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Eliot started writing 'Little Gidding' while recovering from an illness, completing the first draft in July 1941. But he was unhappy with it, considering that the pressure of the air raids on London, had made him write it too quickly, and he set the poem aside, not returning to it until August 1942. He finished it in September and published it in October’s New English Weekly, in which he had also first published the second and third of the Four Quartets, which 'Little Gidding' was intended to conclude.

’Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot is a long poem which merits detailed study. It is the culmination of Eliot’s poetry in many ways: a crowning culmination, in which many strands come together.

British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965) was one of the twentieth century's major poets. Born in the United States, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, and was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927, renouncing his American citizenship. His poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement.

When teaching 11 to 14 year olds about mediaeval literature like Beowulf or Gawain and the Green Knight, one runs into the enormous barrier of in some cases a thousand years of cultural and linguistic changes which act as an abyss between the modern student and the works.

One of the main figures of the Romantic movement, John Keats (1795 – 1821) only managed to get into publication four years before his death. His poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, but by the end of the 19th century, he had not only become one of the most beloved of all English poets, but had had a significant influence.

Renowned Canadian academic Northrop Frye, outlines the shape of fiction in his book Anatomy of Criticism

It was common practice in schools a few years ago, and may still be, that, in order to ‘do’ Shakespeare, the teacher would play Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet to a class of students and then take one scene from the original play and examine it in close detail. An essay was then set on that scene. This constituted ‘doing’ Shakespeare, after which the teacher and the curriculum moved on.

Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock is an interesting example of an Irony, a story which draws its power from the classic patterns and symbology of a traditional Epic by turning those things upside down.

When you think about writing your book (or story or whatever it is you’re working on) does it initially seem to you like a mountain over which you will never be able to climb? 

Do you feel apathetic about the idea of writing it, even before you sit down to begin? 

Here is a list of questions for creative writers.

If you wish, you may cut and paste these into an email, answer them (one word answers are fine, but you may want to elaborate on certain points), and then send your answers to me at this address:

grant@clarendonhousebooks.com

See if you can immediately write down your goal as a writer. It might be that you want to make a lot of money from writing; perhaps you want to write a best-seller which will enable you to retire; or maybe you have just always had a novel ‘inside you’ waiting to burst out. 

Now we reach the moment of truth. Does your fiction achieve its desired result? You can only really tell this from completed works. Think of the number of works of fiction which you have read or seen or experienced in some way which you felt were faltering in some way during the story, but which managed to recover to produce some kind of fulfilment at the end; conversely, think of those works that seemed to be going along fine and then which failed to deliver the goods in the closing chapters.

Style is the way in which a writer uses words and other devices right there on the page in front of the reader.

Whereas Ideas, Characters, Attractive Power, Emotional Commitment and even Plot could be described conceptually to some degree apart from the story itself, style is the story itself: it’s what we end up with once all the planning and structure and background development have been done. As this is the aspect of fiction most clearly seen by the reader, and the one in which he or she has the most direct contact, this is the thing upon which the quality of a piece of work is most often judged.

Things like Ideas, Characters, Attractive Power and Emotional Commitment usually take place in the scenes or chapters of a work, or build up cumulatively over the length of a story. But most stories need a framework upon which to hang these things. The interesting thing is that these frames normally come in a standard shape and do similar things.

Let’s say that you have a work jam-packed full of powerful ideas, bristling with exciting and recognisable characters, and filled with attractive power - what could go wrong?

Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 – 1945), famous as an author and member of the Inklings along with J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and others, was educated at St Albans School, Hertfordshire, and was awarded a scholarship to University College London, but couldn’t complete the degree because of a lack of financial resources. Williams became an editor at the Oxford University Press (OUP) and continued to work there until his death in 1945.

Whether or not you have good ideas and working characters, the trick underlying everything is to be able to attract readers.

This is a much more mechanical process than you might think.

Of all of C. S. Lewis’s vast contribution to literature and to thought in the Twentieth Century, it is his last book, The Discarded Image, which is perhaps the most under-valued.

There can hardly be a work of fiction without this thing called a ‘character’. But there is a great deal of false and misleading information out there about what a character is and how to devise a successful one. The construction of characters or viewpoints turns out to be much simpler - and stranger - than you might think.

Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) an English novelist and poet, regarded himself primarily as a poet, though his first collection was not published until 1898. 

Ideas underpin any piece of fiction. They make the difference between the book that doesn’t get sold and the bestseller; they also make the difference between the bestseller that a couple of years later you find on the second-hand bookshelf, and the bestseller which is read again and again and made into box-office-shattering films.

If we accept momentarily that there is a female companion archetype in fiction, as outlined in How Stories Really Work, then it’s worth looking at Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello in its light.

Philip Larkin has been called the other English poet laureate, though he is widely read in Europe and in the United States. Larkin’s idea of a poetry is the act of constructing ‘a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.’ Rarely interviewed, it is not an easy task to get an overview of his life or work other than from the work itself

Some works could be labelled ‘character-driven’, while some are ‘plot-driven’.

Shakespeare’s Richard the Third is an example of the first kind.

Classically, prose is defined as a form of language based on grammatical structure and the natural flow of speech. It is normally contrasted with poetry or verse which is said to depend on a rhythmic structure, using meter or rhyme.

In September, 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and others founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose artistic goal was a return to simplicity, presenting nature directly, with faithfulness and attention to detail, but with spiritual resonance. 

Drama has its own terminology. Understanding it helps to understand the plays and their meanings more fully. Here is a handy glossary of some terms used when discussing Drama.

Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970), known as E. M. Forster, was an English novelist, short story writer and essayist.

If we want to understand Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a play, there are a series of questions that we can ask which take us deeply into both storyline, character and theme. 

Anyone interested in improving their job opportunities, raising their IQs and boosting their success in the education system could achieve all three by focusing on one key area: words.

Imagine a story which begins with death. A young man who has lost his father is being brought up by a close family member, but encounters an old man who orientates him to the villain of the tale. However, his advice on what to do is questionable and even twisted. 

A simple search on Google will give you a glimpse of the many thousands of books and blog posts that there are on writing. And on this blog, in earlier posts, we have dismantled some writing advice and seen what works and what doesn’t. Here are some tips based on what is given in detail in the e-course How to Write Stories That Work - and Get Them Published! and from experience.

H. G. Wells. the scientific rationalist and author, famous for the novels The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Time Machine and many other works, ventured in 1894 into the realms of the gothic horror story, popular during the Victorian era, with ‘The Red Room’.

In Charles Dickens' Ironic masterpiece Great Expectations, it's not difficult to spot our protagonist. 

We have been tracing the development of the character of the Doctor as part of charting the three successful pillars upon which the programme is built.

One of the defining figures of early 19th century literature, Jane Austen wrote six novels, most of them set in the Hampshire countryside where she lived her whole life. Her work is noted for its economy, formality and subtlety, but what makes Austen’s work tick is people.

We’re so used to thinking of the physical universe as obeying certain ‘laws’ that we can get muddled about the idea of it. 

Here’s a simple checklist for studying a single poem that tries to cover the different aspects that one ‘should’ know about any piece of poetry.

To meet the basic requirements for writing an English Literature essay in a school context, there is surprisingly little really useful guidance.

If we can grasp the rather strange idea that characters in fiction are not ‘people’ at all, but constructs, almost mechanical in nature, then we can see a kind of genealogy of character, or a relationship between them as constructs.

Consider the most powerful, memorable moments in your own reading. Think for a moment about the scenes in your favourite books or films which created ‘goosebump’ sensations for you. Try to recall the exact incidents which had the most lasting effect on you as a reader.

Even the most primitive of stories use the question ‘What will happen next?’ to lead readers on and on through whatever adventure the narrative is about.

’Jerusalem’, by William Blake, from the preface of ‘Milton a Poem’, first printed in 1804, was originally called ‘And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time’.

According to Owen Barfield, close friend of C. S. Lewis and a member of the Inklings group, as well as being an influence upon Tolkien, the human consciousness was progressing from one based upon an external and unknowable underlying reality, which our senses and unconscious minds organised for us into the world that we perceived and knew, through a stage where these organised elements (or ‘collective representations’ as Barfield called them) were separated out from us through what we call scientific method, eventually arriving, he hoped, at a condition in which the individual human imagination would re-create the world in harmony with the underlying reality - or not, as Barfield pointed out.

On July 1, 1916, the British launched a massive offensive against the German lines in the Somme River region of France.

Owen Barfield, British philosopher and close friend of C. S. Lewis, said once that Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, his famous work about the evolution of consciousness and much else was his own personal favourite.

Poetry, like other forms of creative writing, is fiction, in the sense that it is ‘made up’: the poet puts words together not for any other reason but to convey a thought or experience creatively.

Whereas once it had commanded the airwaves and helped to win the war, by the late 1950s the BBC was under siege from independent television, which, unrestricted by the corporation’s remit to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ had wooed audiences by focusing on simply entertainment.

We know from How Stories Really Work that fiction follows certain templates in order to be successful. Rather than detracting from the power of a tale, a fixed set of guidelines, skilfully applied and hardly ever deviated from, almost guarantees that a story will reach readers and survive the passage of time.

It’s part of the legend of the composition of the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ that it arose out of drug-induced reverie. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge says as much in his foreword to the poem: ‘if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things… without any sensation or consciousness of effort’.

Detective stories are amongst the most popular genre of tale in the modern age, and it’s not hard to see why.

I lived for some years on Highgate Hill in North London. A small statue of a black cat, protected from passers-by by a cage, supposedly marks the spot where Dick Whittington’s pet lingered, urging his master to turn back to become Lord Mayor of London - but further up the hill, I noted in my many walks to nearby Waterlow Park, there is set in the brick wall a bronze plaque that bears the following inscription (pictured above)

Narrative’ as a term originated in the 17th century and comes from the Latin word ‘narrat-‘ meaning ‘related, told’, which comes from the verb narrare (from gnarus ‘knowing’).

Think of readers as your employers for a moment. 

They have a job that they need doing. They’ve (potentially) turned to you to do it. 

What is the job?

We all work extremely hard already as writers. To be told that we have to do more is not an easy thing to hear. But the truth is that, unless we stay on top of things in particular ways, the harsh financial facts of life will catch up with us.

’Initially, Watchmen gained a lot of its readership because it was taking an unusual look at superheroes, but actually it was more about redefining comics than it was about redefining one particular genre,’ said Alan Moore, the famous writer of what has been called the greatest comic book of all time, to a London music newspaper a few years ago.

We have seen in earlier articles that the Doctor began his life on the television screen in a role approximating that of a villain: he was an aggressive, mysterious old man who suddenly and impulsively kidnaps the two teachers who stumble into the Tardis, innocently seeking an explanation for the odd behaviour of one of their students.

In your work, you must have some kind of idea of what you are offering to the public, even if you are still in the planning stage. You should at least have a notion of whether you have written or want to write a Comedy or an Epic, or a Tragedy or an Irony.

To be a truly successful fiction writer, attracting readers must happen on every page of your work - ideally, with every line.

Fiction is indeed a vast universe, but it follows laws not dissimilar to those laws we take for granted in the physical universe around us.

Endings in stories are incredibly important, but many would-be writers get lost in a labyrinth soon after starting and never make it to the middle of their tale, much less the end.

In finishing your story, you are trying to do two basic things:

As we have seen, in Doctor Who’s third broadcast story, ’The Edge of Destruction’ Hartnell’s Doctor, proud and arrogant, who began as a quasi-antagonist in ‘An Unearthly Child’, becomes an ally of and friend to Ian and Barbara, the teachers he had kidnapped.

Master authors use every trick in the book to capture and hold reader attention. What is known as ‘great writing’ or even ‘good writing’ is simply the use of certain subtle techniques at a word and sentence level, in the framework of larger structural arrangements, all of it aimed at ‘caging’ unsuspecting readers for the duration of a tale.

Even the simplest story is driven forward on the back of the basic questions ‘What will happen next?’ and ‘What is really going on?’ They are the devices which create and increase suspense. But what are some simple, practical ways to introduce them into your story?

Successful stories ask readers four key questions:

Are you interested in independently publishing a book?

What that means is getting a book into the hands of readers either through electronic devices or hard copy without going through the centuries-old route of using a traditional publisher.

If you are really serious about wanting to make a living from writing, there are five hard-hitting bits of advice that you probably need to confront: