Make the most of formatting

‘So,’ she said, peering suspiciously inside the bag. ‘This is the merchandise we talked about?’

The salesman nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s all there. Every last bit.’

‘And if I take it?’ she asked. ‘What then?’

He shrugged. ‘Then it’s yours,’ he said. ‘What happens after that is up to you.’ She scanned his face for clues, but saw nothing. She hesitated. What should she do? There was no guarantee that what she thought was in the bag was actually what was in the bag. BUT WAS THAT A CHANCE SHE COULD TAKE? So much rested on this. So much.

‘And you’ll be discreet?’ she said. He smiled.

‘I AM THE SOUL OF DISCRETION,’ he whispered.

Lump all the dialogue and narrative together

The thing is, I can’t see this working. I patted the side of the machine and shook my head. Why not? Well, we don’t have enough fuel for a start. That shouldn’t be a problem. I pointed towards the furniture. I know you did, but we’re not going to burn it just because you pointed to it. So this was how he was going to play it. Please don’t refer to me in the third person when I’m standing right here; it’s rude. Oh, sorry. So, what do we do? I thought for a moment. What do you mean you thought for a moment? You thought for a moment just now, or a while ago? This is confusing. I know. How are we supposed to tell who’s talking at any given moment? We can’t really. Like just then – you answered your own question, but it sounded like I answered it. I stopped to think for a moment. I know, so did I. No, I didn’t actually say that out loud, that was just... I stopped to think for a moment. I know, you said that already. I stopped to think for a moment. What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? No, I was just stopping to think for a moment. Oh, okay. You know what? Some aspects of modernism are hard to pull off, it turns out. I nodded. Me too.

ROMANCE WEEK #5: Force a happy ending

Arianna, having fallen in love at first glance, made sacrifices to pursue her passion and encountered obstacles to her happiness, was just about to sink into despair when something remarkable and completely unexpected happened.

In an instant, she overcame her irrational fear of trained animals and felt the circus-related allergies to canvas, face-paint and straw simply melt away. Despite her lifelong disdain for circuses, she suddenly found herself fascinated by their transgressive liminality and ready to abandon her hugely successful academic career to revel in their chaotic energy. Also, she renounced her commitment to celibacy despite its strong philosophical underpinnings.

Just as she was undergoing this series of remarkable yet highly convenient revelations, she heard a strangled kind of grunt and looked up to see the bearded lady being crushed beneath a tiger which had been carelessly dropped on her by a strong-man. In a heartbeat, she was at Alfonzo’s side.

‘How terrible for you,’ she whispered, stroking the top of his curly wig. He looked up at her and she saw the flash of true love in his ocean-blue eyes.

‘Allo,’ he said, and she knew that they would be happy for many, many years.

ROMANCE WEEK #4: Convey sensuality

With thanks to Daniel M

She watched as Alfonzo’s hands snaked up the bearded interloper’s back, caressing her like a seahorse caresses his young after carrying them for their two-to-four-week gestation period, because it’s male seahorses that get pregnant, not female ones.

She choked back tears as he stroked the harlot’s long, luxurious beard. How she wished that was her beard he was stroking. Of course, she did not have a beard, being a professor of theology rather than a circus performer. But he could stroke her other body hair, couldn’t he? Her sensibly bobbed brown locks, her barely visible downy upper-lip hair, the wispy tufts under her arms and finally – she barely dared imagine – her delicate and mysterious hoo-ha. Just thinking the word gave her a thrill. It had an earthy sensuality to it, a deep and primal power that spoke to the very fabric of her nature. Hoo-ha. She trembled silently. Hoo-ha.

ROMANCE WEEK #3: Create artificial barriers to your couple’s happiness

Doubtless her colleagues would think her mad. After all, she was not only a renowned philosophical and religious thinker, but had been devoutly celibate for some twenty years now. She had written her doctoral thesis on the notion of the carnivalesque, dismissing circuses as a culturally bankrupt dead-end of the carnival tradition. To make things worse, she was violently allergic to straw, canvas and face-paint and had an irrational fear of trained animals of all kinds.

By the time she reached the procession, she was breathless with both exertion and the passion that boiled in her loins. She approached the diminutive figure who had become her entire world, ready to fall at his feet and declare her love, only to be stopped short. She had reached him just in time to see him engaging in a passionate embrace with a clearly besotted bearded lady.

ROMANCE WEEK #2: Make their love believable

In an instant, she burned for him. His brightly painted face, his mismatched clothes, his trick lapel flower – oh, how she yearned to be squirted by that flower. She watched him as he walked, his enormous shoes flapping against the ground and honking with each step. He was masterful – commanding, even. She felt as if she was being pulled into his orbit, as if her soul was tracing a circle around him like the one formed by the hooped waist of his comically oversized trousers. How she longed to cradle that lopsided face in her hands, to kiss that shining red nose.

She hurriedly stuffed philosophical treatises into her desk and locked the lid with trembling hands. Her article on the dichotomy of free will would have to wait – she had no choice now but to run away and join the circus.

ROMANCE WEEK #1: Create an unlikely pairing

Arianna Milieux, the most widely respected female theologian of her era, stared out of the window and considered the nature of divinity. She watched a leaf fall slowly from one of the tall trees on the boulevard outside. The way it fell – drifting first one way, then the other, but falling, always falling – put her in mind of what her colleague Luc had been saying over lunch the previous day regarding the Miltonic conception of virtue and the inherent incompleteness of man.

She was just reaching for a pen when something bright caught her eye. Between the trees, on a street perpendicular to the boulevard, she could see the garish colours of a circus convoy. Slowly, it revealed itself to her, emerging from the trees and onto the main thoroughfare. The elephants caught her attention immediately, their upraised trunks leading the procession. Behind them was an open platform of a vehicle, in the manner of a carnival float, containing a troupe of acrobats who leapt and tumbled even as they travelled. What really took her breath away, though, was the sight of the man who walked behind this acrobatic spectacle, calmly pacing along the boulevard as if he owned the city and everything in it.

Even from a distance, she could see the piercing blue of his eyes, the firm set of his jaw, the sheer size of his bright red shoes as they flapped around below his barely three-foot frame. She knew him by reputation, but had never before seen him in person – this could only be Alfonzo, the shortest clown in all of Europe.

Get overexcited about finishing your first draft

The rain was more insistent now, falling in sheets across the landscape. It ran down his neck and inside his coat, the rivulets of cold water flowing over his skin. He didn’t mind. It was good to feel something, anything, after all this time. He lay a hand on the rough stone.

‘Goodbye, old friend.’ With that, he slowly turned away from the grave and began the long walk home. And... BOOM! We are outta here! 160,000 words and this book is toast. See ya for the sequel, suckers...