‘Love, Fear & All That Other Stuff’ with Richard Yaxley

On 1st February, Write Link members kicked off 2025 in promising fashion, with the first meeting of the year hosting a workshop by highly experienced and acclaimed author Richard Yaxley. Richard’s many Young Adult novels and short stories have won and been shortlisted in numerous awards, including his story Fly High winning the 2024 StoryLinks Short Story competition. With the workshop titled ‘Love, Fear and all that other stuff’, attendance was strong and expectations were high.

With Write Linkers keen to soak up Richard’s wisdom, he began with a note of caution by highlighting a couple of his beliefs and disbeliefs.
1. He believes that every writer needs to find their own way.
2. He doesn’t believe that any creative process (writing included) can be 100% taught.
The key message here, he firmly reminded us, is that each writer, in each learning experience, needs to ‘pick and choose’ the advice that resonates best with their own writing process and experience.

Richard pointed out that many writers begin their careers writing short stories, and yet it’s arguably the most difficult narrative form to master. He briefly discussed some of the difficulties of short story writing, and suggested that perhaps they are so prevalent as a legacy of being the predominant form of narrative writing in schools.

Richard then posed an age-old question: What is a story? Responses varied widely, even wildly!, but underlying virtually all was the concept of Humanity. My personal favourite response was: ‘a tale of something relatable and emotive, often about something ordinary that becomes extraordinary’. In his own inimitable way, Richard then cut through all the group responses, using the metaphor of dropping a pebble into a well to introduce us to the concept of story as a ‘Mighty Echo’.

In response to a question about his own process, Richard shared that he always begins with a character, that he always knows the beginning and ending before he starts to write, and that the middle is always the messy part. He explained that he starts with a character but at the beginning, he says, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’ Finding the story is about disrupting the character in some way, so that we learn more about them as a consequence of the disruption. Therefore, in Richard’s words, a short story is a disruption — an intense experience for the character.

‘To know the character is to know the story’ Richard Yaxley

Understanding characters, Richard explained, is a matter of understanding their Physiology (gender, age, appearance, etc); their Sociology (class, education, home-life, community, etc.); and their Psychology (morality, sexuality, ambition, temperament, etc.). Finding the story involves knowing the character well, and determining where the disruption can occur. Richard advised us to:
Know the characters to find the story.
Know the characters by knowing their purpose.
Know the characters by knowing their past, and how that affects their actions in the present.

Richard then engaged in ‘modelled decision-making’, by guiding us through three readings of his short story Moonlighting. The readings focussed, in turn, on Humanity, Roles and Techniques. In the first reading, we identified the humanity of his characters: their loves and fears, what they most wanted to gain, or would hate to lose. Richard pointed us to particular language in the story that signalled acceptance or rejection, and how these elements move the story forward. In the second reading, Richard highlighted the roles adopted by the characters, in particular the roles of ‘driver, responder, receiver and observer’. He encouraged us to think about the balance of power between characters, and how that shifts throughout the story — what Richard called the ‘power dance’. Finally, in the third reading, the focus was on identifying some of the techniques used in writing a story: orientating via the characters, ensuring that description and dialogue are purposeful, building character and adding context, and ‘shifting’ or ‘disrupting’ the story. Through all of this, however, Richard reminded us that above all, writing is an organic process — that these considerations are not necessarily front of mind during the act of writing.

I think it’s fair to say that, for many of us in attendance, this way of analysing or ‘knowing’ the characters in the story (and not just the human characters, but also elements of setting!), was both instructive and enlightening. It challenges us to think about our own characters in such depth, to know them well, to know their purpose, and to find the disruption that will produce the ‘mighty echo’ in our own stories.

Write Linkers extend their appreciation to Richard for his inspiring, thought-provoking workshop.

You can learn more about Richard Yaxley’s work here: https://richardwyaxley.com/

Written by Jenny Ruge

Photo credits: Rebecca Sheraton