This month, Platform continues its collaboration WRAP (Writing, Reading and Pleasure), with a master class run by featured writer Ashley Hickson-Lovence.
If you are an avid reader of Platform, then you will already be aware of who Ashley Hickson-Lovence is and know a bit about his writing. In case you don’t know, Ashley Hickson-Lovence was previously an English teacher (secondary school), before deciding to get a master’s degree in Creative Writing at City, University of London.
He is currently in his third year of a PhD course in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norfolk. His main focus is examining the depiction of black footballers in their autobiographies and the problems that come with it because they are usually ghost-written by white journalists, which begs the question whose story is being told?
Hickson-Lovence’s first novel was The 392, and he is currently working on his second novel Your Show which is set to be released next year.
As a novelist, Ashley Hickson-Lovence wants to encourage people who are not normally interested in reading and writing to try it.
The writing masterclass consisted of five writing exercises to prepare for the WRAP short story competition, of which entries are due 26th March. To enter this competition, you have to write 250 words inspired by a bus journey.
Ashley Hickson-Lovence began the masterclass by teaching us the importance of the first line when writing, as it has to be memorable and hook the reader in. An agent will say yes or no to you based solely on your first page of writing. He also said that every sentence counts, and that the first page of your book is just as important as that first line.
The first exercise in the masterclass was to complete a five-minute free write, based upon an image. The image we were given was a well-known one of a road in Manchester, and we had to describe what we could see, writing for the whole five minutes without stopping. It didn’t matter whether you went completely off on a tangent or wrote about something random that had nothing to do with the picture, as long as you kept writing that was the focus as the exercise was about the act of writing rather than what you wrote.
The second exercise required a choice, you could either add/amend your previous piece (this is the first option for the rest of the activities; however, the second choice differs.) Or you could write the first sentence or beginning of a novel based upon the first lines that Hickson-Lovence gave us from well-known books.
The next exercise had the option for you to again return to your free write, but this time add Zadie-Smith style details without including any reference to specific people or characters. The other option was to return to a place that you know well and write a description of it using features from Zadie Smith’s book N.W.
Ashley gave some advice on writing, stating that if you see a good line on TV, write it down keeping it in mind for your own writing.
We then focused on characterisation, concentrating on the novel 253 by Geoff Ryman – first written as an internet novel. This means that he wrote the story posting each of his characters online. The plot of the novel is rather simplistic, but that is what makes it effective. There are 253 people on a train from Waterloo to Lambeth North, only 253 words are used (how the novel got its name) to describe the characters and what happened on the train during that six-minute train journey.
The penultimate exercise was to describe or add another character to your original free write in 253 style, giving your character a performance action (running, swimming etc.) The other option was to write about someone you vaguely know travelling on a bus in Ryman’s 253 style.
The final focus was on dialogue, inspired by the book Lanny by Max Porter. He taught us how we can make dialogue between characters more distinctive (by using the style new speaker-new line to begin with).
For the final exercise we added dialogue between two characters from our free write or write about two people on a first date. This brief was more specific however, because we had to start the conversation with: “Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?”
This question came from a study that was published in the New Yorker called 36 Questions Leading to Love. Ashley Hickson Lovence believes that this is a good writing exercise to try in your spare time, choosing a question from the list and writing a conversation between two characters where they ask one of the questions from the study and seeing where it goes.
Ashley told us the literary techniques that are good to use for this exercise. The first one being compound adjectives such as “downy-haired” and “grass-stained”.
Dynamic verbs should also be added when writing dialogue as they create dynamism energy and movement as the name would suggest.
The writing masterclass ended with a Q&A, where we got to ask Ashley Hickson Lovence our own questions.
The first question asked included: “How do you (Ashley Hickson-Lovence) divide time between critical writing and creative writing in your degree?
“Are you working on multiple projects?”
Ashley answered by saying that it is rather haphazard. He started his PhD in September 2018 and at the end of his first-year probation review, he had not done much writing, only 600 words on the novel he had to write, barely scraping past into his second year.
In his second year he made up for this by writing the entirety of his second novel Your Show.
In his third year, Hickson-Lovence edited his novel so that it is publishing ready.
In terms of his critical writing, it is a completely different story as he found working on it tricky and had nearly finished his first draft.
The second question was: “Where did you get inspiration for your writing this year during the pandemic?”
Ashley stated that he normally people watched or would go on a walk or to a coffee shop, however being in a pandemic made these tasks impossible. He has found reading poetry helpful because it calms him down, as well as reading small presses because they are more expressional. He then went on to say that it has not been easy, when he thinks about his third book, he has no idea where to begin.
The final question was in regard to the goals that he sets on his Instagram posts and how he chooses to set those goals e.g., how many words for each chapter.
Most publishers did not take on The 392, thinking that it was too short at only 45,000 words when the average fiction novel is 80,000 words.
Hickson-Lovence thinks that he did what was right for his novel and for his third book, he is aiming to write it in three parts, with each part being approximately 1500 words.
Thank you to WRAP and Ashley-Hickson Lovence for the writing masterclass.
More information on WRAP and its events can be found here.
By Ellie Moylan
Feature image: BBC