I listed all those lines then sorted them alphabetically and just started writing, incorporating them into one linear story:
=================================================
A train ride back along the longest pier in the world, that's all Bill had asked for. At the end of their separate days at the coast, one train ride, no hanky-panky. He just wanted to sit next to her and tell her something. Was it a deal? He said. Ethel said she didn't know, but name the time. If she was there, then the answer was a yes.
All day Ethel had tried to make her mind up, but she was still confused. She had a very active mind – like photos going off. All day, all the time these photos had been coming into her head – Bill and her, her and Bill, her and Bill and Toby, (even her and Toby.) But as the day went on Bill had seemed more distant, barely real. She found it hard to believe that Bill would ever dump his best mate for her. Bill and Toby weren't just friends; they were inseparable. She must have seen them half a dozen times that day already, dodging the rain in their kiss-me-quick hats, once with fish and chips.
Ethel was with Geoff. Geoff meant well and she did enjoy his company, but last week she had told him, she couldn't see their friendship ever being more. Geoff had laughed, relieved. "Don't worry," he said. He told her that a few days ago he had finally realised he was destined for the single life. He just wasn't the marrying kind, and no woman would ever put up with his ways.
Yesterday, Bill must have followed Ethel home from the bank. She was only half-way to the bus-stop when he "accidentally" bumped into her. She had given him a hard time, of course. She knew how important it was to play hard to get, but he'd persisted. When he asked her if she was going on the village trip to the seaside she said yes but then added quickly, "With Geoff Smith from Accounts Received." Bill didn't bat an eyelid. "Good for you," he said. "I'm stuck with Toby." Then he made his little proposition. She left him hanging, but her eyes were still shining with delight all the way home.
Ethel was sitting down for her hake and chips and mushy peas lunch now, with Geoff, no newspaper wrappers for him, but in her head she was elsewhere. She was hearing her interview again, how nervous she'd got, how crazy she must have sounded: "I always keep my jewellery in the bread oven. I become restless just staying in one place for so long. I need a challenge. If things stay the same I get frustrated and then angry. I can feel the temper swell up inside of me. When I came here I didn't want to be spotted by any of my friends. Life is like a recipe. You have to think what ingredients you've got and make the most of them. I have finally found a recipe I can understand which is why I want this job. Loud? Yes I am. I frighten myself sometimes, I'm so loud. But that's what passion is, isn't it? Please give me the job."
She had had no idea what he really wanted but it was something and she'd have to pay her own way to London, rip up her roots. It would be at least a year and no chance of going home. Was there perhaps a boyfriend? he asked.
She wanted to shout out, "I had no roots until you came and rescued me. Really, I can't wait to see the world. Please?"
In the end Ethel still couldn't believe how horribly easy it had been. For once in her life she had thrown all caution to the wind, and just "gone for it". She had spoken from the heart and now look, a dream job. London, New York, Paris.
Sir Henry had asked her if she would just go out of the room for a minute, to let him think. Then he had called her back in, told her she was as mad-as-a-hatter but he was past caring. He smiled wearily and waved his hand in surrender. To Ethel that hand was like a magic wand. "I'm getting on now," Sir Henry said, "but there's life in the old dog yet. Thank God for your freshness and your honesty. I'm giving you the job because you wanted it so much."
Then Sir Henry told her he was giving a talk in town tonight. He could giver her a lift if she wanted one. "Great!" she said. He laughed and chattered most of the way. "I'm not sure the young mums know what to make of me. I think, because of the long white hair and the beard they expect something serious and learned but I'm still twenty in here." He had pointed to his chest, still laughing, then glanced up at his rear-view mirror.
Ethel had seen the Austin tailing them but Sir Henry didn't seem unduly worried. She had read somewhere that in the evenings he became a different person. He had surprised her already with his laughter, and now these confessions…
"A penny for them!" a voice said. Oh heck, Geoff! "Oh dear," she said. "I'm sorry Geoff. I didn't mean to be rude. But you know me. I have this quiet face but the inside of my head is full of words, pictures, ideas and dreams. I'm quite mad, really."
She looked down at her plate, the food half eaten, gone cold. Poor old Geoff, she thought. Why was it that "nice" never seemed to be enough? He was a mummy's boy, sweet, but ruined by too much care. Oh, she knew what Marjorie Smith would say if she confronted her. It was "her duty as a mother to protect her son", etc. Perhaps, but love is also about letting go, letting your loved ones grow wings.
Geoff was smiling. Somehow his hand crept had crept across the table and into hers and now warmed her hand, there between the salt-and-vinegar and next to the Heinz ketchup. "I'll be OK," he said, really. He raised a glass of Vimto. "To the old days!" he said. Ethel raised her glass and they clinked together, but she knew the old days had gone for ever.
=====================================
That was about two-thirds of the way but it's breaking my heart. The 'thickness/density/texture of the above, is of course, far too much for a womag story, but what you should realise is that in the above passage (all the same voice, yes?) comes from EXTRACTS FROM 31 DIFFERENT STORIES
How can the style, the voice, the rhythms from THIRTY-ONE stories be so effortlessly interchangeable?
THIRTY-ONE MEANINGLESS SAUSAGES.
Monday, 16 April 2007
A Very Special Set of prompts
Today, especially for you, some deep, meaningful, inspirational story prompts: any thoughts, or are you overwhelmed?
These are not ordinary prompts. These are not dumb lines cut from poems, not the words of dead letter-writers.
99% of these are specially selected (BY THE PUBLISHERS) and highlighted (BY THE PUBLISHERS) bolded, italic, in a different colour to "spice up" a story and to excite the reader into reading the story NOW.
These are selected from 31 Stories, all in the same "literary journal". To help the reader and aspiring writer all 31 stories have the same identical or near-identical voice, the same rhythm. It shouldn't be too difficult to combine ALL these prompts into one story if you felt so inclined.
Please note, despite the literary pleasure this et of prompts will bring you, I did NOT make the selection myself, did not decide to mine for diamonds. I repeat, these sentences were specially selected by the editors of this literary journal, bolded, coloured, italicised, for your delictation.
It was a hot morning in late July and the Everly Brothers' number-one hit, Bye Bye Love was blaring out over the fairground as the maintenance team inspected the rides before opening to the public.
Only a bully would pick on a young lad like that.
There was so much pain in his dark eyes.
She sighed as she looked around her perfect house. So why was she so dissatisfied?
I didn't want to be spotted by any of my friends.
Jimmy knew the old days had gone for ever
He must have followed me home from the bank
Dodging the rain in kiss-me-quick hats with fish and chips
A train ride back along the longest pier in the world
Molly put her arm round him and lay her head in his.
Bill and Toby weren't just friends; they were inseparable.
She was in shock. He'd be home from his travels in just hours - but were they truly made for each other?
All day she tried to make her mind up, but she was still confused.
All the time these photos have been coming he has seemed more distant
Silly to keep them she'd never use them again
Perhaps someone had taken a wrong turning in the dark
I always keep my jewellery in the bread oven.
He finally realised he was destined for the single life
Ken seemed oblivious to his lack of social skills
The phone call had changed everything
She recalled that 363 was shy and very young.
Why was the old bird sticking in her heels?
Jessica's hand crept into hers and warmed her hand
Her eyes were still shining with delight all the way home.
In the evenings he became a different person.
Suddenly the doors opened and out marched the chef
The story goes that one day the miller just vanished
They could feel a draught of fresh air coming from ahead of them.
She was getting her message across at last
The faint strains of Chopin wafted through the walls.
I'm getting on now, but there's life in the old dog yet
You try thinking of enough boys' names for 147 gnomes
Tom looked forlornly out the window.
I became restless just staying in one place for so long
Words that would tie me down for life came hurtling at me.
Tom was spellbound by the guitar
Geoff meant well and she did enjoy his company
Twice you could have used that triple-letter square
Think like your opponent and it's anyone's game.
Life was getting more of a struggle these days.
I was past caring - wearily I waved my magic wand.
There's only so much cleaning you can do.
I'm not sure the young mums knew what to make of me.
I had no roots until you and dad came and rescued me.
Saving up for the car had killed her social life
In her rear-view mirror she saw the Austin tailing them.
Katy hated plants, or rather they hated her. But all that was to change...
There I was, brought to my knees by houseplants
She'd lost her temper - literally! Downtrodden Denise just couldn't get angry until...
I can feel the temper swell up inside of me.
You can't imagine how it feels to be up there on stage
Suddenly, there he was, jitterbugging towards her.
It was her duty as a mother to protect her son
I frighten myself sometimes, I'm so loud.
I finally found a recipe I could understand
I had no idea what he wanted but I'd have to pay
Max had never seen anyone without teeth
I still couldn't believe how horribly easy it had been.
These are not ordinary prompts. These are not dumb lines cut from poems, not the words of dead letter-writers.
99% of these are specially selected (BY THE PUBLISHERS) and highlighted (BY THE PUBLISHERS) bolded, italic, in a different colour to "spice up" a story and to excite the reader into reading the story NOW.
These are selected from 31 Stories, all in the same "literary journal". To help the reader and aspiring writer all 31 stories have the same identical or near-identical voice, the same rhythm. It shouldn't be too difficult to combine ALL these prompts into one story if you felt so inclined.
Please note, despite the literary pleasure this et of prompts will bring you, I did NOT make the selection myself, did not decide to mine for diamonds. I repeat, these sentences were specially selected by the editors of this literary journal, bolded, coloured, italicised, for your delictation.
It was a hot morning in late July and the Everly Brothers' number-one hit, Bye Bye Love was blaring out over the fairground as the maintenance team inspected the rides before opening to the public.
Only a bully would pick on a young lad like that.
There was so much pain in his dark eyes.
She sighed as she looked around her perfect house. So why was she so dissatisfied?
I didn't want to be spotted by any of my friends.
Jimmy knew the old days had gone for ever
He must have followed me home from the bank
Dodging the rain in kiss-me-quick hats with fish and chips
A train ride back along the longest pier in the world
Molly put her arm round him and lay her head in his.
Bill and Toby weren't just friends; they were inseparable.
She was in shock. He'd be home from his travels in just hours - but were they truly made for each other?
All day she tried to make her mind up, but she was still confused.
All the time these photos have been coming he has seemed more distant
Silly to keep them she'd never use them again
Perhaps someone had taken a wrong turning in the dark
I always keep my jewellery in the bread oven.
He finally realised he was destined for the single life
Ken seemed oblivious to his lack of social skills
The phone call had changed everything
She recalled that 363 was shy and very young.
Why was the old bird sticking in her heels?
Jessica's hand crept into hers and warmed her hand
Her eyes were still shining with delight all the way home.
In the evenings he became a different person.
Suddenly the doors opened and out marched the chef
The story goes that one day the miller just vanished
They could feel a draught of fresh air coming from ahead of them.
She was getting her message across at last
The faint strains of Chopin wafted through the walls.
I'm getting on now, but there's life in the old dog yet
You try thinking of enough boys' names for 147 gnomes
Tom looked forlornly out the window.
I became restless just staying in one place for so long
Words that would tie me down for life came hurtling at me.
Tom was spellbound by the guitar
Geoff meant well and she did enjoy his company
Twice you could have used that triple-letter square
Think like your opponent and it's anyone's game.
Life was getting more of a struggle these days.
I was past caring - wearily I waved my magic wand.
There's only so much cleaning you can do.
I'm not sure the young mums knew what to make of me.
I had no roots until you and dad came and rescued me.
Saving up for the car had killed her social life
In her rear-view mirror she saw the Austin tailing them.
Katy hated plants, or rather they hated her. But all that was to change...
There I was, brought to my knees by houseplants
She'd lost her temper - literally! Downtrodden Denise just couldn't get angry until...
I can feel the temper swell up inside of me.
You can't imagine how it feels to be up there on stage
Suddenly, there he was, jitterbugging towards her.
It was her duty as a mother to protect her son
I frighten myself sometimes, I'm so loud.
I finally found a recipe I could understand
I had no idea what he wanted but I'd have to pay
Max had never seen anyone without teeth
I still couldn't believe how horribly easy it had been.
Sunday, 15 April 2007
Theme: TRUTH
Some more KB course notes.
When we talk about truth in writing, we do not mean “factual truth”. When a writer protests “but it really happened” it’s usually in response to criticism of the story. Hang on to the fact that real events hardly ever feel true.
One truth is the writer being truthful internally. He begins to write about a fictional marriage, realises that his story has taken him towards using a truth, some partially-real event, where (let’s use a crude example) he once coerced someone into sex. He becomes aware of guilt, an uncomfortable feeling, so changes the event to be more “palatable”.
This isn’t merely losing the truth. This is lying, cheating, distorting your very essence. If things rise up in your writing that make you feel horror or revulsion or guilt embrace them. They contain dynamic power, true weight and velocity. It is bad skirting the issue, even worse to stop writing, but to change it, that’s a sin, and as long as you do it, you will never write well.
Some of you have expressed concern when listing some of your demons. You “just don’t want to go there” or “people will not want to know my sordid secrets”.
Well, first, understand there is no absolute reason why you “must” use a real event. When we talk of truth we do not mean confession.
There may well be times when, effectively you will feel “for once” you are being honest and ‘telling it like it is”, but that does NOT have to be the case.
If certain events at a time in your past make you uncomfortable, I do not require you to prostrate yourself, wear sack-cloth and ashes or self-flagellate.
What matters is you FEEL these things. You go to the places where huge swelling elements of psychological power loom, swell up, and dominate your thinking, shape your everyday interactions.
Let me use a not-that-uncommon example of parentage. Perhaps you were fostered or you discover that “Daddy” wasn’t your real father. There are many possible combinations. It is highly likely that these fundamental facts about your early life DEFINE you. It may be that in some ways they severely limit you, even create at certain times crippling inhibitions.
Many writers misinterpret their teacher’s exhortations to “go there, work with it”. They react defensively. They “can’t do it”. They’ll be wrecked. It will “fuck them up”. That stuff is behind them. They worry about Pandora's Box.
But I am not interested (directly) in THEIR experiences. I do not CARE about their foster mother who drank or the real father who was violent. Very often “going there” if we go there directly, specifically, results in stilted work, crippled writing.
No, the trick is NOT to write about YOUR fostering, but to write "FICTION" about foster parents, lost children. People who are NOT you. I’d go so far as to say that the fiction will ALWAYS be stronger than stuff you call fact.
What we want to access is not the actualities, not the distorted memories, the layers of lies and adjustments. Instead, by writing “freely” about some other kid what we might get is (bulging out from within, through the prose) the truth of the PAIN.
It’s the pain, the pressure, the denials we use, NOT by confessing them but by articulating through angles. I, real, a boy, was left by a mother. I write perhaps of a man who left a girl. I USE my aches, use the dynamics, allow my voices to speak, let the hum come through. I’m relieved to be writing fiction and not worrying about MY life, but it’s the COLOUR of my life that comes through and strengthens the work.
Sometimes we can gain strength and power from openly REFUSING to speak, but by articulating the refusal and talking “away” from the subject (provided we have admitted the basic stance) we allow the reader to pick up the vibes, to articulate and amplify them.
One example of this is my story Not About Her Father.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. She writes about a fox.
The fox, it smells a little. It trots across ash, a black, com-stubbled field, heading for a thorn hedge. It sees, far-off a tractor, a driver, a ruddy man, oblivious, facing the wrong way, birds wheeling.
The fox, its stink, reaches the hedge. It urns, head low, haunches lifted, a gentle trot, tongue lolling, sniffing, waiting.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father.
She writes about sea-lions, walruses. She writes about shingle beaches, great fat, blubbery animals, slapping, banging into each other, deep roars, bang, bang, slap-slap, the blood, the splatter, fodder for Attenboroughs, flashed blood, weight, roars, the males, the males, until just one, the heaviest, the most determined.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. She writes about the fox.
The fox sees a pheasant, but the pheasant is in the open. The fox wonders if he can cross the field and kill the pheasant, but the sky is blue, the light is good, there is the tractor and its ruddy man. He will be seen.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. She writes for magazines.
She writes of Henry, he with the startling blue eyes. She writes of Sandra, misunderstood, trying to make a new life. She writes of chance meetings in gentle cafes, of hands touching accidentally, apologies, laughter, and of small obstacles and then, wonderful endings.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. Instead, when she writes, she writes to town councillors. She is severe. She writes about improper practices, about holes in the road and careless pavements, of danger, of old people who might break a limb. Did they know how many pensioners die after breaking a hip, do they?
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. When her class write to her, when they write for her, when they write, “Miss Hodges is firm but fair!” and when they write, “I will miss you Miss, here are some Quality Street, don’t eat them all at once.” She briefly wonders about their homes, about their fathers. But never has she said, “Today’s Essay, My Father!” She may ask for reflections on a cherry-stone, how to be a fish.
She may ask them, “Why is the sky blue, and is it blue at night?” She will suggest a mushroom, a teddy, to be a trifle, fly upside down in the rain, speculate. But please, no parent stories.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. Not even as the fox, the sly, slow fox trots now, intent, for he knows where a mother buries her babies, where the rabbit hides and the kittens whimper, thinking that, beneath their earth they are safe. They mew in silence, but the sly, stinking fox will hear, he hears. He trots closer, glancing away to the tractor, the man, the sky, the spinning, cawing birds.
To be a mushroom, a jellyfish, to float and to sail, to not be a bucket, I’d fail as a pail. I will be a banana, a ticket, some cream, I will write class-room ditties. I will not hear a scream.
The fox, not her father, digs up the kittens. He kills six, he eats one. He trots away, blood on his face, the last, a live kitten whimpering.
This is a simple idea. We know by saying this is NOT about her father that the reader presumes it is, brings his own inversion processes to the story, his own assumptions. A brilliant writer might use “metaphors’ which truly were not MEANT to be metaphors. Now the reader’s distortions will create power and three-dimensionality. The act of metaphorical connection brings power.
We can approach painful, confusing areas sometimes by over-emphasising the opposite (like Not About Her Father) or as here in “A Wonderful Man”.
My father had soft red hair, drawn back flat in the fashion of the day, light blue eyes, and a boyishly-shy eyes-down, head-tilted, disarming smile. He was handsome, wiry, muscled, and of average height and build, and his hands and fingernails were broken by twenty years of hammering steel. This story is true and I have to tell you, my father, he was a wonderful man.
Here we take a convention, an understanding, that we rarely talk in literature so directly. We use the idea that “the lady doth protest too much”. By saying, “This story is true and I have to tell you, my father, he was a wonderful man.” We give the strongest hint possible that it's not true.
When real events drive us and we know we should access them (I talk of events we know well) but we find that the events always screw with the writing - then we need to play tricks on ourselves. It was a man, write about a woman. It was a mother, write about the father. It was in 1965, could it happen in 1995? It is often suddenly liberating to “transpose and transport” events, especially those involving real living people.
I have already mentioned that sometimes the key is to write a total fiction, but every time you pause to think, you think not of the fiction but of the ache of the real, how it felt and what it meant. You may instead not write directly of the traumatic events but of the person BEFORE the event or long after. For example, writing of a murder victim or a rape victim, or a woman losing children in a fire, but NOT writing about the fire, the rape, the murder can have a powerful “feel-of-the-coming-weight” effect. Often the perceived “bravery” of avoiding the actual incident will lend the reader great confidence, and a perverse, inverted “trust”.
An example of this might be, a “light” eventless ramble about JFK in Dallas a few hours before the assassination, or an inconsequential spat involving Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dunkin Donuts. The strength here comes from NOT needing to mention the gunshots, the book repository, the grassy knoll.
The thing to remember in all these stories is that the incidents are not as crucial as the humanity they expose. Remember that when you wonder whether to search deep in your heart. What you did and what you said MAY be of interest, but what it all MEANT universally, how what you felt translates, THAT is where true power lies.
UNIVERSAL TRUTHS (but not clichés)
When we read something powerful and it hits us primitively, in the gut, through the gut, at a level we know MEANS something, there is a profound sense of “rightness”. The truth here is like revelation like a glimpse of God, or “what it’s all about”. I think we get that in Hall’s The Ledge and in Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
There’s a profound sense of the author hitting a life-statement so perfectly that it’s like a beam of light through a dark cloud.
When we investigate our own deeper thoughts, our memories, repressions, problems it’s all too easy (if we can access them at all) to sermonise or lecture. Suddenly we are pontificating and the message that comes over is “This is important because it happened to ME.”
We see this with other people’s holiday snaps. We see it with stories of teen angst (written by teens) and stories of ‘the first time” or “I was abused”.
It isn’t that in the hands of another, these stories cannot be interesting or important. The problem is that all too often the writer is boring and self-obsessed. What they have failed to grasp is that we need to find the universality, the empathising moments. It isn’t YOU (or me) who matters, or the specifics of the event, but what we and the events (and our reactions) REPRESENT.
So it isn’t MY sad menopausal, trundling life that is the point. It is the tragedy of ALL sad menopausal, trundling lives (if indeed they are tragic.) We must get the universal FROM the individual. Tell me about what it is to be alive.
Tell me about the human condition.
When we talk about truth in writing, we do not mean “factual truth”. When a writer protests “but it really happened” it’s usually in response to criticism of the story. Hang on to the fact that real events hardly ever feel true.
One truth is the writer being truthful internally. He begins to write about a fictional marriage, realises that his story has taken him towards using a truth, some partially-real event, where (let’s use a crude example) he once coerced someone into sex. He becomes aware of guilt, an uncomfortable feeling, so changes the event to be more “palatable”.
This isn’t merely losing the truth. This is lying, cheating, distorting your very essence. If things rise up in your writing that make you feel horror or revulsion or guilt embrace them. They contain dynamic power, true weight and velocity. It is bad skirting the issue, even worse to stop writing, but to change it, that’s a sin, and as long as you do it, you will never write well.
Some of you have expressed concern when listing some of your demons. You “just don’t want to go there” or “people will not want to know my sordid secrets”.
Well, first, understand there is no absolute reason why you “must” use a real event. When we talk of truth we do not mean confession.
There may well be times when, effectively you will feel “for once” you are being honest and ‘telling it like it is”, but that does NOT have to be the case.
If certain events at a time in your past make you uncomfortable, I do not require you to prostrate yourself, wear sack-cloth and ashes or self-flagellate.
What matters is you FEEL these things. You go to the places where huge swelling elements of psychological power loom, swell up, and dominate your thinking, shape your everyday interactions.
Let me use a not-that-uncommon example of parentage. Perhaps you were fostered or you discover that “Daddy” wasn’t your real father. There are many possible combinations. It is highly likely that these fundamental facts about your early life DEFINE you. It may be that in some ways they severely limit you, even create at certain times crippling inhibitions.
Many writers misinterpret their teacher’s exhortations to “go there, work with it”. They react defensively. They “can’t do it”. They’ll be wrecked. It will “fuck them up”. That stuff is behind them. They worry about Pandora's Box.
But I am not interested (directly) in THEIR experiences. I do not CARE about their foster mother who drank or the real father who was violent. Very often “going there” if we go there directly, specifically, results in stilted work, crippled writing.
No, the trick is NOT to write about YOUR fostering, but to write "FICTION" about foster parents, lost children. People who are NOT you. I’d go so far as to say that the fiction will ALWAYS be stronger than stuff you call fact.
What we want to access is not the actualities, not the distorted memories, the layers of lies and adjustments. Instead, by writing “freely” about some other kid what we might get is (bulging out from within, through the prose) the truth of the PAIN.
It’s the pain, the pressure, the denials we use, NOT by confessing them but by articulating through angles. I, real, a boy, was left by a mother. I write perhaps of a man who left a girl. I USE my aches, use the dynamics, allow my voices to speak, let the hum come through. I’m relieved to be writing fiction and not worrying about MY life, but it’s the COLOUR of my life that comes through and strengthens the work.
Sometimes we can gain strength and power from openly REFUSING to speak, but by articulating the refusal and talking “away” from the subject (provided we have admitted the basic stance) we allow the reader to pick up the vibes, to articulate and amplify them.
One example of this is my story Not About Her Father.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. She writes about a fox.
The fox, it smells a little. It trots across ash, a black, com-stubbled field, heading for a thorn hedge. It sees, far-off a tractor, a driver, a ruddy man, oblivious, facing the wrong way, birds wheeling.
The fox, its stink, reaches the hedge. It urns, head low, haunches lifted, a gentle trot, tongue lolling, sniffing, waiting.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father.
She writes about sea-lions, walruses. She writes about shingle beaches, great fat, blubbery animals, slapping, banging into each other, deep roars, bang, bang, slap-slap, the blood, the splatter, fodder for Attenboroughs, flashed blood, weight, roars, the males, the males, until just one, the heaviest, the most determined.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. She writes about the fox.
The fox sees a pheasant, but the pheasant is in the open. The fox wonders if he can cross the field and kill the pheasant, but the sky is blue, the light is good, there is the tractor and its ruddy man. He will be seen.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. She writes for magazines.
She writes of Henry, he with the startling blue eyes. She writes of Sandra, misunderstood, trying to make a new life. She writes of chance meetings in gentle cafes, of hands touching accidentally, apologies, laughter, and of small obstacles and then, wonderful endings.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. Instead, when she writes, she writes to town councillors. She is severe. She writes about improper practices, about holes in the road and careless pavements, of danger, of old people who might break a limb. Did they know how many pensioners die after breaking a hip, do they?
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. When her class write to her, when they write for her, when they write, “Miss Hodges is firm but fair!” and when they write, “I will miss you Miss, here are some Quality Street, don’t eat them all at once.” She briefly wonders about their homes, about their fathers. But never has she said, “Today’s Essay, My Father!” She may ask for reflections on a cherry-stone, how to be a fish.
She may ask them, “Why is the sky blue, and is it blue at night?” She will suggest a mushroom, a teddy, to be a trifle, fly upside down in the rain, speculate. But please, no parent stories.
What she doesn’t do is write about her father. Not even as the fox, the sly, slow fox trots now, intent, for he knows where a mother buries her babies, where the rabbit hides and the kittens whimper, thinking that, beneath their earth they are safe. They mew in silence, but the sly, stinking fox will hear, he hears. He trots closer, glancing away to the tractor, the man, the sky, the spinning, cawing birds.
To be a mushroom, a jellyfish, to float and to sail, to not be a bucket, I’d fail as a pail. I will be a banana, a ticket, some cream, I will write class-room ditties. I will not hear a scream.
The fox, not her father, digs up the kittens. He kills six, he eats one. He trots away, blood on his face, the last, a live kitten whimpering.
This is a simple idea. We know by saying this is NOT about her father that the reader presumes it is, brings his own inversion processes to the story, his own assumptions. A brilliant writer might use “metaphors’ which truly were not MEANT to be metaphors. Now the reader’s distortions will create power and three-dimensionality. The act of metaphorical connection brings power.
We can approach painful, confusing areas sometimes by over-emphasising the opposite (like Not About Her Father) or as here in “A Wonderful Man”.
My father had soft red hair, drawn back flat in the fashion of the day, light blue eyes, and a boyishly-shy eyes-down, head-tilted, disarming smile. He was handsome, wiry, muscled, and of average height and build, and his hands and fingernails were broken by twenty years of hammering steel. This story is true and I have to tell you, my father, he was a wonderful man.
Here we take a convention, an understanding, that we rarely talk in literature so directly. We use the idea that “the lady doth protest too much”. By saying, “This story is true and I have to tell you, my father, he was a wonderful man.” We give the strongest hint possible that it's not true.
When real events drive us and we know we should access them (I talk of events we know well) but we find that the events always screw with the writing - then we need to play tricks on ourselves. It was a man, write about a woman. It was a mother, write about the father. It was in 1965, could it happen in 1995? It is often suddenly liberating to “transpose and transport” events, especially those involving real living people.
I have already mentioned that sometimes the key is to write a total fiction, but every time you pause to think, you think not of the fiction but of the ache of the real, how it felt and what it meant. You may instead not write directly of the traumatic events but of the person BEFORE the event or long after. For example, writing of a murder victim or a rape victim, or a woman losing children in a fire, but NOT writing about the fire, the rape, the murder can have a powerful “feel-of-the-coming-weight” effect. Often the perceived “bravery” of avoiding the actual incident will lend the reader great confidence, and a perverse, inverted “trust”.
An example of this might be, a “light” eventless ramble about JFK in Dallas a few hours before the assassination, or an inconsequential spat involving Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dunkin Donuts. The strength here comes from NOT needing to mention the gunshots, the book repository, the grassy knoll.
The thing to remember in all these stories is that the incidents are not as crucial as the humanity they expose. Remember that when you wonder whether to search deep in your heart. What you did and what you said MAY be of interest, but what it all MEANT universally, how what you felt translates, THAT is where true power lies.
UNIVERSAL TRUTHS (but not clichés)
When we read something powerful and it hits us primitively, in the gut, through the gut, at a level we know MEANS something, there is a profound sense of “rightness”. The truth here is like revelation like a glimpse of God, or “what it’s all about”. I think we get that in Hall’s The Ledge and in Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
There’s a profound sense of the author hitting a life-statement so perfectly that it’s like a beam of light through a dark cloud.
When we investigate our own deeper thoughts, our memories, repressions, problems it’s all too easy (if we can access them at all) to sermonise or lecture. Suddenly we are pontificating and the message that comes over is “This is important because it happened to ME.”
We see this with other people’s holiday snaps. We see it with stories of teen angst (written by teens) and stories of ‘the first time” or “I was abused”.
It isn’t that in the hands of another, these stories cannot be interesting or important. The problem is that all too often the writer is boring and self-obsessed. What they have failed to grasp is that we need to find the universality, the empathising moments. It isn’t YOU (or me) who matters, or the specifics of the event, but what we and the events (and our reactions) REPRESENT.
So it isn’t MY sad menopausal, trundling life that is the point. It is the tragedy of ALL sad menopausal, trundling lives (if indeed they are tragic.) We must get the universal FROM the individual. Tell me about what it is to be alive.
Tell me about the human condition.
THEME: Narrowing the Field
Someone read this blog, then sent me this, some old course handout of mine from a Kingfisher Barn course
Think of a water slide. Every ride appears different, exciting, yet think of the science that shapes the passage of the person or boat. There is randomness within control; there is variation within parameters. What looks wild is in fact directed. In the case of the slide it has to be for safety’s sake.
If you know the intent of your story, you know the start and end points of your water ride. Your intent, (the meaning you wish to transmit, the theme of your story, what it “says”) is like the sides of the slide. The more you move away from the central direction, the greater is the force pushing you back on track.
One of the reasons so many Boot Campers struggle with this concept is that they don’t manage to ; articulate; a theme. They head off into the darkness with vague statements like, “I wanted to write about proper treatment of animals” (not a theme) or “I wanted to examine sexual coercion in marriage” (also not a theme).
If the author had wanted to say “Treating animals badly makes a man a beast and leads to degradation” then the author has a theme (and, incidentally a plot. If the second author had wanted to say, “Sexual coercion in marriage leads to emptiness, bitterness and death” again, there is a clear point to the story, a definite “residue’ and we know many things about the plot.
I am constantly amazed at how vague people are when approaching a story.
We should think of a story as anecdotal support for a belief. We SHOW that racial prejudice is bad, by writing a story involving it. We highlight the evils of child-abuse by writing a story about it.
Now would we enter a debate on race without an opinion? Would we discuss child abuse without an opinion, discuss rape without an opinion? Why then enter the dangerous territory of characters doing their own thing if we don’t have a definite opinion, a real intent?
I remember Lexie’s story Dominion because it jumps around, almost grabbing a theme then running from it. Had the author chosen one core theme and driven the story with it, then she would have a powerful story.
Meredith Twp Evans and His Butty Ernie the Egg.
Note the title places Twp Evans first despite the fact that Ernie is the central character. I had some plot, a vague “life-history” but a life-history is not a STORY. What I also needed was what this particular history said about the human condition. I write a fair amount about ballistic fate and about destiny, about people sent to guide us. The family-history rumour (untrue, I suspect) gave me the idea of Twp and it was the idea of Twp’s pervasive presence, his influence that gave me the key to the story and its shape.
Ernie was relatively passive. He is taken on by, taught, shaped, protected then saved by Twp. But even that is not enough. The two final nails come when after the disaster Twp asks Ernie is he going back underground. Only when he hears Ernie say, “No.” can Twp walk off, effectively into the sunset.
The story effectively finishes there. I used the wartime stuff, the shooting, the recovery to bring the story back to the opening, to remind us again about fate and to allow Ernie to mention Twp again. (Remember that Twp means stupid).
That’s how I became Ernie the Egg and wealthy, but I have been under the ground and I have been shot for my country. I limp of course, money can’t cure that, but I have a daughter and now a grandson, Meredith. I like to walk and I like the sweetness of the air on top of the mountain. I do not like the dark but most times it cannot rain hard enough to disturb me. When it does, I wait in the lee of a mountain and rest, thinking myself twp for being out without a coat. And I wonder about Meredith Evans, collier, but he is gone.
In Ballistics I was dealing with an incident (throwing the keys into a child’s eye) but that is an EVENT. Think how 99.9 of beginners would approach this story. They would have a couple fighting, and this lovely-wuvvly, itsy-bitsy, such-a-pretty-likkle-girl hovering, just WAITING to be zapped. The olds would fight, and right at the death he would throw the keys, and, “Oh, No!” they are going to hit the child. The beginner imagines an ACTION is important, so withholds it for dramatic effect and kills the story.
Instead I asked myself about that half-second when the keys were in the air. I thought about how the total precision of the trajectory, the air temperature, wind, weight of the keys, air resistance, how I threw them, the split-second I threw them, how my wife reached up (and then withdrew her hand), how all these things had to combine in utter perfection to blind the child.
I am personally unable to see that as chance. It was ‘meant’ to happen and it is that, the ballistic nature of the actions, the dramas that brought all the people to this point, then heritage and so on.
Much of the story is reportage, and it is mostly various truths, combinations and recombinations, but it’s still very much a fictional construction. The daughter’s future is discussed (as the keys fly) and the story closes with them (father-daughter) coming to an understanding, not forgiveness or love, these are not the issues, but understanding, as the daughter, now a woman herself realises that the world is not as simple as it’s painted and the power of onrushing love is overwhelming. So she asks him, did he love her? (referring to the father's affair, that begat the rows, that begat the throwing of the keys…)
Now for the next quarter second of your life you can see perfectly, but you aren’t yet old enough to see what happens around you, only what happens to you and because of you. You will be six before you hear the word Ruth, eight before you understand who she was, and not until you are fifteen will you have the courage to ask your father was it her, did she cause all the anger, was she the hand that guided his?
His eyes will fill up. He will try to hold you but will feel awkward because you look and act like a woman now. “No,” he will say, “It was me, and me alone. Ruth was before you were born; your mother couldn’t let it go.”
When you ask your father “Did you love her. Dad?” and he says, “Do you mean Ruth?” all you will do is nod and at first he will nod. Then he will take a breath and tell you he loved her completely, absolutely, hopelessly. He will stand, go over to the window and look out. You will not be sure if he is crying but you will be old enough to wait for him to turn round. You glance at your reflection in a tiny mirror you carry and adjust your eye.
What matters here is of course I had material but what “made’ the story was finding the shape, the construction, the voice and attitude to make it truly meaningful . It is this universality, this example of human frailty that takes the story away from being crude drama and into something resonant and lasting. But as always it’s created by asking the question, “Why am I writing this? What is it that aches? What is it calls out to me? Why should anyone care about this? What is it that I’m trying to say?”
And this weekend and another twenty weekends, what you will search for is the core of you, what you are and what it is you are trying to say, then, specific to each story, and here?
Think of a water slide. Every ride appears different, exciting, yet think of the science that shapes the passage of the person or boat. There is randomness within control; there is variation within parameters. What looks wild is in fact directed. In the case of the slide it has to be for safety’s sake.
If you know the intent of your story, you know the start and end points of your water ride. Your intent, (the meaning you wish to transmit, the theme of your story, what it “says”) is like the sides of the slide. The more you move away from the central direction, the greater is the force pushing you back on track.
One of the reasons so many Boot Campers struggle with this concept is that they don’t manage to ; articulate; a theme. They head off into the darkness with vague statements like, “I wanted to write about proper treatment of animals” (not a theme) or “I wanted to examine sexual coercion in marriage” (also not a theme).
If the author had wanted to say “Treating animals badly makes a man a beast and leads to degradation” then the author has a theme (and, incidentally a plot. If the second author had wanted to say, “Sexual coercion in marriage leads to emptiness, bitterness and death” again, there is a clear point to the story, a definite “residue’ and we know many things about the plot.
I am constantly amazed at how vague people are when approaching a story.
We should think of a story as anecdotal support for a belief. We SHOW that racial prejudice is bad, by writing a story involving it. We highlight the evils of child-abuse by writing a story about it.
Now would we enter a debate on race without an opinion? Would we discuss child abuse without an opinion, discuss rape without an opinion? Why then enter the dangerous territory of characters doing their own thing if we don’t have a definite opinion, a real intent?
I remember Lexie’s story Dominion because it jumps around, almost grabbing a theme then running from it. Had the author chosen one core theme and driven the story with it, then she would have a powerful story.
Meredith Twp Evans and His Butty Ernie the Egg.
Note the title places Twp Evans first despite the fact that Ernie is the central character. I had some plot, a vague “life-history” but a life-history is not a STORY. What I also needed was what this particular history said about the human condition. I write a fair amount about ballistic fate and about destiny, about people sent to guide us. The family-history rumour (untrue, I suspect) gave me the idea of Twp and it was the idea of Twp’s pervasive presence, his influence that gave me the key to the story and its shape.
Ernie was relatively passive. He is taken on by, taught, shaped, protected then saved by Twp. But even that is not enough. The two final nails come when after the disaster Twp asks Ernie is he going back underground. Only when he hears Ernie say, “No.” can Twp walk off, effectively into the sunset.
The story effectively finishes there. I used the wartime stuff, the shooting, the recovery to bring the story back to the opening, to remind us again about fate and to allow Ernie to mention Twp again. (Remember that Twp means stupid).
That’s how I became Ernie the Egg and wealthy, but I have been under the ground and I have been shot for my country. I limp of course, money can’t cure that, but I have a daughter and now a grandson, Meredith. I like to walk and I like the sweetness of the air on top of the mountain. I do not like the dark but most times it cannot rain hard enough to disturb me. When it does, I wait in the lee of a mountain and rest, thinking myself twp for being out without a coat. And I wonder about Meredith Evans, collier, but he is gone.
In Ballistics I was dealing with an incident (throwing the keys into a child’s eye) but that is an EVENT. Think how 99.9 of beginners would approach this story. They would have a couple fighting, and this lovely-wuvvly, itsy-bitsy, such-a-pretty-likkle-girl hovering, just WAITING to be zapped. The olds would fight, and right at the death he would throw the keys, and, “Oh, No!” they are going to hit the child. The beginner imagines an ACTION is important, so withholds it for dramatic effect and kills the story.
Instead I asked myself about that half-second when the keys were in the air. I thought about how the total precision of the trajectory, the air temperature, wind, weight of the keys, air resistance, how I threw them, the split-second I threw them, how my wife reached up (and then withdrew her hand), how all these things had to combine in utter perfection to blind the child.
I am personally unable to see that as chance. It was ‘meant’ to happen and it is that, the ballistic nature of the actions, the dramas that brought all the people to this point, then heritage and so on.
Much of the story is reportage, and it is mostly various truths, combinations and recombinations, but it’s still very much a fictional construction. The daughter’s future is discussed (as the keys fly) and the story closes with them (father-daughter) coming to an understanding, not forgiveness or love, these are not the issues, but understanding, as the daughter, now a woman herself realises that the world is not as simple as it’s painted and the power of onrushing love is overwhelming. So she asks him, did he love her? (referring to the father's affair, that begat the rows, that begat the throwing of the keys…)
Now for the next quarter second of your life you can see perfectly, but you aren’t yet old enough to see what happens around you, only what happens to you and because of you. You will be six before you hear the word Ruth, eight before you understand who she was, and not until you are fifteen will you have the courage to ask your father was it her, did she cause all the anger, was she the hand that guided his?
His eyes will fill up. He will try to hold you but will feel awkward because you look and act like a woman now. “No,” he will say, “It was me, and me alone. Ruth was before you were born; your mother couldn’t let it go.”
When you ask your father “Did you love her. Dad?” and he says, “Do you mean Ruth?” all you will do is nod and at first he will nod. Then he will take a breath and tell you he loved her completely, absolutely, hopelessly. He will stand, go over to the window and look out. You will not be sure if he is crying but you will be old enough to wait for him to turn round. You glance at your reflection in a tiny mirror you carry and adjust your eye.
What matters here is of course I had material but what “made’ the story was finding the shape, the construction, the voice and attitude to make it truly meaningful . It is this universality, this example of human frailty that takes the story away from being crude drama and into something resonant and lasting. But as always it’s created by asking the question, “Why am I writing this? What is it that aches? What is it calls out to me? Why should anyone care about this? What is it that I’m trying to say?”
And this weekend and another twenty weekends, what you will search for is the core of you, what you are and what it is you are trying to say, then, specific to each story, and here?
Creative Writing Myths
Recently, some of my Boot Campers attended a writing weekend, and at one lecture they were told “Open short stories with dialogue!” They were also told that 60% of womag stories were dialogue and that using ‘said” was a huge no-no, better to use animal-type speech tags like purred and growled.
I say recently (but the steam is still coming out of my ears) but in a later discussion with some of the Boot Campers (drinking champagne in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral) I questioned, not just this as advice, but in terms of the actuality, the empirical facts.
I have seen (and was taught) “Open with a bang”, “Start in media res”, “Use lots of dialogue”. Barely weeks ago I read these items as “cardinal virtues’ on a web site (after the web-site had been recommended on yet another web-site!)
The point then is two-fold. Is the advice good or bad (or restricted to one or more genres)? Or is it plain wrong whatever genre we investigate?
Oops, there’s a third point – does “advice’ of whatever veracity get carelessly extended into areas for which it was never intended? There’s a problem here, and that’s how repetition and embedded quotation can solidify myths into facts.
I like to visit Lundy Island, a haven of peace in the Bristol Channel, Once I remember reading, in a serious book, that “A million ships a year sail past Lundy.’ It was only weeks later that the number finally hit home (after I had gone to use it in a university lecture) and I thought, “HOW many?”
Simple sums. That many ships per year meant 2,740 ships per day passing the island to dock in really, a small number of ports, some of which in their heyday could only berth 20-30 ships. The number was way, way wrong. The simplest thought should have told us that AT LEAST 114 ships an hour were sailing by. So why should the “fact” be in more than one academic book?
Repetition and weak reading! In all probability someone wrote “a million ships have passed Lundy’s shores” or “a million tonnes of shipping pass the island”. One mis-quotation, a few reinforcements and bingo, we have a fact.
So I have looked, first at short-stories, at literary shorts, at general fiction shorts, then at ‘womag” shorts, coffee-break stories often with simple twists in the tail.
What percentage of stories are dialogue? FACTS!
What percentage of stories open with dialogue? FACTS!
How often do stories open with a big bang? FACTS!
Can stories, even popular, non-literary stories sell without the big-bang and dialogue openers?
So I looked at one hundred stories from womags. The bottom end of the writing world, the highest incidence (by far) of dialogue openers and yet even there, just 28% opened with dialogue, NONE began with a big bang, about 60% opened in media res but in a very gentle, often genteel way. As for 60% of the story should be dialogue - Really? I found just 15 in the 100 had anything like half dialogue.
UPDATE
I've just picked up "Fiction Feast" (April 2007) 13 stories, THREE open with dialogue.
That's 23%
Or "Yours" (same month) 31 All New Stories. And just 8 are dialogue openers 26%.
The combined total 11/44 just 25% AND THIS IS THE GENRE MOST LIKELY TO HAVE DIALOGUE OPENERS, the cheapest, most-throw-way genre there is.
My little survey (adding in the initial hundred) shows 39/144 = 27% so the original 28% seems to hold.
So, very simply. What those speakers said? UNTRUE.
Now what happens when we move away from womag writing. I looked at copies of Peninsular, Ashes, World Wide Writers all mid-range, from light fiction to semi-serious fiction but hardly “high-lit”.
The figures were 16% beginning with dialogue, 2% big bang, 80% in media res and just 11% that were over half dialogue.
Looking towards more serious fiction, in Best American Short Stories, working backwards from BASS 2003 (and looking at BASS of the century) the incidence of dialogue openings is very small, under 5%. Big bang beginnings are even rarer and almost no stories were 60% dialogue. After a while I barely scanned the stories as this became so obvious.
So let’s see what we have:
DO BB IMR 60?
27 00 60 15 womag sample
16 02 80 11 general fiction sample
00 04 55 02 literary fiction sample
15 02 65 09 overall
So, despite the admonitions of these lecturers (where do they get their numbers, the sky?) the facts are that across all fiction less than one sixth of stories open with dialogue, less than 10% of stories are over 50% dialogue (never mind their much vaunted 60%).
And what about “Open with a bang”? Well they (big bang openers) are about as common as rocking-horse droppings! When I looked for in media res openings I found things much more difficult. Often an opening would interest me and I’d put a tick in the IMR box but often, in fact, it was not “action’ but language, or setting or voice which attracted me. The 66% quoted there is probably nearer 50%, but someone else can decide.
So what conclusions can we make? First, don’t trust my figures! Do your own survey, of whatever field you’re interested in. Whatever that field is I KNOW that you’ll discover these three statements:
Always open with dialogue.
60% of a short story should be dialogue.
Open with a bang,
Are simply WRONG. Even when we talk of a very formulaic market such as womags, the figures and the admonitions of ‘experts” simply don’t tally.
The truth is an opening should interest the reader. Complicated isn’t it? The opening should catch our eye, get our ear, but not crudely, not in some over the top, exaggerated way but ‘cleverly’, subtly, even sneakily.
Dialogue can help a story zip by, can give it ‘air and space” but how much is the key question. It is most certainly NOT “at least 60%. It’s not 50%.
It’s whatever the story requires to be right. In some stories that was no dialogue or a few bare lines. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle it was 99%. In many womag stories it looked to be 20-40%, in some not a lot at all. But don’t take my word for it, instead, do your research.
Better still, forget formulas and write to move people, or to entertain, and write what feels good and wholesome to you, what would please YOU.
In the end it’s the words, and the heart of the writer, not some damn bean-counter, or worse, someone who is passing on (through a photocopy darkly) misinformation that simply doesn’t tally with the reality when you check what’s on the shelf.
Alex
I say recently (but the steam is still coming out of my ears) but in a later discussion with some of the Boot Campers (drinking champagne in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral) I questioned, not just this as advice, but in terms of the actuality, the empirical facts.
I have seen (and was taught) “Open with a bang”, “Start in media res”, “Use lots of dialogue”. Barely weeks ago I read these items as “cardinal virtues’ on a web site (after the web-site had been recommended on yet another web-site!)
The point then is two-fold. Is the advice good or bad (or restricted to one or more genres)? Or is it plain wrong whatever genre we investigate?
Oops, there’s a third point – does “advice’ of whatever veracity get carelessly extended into areas for which it was never intended? There’s a problem here, and that’s how repetition and embedded quotation can solidify myths into facts.
I like to visit Lundy Island, a haven of peace in the Bristol Channel, Once I remember reading, in a serious book, that “A million ships a year sail past Lundy.’ It was only weeks later that the number finally hit home (after I had gone to use it in a university lecture) and I thought, “HOW many?”
Simple sums. That many ships per year meant 2,740 ships per day passing the island to dock in really, a small number of ports, some of which in their heyday could only berth 20-30 ships. The number was way, way wrong. The simplest thought should have told us that AT LEAST 114 ships an hour were sailing by. So why should the “fact” be in more than one academic book?
Repetition and weak reading! In all probability someone wrote “a million ships have passed Lundy’s shores” or “a million tonnes of shipping pass the island”. One mis-quotation, a few reinforcements and bingo, we have a fact.
So I have looked, first at short-stories, at literary shorts, at general fiction shorts, then at ‘womag” shorts, coffee-break stories often with simple twists in the tail.
What percentage of stories are dialogue? FACTS!
What percentage of stories open with dialogue? FACTS!
How often do stories open with a big bang? FACTS!
Can stories, even popular, non-literary stories sell without the big-bang and dialogue openers?
So I looked at one hundred stories from womags. The bottom end of the writing world, the highest incidence (by far) of dialogue openers and yet even there, just 28% opened with dialogue, NONE began with a big bang, about 60% opened in media res but in a very gentle, often genteel way. As for 60% of the story should be dialogue - Really? I found just 15 in the 100 had anything like half dialogue.
UPDATE
I've just picked up "Fiction Feast" (April 2007) 13 stories, THREE open with dialogue.
That's 23%
Or "Yours" (same month) 31 All New Stories. And just 8 are dialogue openers 26%.
The combined total 11/44 just 25% AND THIS IS THE GENRE MOST LIKELY TO HAVE DIALOGUE OPENERS, the cheapest, most-throw-way genre there is.
My little survey (adding in the initial hundred) shows 39/144 = 27% so the original 28% seems to hold.
So, very simply. What those speakers said? UNTRUE.
Now what happens when we move away from womag writing. I looked at copies of Peninsular, Ashes, World Wide Writers all mid-range, from light fiction to semi-serious fiction but hardly “high-lit”.
The figures were 16% beginning with dialogue, 2% big bang, 80% in media res and just 11% that were over half dialogue.
Looking towards more serious fiction, in Best American Short Stories, working backwards from BASS 2003 (and looking at BASS of the century) the incidence of dialogue openings is very small, under 5%. Big bang beginnings are even rarer and almost no stories were 60% dialogue. After a while I barely scanned the stories as this became so obvious.
So let’s see what we have:
DO BB IMR 60?
27 00 60 15 womag sample
16 02 80 11 general fiction sample
00 04 55 02 literary fiction sample
15 02 65 09 overall
So, despite the admonitions of these lecturers (where do they get their numbers, the sky?) the facts are that across all fiction less than one sixth of stories open with dialogue, less than 10% of stories are over 50% dialogue (never mind their much vaunted 60%).
And what about “Open with a bang”? Well they (big bang openers) are about as common as rocking-horse droppings! When I looked for in media res openings I found things much more difficult. Often an opening would interest me and I’d put a tick in the IMR box but often, in fact, it was not “action’ but language, or setting or voice which attracted me. The 66% quoted there is probably nearer 50%, but someone else can decide.
So what conclusions can we make? First, don’t trust my figures! Do your own survey, of whatever field you’re interested in. Whatever that field is I KNOW that you’ll discover these three statements:
Always open with dialogue.
60% of a short story should be dialogue.
Open with a bang,
Are simply WRONG. Even when we talk of a very formulaic market such as womags, the figures and the admonitions of ‘experts” simply don’t tally.
The truth is an opening should interest the reader. Complicated isn’t it? The opening should catch our eye, get our ear, but not crudely, not in some over the top, exaggerated way but ‘cleverly’, subtly, even sneakily.
Dialogue can help a story zip by, can give it ‘air and space” but how much is the key question. It is most certainly NOT “at least 60%. It’s not 50%.
It’s whatever the story requires to be right. In some stories that was no dialogue or a few bare lines. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle it was 99%. In many womag stories it looked to be 20-40%, in some not a lot at all. But don’t take my word for it, instead, do your research.
Better still, forget formulas and write to move people, or to entertain, and write what feels good and wholesome to you, what would please YOU.
In the end it’s the words, and the heart of the writer, not some damn bean-counter, or worse, someone who is passing on (through a photocopy darkly) misinformation that simply doesn’t tally with the reality when you check what’s on the shelf.
Alex
An Old Story
This was one of mine published in The New Welsh Review about a hundred years ago
BLOOD RED WALLS, GLEAMING WHITE DADO
This was once Miss Honeybone's bedroom, a cheap fawn carpet, walls cream but dirty, smeared with age. When they moved in, after Miss Honeybone had gone to a wardened apartment the other side of town, it was the only room they felt they could sleep in. Now it wasn't a bedroom, it had no thin carpet; the floor was bare boards, stained dark oak and then polished, and the walls were blood red with a gleaming white dado rail.
The bath had cost more than his first house, big enough to die in, white as a communion dress. At one end a spotlight let him read, at the other a circle of glass let his wife shower quickly before she escaped to work. He would put his little table, the notepad, the pencil next to the bath, then, as the water ran, foaming some pretty oils his wife had said would help him think, he would go downstairs, grab the bottle, the wineglass, and return.
He had been blocked now for three months, thirteen weeks where not only could he not sit there and type, but not even the desire came, not even those glimmering, shimmering ideas. He had found he was sleeping a lot, drifting away during some daytime TV show, waking during another.
He had begun working out - once he'd been a serious runner - but he found the walk to the gym, the steps, weights, treadmill and swim, not only ate his time but made his gut feel odd. Often he felt desperate to shit, filled up, but when he found a toilet nothing happened. But he had decided to wear the discomfort, and the strange sensations in his lower stomach. He was sure it was the change in routine, the extra exercise, and that his body would settle down again. Today was like any other day.
Ruth was away - a conference in Dallas - and he'd slugged out of bed and made it to the gym. Once when he'd been fit, starting out as a writer, he used to talk about how his running blew the crud away, how long slow distance was cleansing, how the forest, the dark green avenues, the mulch underfoot was a mantra, how then, then, his head had not been full of fat. He had decided that he would write again when he was thirty pounds lighter.
Today, before the gym he'd wanted to go, but couldn't. Half-way through warming up on a static bike the feeling came again, but again he couldn't. He was sane enough then to smile wryly, considering he was now doubly-blocked. It was later, on the treadmill, just two eight-minute miles, that he had the shooting cramp and thought he was about to explode.
But that was then, this now, and now, the pain abated, he was going to bathe. There was just this pressure, the sense of swollen waste in his bowel, of the fat clogging his head, of his useless arthritic fingers, of sleep calling.
He opened the taps wide, threw in the stuff Ruth had bought, watched the oils turn to foam and a smell like vanilla - like lavender - whisper around his head. A thought came to him - a flash - his first wife getting ready to go away after the wedding, changing, and for a moment stood there in light like wooden slats, dust motes glinting in the air and she, shy, looking up to smile, knowing just what she looked like, what she did to him, in fresh-for-the day white lace underwear. Their marriage had lasted three years, the image, the vision, less than a second, but now he remembered - one swelling second of richness against the thousand days of staying alive, waiting for life to begin.
As he went downstairs for his wine - red, white now upset his stomach and gave him heartburn - he felt in the air for that moment, that split-second when he had seen Kathy lifted up, framed by sunlight, exalted. The image wouldn't quite come back and he knew he had never been that to anyone, and he knew that for him to even feel an approximation of that glory had taken the artificiality of his sports, the gleam of passion from going beyond himself, the pure gorilla moments, the displays, the haka, the roaring thing which came after a game, a goal, when he was so on fire he was a strutting baboon, rainbow-dicked, his teeth-bared, white.
He went back upstairs, bottle and glass, thinking, wondering where Kathy was now, where any love was now. The bath rumbled.
They had been in the house fifteen months and from the beginning he had thrown himself head-first at it, clattering down lath-and-plaster walls filthy with horse-hair and a black, cancerous, choking dust, sledgehammering stone walls, navvying trenches across the garden, ripping out the guts of the house for electrician's, for plumbers, for dry-rot experts, and decorators. The house had ached and creaked as he disturbed it, as he defiled it, and in the night its ghosts moved.
He had only seen one, but high in the middle of the day, not at night, as he built a bookcase on the ground floor, and she, a quiet, dark-haired girl dressed like one of the Railway Children had not stayed long enough to smile. He had shaken his head and dismissed her as his own tiredness.
Now he was only thinking of Kathy, the women in his life, of the sunlit razor-thin instants that had made him, the aches and strains that sucked and pulled him into being a writer, his house, the walls and cupboards that made him. He undressed and stepped into the bath.
The water was soft, kissed by a machine in the basement, now silky, almost sensual, wrapping him. When he had the time, like now, he would wallow and lie back, lifting his fingers to feel the softenesses hush through them, even the water-splash different, softness into softness. His gut ached again and the wrong feeling of fullness surged back. He turned to the table, the cabernet sauvignon, and filled the dry glass.
Kathy; he could remember their first time, on the cold floor of a hut. He had been angry, something said as they danced somewhere, and she, seizing the moment, had taken him by the hand, walked him into the cold, kissed him and said, "Let's find somewhere." But afterwards she had said "Now don't expect that to happen every night."
The memory made him smile, despite the pain and fullness, but he realised this was descriptive, articulated, memory, something he retold himself. It wasn't the moment, the vision, the light, the absolute clarity of Kathy, his wedding-day bedroom. He knew that was something else, something purer, something altogether of a higher order, like the plant-seeds sticking to his navy-blue coat as he climbed from a train-wreck on a December morning, an image still so instantaneous he could smell sparks, feel the slip of thawed mud, hear London murmuring so near, so far, taste car-fumes.
He drank the wine quickly, looking for the narrow lands between a sterile consciousness and a useless intoxication. There was a window of opportunity, just beyond half-a-bottle where sometimes he found a portal into himself, out of himself, where he knew the vivid moments hid, like the girl-ghost, not to be looked at, where the extra words breathed, as long as you didn't listen too hard, where if he pretended not to notice it, his soul lost the ability to hide, where veils fell away. He sought that now, the place found by not looking, the words which only came if you didn't listen, the insights, the finenesses, the narrow moments impossible to call up.
And it was now that he started to bleed.
Deep in him he thought there had been a pop. Once, running a marathon he had heard and felt just such a pop and seconds later a blister on the other foot went too, and he was squelching the streets of London in his own blood. This was the same, except there was some relieving of pressure, as if his whole inside had moved an inch, and the water, faint lilac, bubbles white, turned red, the froth pinking like life escaping from a lung-wound.
He thought, "Oh," fascinated by the colour of his insides outside, the lack of pain, the peculiar sexuality of his leaking tainting the bath.
He was sure that such a royal red must signal danger, and there would come a moment when he might feel scared, but the inter-twirling patterns, swirling, gorgeous, reds into purple, purples and blue, and here, from between his legs, not often, but occasionally, tiny blubs of oily, joy-bright redness, flopping through the silk to the surface and bursting silently, becoming water - all this, was material, incident, Kathy, the train.
There was a moment when he thought perhaps he was dying here, a slight exhilaration, but he reflected, fascinated, on the lack of pain, the approaching - he knew - feathery mind which would let him see, the sweet detachment. He leaned, as carefully as he knew how, trying not to disturb the water, his blood, and poured more red wine - this is my blood - and he remembered, the real crisp truth of pure recall - could see - his priest, the one staring glass eye, the white stubble of his chin, the look he had not seen then, never seen so clearly as now, the fear, disgust of the man for those he gave the body of Christ.
He would use that, he felt sure; but as he lifted his glass, tilted it, he felt a little wine spill, a dribble of red on his chin, but it was not red, not real red, not blood-red, not the red of these walls, God red against the shining, gleaming white dados, not the gush and bubble bright red of arterial blood. Now he saw the wine was corrupted, blue, at best blackcurrant, ersatz in the true world of true red.
Now he could feel the wine working, the gentle, subtle lift off the pedal, the moment when control relaxed but rules were still held near. He waited to hear lines without listening, opening lines, dialogue. Without paying attention he wished for images, the Kathy-moments, to smell musk, but not just smell it, know it, and he waited…
for a different Ruth, crying as she read a poem, a Caesarean scar, a slash and yet so beautiful; a swimming-pool glinting behind a hotel near a road in summer, the sky he sat in once, floating above loping rays, Florida sand, white as a floodlight; his mother, proud, his father still able to walk, a solo goal, glorious, yellow shirts, arms, legs, black shorts, but nothing touching him, someone's soft green eyes, the stretchers, limp faces filthy with orange antiseptic - seeds sticking to his coat, someone's soft eyes, a shade of green, a hotel bedroom, sun slatting, dust, fairy dust, and fresh and new for the day, Kathy, surrendered white, Kathy, rising from the far end of the bath now, where the circle of glass lets his wife shower.
He feels peculiar but he thinks, "I'm not angry," and Kathy says, "Let's go find somewhere." He can see her eyes and he knows there's no word for that green. "No promises," she says.
1,900 words
BLOOD RED WALLS, GLEAMING WHITE DADO
This was once Miss Honeybone's bedroom, a cheap fawn carpet, walls cream but dirty, smeared with age. When they moved in, after Miss Honeybone had gone to a wardened apartment the other side of town, it was the only room they felt they could sleep in. Now it wasn't a bedroom, it had no thin carpet; the floor was bare boards, stained dark oak and then polished, and the walls were blood red with a gleaming white dado rail.
The bath had cost more than his first house, big enough to die in, white as a communion dress. At one end a spotlight let him read, at the other a circle of glass let his wife shower quickly before she escaped to work. He would put his little table, the notepad, the pencil next to the bath, then, as the water ran, foaming some pretty oils his wife had said would help him think, he would go downstairs, grab the bottle, the wineglass, and return.
He had been blocked now for three months, thirteen weeks where not only could he not sit there and type, but not even the desire came, not even those glimmering, shimmering ideas. He had found he was sleeping a lot, drifting away during some daytime TV show, waking during another.
He had begun working out - once he'd been a serious runner - but he found the walk to the gym, the steps, weights, treadmill and swim, not only ate his time but made his gut feel odd. Often he felt desperate to shit, filled up, but when he found a toilet nothing happened. But he had decided to wear the discomfort, and the strange sensations in his lower stomach. He was sure it was the change in routine, the extra exercise, and that his body would settle down again. Today was like any other day.
Ruth was away - a conference in Dallas - and he'd slugged out of bed and made it to the gym. Once when he'd been fit, starting out as a writer, he used to talk about how his running blew the crud away, how long slow distance was cleansing, how the forest, the dark green avenues, the mulch underfoot was a mantra, how then, then, his head had not been full of fat. He had decided that he would write again when he was thirty pounds lighter.
Today, before the gym he'd wanted to go, but couldn't. Half-way through warming up on a static bike the feeling came again, but again he couldn't. He was sane enough then to smile wryly, considering he was now doubly-blocked. It was later, on the treadmill, just two eight-minute miles, that he had the shooting cramp and thought he was about to explode.
But that was then, this now, and now, the pain abated, he was going to bathe. There was just this pressure, the sense of swollen waste in his bowel, of the fat clogging his head, of his useless arthritic fingers, of sleep calling.
He opened the taps wide, threw in the stuff Ruth had bought, watched the oils turn to foam and a smell like vanilla - like lavender - whisper around his head. A thought came to him - a flash - his first wife getting ready to go away after the wedding, changing, and for a moment stood there in light like wooden slats, dust motes glinting in the air and she, shy, looking up to smile, knowing just what she looked like, what she did to him, in fresh-for-the day white lace underwear. Their marriage had lasted three years, the image, the vision, less than a second, but now he remembered - one swelling second of richness against the thousand days of staying alive, waiting for life to begin.
As he went downstairs for his wine - red, white now upset his stomach and gave him heartburn - he felt in the air for that moment, that split-second when he had seen Kathy lifted up, framed by sunlight, exalted. The image wouldn't quite come back and he knew he had never been that to anyone, and he knew that for him to even feel an approximation of that glory had taken the artificiality of his sports, the gleam of passion from going beyond himself, the pure gorilla moments, the displays, the haka, the roaring thing which came after a game, a goal, when he was so on fire he was a strutting baboon, rainbow-dicked, his teeth-bared, white.
He went back upstairs, bottle and glass, thinking, wondering where Kathy was now, where any love was now. The bath rumbled.
They had been in the house fifteen months and from the beginning he had thrown himself head-first at it, clattering down lath-and-plaster walls filthy with horse-hair and a black, cancerous, choking dust, sledgehammering stone walls, navvying trenches across the garden, ripping out the guts of the house for electrician's, for plumbers, for dry-rot experts, and decorators. The house had ached and creaked as he disturbed it, as he defiled it, and in the night its ghosts moved.
He had only seen one, but high in the middle of the day, not at night, as he built a bookcase on the ground floor, and she, a quiet, dark-haired girl dressed like one of the Railway Children had not stayed long enough to smile. He had shaken his head and dismissed her as his own tiredness.
Now he was only thinking of Kathy, the women in his life, of the sunlit razor-thin instants that had made him, the aches and strains that sucked and pulled him into being a writer, his house, the walls and cupboards that made him. He undressed and stepped into the bath.
The water was soft, kissed by a machine in the basement, now silky, almost sensual, wrapping him. When he had the time, like now, he would wallow and lie back, lifting his fingers to feel the softenesses hush through them, even the water-splash different, softness into softness. His gut ached again and the wrong feeling of fullness surged back. He turned to the table, the cabernet sauvignon, and filled the dry glass.
Kathy; he could remember their first time, on the cold floor of a hut. He had been angry, something said as they danced somewhere, and she, seizing the moment, had taken him by the hand, walked him into the cold, kissed him and said, "Let's find somewhere." But afterwards she had said "Now don't expect that to happen every night."
The memory made him smile, despite the pain and fullness, but he realised this was descriptive, articulated, memory, something he retold himself. It wasn't the moment, the vision, the light, the absolute clarity of Kathy, his wedding-day bedroom. He knew that was something else, something purer, something altogether of a higher order, like the plant-seeds sticking to his navy-blue coat as he climbed from a train-wreck on a December morning, an image still so instantaneous he could smell sparks, feel the slip of thawed mud, hear London murmuring so near, so far, taste car-fumes.
He drank the wine quickly, looking for the narrow lands between a sterile consciousness and a useless intoxication. There was a window of opportunity, just beyond half-a-bottle where sometimes he found a portal into himself, out of himself, where he knew the vivid moments hid, like the girl-ghost, not to be looked at, where the extra words breathed, as long as you didn't listen too hard, where if he pretended not to notice it, his soul lost the ability to hide, where veils fell away. He sought that now, the place found by not looking, the words which only came if you didn't listen, the insights, the finenesses, the narrow moments impossible to call up.
And it was now that he started to bleed.
Deep in him he thought there had been a pop. Once, running a marathon he had heard and felt just such a pop and seconds later a blister on the other foot went too, and he was squelching the streets of London in his own blood. This was the same, except there was some relieving of pressure, as if his whole inside had moved an inch, and the water, faint lilac, bubbles white, turned red, the froth pinking like life escaping from a lung-wound.
He thought, "Oh," fascinated by the colour of his insides outside, the lack of pain, the peculiar sexuality of his leaking tainting the bath.
He was sure that such a royal red must signal danger, and there would come a moment when he might feel scared, but the inter-twirling patterns, swirling, gorgeous, reds into purple, purples and blue, and here, from between his legs, not often, but occasionally, tiny blubs of oily, joy-bright redness, flopping through the silk to the surface and bursting silently, becoming water - all this, was material, incident, Kathy, the train.
There was a moment when he thought perhaps he was dying here, a slight exhilaration, but he reflected, fascinated, on the lack of pain, the approaching - he knew - feathery mind which would let him see, the sweet detachment. He leaned, as carefully as he knew how, trying not to disturb the water, his blood, and poured more red wine - this is my blood - and he remembered, the real crisp truth of pure recall - could see - his priest, the one staring glass eye, the white stubble of his chin, the look he had not seen then, never seen so clearly as now, the fear, disgust of the man for those he gave the body of Christ.
He would use that, he felt sure; but as he lifted his glass, tilted it, he felt a little wine spill, a dribble of red on his chin, but it was not red, not real red, not blood-red, not the red of these walls, God red against the shining, gleaming white dados, not the gush and bubble bright red of arterial blood. Now he saw the wine was corrupted, blue, at best blackcurrant, ersatz in the true world of true red.
Now he could feel the wine working, the gentle, subtle lift off the pedal, the moment when control relaxed but rules were still held near. He waited to hear lines without listening, opening lines, dialogue. Without paying attention he wished for images, the Kathy-moments, to smell musk, but not just smell it, know it, and he waited…
for a different Ruth, crying as she read a poem, a Caesarean scar, a slash and yet so beautiful; a swimming-pool glinting behind a hotel near a road in summer, the sky he sat in once, floating above loping rays, Florida sand, white as a floodlight; his mother, proud, his father still able to walk, a solo goal, glorious, yellow shirts, arms, legs, black shorts, but nothing touching him, someone's soft green eyes, the stretchers, limp faces filthy with orange antiseptic - seeds sticking to his coat, someone's soft eyes, a shade of green, a hotel bedroom, sun slatting, dust, fairy dust, and fresh and new for the day, Kathy, surrendered white, Kathy, rising from the far end of the bath now, where the circle of glass lets his wife shower.
He feels peculiar but he thinks, "I'm not angry," and Kathy says, "Let's go find somewhere." He can see her eyes and he knows there's no word for that green. "No promises," she says.
1,900 words
Stats Update 08:00 Sunday
CRITS
6-6-5-5-4-3
all need 8 crits by Monday Midnight
Subs for the month 85 (we should be on 105)
alx
6-6-5-5-4-3
all need 8 crits by Monday Midnight
Subs for the month 85 (we should be on 105)
alx
THEME: Shoot the Bloody Rhino
Last night I watched some explanatory material, about the making of "Gladiator" and we saw how three specific things turned an action B-Movie into a very good film that appealed to women as much as men, and on the way saved at least three million dollars, losing something that, had it been in the film, would have attracted a lot of "Ooooh-Aahhh" superficial attention, yet obviously was utterly unnecessary, and very probably would have weakened the film.
The "plot" of the film, despite, is simple. A Roman general escapes assassination but not in time to save his wife and child. He sees their bodies. Before he can avenge them (if he could) he is almost killed and becomes a slave-gladiator. He has no wish to fight but once he does, he becomes a near-invincible fighter, and here the plot is nihilistic.
Eventually, as he rises through the ranks (as a killer) he ends up in Rome and in the arena, where first he is masked and then confronts the Emperor. The Emperor secretly wounds him, they fight, the hero wins, but dies. Then, crucially, we see him "transported" to be in Elysium with his family again.
OK so far?
But what the background material tells us is three or four things. First, the "take" on the film was to NOT be "historical" but to aim for a contemporary sensibility. One writer actually spoke of it being Los Angeles as seen from 1,000 years in the future.
Second, they brought in a playwright not a screen-writer who worked on the set-piece dialogue scenes and made them "heavier" almost Shakespearian. This we see added "weight" and profundity to the whole.
Third (and this might seem to us the most important element) a third writer was brought into the movie. The first two writers, producers, directors, actors all knew the script "somehow didn't quite work", but why?
The new writer identified plot holes, issues, but fundamentally he said, the film was about a man wanting to kill (a revenge movie), whereas he wanted to see a film about love something that lifted the spirit.
If the wife and child lived, there were all sorts of plot difficulties, but if they lived ON ie they were dead but in Heaven "waiting", the gladiator's journey was now to be with them again. He was "going home", something simple, deep, basic, fundamental, human, identifiable, universal.
If the gladiator is incomplete, alive but without his loved ones he becomes complete by dying. But our sensibilities are that despite this, he could not just take poison (he's a hero, a gladiator, after all.) We need his death to mean something.
If we sense his nihilism (now explained) and then an inevitable moving towards the meeting with the emperor (and face it, we all know the gladiator will win, the emperor lose), but also sense that this is the gladiator "going home" (honourably) the death becomes a victory "and they all live happily ever after".
So the "colour and sensibility" of the script needed to change, and it was changed.
But here is the crucial element for us writers of fiction. The change was of TONE and it was there from the absolute start.
The start was a great battle scene, but we did not start with action, but with humanity. There are moments of near-softness before we see the general as a killing machine. We see him thinking, feeling, see him look at a Robin and marvel at it. Before the battle he walks before the men almost as their mate, a buddy, punching shoulders etc. His transition is almost from "poet" to warrior and in steps, but if we start as "warrior" and then try to add in, "but he's really a soft, sensitive guy" our commonplace preconceptions stop us truly taking his softer side on board.
The story will be about reaching Elysium, so why not a pretty bird, a moment of calm, an "easy" image which can be casual, profound, metaphorical or any shades thereof depending on the reader.
And before the battle the main character actually speaks of the idea of dying and being in Elysium (to his men) but crucially it is spoken of as positive, as achievement (which is how the film ends.)
Not surprisingly, the Romans win, and the Emperor (the good one) asks what he can give his general. Again, reinforcing the theme, the general says, "Let me go home?"
When the third (and crucial) writer talked to camera he continued and explained how the motif "going home" is brought up "quietly" at spots throughout the story. The gladiator talks to a black slave/gladiator, again a family man whose sole aim in life is to go home.
One third of the way through the film we see a transportation/floating "almost to Elysium" scene (when the general almost dies and is captured). The scene is brilliant because it is real and factual (transported over the ground) while also being metaphorical (almost out of body etc) and foreshadowing a near-identical last few shots when the general finally makes it to see his family.
Thus adding texture and strength to dialogue "meated up" the story. Adding a certain tone at the start which threaded through the story gave it both backbone, a leit motif and a certain aura, a sensibility (which said this is not merely a fight movie but more) and foreshadowing made the end even more believable as we had almost gone there before.
Lastly, that bloody rhino!
Oh, yes, it would have made dramatic action. (It would also have cost $3,000,000). And the director was excited, he wanted to do it. Why? For dramatic reasons, for theme, for artistic integrity? Nope. Just that he had always wanted to do a rhino. As it happened, the rhino was dropped.
Question, how would the rhino-fight have made a difference to the feel, the meaning, the sensibility we are left with?
Answer. Not only would it not have added a thing, it would have detracted from the whole because it would be big and distracting and saying to us, "this is so big, it must matter" when in fact it was just a boy with a toy.
Ask, of your work, where are my rhinos? Do I have this element in my story purely because either (a) I fancy it or (b) I think it's "interesting" or "exciting"?
That isn't the question.
The question is first, is it necessary, second does it make the work stronger, does it enhance the meaning?
Simpler is almost always better.
Focus on the heart, find the story's soul, kill your darlings.
Shoot the bloody rhino.
1109
The "plot" of the film, despite, is simple. A Roman general escapes assassination but not in time to save his wife and child. He sees their bodies. Before he can avenge them (if he could) he is almost killed and becomes a slave-gladiator. He has no wish to fight but once he does, he becomes a near-invincible fighter, and here the plot is nihilistic.
Eventually, as he rises through the ranks (as a killer) he ends up in Rome and in the arena, where first he is masked and then confronts the Emperor. The Emperor secretly wounds him, they fight, the hero wins, but dies. Then, crucially, we see him "transported" to be in Elysium with his family again.
OK so far?
But what the background material tells us is three or four things. First, the "take" on the film was to NOT be "historical" but to aim for a contemporary sensibility. One writer actually spoke of it being Los Angeles as seen from 1,000 years in the future.
Second, they brought in a playwright not a screen-writer who worked on the set-piece dialogue scenes and made them "heavier" almost Shakespearian. This we see added "weight" and profundity to the whole.
Third (and this might seem to us the most important element) a third writer was brought into the movie. The first two writers, producers, directors, actors all knew the script "somehow didn't quite work", but why?
The new writer identified plot holes, issues, but fundamentally he said, the film was about a man wanting to kill (a revenge movie), whereas he wanted to see a film about love something that lifted the spirit.
If the wife and child lived, there were all sorts of plot difficulties, but if they lived ON ie they were dead but in Heaven "waiting", the gladiator's journey was now to be with them again. He was "going home", something simple, deep, basic, fundamental, human, identifiable, universal.
If the gladiator is incomplete, alive but without his loved ones he becomes complete by dying. But our sensibilities are that despite this, he could not just take poison (he's a hero, a gladiator, after all.) We need his death to mean something.
If we sense his nihilism (now explained) and then an inevitable moving towards the meeting with the emperor (and face it, we all know the gladiator will win, the emperor lose), but also sense that this is the gladiator "going home" (honourably) the death becomes a victory "and they all live happily ever after".
So the "colour and sensibility" of the script needed to change, and it was changed.
But here is the crucial element for us writers of fiction. The change was of TONE and it was there from the absolute start.
The start was a great battle scene, but we did not start with action, but with humanity. There are moments of near-softness before we see the general as a killing machine. We see him thinking, feeling, see him look at a Robin and marvel at it. Before the battle he walks before the men almost as their mate, a buddy, punching shoulders etc. His transition is almost from "poet" to warrior and in steps, but if we start as "warrior" and then try to add in, "but he's really a soft, sensitive guy" our commonplace preconceptions stop us truly taking his softer side on board.
The story will be about reaching Elysium, so why not a pretty bird, a moment of calm, an "easy" image which can be casual, profound, metaphorical or any shades thereof depending on the reader.
And before the battle the main character actually speaks of the idea of dying and being in Elysium (to his men) but crucially it is spoken of as positive, as achievement (which is how the film ends.)
Not surprisingly, the Romans win, and the Emperor (the good one) asks what he can give his general. Again, reinforcing the theme, the general says, "Let me go home?"
When the third (and crucial) writer talked to camera he continued and explained how the motif "going home" is brought up "quietly" at spots throughout the story. The gladiator talks to a black slave/gladiator, again a family man whose sole aim in life is to go home.
One third of the way through the film we see a transportation/floating "almost to Elysium" scene (when the general almost dies and is captured). The scene is brilliant because it is real and factual (transported over the ground) while also being metaphorical (almost out of body etc) and foreshadowing a near-identical last few shots when the general finally makes it to see his family.
Thus adding texture and strength to dialogue "meated up" the story. Adding a certain tone at the start which threaded through the story gave it both backbone, a leit motif and a certain aura, a sensibility (which said this is not merely a fight movie but more) and foreshadowing made the end even more believable as we had almost gone there before.
Lastly, that bloody rhino!
Oh, yes, it would have made dramatic action. (It would also have cost $3,000,000). And the director was excited, he wanted to do it. Why? For dramatic reasons, for theme, for artistic integrity? Nope. Just that he had always wanted to do a rhino. As it happened, the rhino was dropped.
Question, how would the rhino-fight have made a difference to the feel, the meaning, the sensibility we are left with?
Answer. Not only would it not have added a thing, it would have detracted from the whole because it would be big and distracting and saying to us, "this is so big, it must matter" when in fact it was just a boy with a toy.
Ask, of your work, where are my rhinos? Do I have this element in my story purely because either (a) I fancy it or (b) I think it's "interesting" or "exciting"?
That isn't the question.
The question is first, is it necessary, second does it make the work stronger, does it enhance the meaning?
Simpler is almost always better.
Focus on the heart, find the story's soul, kill your darlings.
Shoot the bloody rhino.
1109
A Writer is...
Why would anyone read the stories in women's magazines?
More worrying, why does anyone WRITE them? What is it about the people who read shallow, trite, thin, copycat-character trivia that allows editors to puke out such trash year upon year upon year?
Is it for the money? Do people really believe this stuff?
I once spoke to a womag rubbish-operative (she used the term writer) who told me she would write a story (I use the term lightly) then she said:
I write it in first person, I write it in third, I change a few names, I change the setting. Sometimes I change the point of view. One story with a few changes I can place four, five, six times, no problem.
And this is writing? At least prostitution you get to meet people!
Would I write for women's magazines? Yes. But then if I could get £500 a week kissing old women I'd do that too, as long as I had time for REAL writing. What amazes me, horrifies me, and most importantly SADDENS me is that some of these pfaff machines actually believe they are writing; they call themselves "writers" in just the same way as Shakespeare was a writer, Dickens, in the same way as Raymond Carver who could cut your heart out with a story, pass it to you, still beating, was a writer; like Alice Munro is a writer. They think, "Tea With George" where the neat twist is George is a cat, is on the same planet as Sargent's "The Ledge", that the discovered secret letter story should be spoken of in the same hushed breath as Nathan Englander's The 27th Man. It beggar's belief!
Obviously, the problem here is in definitions. I wish womag stories were illegal and their readers and writers were put in a sack, the top tied tightly with wire (I'll do it, gleefully) and then, dropped, with relish, into the nearest canal, but meanwhile, what about the word "Writer".
Are all people who write "writers"? Are Saul Bellow and Jackie Faye GoLightly*, Queen of the Cat Story just two sides of the same diamond or is Bellow the great mountain and dear Jackie the slime under the rock?
I asked recently, is someone who thinks up birthday card rhymes:
Today is your birthday
Hip hip hip hooray
So I'm sending you this card
Many happy returns of the day
A POET?
Is this person a WRITER? Does their job description say WRITER? Does the card company advertise for "Nobel Prize Winner (may accept Pulitzer or Booker nominees) required to create beautiful art for our cards?"
Will this writer's gravestone say writer? Does it say writer on his passport, will he be buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey?
The answer is no.
So if this person, who produces verse, pfaff by the shedload for shipping out is NOT a writer, then haven't we at least reached an understanding that word-stringing alone does not make a writer, published or not?
I define writer, whether publicly acclaimed or aspiring to be, as someone who looks into their heart, the hearts of others, someone who knows that bad things happen, that pain is real and may be beautiful, someone who wants, just once, to reach out and touch the inside of someone, to linger there for an emotional hour, to stay with a person, deep within them for ever, and I do mean forever, because if you change a man's soul you affect everyone he sees, and touches, you affect his children.
I believe there should be a law which rounds up anyone who wishes to write five minute coffee break stories.
They should be locked in a room and made to read Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, Rob Stone's Under The Pitons, stories like Affairs of the Heart; The Ledge; Differently; Cathedral; The Things They Carried; A Well- Lighted Place; The Dwarf; That Evening Sun Go Down; Tumblers; Best American Short Stories of the Century.
They should be made to read William Trevor, Anton Chekov, and at least half a dozen stories by Hemingway, by F Scott Fitzgerald. They should be starved of food and water, and given just one thing, good stories, true stories, and the light to read them by.
These people should know, in all probability they will die. One at a time they should be taken from the room, screaming, and later, while they all sit around saying "but nothing happens in a Carver story" or "where's the surprise ending?" or "I want to be cheered up!" a shot should ring out.
In fact, we don't kill them. When these "writers" are taken away, we take them to a soft, gentle room, the walls vanilla, delicate. We give them a nice meal, their favourite drink. We let them shower and change. We put sweet music on a fine player.
We sit them down, we give them one story, Raymond Carver's "A Small Good Thing".
If they cry, they go free.
** a totally made-up name but knowing my luck there probably is someone called that contacting her lawyer as we speak.
More worrying, why does anyone WRITE them? What is it about the people who read shallow, trite, thin, copycat-character trivia that allows editors to puke out such trash year upon year upon year?
Is it for the money? Do people really believe this stuff?
I once spoke to a womag rubbish-operative (she used the term writer) who told me she would write a story (I use the term lightly) then she said:
I write it in first person, I write it in third, I change a few names, I change the setting. Sometimes I change the point of view. One story with a few changes I can place four, five, six times, no problem.
And this is writing? At least prostitution you get to meet people!
Would I write for women's magazines? Yes. But then if I could get £500 a week kissing old women I'd do that too, as long as I had time for REAL writing. What amazes me, horrifies me, and most importantly SADDENS me is that some of these pfaff machines actually believe they are writing; they call themselves "writers" in just the same way as Shakespeare was a writer, Dickens, in the same way as Raymond Carver who could cut your heart out with a story, pass it to you, still beating, was a writer; like Alice Munro is a writer. They think, "Tea With George" where the neat twist is George is a cat, is on the same planet as Sargent's "The Ledge", that the discovered secret letter story should be spoken of in the same hushed breath as Nathan Englander's The 27th Man. It beggar's belief!
Obviously, the problem here is in definitions. I wish womag stories were illegal and their readers and writers were put in a sack, the top tied tightly with wire (I'll do it, gleefully) and then, dropped, with relish, into the nearest canal, but meanwhile, what about the word "Writer".
Are all people who write "writers"? Are Saul Bellow and Jackie Faye GoLightly*, Queen of the Cat Story just two sides of the same diamond or is Bellow the great mountain and dear Jackie the slime under the rock?
I asked recently, is someone who thinks up birthday card rhymes:
Today is your birthday
Hip hip hip hooray
So I'm sending you this card
Many happy returns of the day
A POET?
Is this person a WRITER? Does their job description say WRITER? Does the card company advertise for "Nobel Prize Winner (may accept Pulitzer or Booker nominees) required to create beautiful art for our cards?"
Will this writer's gravestone say writer? Does it say writer on his passport, will he be buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey?
The answer is no.
So if this person, who produces verse, pfaff by the shedload for shipping out is NOT a writer, then haven't we at least reached an understanding that word-stringing alone does not make a writer, published or not?
I define writer, whether publicly acclaimed or aspiring to be, as someone who looks into their heart, the hearts of others, someone who knows that bad things happen, that pain is real and may be beautiful, someone who wants, just once, to reach out and touch the inside of someone, to linger there for an emotional hour, to stay with a person, deep within them for ever, and I do mean forever, because if you change a man's soul you affect everyone he sees, and touches, you affect his children.
I believe there should be a law which rounds up anyone who wishes to write five minute coffee break stories.
They should be locked in a room and made to read Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, Rob Stone's Under The Pitons, stories like Affairs of the Heart; The Ledge; Differently; Cathedral; The Things They Carried; A Well- Lighted Place; The Dwarf; That Evening Sun Go Down; Tumblers; Best American Short Stories of the Century.
They should be made to read William Trevor, Anton Chekov, and at least half a dozen stories by Hemingway, by F Scott Fitzgerald. They should be starved of food and water, and given just one thing, good stories, true stories, and the light to read them by.
These people should know, in all probability they will die. One at a time they should be taken from the room, screaming, and later, while they all sit around saying "but nothing happens in a Carver story" or "where's the surprise ending?" or "I want to be cheered up!" a shot should ring out.
In fact, we don't kill them. When these "writers" are taken away, we take them to a soft, gentle room, the walls vanilla, delicate. We give them a nice meal, their favourite drink. We let them shower and change. We put sweet music on a fine player.
We sit them down, we give them one story, Raymond Carver's "A Small Good Thing".
If they cry, they go free.
** a totally made-up name but knowing my luck there probably is someone called that contacting her lawyer as we speak.
Sunday Prompts
use these for poetry prompts, also
Circular Sore
Everyone suddenly burst out singing
Permanganate
It has been said I sometimes lie, or bend he truth
Broccoli
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable not
Zinc
I sit in one of the dives on fifty-second street
True
The effect of red, red wine
Almost true
My father and my mother never quarrelled
Bambi
Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood
Carousel
We stepped into the lift, the two of us, alone
Light
An Englishman, An Irishman, A Romanian
Anagram
You carry on as best you can, the task of being
Rugby
Two Sunblest vans and an elephant Mrs, I'm peckish
Perspire
The way mist rises of a swamp
Heroes
End of a season, end of a play, no-one left
Chick
The Land of the Last Biscuit, Odd Sock.
Lit
Where and when exactly did we first have sex
Blossom
It's only a week, but already you are sleeping
Lilac
Life is a house in ruins. And we mean to fix it up
Circular Sore
Everyone suddenly burst out singing
Permanganate
It has been said I sometimes lie, or bend he truth
Broccoli
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable not
Zinc
I sit in one of the dives on fifty-second street
True
The effect of red, red wine
Almost true
My father and my mother never quarrelled
Bambi
Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood
Carousel
We stepped into the lift, the two of us, alone
Light
An Englishman, An Irishman, A Romanian
Anagram
You carry on as best you can, the task of being
Rugby
Two Sunblest vans and an elephant Mrs, I'm peckish
Perspire
The way mist rises of a swamp
Heroes
End of a season, end of a play, no-one left
Chick
The Land of the Last Biscuit, Odd Sock.
Lit
Where and when exactly did we first have sex
Blossom
It's only a week, but already you are sleeping
Lilac
Life is a house in ruins. And we mean to fix it up
Saturday, 14 April 2007
Surprise!
Had to vacuum and stuff (guests round tonight) but one-two of this morning's prompts started ringing in my head and out popped a dark poem about my childhood: Sleeping Lions.
260 words. 563 words on a non-writing day, that's very cool!
19,215 Words Total April 14th 10:55
5,215 Words ahead of schedule
260 words. 563 words on a non-writing day, that's very cool!
19,215 Words Total April 14th 10:55
5,215 Words ahead of schedule
Busy day
Finishing Crits and out at noon, so not much time,
but managed a half-decent draft of a poem,
so the engine is still running.
(crits are now 4-4-3-3-2-2)
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
6,797 Words Thursday (Stories, Article, Story)
0,200 Words Friday (Poem)
0,300 Words Saturday (Poem)
18,955 Words Total April 14th 09:55
4,955 Words ahead of schedule
but managed a half-decent draft of a poem,
so the engine is still running.
(crits are now 4-4-3-3-2-2)
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
6,797 Words Thursday (Stories, Article, Story)
0,200 Words Friday (Poem)
0,300 Words Saturday (Poem)
18,955 Words Total April 14th 09:55
4,955 Words ahead of schedule
Story & Poetry Prompts, Saturday
Sacrament
Six in a sack, drowning, and calling out clichés
No Milk Today. No, One Extra!
Hard Disc Issues
My father at the dictionary-stand, touches the page and weeps
Blackened Bread Pudding
And every day do you grow old, and I?
PEAS
After the pantomime, carrying you back to the car
How she would chew her belly-pork
And now I have a dog called Elederly
The Thomases Have a Car!
My eldest sister arrived home that morning
Crying in St Mary's
It was like keeping a puppy in your underpants
SLUT
What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?
With the cool slick glass between us
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
My father's old blue cardigan
A night with lions, trying not to move
A spoonful of chocolate tapioca
It has floated away down a dark, mythological river
Nearby, the tractors and the cutters drip oil
Six in a sack, drowning, and calling out clichés
No Milk Today. No, One Extra!
Hard Disc Issues
My father at the dictionary-stand, touches the page and weeps
Blackened Bread Pudding
And every day do you grow old, and I?
PEAS
After the pantomime, carrying you back to the car
How she would chew her belly-pork
And now I have a dog called Elederly
The Thomases Have a Car!
My eldest sister arrived home that morning
Crying in St Mary's
It was like keeping a puppy in your underpants
SLUT
What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?
With the cool slick glass between us
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
My father's old blue cardigan
A night with lions, trying not to move
A spoonful of chocolate tapioca
It has floated away down a dark, mythological river
Nearby, the tractors and the cutters drip oil
BC STATS UPDATE April 14th
I'm now nearer 60 than any other birthday
This session gets us up to 106 Primary Stories posted
Stories posted late Friday Night. 4-3-2-1-1-1 crits by 07:40 Saturday
A TC story at Glass Fire gets us to 31 actual publications for the year.
A humorous story taken by Defenestration takes the hit count to 56
16 prizes this year 3 FIRSTS, 2 Runner-Up, 1 Third, 10 other named finalists
alx
This session gets us up to 106 Primary Stories posted
Stories posted late Friday Night. 4-3-2-1-1-1 crits by 07:40 Saturday
A TC story at Glass Fire gets us to 31 actual publications for the year.
A humorous story taken by Defenestration takes the hit count to 56
16 prizes this year 3 FIRSTS, 2 Runner-Up, 1 Third, 10 other named finalists
alx
Friday, 13 April 2007
Early Start, But SOMETHING!
Most of today in hospital I should think, so up early, post some prompts and squeeze out a poem:
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
6,797 Words Thursday (Stories, Article, Story)
0,200 Words Friday (Poem)
18,655 Words Total April 13th 07:25
5,655 Words ahead of schedule
Better to have done SOMETHING. kept the blood moving, the sparks quietly sparking, than to use hospital as an excuse. Now I might manage a story this evening, because the day is a WRITING day (already.)
ADDED LATER
08:44
Not enough time to write, but time to send out subs, so reached my monthly target and then subbed one more!
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
6,797 Words Thursday (Stories, Article, Story)
0,200 Words Friday (Poem)
18,655 Words Total April 13th 07:25
5,655 Words ahead of schedule
Better to have done SOMETHING. kept the blood moving, the sparks quietly sparking, than to use hospital as an excuse. Now I might manage a story this evening, because the day is a WRITING day (already.)
ADDED LATER
08:44
Not enough time to write, but time to send out subs, so reached my monthly target and then subbed one more!
FRIDAY 13th, Prompts
PROMPTS
US Navy Shows Off Terror-Fighting Dolphins
RESTLESS
It's This Fucking Cough
RED
A Penguin, a Donkey, a Piano, Their Tinkle-Plonky Grief.
REMEMBER
There are Miners Still, in the Underground Rivers
REDEEM
Argentine Ant-Eater Kills Zookeeper
REMORSE
Daffodils, Bird-Whistles, Bobble-Hats
REALLY
You're 12, 13 at most, leaving by the back door
RESPOND
an ordinary light at the kitchen table
RESPITE
A Woman Getting on a Plane, This is How it Will Happen
I Miss You as if You Were Fiction, The Ink Still Wet
REGINALD
Quite What the Word meant Then Escapes me
RELIANT
Chastising London, Even as We Entered Her
RELUME
On the Morning Bus Someone Reeks of Guilt
RELUCENT
No is the Blank, the Zero, the Lumpy Zilch
RELIVER
Quianlong the stone-grinder stands to work at his trestle-table
RELICT
I am Building a Box
RELEASEMENT
Are We dead, do you think? I thought we were
REISNER
US Navy Shows Off Terror-Fighting Dolphins
RESTLESS
It's This Fucking Cough
RED
A Penguin, a Donkey, a Piano, Their Tinkle-Plonky Grief.
REMEMBER
There are Miners Still, in the Underground Rivers
REDEEM
Argentine Ant-Eater Kills Zookeeper
REMORSE
Daffodils, Bird-Whistles, Bobble-Hats
REALLY
You're 12, 13 at most, leaving by the back door
RESPOND
an ordinary light at the kitchen table
RESPITE
A Woman Getting on a Plane, This is How it Will Happen
I Miss You as if You Were Fiction, The Ink Still Wet
REGINALD
Quite What the Word meant Then Escapes me
RELIANT
Chastising London, Even as We Entered Her
RELUME
On the Morning Bus Someone Reeks of Guilt
RELUCENT
No is the Blank, the Zero, the Lumpy Zilch
RELIVER
Quianlong the stone-grinder stands to work at his trestle-table
RELICT
I am Building a Box
RELEASEMENT
Are We dead, do you think? I thought we were
REISNER
Thursday, 12 April 2007
Tomorrow's Primary
Tom C writing...
Bloody hell. I was drifting into another night of indolence and then I read this on the BootCamp blog:
And, damn me, I thought, I can't let another evening slide. So I started writing a story for tomorrow's primaries. Only trouble is, I'm 2500 words in and I'm not even half way through yet. There's a prodigious amount of writing still to do, followed by, I expect, a prodigious amount of cutting - I don't generally do 5000 word stories... I'm not sure I have a hope of getting this done in time. We'll see.
Bloody hell. I was drifting into another night of indolence and then I read this on the BootCamp blog:
Beside I needed to post some prompts for the Boot Campers. THEY at least were going to write today (there's a story deadline tomorrow.)
And, damn me, I thought, I can't let another evening slide. So I started writing a story for tomorrow's primaries. Only trouble is, I'm 2500 words in and I'm not even half way through yet. There's a prodigious amount of writing still to do, followed by, I expect, a prodigious amount of cutting - I don't generally do 5000 word stories... I'm not sure I have a hope of getting this done in time. We'll see.
100 STORIES
We've just posted two stories for the latest deadline (tomorrow)
our 99th and 100th for the year (not including flashes)
alx
our 99th and 100th for the year (not including flashes)
alx
I'll Stop if You'll Stop
a fresh story.
Frankly, I'm not convinced it works, but...
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
6,797 Words Thursday (Stories, Article, Story)
18,455 Words Total April 12th 20:31
6,455 Words ahead of schedule
Frankly, I'm not convinced it works, but...
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
6,797 Words Thursday (Stories, Article, Story)
18,455 Words Total April 12th 20:31
6,455 Words ahead of schedule
Don't Stop Now!
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
5,529 Words Thursday (Stories, Article)
17,189 Words Total April 12th 18:31
5,189 Words ahead of schedule
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
5,529 Words Thursday (Stories, Article)
17,189 Words Total April 12th 18:31
5,189 Words ahead of schedule
When There is No Fresh Juice
I recently returned from a short break in Berlin where the weather was depressing, where I didn't feel too good, and where the creative impulse seemed, for whatever reason, to have been expunged.
I returned and wrote on my blog about how empty I felt. Certainly I didn't imagine writing new material today, and if I was to write anything, surely it would be rubbish?
So, should I sit back and wait for the muse, or clean my desk, or go for a long run? Maybe I could go to an internet "writers site" and spend dizzy hours there chatting about inanities, or get into a flame war, or maybe (on the writing site) begin an earnest hot-stuff discussion sans faits about Iraq or the price of fish…
One thing I didn't do was cook breakfast, not even a cup of tea or put the percolator on. I didn't dress, didn't shower. I came down-stairs, sat in my office, and even though I didn't feel in the zone, I placed my butt there!
In Boot Camp there was a notification of a competition, ah-hah, and I had an email from a colleague mentioning the same. Surely, this friend said, I had something right for it?
Yes, I did, but the stories I had were too long, or too short. Not to worry, maybe there'll be another day, another competition, and another excuse? Beside I needed to post some prompts for the Boot Campers. THEY at least were going to write today (there's a story deadline tomorrow.)
For prompts, I often visit letters (I love Martha Gellhorn's, for example) or poetry, or story openings. Letters are voiced, full of passion. Poetry is voiced too, but it often echoes, resonates, opens windows and doors. A single line from a poem can set off a chain reaction of words and ideas, driven by the soul, a gut reaction.
I left Martha alone this morning. Instead I visited an anthology from Bloodaxe Books (ISBN 1-85224-588-3) edited by Neil Astley and called "Staying Alive." Incidentally I strongly recommend this book and its sequel "Being Alive."
I opened the book at a random page and it appeared to be about a sense of place. (When I go word-divining I don't even, necessarily, start at the poem's title, or the author-name.) By chance I fell into a psychic space, a source, a hundred muses waiting) where the writers, knowing I would one day pass this way, had written these words. The editor, knowing my need had collected them together, the publisher, understanding me, where I am from, my inadequacies, had printed the book, specifically for me. I only had to read a few lines to know this.
The first poem (I think) began Language is the house with lamplight in its windows and the image immediately hit me, that sense of finally seeing the house after a long, long journey. I wonder if some pain-pleasures like this one are still available to us now we have routine transport, now we rarely get cold and wet. I remember, when I was in my late teens, an Air Force friend hitch-hiked from Norfolk to South Wales to meet up with me: a totally miserable trip, freezing, wet, and my mother warmed up some stew for him on the stove.
Those stews (always New Zealand Lamb) had so much fat in them that when the cooled they formed a thick white crust. I remember how we'd put on the gas, and break through the fat-crust, how it would then melt, dissolve into fantastic flavours.
I met this friend about a year ago, almost forty years on. He always says two things to me when we meet. First my RAF number, second, "Jonesy, your Mam's stew." He swears to this day that it was the best meal he ever ate. How curious, that despite two lives (three if you include my mother) the cross-roads of whatever we are have this huge sign overhead saying "Irish Stew!"
I remember, in military training, having to carry two men's gear for a twenty-mile route-march. I was timid, quiet, an outsider in this group, desperately unhappy, and genuinely hurting, with bleeding foot blisters, a red-raw back, totally soaked through, cold. When we finally "made it!" into camp we set up our two-man tents (me on my own) and crawled out of the rain. Then, half-an-hour later the cook clanged that it was time for food. I have a gag-and-throw-up aversion to celery and the food was a steaming bowl, of, yep, celery soup. I forced it down me, didn't throw up, and I knew, categorically, that day, that there was a God, and that he hated me, that he had singled me out for special treatment.
That single line (from a sequence by Anne Michaels) has reminded me of my mother, of my best friend, given me back the smells of a working-class kitchen, reminded me how thirty-forty years ago it really was a lot tougher. And of course it made me think of my mother (dead twenty years) and peripherally, my father. It makes me think of how the food we ate then, was laced with fat and flavour and I don't think we were all keeling over with heart attacks. It makes me think that when I holiday in Cornwall some of the meals are gigantic and probably just as fatty, and yet there are all these old people…
I began to realise that all the poems I was looking at made me ache (and remember I'm almost poetry-blind) but why did I ache? I flicked back to the beginning of the section to discover it was called "My People." All the poems were people looking back at what home means, what country means, what it is to be Welsh, watching the rape of the fair country, to be Irish and occupied, to live in a city divided by a wall, to be a Jew.
Diamond miners have to cut through rock and when they find a diamond it's still rough rock. Yet we can "mine" a poetry book and the diamonds have been discovered, dug from the earth, polished and given away free!
Here are the lines I copied:
My people pass through gardens untouched
that's why, so freely, we call it our own
there are places in Wales I don't go
She makes a quiet breakfast for herself
Yes, that is the door, and behind it they live
lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh
music, on fat-bellied instruments
collops of dog, gobbets of pig
teenagers fleeing to their rooms
of the forests, smashed faces, of the farms, stone trickle
open a map of middle-England
he seemed a hollow oak-trunk, covered with ivy
coffee steam making the van windows misty
old damp soaks through the wallpaper
Everyone hates the English, including the English
Dai K lives at the end of a valley
and the road runs down through the empty gate
though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where
I place my hope on the water
One morning early I met armoured cars
we worked nights as machine operators
the square where they burned books, it is beautiful
we will know where they are by their absence
language is the house with lamplight in its windows
there are moments when it seems to me, I've squandered my life
what are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
he walks briskly, out to infect a city
our dogs, silent, moving like shadows on the wall
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires
My people pass through gardens untouched…
OK, your nation, or your students, what gardens, what does this mean by untouched? Could you not start a story with this line? Could you not simply hear that voice and let it take you on a journey? Maybe you could add: That's why, so freely, we call it our own – notice the way the pauses change the meaning, add voice, colour, texture, make us dwell, dwell on the words, dwell in them.
There are places in Wales I don't go.
How did they know I was Welsh-Irish but born in Wales, brought up there, ache for my childhood? How did they know I would read this line two weeks before a short-story competition about how Wales has changed?
She makes a quiet breakfast for herself
was a line from the second stanza of the lovely poem 'A Summer Morning' by Richard Wilbur. Interestingly I didn't "see" the opening stanza, but this line just wanted to be copied. It reminds me of my mother and how she would sometimes, in later life, simply stand at the kitchen stove and wonder.
Yes, that is the door, and behind it they live:
and this, why does it aches so much? How many stories does it promise (and what if we combine ideas, the hearts and aches of poems from different times, different countries?)
Lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh:
I dropped an adjective or adverb there. I think it was "plump" not sure. I wonder why? Is the omission itself somehow significant? Looking at it, this one could almost be cliché.
But could Music, on fat-bellied instruments be clichéd?
How might we use that line, the thought, the voice, the direction? Could it combine with "Lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh" (for all I know it might be from the same poem. Without checking I don't know. What I know is that these lines, their ache, the way they "hang" and resonate, the way they set off connections in my head (or more, my soul) is near magical.
Collops of dog, gobbets of pig.
Do you even care what this means? Listen to the sounds, the feeling. Collops can mean slices (as in of meat) and relate also to roasted over coals. Right now I can't remember which poem that was from, but I do know that the two phrases buzz inside me.
Teenagers fleeing to their rooms.
This one is interesting. A single teen-ager fleeing to her room (or his room) well, that would be cliché. So why is this not? But I can feel how the plural idea would form itself around other ideas, would help me build a poem or a story.
Of the forests, smashed faces, of the farms, stone trickle.
Now I cheated here. I can't remember the original line or lines but I know I condensed the prose somehow.
But again, the point is, this "swells" makes me think, makes me want to write, makes me want to do something. When we find these things happening we should ask why, either directly or by writing to discover.
Open a map of middle-England.
I remember this a little, the poem, it was about how middle-Englishness seemed to hold such old values, merely in the village names. I can't tell you if, in fact, the poem has a bitter core or uses the idea subversively or turns it upside down, but what I can say is that the very idea seems to connect with me and I think I know what the author means. There is something so core-feeling, so fundamentally 'safe' and real about a quiet English village. Even though that safety is probably mythical, the fact that I can even imagine it matters and should be enough for a story.
He seemed a hollow oak-trunk, covered with ivy.
I'm sure I recently read somewhere (probably Ruth Padel's book) about the poet Seamus Heaney climbing into a hollowed tree and thinking how his being there altered the world he looked out at. But again, feel the words, their textures, the way they roll out, their warmth. Could you not start a story with that line? Would it not have its own grace and direction?
Coffee steam making the van windows misty.
So where are you now? Are you thinking 'Steamy Windows' the cliché, the Tina Turner song perhaps, or remembering days way gone by before air-conditioning and central heating (remember frost on the inside of windows?) or a café where she said she would meat you but failed to show? Merely reading this sentence I can generate half-a-dozen stories.
Old damp soaks through the wallpaper.
Another sentence which maybe, standing alone, looks a little bit cliché, but do you not now smell the room, see the two people not quite making it? Maybe it's "Cathy Come Home" or something 'kitchen-sink' from the sixties. Maybe just thinking 'the sixties' makes you wonder about the differences between black-and-white and colour memories… and when we remember is there colour? And wasn't life simpler, more naïve then? And remember those pompous, patronising talk-over voices on Pathe News? Were we really that stupid, that easy to manipulate?
Everyone hates the English, including the English.
The first bit, OK, the second bit much better, but the edge created in the pairing of the two could easily drive another poem or a short. You can substitute another nationality if you like, but curiously, interestingly, would "Americans" work? I don't think so:
Everyone hates the Americans, including the Americans.
I don't think that second bit would hold, do you? So what does that say, what stories are there?
Dai K lives at the end of a valley.
I rattled through this poem, "Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel" by Harri Webb and it "had me going" being Welsh and occasionally writing in that vein.
I sometimes think of The Taffia (as in Mafia) and how "real Welshness" is like some middle-class educated secret (and magic key) passed round by some Druid inner-circle (probably worse now the MAs have started and are taking root.) Do I have any story ideas? Only about nineteen.
And the road runs down through the empty gate.
This line from an Irish poem I think, reminds me of a line in an old story of mine, and countless grainy black and white films, probably all cheesy, "How Green Was My Valley" being at the top of the list.
Why is it that memories of childhood are both vital to us and horribly cliché at the same time? Do those people who had an easy childhood have any idea how they mistreat those whose memories are clichés by glibly rattling out the Monty Python put-down, "We lived in a box at the top of our street…"
But the look and feel of that sentence, makes me want to write something. I just have to avoid the obvious lines.
Though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where.
Hmmm, that looks plain now, but when I copied it, it felt a lot more. Perhaps the context mattered more than I realised. To what did it connect. What in it connected to me? And f I combine it with another line, what happens?
And the road runs down through the empty gate, though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where, but it is there, it holds me, black and white, real.
There's a story lurking.
I place my hope on the water.
I love the line. I just wish it didn't set off "Smoke on the Water" in my head. It feels like a line from the last paragraph of a story, rather than an opener… I still wish I had written it.
One morning early I met armoured cars.
Wowzer. I fancy this would be better, in a wild and abstracted, surreal story, but whatever, what a great line, and what a prompt!
We worked nights as machine operators.
Ordinary? Maybe. But I can imagine it sparking a story. I get a sense of the people represented by the "we" almost instantly. And "night" and machines are always good for meaty stories.
The square where they burned books, it is beautiful.
Oh, this wasn't a line from a poem. It just came to me while I was typing, presumably triggered by something in the poems.
I'd read The Book Thief recently, and read in there about Nazi book-burnings, then, while on a bus tour of Berlin in the rain (this week) I saw the square, immaculate, manicured, and that felt incongruous.
Other things discovered in Berlin also felt incongruous, like people arrested by the Nazis and freed by judges for lack of evidence. Really?
We will know where they are by their absence.
I cheated here. The line was the absence (of trees) but I could probably write three or four shorter short stories directly from that as an opener.
You?
Language is the house with lamplight in its windows.
We've been here, but I bet if I wrote about this now another set of hooks from cues would emerge.
There are moments when it seems to me, I've squandered my life.
Another line that now, coldly seems either a bit cliché or at least "stock" or "telly" but it's an easy start to a good story, and if you really think the opener is too "easy" well change it!
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
This is from Waiting for the Barbarians, and I'm sure I've read it before, somewhere. But for some reason I thought it was a fairly modern poem not a translation from Ancient Greek (did they think the barbarians were The Romans?) but can you not generate a short-story from the mere idea of everyone waiting?
He walks briskly, out to infect a city.
Almost immediately I get the idea of a virus, biological warfare, like some snippet of "24" or that Dustin Hoffman film. Damn those cheap thrillers, that wasn't what I wanted to think, wasn't where I wanted to go!
It must be that word "infect". I think the poem (if I can find it) had a different intent. What hits you?
Our dogs, silent, moving like shadows on the wall.
That first word "our" makes it all quite different for me. I love the long pauses created by the commas here and the whole image is fantastic, and would grace any story (Steal! Steal! Steal!)
Are they dogs?
Comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires.
This was from "Death by Meteor" (George Szirtes) I think, a simple idea. If we knew the meteor landed at, say, midnight, and there was nothing we could do about it, what then?
The mere idea can give us a whole tranche of stories. The cheap ones will be simple "Science Fiction" what-ifs, but what else might we write?
I had to go out earlier (maybe a thousand words into this little essay) and detoured into Borders on my way back. Browsing the 3 for 2s I found two books on the resistance to the Nazi movement.
When I was in Berlin this had struck me as a very interesting subject, one I knew absolutely nothing about. How would I have fared under that regime? Badly, I think. I doubt I could have had the courage to stand against a state.
I failed to find the right books while in Berlin, yet here I am, a random moment, a random stop-off in the local American-owned bookstore and two jump out at me. Why?
Is this Big G showing off again, God leaking? Is it really mere coincidence that these books appear, mere serendipity?
Is there a story here?
Of course I bought the third book to make my three up, and then drifted into a second three. Then I remembered TomC had suggested I look at a crime book by Xxxxxxx, so I picked that up, went for a coffee upstairs and read some. Then around me I realised it was almost all mothers-with-kids as if someone had picked the lock on the local institution, and…
And I bought some more poetry, for the poems themselves, for the poetry itself, for the inspiration, but also, for the connections there are always connections.
I returned and wrote on my blog about how empty I felt. Certainly I didn't imagine writing new material today, and if I was to write anything, surely it would be rubbish?
So, should I sit back and wait for the muse, or clean my desk, or go for a long run? Maybe I could go to an internet "writers site" and spend dizzy hours there chatting about inanities, or get into a flame war, or maybe (on the writing site) begin an earnest hot-stuff discussion sans faits about Iraq or the price of fish…
One thing I didn't do was cook breakfast, not even a cup of tea or put the percolator on. I didn't dress, didn't shower. I came down-stairs, sat in my office, and even though I didn't feel in the zone, I placed my butt there!
In Boot Camp there was a notification of a competition, ah-hah, and I had an email from a colleague mentioning the same. Surely, this friend said, I had something right for it?
Yes, I did, but the stories I had were too long, or too short. Not to worry, maybe there'll be another day, another competition, and another excuse? Beside I needed to post some prompts for the Boot Campers. THEY at least were going to write today (there's a story deadline tomorrow.)
For prompts, I often visit letters (I love Martha Gellhorn's, for example) or poetry, or story openings. Letters are voiced, full of passion. Poetry is voiced too, but it often echoes, resonates, opens windows and doors. A single line from a poem can set off a chain reaction of words and ideas, driven by the soul, a gut reaction.
I left Martha alone this morning. Instead I visited an anthology from Bloodaxe Books (ISBN 1-85224-588-3) edited by Neil Astley and called "Staying Alive." Incidentally I strongly recommend this book and its sequel "Being Alive."
I opened the book at a random page and it appeared to be about a sense of place. (When I go word-divining I don't even, necessarily, start at the poem's title, or the author-name.) By chance I fell into a psychic space, a source, a hundred muses waiting) where the writers, knowing I would one day pass this way, had written these words. The editor, knowing my need had collected them together, the publisher, understanding me, where I am from, my inadequacies, had printed the book, specifically for me. I only had to read a few lines to know this.
The first poem (I think) began Language is the house with lamplight in its windows and the image immediately hit me, that sense of finally seeing the house after a long, long journey. I wonder if some pain-pleasures like this one are still available to us now we have routine transport, now we rarely get cold and wet. I remember, when I was in my late teens, an Air Force friend hitch-hiked from Norfolk to South Wales to meet up with me: a totally miserable trip, freezing, wet, and my mother warmed up some stew for him on the stove.
Those stews (always New Zealand Lamb) had so much fat in them that when the cooled they formed a thick white crust. I remember how we'd put on the gas, and break through the fat-crust, how it would then melt, dissolve into fantastic flavours.
I met this friend about a year ago, almost forty years on. He always says two things to me when we meet. First my RAF number, second, "Jonesy, your Mam's stew." He swears to this day that it was the best meal he ever ate. How curious, that despite two lives (three if you include my mother) the cross-roads of whatever we are have this huge sign overhead saying "Irish Stew!"
I remember, in military training, having to carry two men's gear for a twenty-mile route-march. I was timid, quiet, an outsider in this group, desperately unhappy, and genuinely hurting, with bleeding foot blisters, a red-raw back, totally soaked through, cold. When we finally "made it!" into camp we set up our two-man tents (me on my own) and crawled out of the rain. Then, half-an-hour later the cook clanged that it was time for food. I have a gag-and-throw-up aversion to celery and the food was a steaming bowl, of, yep, celery soup. I forced it down me, didn't throw up, and I knew, categorically, that day, that there was a God, and that he hated me, that he had singled me out for special treatment.
That single line (from a sequence by Anne Michaels) has reminded me of my mother, of my best friend, given me back the smells of a working-class kitchen, reminded me how thirty-forty years ago it really was a lot tougher. And of course it made me think of my mother (dead twenty years) and peripherally, my father. It makes me think of how the food we ate then, was laced with fat and flavour and I don't think we were all keeling over with heart attacks. It makes me think that when I holiday in Cornwall some of the meals are gigantic and probably just as fatty, and yet there are all these old people…
I began to realise that all the poems I was looking at made me ache (and remember I'm almost poetry-blind) but why did I ache? I flicked back to the beginning of the section to discover it was called "My People." All the poems were people looking back at what home means, what country means, what it is to be Welsh, watching the rape of the fair country, to be Irish and occupied, to live in a city divided by a wall, to be a Jew.
Diamond miners have to cut through rock and when they find a diamond it's still rough rock. Yet we can "mine" a poetry book and the diamonds have been discovered, dug from the earth, polished and given away free!
Here are the lines I copied:
My people pass through gardens untouched
that's why, so freely, we call it our own
there are places in Wales I don't go
She makes a quiet breakfast for herself
Yes, that is the door, and behind it they live
lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh
music, on fat-bellied instruments
collops of dog, gobbets of pig
teenagers fleeing to their rooms
of the forests, smashed faces, of the farms, stone trickle
open a map of middle-England
he seemed a hollow oak-trunk, covered with ivy
coffee steam making the van windows misty
old damp soaks through the wallpaper
Everyone hates the English, including the English
Dai K lives at the end of a valley
and the road runs down through the empty gate
though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where
I place my hope on the water
One morning early I met armoured cars
we worked nights as machine operators
the square where they burned books, it is beautiful
we will know where they are by their absence
language is the house with lamplight in its windows
there are moments when it seems to me, I've squandered my life
what are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
he walks briskly, out to infect a city
our dogs, silent, moving like shadows on the wall
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires
My people pass through gardens untouched…
OK, your nation, or your students, what gardens, what does this mean by untouched? Could you not start a story with this line? Could you not simply hear that voice and let it take you on a journey? Maybe you could add: That's why, so freely, we call it our own – notice the way the pauses change the meaning, add voice, colour, texture, make us dwell, dwell on the words, dwell in them.
There are places in Wales I don't go.
How did they know I was Welsh-Irish but born in Wales, brought up there, ache for my childhood? How did they know I would read this line two weeks before a short-story competition about how Wales has changed?
She makes a quiet breakfast for herself
was a line from the second stanza of the lovely poem 'A Summer Morning' by Richard Wilbur. Interestingly I didn't "see" the opening stanza, but this line just wanted to be copied. It reminds me of my mother and how she would sometimes, in later life, simply stand at the kitchen stove and wonder.
Yes, that is the door, and behind it they live:
and this, why does it aches so much? How many stories does it promise (and what if we combine ideas, the hearts and aches of poems from different times, different countries?)
Lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh:
I dropped an adjective or adverb there. I think it was "plump" not sure. I wonder why? Is the omission itself somehow significant? Looking at it, this one could almost be cliché.
But could Music, on fat-bellied instruments be clichéd?
How might we use that line, the thought, the voice, the direction? Could it combine with "Lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh" (for all I know it might be from the same poem. Without checking I don't know. What I know is that these lines, their ache, the way they "hang" and resonate, the way they set off connections in my head (or more, my soul) is near magical.
Collops of dog, gobbets of pig.
Do you even care what this means? Listen to the sounds, the feeling. Collops can mean slices (as in of meat) and relate also to roasted over coals. Right now I can't remember which poem that was from, but I do know that the two phrases buzz inside me.
Teenagers fleeing to their rooms.
This one is interesting. A single teen-ager fleeing to her room (or his room) well, that would be cliché. So why is this not? But I can feel how the plural idea would form itself around other ideas, would help me build a poem or a story.
Of the forests, smashed faces, of the farms, stone trickle.
Now I cheated here. I can't remember the original line or lines but I know I condensed the prose somehow.
But again, the point is, this "swells" makes me think, makes me want to write, makes me want to do something. When we find these things happening we should ask why, either directly or by writing to discover.
Open a map of middle-England.
I remember this a little, the poem, it was about how middle-Englishness seemed to hold such old values, merely in the village names. I can't tell you if, in fact, the poem has a bitter core or uses the idea subversively or turns it upside down, but what I can say is that the very idea seems to connect with me and I think I know what the author means. There is something so core-feeling, so fundamentally 'safe' and real about a quiet English village. Even though that safety is probably mythical, the fact that I can even imagine it matters and should be enough for a story.
He seemed a hollow oak-trunk, covered with ivy.
I'm sure I recently read somewhere (probably Ruth Padel's book) about the poet Seamus Heaney climbing into a hollowed tree and thinking how his being there altered the world he looked out at. But again, feel the words, their textures, the way they roll out, their warmth. Could you not start a story with that line? Would it not have its own grace and direction?
Coffee steam making the van windows misty.
So where are you now? Are you thinking 'Steamy Windows' the cliché, the Tina Turner song perhaps, or remembering days way gone by before air-conditioning and central heating (remember frost on the inside of windows?) or a café where she said she would meat you but failed to show? Merely reading this sentence I can generate half-a-dozen stories.
Old damp soaks through the wallpaper.
Another sentence which maybe, standing alone, looks a little bit cliché, but do you not now smell the room, see the two people not quite making it? Maybe it's "Cathy Come Home" or something 'kitchen-sink' from the sixties. Maybe just thinking 'the sixties' makes you wonder about the differences between black-and-white and colour memories… and when we remember is there colour? And wasn't life simpler, more naïve then? And remember those pompous, patronising talk-over voices on Pathe News? Were we really that stupid, that easy to manipulate?
Everyone hates the English, including the English.
The first bit, OK, the second bit much better, but the edge created in the pairing of the two could easily drive another poem or a short. You can substitute another nationality if you like, but curiously, interestingly, would "Americans" work? I don't think so:
Everyone hates the Americans, including the Americans.
I don't think that second bit would hold, do you? So what does that say, what stories are there?
Dai K lives at the end of a valley.
I rattled through this poem, "Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel" by Harri Webb and it "had me going" being Welsh and occasionally writing in that vein.
I sometimes think of The Taffia (as in Mafia) and how "real Welshness" is like some middle-class educated secret (and magic key) passed round by some Druid inner-circle (probably worse now the MAs have started and are taking root.) Do I have any story ideas? Only about nineteen.
And the road runs down through the empty gate.
This line from an Irish poem I think, reminds me of a line in an old story of mine, and countless grainy black and white films, probably all cheesy, "How Green Was My Valley" being at the top of the list.
Why is it that memories of childhood are both vital to us and horribly cliché at the same time? Do those people who had an easy childhood have any idea how they mistreat those whose memories are clichés by glibly rattling out the Monty Python put-down, "We lived in a box at the top of our street…"
But the look and feel of that sentence, makes me want to write something. I just have to avoid the obvious lines.
Though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where.
Hmmm, that looks plain now, but when I copied it, it felt a lot more. Perhaps the context mattered more than I realised. To what did it connect. What in it connected to me? And f I combine it with another line, what happens?
And the road runs down through the empty gate, though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where, but it is there, it holds me, black and white, real.
There's a story lurking.
I place my hope on the water.
I love the line. I just wish it didn't set off "Smoke on the Water" in my head. It feels like a line from the last paragraph of a story, rather than an opener… I still wish I had written it.
One morning early I met armoured cars.
Wowzer. I fancy this would be better, in a wild and abstracted, surreal story, but whatever, what a great line, and what a prompt!
We worked nights as machine operators.
Ordinary? Maybe. But I can imagine it sparking a story. I get a sense of the people represented by the "we" almost instantly. And "night" and machines are always good for meaty stories.
The square where they burned books, it is beautiful.
Oh, this wasn't a line from a poem. It just came to me while I was typing, presumably triggered by something in the poems.
I'd read The Book Thief recently, and read in there about Nazi book-burnings, then, while on a bus tour of Berlin in the rain (this week) I saw the square, immaculate, manicured, and that felt incongruous.
Other things discovered in Berlin also felt incongruous, like people arrested by the Nazis and freed by judges for lack of evidence. Really?
We will know where they are by their absence.
I cheated here. The line was the absence (of trees) but I could probably write three or four shorter short stories directly from that as an opener.
You?
Language is the house with lamplight in its windows.
We've been here, but I bet if I wrote about this now another set of hooks from cues would emerge.
There are moments when it seems to me, I've squandered my life.
Another line that now, coldly seems either a bit cliché or at least "stock" or "telly" but it's an easy start to a good story, and if you really think the opener is too "easy" well change it!
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
This is from Waiting for the Barbarians, and I'm sure I've read it before, somewhere. But for some reason I thought it was a fairly modern poem not a translation from Ancient Greek (did they think the barbarians were The Romans?) but can you not generate a short-story from the mere idea of everyone waiting?
He walks briskly, out to infect a city.
Almost immediately I get the idea of a virus, biological warfare, like some snippet of "24" or that Dustin Hoffman film. Damn those cheap thrillers, that wasn't what I wanted to think, wasn't where I wanted to go!
It must be that word "infect". I think the poem (if I can find it) had a different intent. What hits you?
Our dogs, silent, moving like shadows on the wall.
That first word "our" makes it all quite different for me. I love the long pauses created by the commas here and the whole image is fantastic, and would grace any story (Steal! Steal! Steal!)
Are they dogs?
Comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires.
This was from "Death by Meteor" (George Szirtes) I think, a simple idea. If we knew the meteor landed at, say, midnight, and there was nothing we could do about it, what then?
The mere idea can give us a whole tranche of stories. The cheap ones will be simple "Science Fiction" what-ifs, but what else might we write?
I had to go out earlier (maybe a thousand words into this little essay) and detoured into Borders on my way back. Browsing the 3 for 2s I found two books on the resistance to the Nazi movement.
When I was in Berlin this had struck me as a very interesting subject, one I knew absolutely nothing about. How would I have fared under that regime? Badly, I think. I doubt I could have had the courage to stand against a state.
I failed to find the right books while in Berlin, yet here I am, a random moment, a random stop-off in the local American-owned bookstore and two jump out at me. Why?
Is this Big G showing off again, God leaking? Is it really mere coincidence that these books appear, mere serendipity?
Is there a story here?
Of course I bought the third book to make my three up, and then drifted into a second three. Then I remembered TomC had suggested I look at a crime book by Xxxxxxx, so I picked that up, went for a coffee upstairs and read some. Then around me I realised it was almost all mothers-with-kids as if someone had picked the lock on the local institution, and…
And I bought some more poetry, for the poems themselves, for the poetry itself, for the inspiration, but also, for the connections there are always connections.
Catching Up, Getting Better
Two radical rewrites so far today.
One cuts 650 words the other ADDED words, new stories so different I class them as new stories.
See, even when the fresh juice isn't there you can always squeeze oranges.
Plus three subs this morning (25 for the month)
AND...
mind you it won't look like that for long...
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
2,224 Words Thursday (Stories)
13,884 Words Total April 12th 10:03
1,884 Words ahead of schedule
One cuts 650 words the other ADDED words, new stories so different I class them as new stories.
See, even when the fresh juice isn't there you can always squeeze oranges.
Plus three subs this morning (25 for the month)
AND...
mind you it won't look like that for long...
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
2,224 Words Thursday (Stories)
13,884 Words Total April 12th 10:03
1,884 Words ahead of schedule
I've Been Here Before
Hoped that this morning I'd wake, feel fresh, turn over a new leaf, start anew, find another cliché to live by, but I still feel crap. very low. I think I'm living in the tail of that bug, the same bug that made Berlin look grey and wet and uninteresting and made me feel like I was eighty-eight and shouldn't be out.
I browsed through "Staying Alive" last night and this morning; found a lovely poem by Richard Wilbur (A Summer Morning.)
Got up around seven, caught up with admin, sorted out prompts for Boot Camp and here, posted them. There's a competition in Wales, ABOUT Wales, CD the end of the month, so that I MUST enter, and there are a whole string of poetry comps that I want to punt at too.
Yes, personally, I'm running on empty, but I know this is an illusion. All it takes is one pleasing line and I'll be off again.
And I need a coffee.
I browsed through "Staying Alive" last night and this morning; found a lovely poem by Richard Wilbur (A Summer Morning.)
Got up around seven, caught up with admin, sorted out prompts for Boot Camp and here, posted them. There's a competition in Wales, ABOUT Wales, CD the end of the month, so that I MUST enter, and there are a whole string of poetry comps that I want to punt at too.
Yes, personally, I'm running on empty, but I know this is an illusion. All it takes is one pleasing line and I'll be off again.
And I need a coffee.
Thursday Prompt Special
USE at least four of these prompts, either word-for-word, or word-order changed, or just the idea, but listen to the sounds, listen to the feelings, see what happens when you read it all over and over, put phrases together, swallow and wallow, don't just look. If the pictures do anything, feel free to use them, but they're really just there to break up the text
There's enough here for the poetry prompts too.
PROMPTS
My people pass through gardens untouched
that's why, so freely, we call it our own
there are places in Wales I don't go
She makes a quiet breakfast for herself
Yes, that is the door, and behind it they live
lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh
music, on fat-bellied instruments
collops of dog, gobbets of pig
teenagers fleeing to their rooms
of the forests, smashed faces, of the farms, stone trickle
open a map of middle-England
he seemed a hollow oak-trunk, covered with ivy
coffee steam making the van windows misty
old damp soaks through the wallpaper
Everyone hates the English, including the English
Dai K lives at the end of a valley
and the road runs down through the empty gate
though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where
I place my hope on the water
One morning early I met armoured cars
we worked nights as machine operators
the square where they burned books, it is beautiful
we will know where they are by their absence
language is the house with lamplight in its windows
there are moments when it seems to me, I've squandered my life
what are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
he walks briskly, out to infect a city
our dogs, silent, moving like shadows on the wall
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires
There's enough here for the poetry prompts too.
PROMPTS
My people pass through gardens untouched
that's why, so freely, we call it our own
there are places in Wales I don't go
She makes a quiet breakfast for herself
Yes, that is the door, and behind it they live
lovers seek refuge in succulent flesh
music, on fat-bellied instruments
collops of dog, gobbets of pig
teenagers fleeing to their rooms
of the forests, smashed faces, of the farms, stone trickle
open a map of middle-England
he seemed a hollow oak-trunk, covered with ivy
coffee steam making the van windows misty
old damp soaks through the wallpaper
Everyone hates the English, including the English
Dai K lives at the end of a valley
and the road runs down through the empty gate
though you'd be pressed, exactly, to say where
I place my hope on the water
One morning early I met armoured cars
we worked nights as machine operators
the square where they burned books, it is beautiful
we will know where they are by their absence
language is the house with lamplight in its windows
there are moments when it seems to me, I've squandered my life
what are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
he walks briskly, out to infect a city
our dogs, silent, moving like shadows on the wall
comets, eclipses, tremors, forest fires
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
TomC - a fruitless Wednesday evening
You get nights like this. I just can't do anything. I have the opportunity - peace and quiet, no hassles, no problems, ideal time to sit down and WRITE something. But I'm buggered if I can. It's frustrating. One of the good things about blogging, I suppose, is that you can thrash something out on those. Over on my own blog, I've just done 600 words or so on a review of a book I've recently finished. Not totally useful, in learning terms, but at least it was words about writing - it was on-topic, even if I wasn't writing my own stuff or critting those of my BC colleagues.
But not to sound dispirited. BC has had a good couple of days with hits - AK has listed below - and it's great to hear of members having success. I'll be thinking about that tomorrow, when I will - I WILL - write something.
But not to sound dispirited. BC has had a good couple of days with hits - AK has listed below - and it's great to hear of members having success. I'll be thinking about that tomorrow, when I will - I WILL - write something.
A Good Day for HITS
Debbie has her new company car...
Cally reports $50 runner-up award at "Cotswold" and a $150 sale to...
My Weekly!
That takes hits to 55 for the year and $3,063
Cally reports $50 runner-up award at "Cotswold" and a $150 sale to...
My Weekly!
That takes hits to 55 for the year and $3,063
Back! But to WORK?
This is supposed to be diarising Boot Camp, so here goes...
We had a chance of a short family break, free flight, free hotel in Berlin so we went. I was flying before we left and managed to get ahead of 1K a day because I prsumed I wouldn't be able to write while over there, and worse, as often happens, when the momentum goes, it's hard to get back on the bike.
So here I am, so not in the mood it's silly. Not a word written yet today.
Days off are never regained. It's so much better to just keep grinding out the work, making writing just something you do every day like eating, drinking...
I've been reading poetry, at least, and reading explanations of those poems that have left me worse off than if I had no guide... dammit!... but at least it's writing work (of a kind)
At least we have a story-deadline Friday (so tomorrow I HAVE to write a story)
alex
We had a chance of a short family break, free flight, free hotel in Berlin so we went. I was flying before we left and managed to get ahead of 1K a day because I prsumed I wouldn't be able to write while over there, and worse, as often happens, when the momentum goes, it's hard to get back on the bike.
So here I am, so not in the mood it's silly. Not a word written yet today.
Days off are never regained. It's so much better to just keep grinding out the work, making writing just something you do every day like eating, drinking...
I've been reading poetry, at least, and reading explanations of those poems that have left me worse off than if I had no guide... dammit!... but at least it's writing work (of a kind)
At least we have a story-deadline Friday (so tomorrow I HAVE to write a story)
alex
And as I Was Away
Someone posted these flash prompts this morning
Wearing a blister on his soul
The 13-step plan
Becoming Elizabeth
Innocent Smoothies
Under the golf umbrella
A Hopeless Case
Peeling
High Jinks in Leicester Square
And the devil replied ...
A pretty sort of wilderness
Photoshop for Memories
Her father's footsteps
Lager Saga
Write a womag story with a moral at the end
under Poetry Prompts they posted one word
SENTINELS
Wearing a blister on his soul
The 13-step plan
Becoming Elizabeth
Innocent Smoothies
Under the golf umbrella
A Hopeless Case
Peeling
High Jinks in Leicester Square
And the devil replied ...
A pretty sort of wilderness
Photoshop for Memories
Her father's footsteps
Lager Saga
Write a womag story with a moral at the end
under Poetry Prompts they posted one word
SENTINELS
Back to Good News!
Spent two days in Berlin. Nuff said.
Back to a small hit for Joel (his second since we named him as one of our 2007 "virgins") and the excellent news that TomC was $400 first and Lexie $100 3rd in a UK comp.
That's 50 hits now, three first prizes, a second and a third already this year and $2,750 picked up in payments.
alx
Back to a small hit for Joel (his second since we named him as one of our 2007 "virgins") and the excellent news that TomC was $400 first and Lexie $100 3rd in a UK comp.
That's 50 hits now, three first prizes, a second and a third already this year and $2,750 picked up in payments.
alx
Tuesday, 10 April 2007
Very shitty first drafts
Oh goodness me, they stink. In the last month, I have written six first drafts of stories, each 2500-3000 words in length, and I am almost convinced that not a single one of them has merit. It's a question of how much the turds can be polished. Sometimes the white hot feeling kicks in, but right now it's gone AWOL and I'm scratching around like an English middle-order batsman.
Interestingly, my first draft process works like this:
On finishing the first draft: "Wow. That is genius. Give me that Bridport gong thingy over here."
A day after finishing the first draft, on rereading: "Oh no."
Two days after finishing the first draft: "Oh Christ. What does that bit mean? What was that? Who wriote this? I did? Quick, someone, cut off my fingers."
Two weeks after finishing the first draft: "Well, I can see what I was trying to do - let's fix it up and get it out there."
I hope at least one of the six will make it to the latter stage. There's nothing like the dispiriting feeling you've just "burnt" a good concept on a shitty first draft, after all.
Problem is, I suspect only one of them is thematically interesting...
Interestingly, my first draft process works like this:
On finishing the first draft: "Wow. That is genius. Give me that Bridport gong thingy over here."
A day after finishing the first draft, on rereading: "Oh no."
Two days after finishing the first draft: "Oh Christ. What does that bit mean? What was that? Who wriote this? I did? Quick, someone, cut off my fingers."
Two weeks after finishing the first draft: "Well, I can see what I was trying to do - let's fix it up and get it out there."
I hope at least one of the six will make it to the latter stage. There's nothing like the dispiriting feeling you've just "burnt" a good concept on a shitty first draft, after all.
Problem is, I suspect only one of them is thematically interesting...
Nightwriter writes: Good to be back
Writing for Bootcamp
Just got back from a week’s holiday enjoying the sea breezes of mid Wales and it’s time to get back to work and back to writing. With most on-line writers groups the thing to do when you’re back is to have a good natter about your hols and catch up on all the gossip while you’ve been away. Then you realise the evening has passed and you haven’t actually written anything or commented on anybody else’s work but hey there’s always tomorrow isn’t there?
Not so on Bootcamp. There was a primaries deadline just before Easter so I know the first task will be to critique stories that have been sent round by email on Good Friday. Some of us may have been allowed to go on holiday but the place doesn’t shut down.
So my first post is a crit. Then I have a look in the chat room – two Bootcampers have come first and third respectively in a recent national short story competition. And there’s a reminder from Alex that we should all be subbing as much as possible during April so now I need to go and update my subs list and see what I can add to it.
Just got back from a week’s holiday enjoying the sea breezes of mid Wales and it’s time to get back to work and back to writing. With most on-line writers groups the thing to do when you’re back is to have a good natter about your hols and catch up on all the gossip while you’ve been away. Then you realise the evening has passed and you haven’t actually written anything or commented on anybody else’s work but hey there’s always tomorrow isn’t there?
Not so on Bootcamp. There was a primaries deadline just before Easter so I know the first task will be to critique stories that have been sent round by email on Good Friday. Some of us may have been allowed to go on holiday but the place doesn’t shut down.
So my first post is a crit. Then I have a look in the chat room – two Bootcampers have come first and third respectively in a recent national short story competition. And there’s a reminder from Alex that we should all be subbing as much as possible during April so now I need to go and update my subs list and see what I can add to it.
Sunday, 8 April 2007
Further Ahead!!!
0,564 Words Flash Sunday
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
11,660 Words Total April 9th 00:01
2,660 Words ahead of schedule
0,480 Words Flash Monday
0,403 Words Poem Monday
1,064 Words Article Monday
0,492 Words Poem Tuesday
0,362 Words Poem Tuesday/Wednesday
3,200 Words Article Thursday
1,596 Words Story Thursday
1,006 Words Story extended Friday & Flash
0,000 Words Saturday
0,682 Words Sunday (Two Poems)
1,914 Words Monday (Article)
11,660 Words Total April 9th 00:01
2,660 Words ahead of schedule
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