Our tutors have been selected with the aid of Poetry Ireland and the Writers Centre in Dublin to assure the highest standard of teaching and the quality of the course content.


COMMERCIAL FICTION WRITING WITH MARTINA DEVLIN

WORKSHOP OUTLINE

THOU SHALL NOT BORE
The first commandment of commercial fiction is "thou shallt not bore". We will be discussing how to bear this in mind every time we settle down to write. Pace is crucial in commercial fiction – deviations for philosophical musings will lead to a manuscript being rejected. We will look at how to maintain pace while remembering to develop character. The best commercial fiction is a blend of plot and character.

THREE RULES OF COMMERCIAL FICTION
Commercial fiction has to press a number of buttons. It must:
:: Reach a mass audience
:: Be a fast-faced page turner
:: Have a strong central character with whom readers can identify
Genres can vary from crime to romantic to humorous to historical, but ideally all three goals should be realised. We will examine how to work towards achieving them.

DIALOGUE VERSUS DESCRIPTION
We will look at how commercial fiction tends to rely more heavily on dialogue than literary fiction. Descriptive passages have to earn their keep. Exercises will focus on how we can move along a story via dialogue, and where some description may be slotted in to add depth and variety. The writing must crack along, be sparkling and witty, and above all accessible – a tall order! We will look at how to write good, clear prose that is easily digested.

CHARACTERS
Why do some characters work and some not? How do you dream up and flesh out a character to make him or her believable? We will work on character development with exercises, and by comparing fictional characters in a number of well-known bestsellers. How have other writers made their characters three-dimensional and what can we learn from them?

EDITING
Entertaining readers is the cardinal rule but it can be the hardest one to follow. Editing is essential here – above all, the need to make cuts. This can be the hardest aspect of the writing business for newcomers, who have to learn where to trust their judgment and where to take outside advice. We will discuss who to turn to for guidance, and where cuts can be made without compromising character development and plot.

OVERVIEW
Commercial fiction writers must know the market – what's selling, who's selling, why they're selling. We will be discussing brand leaders, bestsellers and award winners from Marian Keyes to Maeve Binchy, from Benjamin Black to Paul Howard, from Alexander McCall-Smith to Dan Brown. We will look at what they all have in common. (Clue: they're all thumping good reads.)

AND FINALLY…
We will focus on choosing publishers to whom you want to submit work; the nuts and bolts of how you go about doing it – and how not to end up on the slush pile. Since reading work aloud is part of the life of every author, we will include a session on presenting your work before an audience. A special guest with extensive broadcast experience will join the class to share his tips.


WHO IS MARTINA?


Martina Devlin is an award-winning writer and journalist born in Omagh, Co Tyrone and based in Dublin. She has written five bestselling novels –most recently a historical work about the aftermath of the Titanic sinking, Ship of Dreams, inspired by a family member who drowned during its crossing.

She has also written a memoir, The Hollow Heart, which explores infertility and the fall-out from it; it attracted a lot of attention. Her short stories have featured in a variety of collections.

Prizes include a Hennessy Literary Award (in the short story category) and she has been shortlisted twice for the Irish Book Awards – including this year in the popular fiction category for Ship of Dreams.
She writes weekly columns for The Irish Independent and The Sunday World Magazine.
Her books are Ship of Dreams, The Hollow Heart, Temptation, Venus Reborn, Be Careful What You Wish For and Three Wise Men.

More information is available on her website www.martinadevlin.com

EXTRACT FROM SHIP OF DREAMS

North Atlantic April 14-15th 1912

It was the wails of the drowning that the survivors remembered afterwards.
‘Help! Over here! For the love of God!’
The cries seemed simultaneously to swoop down from the heavens and up from the bowels of the ocean.
‘Save me! Come back! Help!’
The Titanic survivors crouched in their lifeboats – some with palms pressed against their ears to block out the clamour, some listening, horrified; others, fewer in number, begging their fellows to row back.
The entrails of the great liner floated on the Atlantic, and clinging to the flotsam were insects with human voices who batted their despair into the indifference of the night. Those who found whistles in their lifejackets blew on them, others thrashed in the water, but its freezing touch quickly impeded movement.
The survivors shivered, waiting. Waiting for rescue, yes, but also for escape from those howls.
Finally, long after there was no sound but that of water lapping against keels, one of the lifeboats broke ranks and rowed back. It negotiated a cautious path through debris – a shoe here, a spar there – zig-zagging past deckchairs hurled overboard as makeshift rafts. It was too late. Flesh turned blue within minutes by the icy North Atlantic waters had stiffened already into rigor mortis. Lifejackets bobbed in the gentle swell, but the bodies inside them were dead, while those without life preservers had lost their grip on planks to sink silently, lungs inflating with salt water. Just a handful of people remained alive to be plucked from the grey waters.
As for the Titanic, this triumph of marine engineering had split in two, both halves lying two and a half miles below on the ocean floor. Her captain, her designer, her senior officers, her bandsmen, her lift attendants, her engineers, more than two-thirds of those who sailed on her – millionaire and emigrant alike – went to their deaths with her.
And 705 survivors simply watched as it happened.
Among them was American bride Nancy Armstrong, who buried her face in her lap to blot out the shrieks that carried across the water to her lifeboat. She felt no sense of relief at having a place in a lifeboat – no sense of entitlement either. Instead, nauseous, she concentrated on not retching. Behind Nancy sat an Irish girl. Bridie Ryan was staring ahead, eyes flat. She wondered if her three room-mates’ cries were among those slashing the air. Light-hearted girls, they were; she danced the Siege of Ennis with them earlier that evening. Or was Charlie Chadband’s voice part of the din? The Cockney steward who winked at her as she boarded at Queenstown?
Bridie rested her arm along her friend Hannah O’Brien’s broad back. Hannah was rocking back and forth, tears streaming down her face. Hannah wished she had never left home. She wished the American dollars had never arrived. She wished she had never heard the name Titanic. Sweet suffering Jesus, she just wished.
At the oar nearest the two Irishwomen was Major Richmond Hudson. He held himself erect, and in his mind he was a man of twenty-nine again, a United States Cavalry officer at Wounded Knee. He had watched as Chief Big Foot, clearly on the verge of death, was carried from his wagon to a pow-wow between Sioux braves and the officers sent to arrest the elderly warrior. In the ensuing battle – if you could call it that – some three hundred and fifty Indians, mainly women and children, were slaughtered. The Army lost twenty-five men. He counted back: that was just over twenty-one years ago. Major Hudson resigned his commission soon after. At Wounded Knee, he thought he was witnessing all there was to see of man’s inhumanity to man; he believed it, too, for twenty-one years. Until this night. He pressed his lips together until his jaw ached and waited. This too will pass.
Louis Stubel studied the mass of swimmers gasping for life. If they could hang on to debris for long enough, maybe a ship would arrive and save them. The Frenchman was too far away to see the torpor overcoming marbled faces in the water, but it was obvious fingers were losing their grip, bodies sinking with a silent capitulation that barely parted the waves. Louis was a pragmatist, accustomed to the idea that survival was an unequal battle, but he turned away from this human driftwood.
The death throes of fifteen hundred souls pursued the living – pouring from throats which gasped for help, then gasped for breath, and finally stilled. In a time that was neither long nor short but occupied its own savage space, the cries evaporated – sucked into the void where night met sky and sea. But these despairing sounds would pursue Nancy, Louis, Major Hudson, Bridie and Hannah. Just as they were to haunt all those who heard them for a lifetime afterwards.

A hand snaked over the side of the lifeboat near where Hannah crouched, followed by a second one. They clutched the rim, their owner too weak to do any more. Nobody else noticed, distracted by an argument in the middle of the boat involving a woman in a pair of bed socks and a sailor.
‘I don’t see how you can sit there and calmly say, “Most of those coves in the water are only a lot of stiffs now.” My nephew is one of them and I won’t tolerate your referring to him as a stiff.’
‘Callin’ ’em stiffs or not won’t help your nephew now, lady.’
‘It’s just improper. And insolent. I am a personal friend of J. Bruce Ismay. When we reach land I shall make it my business to report you to him. You will never work for the White Star Line again.’
‘No odds to me, lady. Me wages stopped as soon as the ship sank. I’m on me own time now.’
Hannah nudged Bridie, nodding towards the eight bony fingers clinging to their side of the boat. Bridie hesitated. The ship’s crew were saying they would be swamped if they started taking in swimmers. The boat was so packed it was lying low in the water already. Perhaps the fingers would slide off. Hannah threw an impatient look at Bridie, even as she reached for one of the hands. Each girl took hold of a wrist, followed by an elbow, and heaved.
A tousled wet head appeared but their combined strength could make no further progress: this was a dead weight. Hannah leaned right over, almost toppling into the water. Her coronet of plaits was soaked by spray as she groped and found a belt at the newcomer’s waist. She strained at that, Bridie helping, and they hauled, panting, until a pair of shoulders covered in a sopping tartan dressing-gown emerged.
‘’Ere, what are you two at? You’ll ruin it for all of us!’ protested a sailor, as they rocked the boat in their efforts to land the swimmer. ‘Let go of ’im. You let one in and the flood gates open.’
A knee scrabbled for traction and Bridie grabbed it, guiding it over the side.
‘Watch what you’re doing there, you’ll up-end us!’ shouted Peter McLeod, the officer in charge of the lifeboat, but it was too late.
With a final heave, the girls tumbled the man in. He spluttered, bleeding from the nose, and curled into a foetal crouch.
‘We’re dangerously overcrowded as it is, this is ridiculous!’
The women ignored McLeod. ‘Has anyone a sup of whiskey at all before this fellow dies on us?’ panted Bridie.
‘I have some Scotch.’ Major Hudson passed along a hip flash.
Hannah crouched to cradle the newcomer’s head, trickling a few drops into his throat. He coughed, regurgitating some of the spirit, but a healthier colour crept into his cheeks.
Bridie wrapped him in the steamer rug lent to her by a passenger ten minutes earlier, while Hannah coaxed in a few more drops of spirit.
‘‘I absolutely forbid you to allow this person on board,’ said McLeod, a junior officer who found himself elevated to captain.
‘He’s here already. Now away and play with your toy boats.’ Bridie disliked any show of authority on principle.
McLeod’s cheeks pinked up and he turned aside, pretending to study the horizon. There had been no advice in the training manual on giving orders to contrary women who refused to obey them.
With the help of Major Hudson, the two women managed to clear enough space to prop the man in the soaking dressing-gown against a corner of the boat. The major chafed his hands, while Bridie and Hannah each took one of his bare feet and rubbed briskly. The half-drowned man opened his eyes and squinted.
Hannah hoped that on another boat, someone was as merciful to her Tom.