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the
    fleet
Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs
Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish, while he looks about him, laughs,
    swims.
Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean
I should be wronging longer leaving it to float
Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note -
What is...the delightful dene?
Wedlock. What is water? Spousal love...
Father, mother, brothers sisters, friends
Into fairy trees, wild flowers, wood ferns
Ranked around the bower...