Interesting exercise this morning.
I'm having to read some Brecht, so I thought I'd drop off at Borders after the school run, take a browse.
But I arrived at 08:40 with twenty minutes to wait. I had my lap-top with me, and the morning prompts printed out so I started a story. Borders opened 18 minutes later. I went in, found a few bits and pieces on Brcht, bought them, the went upstairs to Starbucks, got a latte and then continued.
I finished the story (2150 words) went downstairs again, asking about a book I'd heard about on the radio (no joy) then went out to the car in time for the ten o'clock news.
So I wrote for pretty much exactly an hour, no email pings, now web, and managed 2,150 words. That's a short novel in a working week! Food for thought?
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
02,410 Words May 17 (Story, Poems) 13:09
05,185 Words May 18 (Long Article)
00.449 Words May 19 (Flash)
00,000 Words May 20 (Satisfied Rest Day!)
02,150 Words May 21 (Story)
33,084 Words Total 12,084 Words ahead of schedule
03,084 Words beyond monthly target
PS, it might be argued that these are just words (ie crap) and will not sell. Time will prove that not to be the case.
Just remember this list and we shall see.
Consciousness
Rules?
Adjectives & Modifiers
Fucking Adverbs
More Stats on Openers
Under the Ribs
Mining Love
Mandolin
Her Red Dress
This is My Daughter
A Brother Hanged (not the actual title)
Broken Shadow
The Road Below
Formerly Known as Prince
As She Walked Home
Brighton, December
John Mole
Drowned (not the actual title)
Before the Closure
Evan's Leaving
Breadknife
Economics
Things
Am I Ready Yet?
School Dinners
SHIPS
A Moorhen
The Early Retirment of (not the actual title)
Museum (not the actual title)
The Wall (not the actual title)
Sliding (not the actual title)
Where I haven't given the actual title it's because the exact title would give away the identity of the writer in a comp (or in Boot Camp). I expect to place at least 80% of the above.
Monday, 21 May 2007
Monday 21st Flash Prompts
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks hares and pheasants
Slithering
And the widening river's presence
A glove, unnoticed, on a floor
And residents from raw estates
Dark suit, white collar
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers
The curative qualities of nothingness
From the window, a strip of an allotment
A Fiddler in the Street, a Man With a Guitar
His clothes hang on the back of the door
Home is so sad.
He liked a lot of gravy
I sometimes walk my alligator, around the park, it's always empty
This is how it ends, sliding quietly
The Cemetery Song
There is never, quite, nothing
The words escape the book, fly like bees
Devoutly Drenched and Thinking of Jesus
I was late getting away
Slithering
And the widening river's presence
A glove, unnoticed, on a floor
And residents from raw estates
Dark suit, white collar
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers
The curative qualities of nothingness
From the window, a strip of an allotment
A Fiddler in the Street, a Man With a Guitar
His clothes hang on the back of the door
Home is so sad.
He liked a lot of gravy
I sometimes walk my alligator, around the park, it's always empty
This is how it ends, sliding quietly
The Cemetery Song
There is never, quite, nothing
The words escape the book, fly like bees
Devoutly Drenched and Thinking of Jesus
I was late getting away
Sunday, 20 May 2007
Sunday Prompts
"What on earth..?" Sister Irene looked up when she heard cheery whistling and heavy footseps on a metal ladder.
The English couple had checked out of the room that morning, so Anna was due to give it a thorough clean and change the linen.
The squeaking infiltrated my dreams and, when I opened my eyes and glanced at the bedroom clock, I saw it was four a.m.
There as no one who could quite match up to our mother. She was tall and blonde and wore polja-dot dresses with full-circle skirts.Carol McClatchie lifted the lid on her tub of face cream then let out a scream. A fly lay writihing on its back, legs flailing in the air.
"Hi there. D'you mind if I put my piano outside your shop?"
There were dog hairs on the cheese. I smile as I remember.
Penny dug her spoon into her desert, watching as chocolate cream oozed over a delicious mixture of nuts and sponge, and thought that she'd never felt less like eating chocolate in her life.
As Pam turned onto the M11 she forced herself to concentrate on the drive ahead.
She skips in front of me, carefree, happy, just as a five year old should be.
Peggie bit her lip in irritation as Sam leaned forward to turn up the sound of the television.
Matthew knew something was wrong as soon as he walked into the kitchen. Usually there were signs of activity - music playing, a pot simmering on e stove, the table laid for supper.
Sarah regretted slamming the front door as soon as she was through it, but she knew she couldn't go back. An ultimatum was an ultimatum, after all.
Jamie lay beneath the plum tree and watched Sally through half-closed eyes.
Valentine's Day will soon be over, thought Maria. It had always been her dream to run a successful restaurant and, by the looks of things, her dream was coming true, right before her eyes.
I can do this. I know I can. So why does that insistent little voice in my head keep nagging away at me?
I don't think of myself as old at all, but it's funny how time catches up with you, so that you find yourself saying, "When I was a girl," in an ironic way and the twenty-somethings you work with nod seriously, instead of smiling at the joke.
At half past nine on Monday morning, Jack gathered up the Sunday papers and headed for the potting shed. He loved Mondays.
===============================
Openings from Woman's Weekly Fiction Special Issue 50 (£1:75) which I thoroughly recommend you all go out and buy
The English couple had checked out of the room that morning, so Anna was due to give it a thorough clean and change the linen.
The squeaking infiltrated my dreams and, when I opened my eyes and glanced at the bedroom clock, I saw it was four a.m.
There as no one who could quite match up to our mother. She was tall and blonde and wore polja-dot dresses with full-circle skirts.Carol McClatchie lifted the lid on her tub of face cream then let out a scream. A fly lay writihing on its back, legs flailing in the air.
"Hi there. D'you mind if I put my piano outside your shop?"
There were dog hairs on the cheese. I smile as I remember.
Penny dug her spoon into her desert, watching as chocolate cream oozed over a delicious mixture of nuts and sponge, and thought that she'd never felt less like eating chocolate in her life.
As Pam turned onto the M11 she forced herself to concentrate on the drive ahead.
She skips in front of me, carefree, happy, just as a five year old should be.
Peggie bit her lip in irritation as Sam leaned forward to turn up the sound of the television.
Matthew knew something was wrong as soon as he walked into the kitchen. Usually there were signs of activity - music playing, a pot simmering on e stove, the table laid for supper.
Sarah regretted slamming the front door as soon as she was through it, but she knew she couldn't go back. An ultimatum was an ultimatum, after all.
Jamie lay beneath the plum tree and watched Sally through half-closed eyes.
Valentine's Day will soon be over, thought Maria. It had always been her dream to run a successful restaurant and, by the looks of things, her dream was coming true, right before her eyes.
I can do this. I know I can. So why does that insistent little voice in my head keep nagging away at me?
I don't think of myself as old at all, but it's funny how time catches up with you, so that you find yourself saying, "When I was a girl," in an ironic way and the twenty-somethings you work with nod seriously, instead of smiling at the joke.
At half past nine on Monday morning, Jack gathered up the Sunday papers and headed for the potting shed. He loved Mondays.
===============================
Openings from Woman's Weekly Fiction Special Issue 50 (£1:75) which I thoroughly recommend you all go out and buy
Primaries Update
10 AM Sunday (36 Hours)
007 Storieswere originally posted
002 Stories cleared from Primaries
005 Stories to be cleared
039 Critiques
124 Critique-Posts and two HOT threads!
007 Storieswere originally posted
002 Stories cleared from Primaries
005 Stories to be cleared
039 Critiques
124 Critique-Posts and two HOT threads!
Saturday, 19 May 2007
Not Stopped Yet!
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
02,410 Words May 17 (Story, Poems) 13:09
05,185 Words May 18 (Long Article)
00.449 Words May 19 (Flash)
30,934 Words Total 11,934 Words ahead of schedule
00,934 Words beyond monthly target
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
02,410 Words May 17 (Story, Poems) 13:09
05,185 Words May 18 (Long Article)
00.449 Words May 19 (Flash)
30,934 Words Total 11,934 Words ahead of schedule
00,934 Words beyond monthly target
Shovelling
I was watching as my father shovelled snow, watching my mother as she, in turn watched him, her face, the cruellest lips, blue in their tightness, the eyes fixed, but he would do it.
I saw them, beleaguered, padlocked, married. Saw them up through the weight of infliction, their horrendous mutual flagellation, such good Catholics, together until a death did them asunder. By Father Maloney's Glass Eye, or she would swing!
My father shovels snow and would shovel snow forever. I think about the shovelling, think that the third oldest profession is shovelling shit.
For we do never covet. Not my neighbour's wife, not her breasts, not her warm tongue, for Thine is and this fucking isn't, and though shalt shovel.
I try to imagine her, that neighbour. She does not even bother to undress properly, they do not, instead released in a glory of wanting, human rather than machine they rage into each other but it is pure love. They seem so pleased with themselves over there. He is shovelling but I am hard with the thrill of my father's pleasure when he stops, brings a hand to his head, collapses. And I notice the pause in my mother, the satisfaction, before, the wife, she reacts: "Your father!" A heart attack. It was the first gift he ever gave her.
Afterwards, after the hole dug through the frozen earth, after the dark fell and there was never, I left. I walked in the cold, a filthy cold, found a café and sat with a cup of hot soup, steam on the windows, a faint smell of rancid margarine somewhere.
Behind the counter, she was pretty, working for her father. Her name-tag said Juliet and when I spoke to her she laughed and mentioned balconies, but no Romeo. I must have said something for she said, "Julie's on the balcony, Romeo's gone clubbing," but I understood her smile. She did not know it, but she was thinking of shovels.
My mother, widow, will design isolated beaches for men to lie in the sun for fifteen minutes, fully-dressed in city suits and bowlers. As a special concession they may put down their umbrellas and close their eyes.
The husband negotiates love routines with a wielded Black & Decker. Inside he is a primitive but he has forgotten that some trees echo of forests, and the silent valleys ache with ancients walking. They walk in him.
Here a husband puts up shelves, but there he cracks, hisses, spins and jumps, drills into a skull. Now I am cold again. I sit on this ledge, people who were me pass underneath. Julie is on her balcony waiting. I am not coming.
449 Words
I saw them, beleaguered, padlocked, married. Saw them up through the weight of infliction, their horrendous mutual flagellation, such good Catholics, together until a death did them asunder. By Father Maloney's Glass Eye, or she would swing!
My father shovels snow and would shovel snow forever. I think about the shovelling, think that the third oldest profession is shovelling shit.
For we do never covet. Not my neighbour's wife, not her breasts, not her warm tongue, for Thine is and this fucking isn't, and though shalt shovel.
I try to imagine her, that neighbour. She does not even bother to undress properly, they do not, instead released in a glory of wanting, human rather than machine they rage into each other but it is pure love. They seem so pleased with themselves over there. He is shovelling but I am hard with the thrill of my father's pleasure when he stops, brings a hand to his head, collapses. And I notice the pause in my mother, the satisfaction, before, the wife, she reacts: "Your father!" A heart attack. It was the first gift he ever gave her.
Afterwards, after the hole dug through the frozen earth, after the dark fell and there was never, I left. I walked in the cold, a filthy cold, found a café and sat with a cup of hot soup, steam on the windows, a faint smell of rancid margarine somewhere.
Behind the counter, she was pretty, working for her father. Her name-tag said Juliet and when I spoke to her she laughed and mentioned balconies, but no Romeo. I must have said something for she said, "Julie's on the balcony, Romeo's gone clubbing," but I understood her smile. She did not know it, but she was thinking of shovels.
My mother, widow, will design isolated beaches for men to lie in the sun for fifteen minutes, fully-dressed in city suits and bowlers. As a special concession they may put down their umbrellas and close their eyes.
The husband negotiates love routines with a wielded Black & Decker. Inside he is a primitive but he has forgotten that some trees echo of forests, and the silent valleys ache with ancients walking. They walk in him.
Here a husband puts up shelves, but there he cracks, hisses, spins and jumps, drills into a skull. Now I am cold again. I sit on this ledge, people who were me pass underneath. Julie is on her balcony waiting. I am not coming.
449 Words
Saturday Morning Prompts
And then the dark fell and there was never
It was the first gift he ever gave her
She does not even bother to undress properly
They seem so pleased with themselves over there
Bovvercraft
My neighbour's wife, her breasts, her warm tongue
Some trees echo of forests
Valleys ache with ancients walking
The suit beach, better than nudists
A cup of hot soup, oxtail, tomato, steam on the windows
I sit on this ledge, people who were me pass underneath
Beleaguer, padlocked, married
Julie's on the balcony, Romeo's gone clubbing
The third oldest profession is shovelling shit
Love routines with a Black & Decker
Me and my hoods
Now he hisses, spins and jumps
Father Maloney's Glass eye
I was watching as my father shovelled snow
It was the first gift he ever gave her
She does not even bother to undress properly
They seem so pleased with themselves over there
Bovvercraft
My neighbour's wife, her breasts, her warm tongue
Some trees echo of forests
Valleys ache with ancients walking
The suit beach, better than nudists
A cup of hot soup, oxtail, tomato, steam on the windows
I sit on this ledge, people who were me pass underneath
Beleaguer, padlocked, married
Julie's on the balcony, Romeo's gone clubbing
The third oldest profession is shovelling shit
Love routines with a Black & Decker
Me and my hoods
Now he hisses, spins and jumps
Father Maloney's Glass eye
I was watching as my father shovelled snow
Five More Hits!
Four articles accepted for The Internet Writers Journal
One third place for Fleur, Charnwood Arts
23 hits in 19 days in May
Taking total to 87 Hits for the Year, $3,433
One third place for Fleur, Charnwood Arts
23 hits in 19 days in May
Taking total to 87 Hits for the Year, $3,433
This Weekend's Primary Stories
Seven in, by 10PM Friday two cleared already
The others 3-3-2-2-1 crits each (12 Hours)
The others 3-3-2-2-1 crits each (12 Hours)
Friday, 18 May 2007
Monthly Target Achieved
I wanted to hit my word-count targets by Wednesday 23rd...
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
02,410 Words May 17 (Story, Poems) 13:09
05,185 Words May 18 (Long Article)
30,485 Words Total 12,485 Words ahead of schedule
00,485 Words beyond monthly target
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
02,410 Words May 17 (Story, Poems) 13:09
05,185 Words May 18 (Long Article)
30,485 Words Total 12,485 Words ahead of schedule
00,485 Words beyond monthly target
Turned Out a Nice Day!
A little hit for me (always welcome) and $25 but followed by two more reported hits and another $25
Our tiny band of hard-workers have had 18 hits in May, an average of 1 per day
83 for the year $3,393 in payments.
MAY
065 RVJ HR'd at JBWB
066 Joel in Shimmer
067 Cally HR'd in Twisted Tongue Comp
068 Joel at Smokebox
069 MJH places at Thieves Jargon
070 Jason Jackson in Leaf Anthology (1)
071 Jason Jackson in Leaf Anthology (2)
072 Claire in Secret Attic
073 Alex Poem in Poetry Monthly, June
074 Caroline wins Blaenau Gwent ($170)
075 Lexie poem in Poetry Monthly June
076 Alex's Tomatoes in Espresso Fiction ($30)
077 Alex's Zombies in Espresso Fiction ($30)
078 Cally story at Word Riot
079 Caroline in June Poetry Monthly
080 DMW gets a story int June Flashquake ($25)
081 Caroline had HR at JBWB Spring (overlooked)
082 Soccer, Cake for RVJ in Flashquake ($25)
Our tiny band of hard-workers have had 18 hits in May, an average of 1 per day
83 for the year $3,393 in payments.
MAY
065 RVJ HR'd at JBWB
066 Joel in Shimmer
067 Cally HR'd in Twisted Tongue Comp
068 Joel at Smokebox
069 MJH places at Thieves Jargon
070 Jason Jackson in Leaf Anthology (1)
071 Jason Jackson in Leaf Anthology (2)
072 Claire in Secret Attic
073 Alex Poem in Poetry Monthly, June
074 Caroline wins Blaenau Gwent ($170)
075 Lexie poem in Poetry Monthly June
076 Alex's Tomatoes in Espresso Fiction ($30)
077 Alex's Zombies in Espresso Fiction ($30)
078 Cally story at Word Riot
079 Caroline in June Poetry Monthly
080 DMW gets a story int June Flashquake ($25)
081 Caroline had HR at JBWB Spring (overlooked)
082 Soccer, Cake for RVJ in Flashquake ($25)
Boot Camp Publications 2007
Three more (Word Riot and two in the H E Bates Anthology)
takes us to 41 for the year
Interesting that the print proportion is much much higher
Thus year to date
21 Web
20 Print
takes us to 41 for the year
Interesting that the print proportion is much much higher
Thus year to date
21 Web
20 Print
Thursday, 17 May 2007
20:30
Too Many Dead Poets, Not Enough Wine
Prunes
I am as silent as a sign
Chalk
When I woke up, my house was in a cloud
The Fanny-Fart Symphony
Sometimes I think I see you
Once I saw a golden retriever that looked at me sadly. I thought, you?
Major Minor and his Aide Corporal Punishment
Snow, slowly rising, whispering
I love her like an old coat
The sky is late today, grieving
When I grow up I would like to be alive
No wonder he left the kitchen drawer ajar
Look at me now mother, your awkward lump
First rehearse the easy things
Prunes
I am as silent as a sign
Chalk
When I woke up, my house was in a cloud
The Fanny-Fart Symphony
Sometimes I think I see you
Once I saw a golden retriever that looked at me sadly. I thought, you?
Major Minor and his Aide Corporal Punishment
Snow, slowly rising, whispering
I love her like an old coat
The sky is late today, grieving
When I grow up I would like to be alive
No wonder he left the kitchen drawer ajar
Look at me now mother, your awkward lump
First rehearse the easy things
Three Flash Sessions Tonight. JHere's Number One
Pairs in Black & White
A potato
Dark, and the lights are out in all the houses
Walter
We will know where they are by the absence of trees
Sand
Rain washed over her body in the empty street
Message to the dying
For comfort on bad nights, a map of Middle England
I am not scared of scissors
in a bright hospital you offered your death to me
Something about hay, and summer
I am pushing stones
Marriage is a black pot on a stove
I can balance like this for hours, and whistle
Don't get struck by lightning
A potato
Dark, and the lights are out in all the houses
Walter
We will know where they are by the absence of trees
Sand
Rain washed over her body in the empty street
Message to the dying
For comfort on bad nights, a map of Middle England
I am not scared of scissors
in a bright hospital you offered your death to me
Something about hay, and summer
I am pushing stones
Marriage is a black pot on a stove
I can balance like this for hours, and whistle
Don't get struck by lightning
How do I get there from here?
Each morning the tyranny of the blank screen assaults me anew. I imagined it would get easier to write, the more of it I did, but the opposite seems true. And then I read that a woman who has produced a hundred and sixteen novels and twelve thousand short story collections has to ‘relearn’ how to write every single day. This is terrifying news. If it’s this hard now, after just a couple of years, what chance do I have after ten, twenty years? How can I avoid being anything more (and probably a lot less) than a sentient jelly?
There are some techniques I use to slap my muse to life each day, sometimes a strong coffee will do it, other times a certain song, loud on my headphones. Occasionally it’s a poem or short story, but often, as soon as I start to read something, the thought of trying to produce something myself flaps out of the window and away up the hill.
I have tried writing on a series of topics over several days, in order to have something guaranteed to write about the next day. The most successful of these was my ‘country’ series where I wrote down everything I knew about particular countries, whether because I had visited them, or because I had never been there and wanted to find out what I could make up. My ‘food’ series was not bad (the crayfish entry was memorable); my ‘building’ series, however, was largely a waste of time. I discovered I know next to nothing about architectural features. But in every case I found myself ground down after a while, it felt too much like routine.
I have tried writing a novel (without having an idea for a novel); I've tried daily flashes; I've tried John Gardner’s writing exercises; I've tried automatic writing; I even went through a phase of forcing myself to think of an opening sentence in the time it took me to brush my teeth, with predictable consequences which my dentist was delighted about – still I’m here, today, unable to think of a single goddam thing to write about, filling my notebooks with yet more what-shall-I-write-about-today verbiage. Garbage. Verbigarbage.
Every single day I go through this vaguely psychotic process. Part of the problem is, I have no idea what I’m working towards. There are no signs of progress, no one saying, you’re on the right track, just keep going like that and you’ll get there.
In any case I’ve decided today: enough is enough. Once and for all, I am going to find a foolproof way to get myself into writing mode each morning, some technique to wake up the writer part of me long enough to produce something, even – especially – when I’m not in the mood to write. No more ‘what shall I write today?’ entries in my notebook.
This might have to be quite drastic. It doesn’t matter. Desperate times and all that. There must be some infallible way to access that weird floaty mood I’m in after a strong coffee or a pint of beer, or after reading something striking or hearing some good music, that mood when I can actually write and not care about what I’m writing.
The trouble is (more analysis! shut up already!) I’m a slightly different person each morning so I don’t know what is going to inspire me that day. I have witnessed this phenomenon in my five-month-old daughter, who by all accounts has pretty similar days and nights – naps and meals at certain times, the same songs, the same books and stories, the same toys – and yet one morning she'll wake up with the joys of the season running through her veins, and the next will be as grumpy as a February afternoon on a disused pier in Norway. As Jonathan Franzen put it:
"He had good days and bad days. It was as if when he lay in bed for a night certain humors pooled in the right or wrong places, like marinade around a flank steak, and in the morning his nerve endings either had enough of what they needed or did not; as if his mental clarity might depend on something as simple as whether he’s lain on his side or on his back the night before, or as if, more disturbingly, he were a damaged transistor radio which after a vigorous shaking might function loud and clear or spew nothing but static laced with unconnected phrases, the odd strain of music."
That sounds about right. As if, not only will a piece of art move one person and leave another completely cold, but also, a piece of art may move a person on one day, and leave that same person completely cold on another. Which suggests that we are different people every day. This is doing terrible things to my sense of identity. Maybe I should change my name each morning? It makes me think of that most absurd and meaningless of questions, where are you from? Somerset, I say. As if that tells them anything at all. What a random fact to know about a person. Where am I from? I’ll tell you where I’m from: a slightly fitful night where I dreamed of canoeing to the North Pole in hiking gear with my Dad and then I woke up with pins and needles in my left foot. Hey, come back here, I was talking to you, you in the hat and the striped scarf, running up that hill, little stick man you are, little Irish stick man it sounds like, I’m going to run after you to find out where the hell you hide at night, breaking my radio, sowing my dreams with images of walking boots - you can leap over that 1000-mile-wide ravine if you like but you can’t hide forever, you little leprechaun stickman with electricity hair, I’m going to catch hold of you and tie you up in my office and feed you prawns until you squeal your secrets...
Right then. How the hell did I get here from there?
There are some techniques I use to slap my muse to life each day, sometimes a strong coffee will do it, other times a certain song, loud on my headphones. Occasionally it’s a poem or short story, but often, as soon as I start to read something, the thought of trying to produce something myself flaps out of the window and away up the hill.
I have tried writing on a series of topics over several days, in order to have something guaranteed to write about the next day. The most successful of these was my ‘country’ series where I wrote down everything I knew about particular countries, whether because I had visited them, or because I had never been there and wanted to find out what I could make up. My ‘food’ series was not bad (the crayfish entry was memorable); my ‘building’ series, however, was largely a waste of time. I discovered I know next to nothing about architectural features. But in every case I found myself ground down after a while, it felt too much like routine.
I have tried writing a novel (without having an idea for a novel); I've tried daily flashes; I've tried John Gardner’s writing exercises; I've tried automatic writing; I even went through a phase of forcing myself to think of an opening sentence in the time it took me to brush my teeth, with predictable consequences which my dentist was delighted about – still I’m here, today, unable to think of a single goddam thing to write about, filling my notebooks with yet more what-shall-I-write-about-today verbiage. Garbage. Verbigarbage.
Every single day I go through this vaguely psychotic process. Part of the problem is, I have no idea what I’m working towards. There are no signs of progress, no one saying, you’re on the right track, just keep going like that and you’ll get there.
In any case I’ve decided today: enough is enough. Once and for all, I am going to find a foolproof way to get myself into writing mode each morning, some technique to wake up the writer part of me long enough to produce something, even – especially – when I’m not in the mood to write. No more ‘what shall I write today?’ entries in my notebook.
This might have to be quite drastic. It doesn’t matter. Desperate times and all that. There must be some infallible way to access that weird floaty mood I’m in after a strong coffee or a pint of beer, or after reading something striking or hearing some good music, that mood when I can actually write and not care about what I’m writing.
The trouble is (more analysis! shut up already!) I’m a slightly different person each morning so I don’t know what is going to inspire me that day. I have witnessed this phenomenon in my five-month-old daughter, who by all accounts has pretty similar days and nights – naps and meals at certain times, the same songs, the same books and stories, the same toys – and yet one morning she'll wake up with the joys of the season running through her veins, and the next will be as grumpy as a February afternoon on a disused pier in Norway. As Jonathan Franzen put it:
"He had good days and bad days. It was as if when he lay in bed for a night certain humors pooled in the right or wrong places, like marinade around a flank steak, and in the morning his nerve endings either had enough of what they needed or did not; as if his mental clarity might depend on something as simple as whether he’s lain on his side or on his back the night before, or as if, more disturbingly, he were a damaged transistor radio which after a vigorous shaking might function loud and clear or spew nothing but static laced with unconnected phrases, the odd strain of music."
That sounds about right. As if, not only will a piece of art move one person and leave another completely cold, but also, a piece of art may move a person on one day, and leave that same person completely cold on another. Which suggests that we are different people every day. This is doing terrible things to my sense of identity. Maybe I should change my name each morning? It makes me think of that most absurd and meaningless of questions, where are you from? Somerset, I say. As if that tells them anything at all. What a random fact to know about a person. Where am I from? I’ll tell you where I’m from: a slightly fitful night where I dreamed of canoeing to the North Pole in hiking gear with my Dad and then I woke up with pins and needles in my left foot. Hey, come back here, I was talking to you, you in the hat and the striped scarf, running up that hill, little stick man you are, little Irish stick man it sounds like, I’m going to run after you to find out where the hell you hide at night, breaking my radio, sowing my dreams with images of walking boots - you can leap over that 1000-mile-wide ravine if you like but you can’t hide forever, you little leprechaun stickman with electricity hair, I’m going to catch hold of you and tie you up in my office and feed you prawns until you squeal your secrets...
Right then. How the hell did I get here from there?
Another Brilliant Day
I must be due a slump but I'm grabbing this while I can!
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
02,410 Words May 17 (Story, Poems) 13:09
25,300 Words Total 8,300 Words ahead of schedule
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
02,410 Words May 17 (Story, Poems) 13:09
25,300 Words Total 8,300 Words ahead of schedule
Thursday Prompts
It started near the primary school
I said to the Mrs, "That's bloody odd."
I have bought an iceberg
The policewoman who told me you had died was very pretty
One of my children asked me who I was
In a past life I was a boring fucker
When making love to a chicken you have to watch out for eggs
My chess board has all black squares, yours white
A Page Four Girl
This having to pay to die, what if you're broke?
I buy ladies' earrings and throw odd ones in corners, knickers under the bed
King in the Land of the Last Biscuit
I SHOT THE FUCKING DOVE OF PEACE
Eleven bar blues
Jeffrey Archer's Hooker? I ad 'er…
Three soft-boiled eggs? The last one's always hard.
Wife-Printed Toilet-Paper
Moi, the Unthinking Man's crumpet
Jerry Mander, Builder
I said to the Mrs, "That's bloody odd."
I have bought an iceberg
The policewoman who told me you had died was very pretty
One of my children asked me who I was
In a past life I was a boring fucker
When making love to a chicken you have to watch out for eggs
My chess board has all black squares, yours white
A Page Four Girl
This having to pay to die, what if you're broke?
I buy ladies' earrings and throw odd ones in corners, knickers under the bed
King in the Land of the Last Biscuit
I SHOT THE FUCKING DOVE OF PEACE
Eleven bar blues
Jeffrey Archer's Hooker? I ad 'er…
Three soft-boiled eggs? The last one's always hard.
Wife-Printed Toilet-Paper
Moi, the Unthinking Man's crumpet
Jerry Mander, Builder
Wednesday, 16 May 2007
Woooooo Hooooo!
a 5,000 word Day!
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
22,890 Words Total 6,890 Words ahead of schedule
01,375 Words May 01 Tuesday
01,023 Words May 02 Wednesday (Flash & Poem)
01,157 Words May 03 Thursday (Long Poem etc)
01,052 Words May 04 Friday
01,000 Words May 04 Friday (EDIT, article drafted 15:49)
00,600 Words May 05-06 (Two Poems)
02,621 Words May 08 (Article)
00,738 Words May 08 (Flash)
00,988 Words May 09 (Flash)
01,227 Words May 10 (Story)
01,736 Words May 12 (Article and Poem)
01,583 Words May 13 (Article)
01,900 Words May 14 (Article & Flash)
00,890 Words May 15 (Flash)
05,000 Words May 16 (Long Story and Article)
22,890 Words Total 6,890 Words ahead of schedule
Something Different
There are about eighty prompts for me to post tonight (for up to four sessions).
Here's the idea
BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE PROMPTS
Choose 3/4/5 numbers between 1 and 164.
Do this 1-2-3-4 times depending on how many sessions you are going to do.
Cut and paste ALL the prompts to a Word file and then select Format-Document-Layout and Line Number-Continuous (not per page) so all the lines now have a number.
Now read ALL the prompts but you must use one of your selected numbers (and others as you fancy)
Spend at least five minutes "living with" the prompts. read them top to bottom, bottom to top, paly around, combine etc
REMEMBER THE ABOVE. DO IT BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE PROMPTS
A black dog
A drizzle glazes the museum entrance
A surprised wreck, a sad sinking
And when each man has given up chasing flies
Angel A
At the end of this sentence, rain will begin
Ballistics
Bless This House, brass
Can it be right to give what I give?
Chestnuts on a shovel
Cold Iron Rail
Days of Wine & Roses
Each family will pay one thousand dollars
Faint photographs, lives history
Five Old men
For a second I looked back into the city, down through the smoke.
Go From Me
Granted, you are dying, but
He – for there could be no doubt about his sex
He gives his daughter shells
He sat on a cold bench, trying to be younger
He was quietly American, not so much a pig
Her voice had the gutturals of machine-guns
His body was as thin as a reflection
Hotel Unthinking
I am a snake, slowly shedding my life
I am burned black by a million sins and sun
I am not me. I do not close this door
I found my pity, beneath some books
I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head
I lift my heavy heart up
I reads once that all revolutions start small
I thought once, how he had sung of the sweet years
I was smoking my pipe
If I lay here dead?
If you were here, wishing, lying on these sheets
In those first years
It is spring, moonless night in the small town
It's possible that Hell is a suburb of Cairo
Oh my love. Yes. Here we sit.
One day I awoke, a yellow star grown on my breast
Orlando
Passing by my wife's car
President George Brown
Punctually at six o'clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue
Mountains.
She never gave a lock of hair away
She was as beautiful as stone in the sunrise
Silk, umbrellas, avarice beyond
Smelling Almond Polish
Something primal
Tanner Hop
The Bella Archipelago
The big guy wasn't any of my business
The biggest TV in the World
The clouds lifted slowly from the ridge of the mountains and the dawn rim appeared.
The fierce full moon
The letter came just before noon, special delivery.
The maid brings me a lamp
The Malpases had moved in the day before
The melancholy of Sunday
The Merrimac River, broad and placid flows down to it.
The priest, barely glancing at the two penitents
The Problem With Jack Harvey
Then all the nations
There was a black car following.
This fucking driver is getting on my tits.
Three Ducks in the hallway
To begin at the beginning
Town & City
Trees air-brushed, leaves added
Video night last Monday.
We are only ever one step from the gutter
We were sitting in a room at the Berglund.
When the heart creaks like cottage-wood
Where are your monuments, battles, martyrs?
Winter branches
With two double bourbons in him, he sat in the final departures lounge at Miami
Airport and thought about life and death.
I have been in love twice. I have married four times. I do not know how to make these things coincide
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods
The naked man who lay splashed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
Here's the idea
BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE PROMPTS
Choose 3/4/5 numbers between 1 and 164.
Do this 1-2-3-4 times depending on how many sessions you are going to do.
Cut and paste ALL the prompts to a Word file and then select Format-Document-Layout and Line Number-Continuous (not per page) so all the lines now have a number.
Now read ALL the prompts but you must use one of your selected numbers (and others as you fancy)
Spend at least five minutes "living with" the prompts. read them top to bottom, bottom to top, paly around, combine etc
REMEMBER THE ABOVE. DO IT BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE PROMPTS
A black dog
A drizzle glazes the museum entrance
A surprised wreck, a sad sinking
And when each man has given up chasing flies
Angel A
At the end of this sentence, rain will begin
Ballistics
Bless This House, brass
Can it be right to give what I give?
Chestnuts on a shovel
Cold Iron Rail
Days of Wine & Roses
Each family will pay one thousand dollars
Faint photographs, lives history
Five Old men
For a second I looked back into the city, down through the smoke.
Go From Me
Granted, you are dying, but
He – for there could be no doubt about his sex
He gives his daughter shells
He sat on a cold bench, trying to be younger
He was quietly American, not so much a pig
Her voice had the gutturals of machine-guns
His body was as thin as a reflection
Hotel Unthinking
I am a snake, slowly shedding my life
I am burned black by a million sins and sun
I am not me. I do not close this door
I found my pity, beneath some books
I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads of my head
I lift my heavy heart up
I reads once that all revolutions start small
I thought once, how he had sung of the sweet years
I was smoking my pipe
If I lay here dead?
If you were here, wishing, lying on these sheets
In those first years
It is spring, moonless night in the small town
It's possible that Hell is a suburb of Cairo
Oh my love. Yes. Here we sit.
One day I awoke, a yellow star grown on my breast
Orlando
Passing by my wife's car
President George Brown
Punctually at six o'clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue
Mountains.
She never gave a lock of hair away
She was as beautiful as stone in the sunrise
Silk, umbrellas, avarice beyond
Smelling Almond Polish
Something primal
Tanner Hop
The Bella Archipelago
The big guy wasn't any of my business
The biggest TV in the World
The clouds lifted slowly from the ridge of the mountains and the dawn rim appeared.
The fierce full moon
The letter came just before noon, special delivery.
The maid brings me a lamp
The Malpases had moved in the day before
The melancholy of Sunday
The Merrimac River, broad and placid flows down to it.
The priest, barely glancing at the two penitents
The Problem With Jack Harvey
Then all the nations
There was a black car following.
This fucking driver is getting on my tits.
Three Ducks in the hallway
To begin at the beginning
Town & City
Trees air-brushed, leaves added
Video night last Monday.
We are only ever one step from the gutter
We were sitting in a room at the Berglund.
When the heart creaks like cottage-wood
Where are your monuments, battles, martyrs?
Winter branches
With two double bourbons in him, he sat in the final departures lounge at Miami
Airport and thought about life and death.
I have been in love twice. I have married four times. I do not know how to make these things coincide
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods
The naked man who lay splashed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
Under the Ribs
I read an easy-to-read "small" poet-published poem in Boot Camp this morning and posted a reply. It's OK but if this was a story it would be TMAWIA . It's one totally accessible, instant, obvious observation and question. I mean how long does it make us think? We have it and have forgotten it in five seconds.
But then I realised that there are many stories where something like this happens. (It's slightly longer-timed in the story but that's a word-count thing more than anything else.)
They get in, get out, and barely create dust. A week later you cannot remember the plot, theme, character, but more importantly, the emotions, the weight, the smell have disappeared.
But my reaction to the poem is whispering something to me, something like my "napalm" idea but not quite the same.
This: when you want to convey into the reader a certain set of emotions, it is not only the semantic content you have to think about, but the musicality, tone, pace, pacing etc. Part of the reader is hypnotised.
Some musics stick, get under, start to burn, some just bounce off.
Worse (and this is only a partly-formed idea right now) some use a cheap trick to get, not under the skin at all, but into some cheap hotel in the head where all the responses are well-known and we are too lazy to walk out in the rain, get wet, risk getting mugged, because across the street is a place that's alive-alive-alive and the Devil drops in on Thursdays.
What I will say next, may or may not be connected to my thoughts above (but that's the point really, should all connections always be the perfectly crisp, neatly-packaged ones that don't unhinge us?)
Yesterday, scouring second-hand bookshops for biographical stuff on T S Eliot (and when I quote him I might be able to show how some lines go straight up under the ribs) I picked up, for a throw-away pound, the stories of Sean O'Faolain. In the foreword to his collection he says:
"I must, if only in my defence, tell the reader of this volume that it opens with three stories from my first collection, Midsummer Night Madness and that although I have chosen them because I like them very much they contain things that make me smile today – and yet I have been unwilling to rewrite them. I should like to explain why.
They belong to a period, my twenties. They are very "romantic" as their weighted style shows. I should have to change my nature if I were to [rewrite and] change the style, which is full of romantic words, such as dawn, dew, onwards, youth, world, adamant or dusk; of metaphors and abstractions; of personalisations and sensations which belong to the author rather than to the characters.
They also contain many of those romantic words "and" and "but", which are words that are part of the attempt to carry on and expand the effect after the sense has been given. Writers who put down the essential thing, without any cocoon about it, do not need those "ands" and "buts". The thing is given and there it lies; whereas the writer who luxuriates goes on with the echoes of his first image or idea.
His emotions and thoughts dilate, the style dilates with them, and in the end he is trying to write a kind of verbal music to convey feelings that the mere sense of the words cannot give. He is chasing the inexpressible. He is interested mainly in his own devouring daemon. He is, as I was in my twenties, drowned in himself.
French writers, on the other hand, often spoil their stories by adding too much analysis in their obsessive pursuit of clarity at all costs.
Hemingway is the real man. He writes short sentences because with his genius for seizing on the essential he can also seize on the simple image to convey what he wants to say. If we sometimes think that he is saying something obvious that may well be because only a man of genius can see and say what, once he has seen and said it, we flatter him by thinking of as obvious."
***
I'm not sure if I needed to drift into discussing Hemingway but it seemed polite to allow Mr O'Faolain to finish his page! From here on I'm on unsteady ground, trying to write an article while at the same time, trying, for myself, to articulate what I'm feeling. I'm well aware that I could write the article, "discover" and then edit it to death until it actually looks like I'm expert and always was. In fact I was expert before I was born.
This is a complex thing. It's to do with many things and they are not all concrete; language, pace, pacing, the removal of the author, obliqueness, appeal to memory and myth, allusion, language again, tone, voice, the colour of words, rhythm (as emphases, rise and fall, musicality, tone) all these things can combine to direct the story "underneath and inside."
We have all heard the person who cannot tell a joke well. It's not the joke, it's the way yer tell 'em. So we know the delivery is part of the meaning.
A good poet is a good poet, a great slam-poet is a performer. Many poets and writers cannot read their own work well, some are brilliant speakers and enrich the poem beyond what we can see on the page. I think it was Eliot who on hearing Yeats read a poem said to fully understand them, to completely feel, you needed to be Irish, speak as an Irishman, know and feel Ireland's history. I've probably made that up, but I don't care.
If I write, "Married and not even pregnant, there's posh for you!" that is so Welsh I can see red shirts at The Arms Park, miners clopping home along black streets, wives with arms folded standing in doorways. For all I know that might have originated in London's East End, or in Newcastle or might have been invented on the stage, but my reality is I hear it from my mother's mouth and the voice, the lilt, the wry commentary open up all my Welshness, the different sensibilities of a South Walian and alter my experience.
This is even wilder, crazier, when I remind myself my mother was Irish!
I think most writers understand the nature of the woman's magazine story, the "womag" story. As an email correspondent wrote; "They are trilling, shallow, meaningless. They avoid the uncomfortable core of human existence and even when "an issue" is raised it is dealt with in a blink of an eye, simplistic, no ripples, no complexity, no doubt."
Now look at the phrasings of some womag stories.
Things were different for Jimmy at Grandma and Grandpa's house.
It all started when a job came up at the local school.
I finally found a recipe I could understand.
She was worried that he wasn't settling in to school as he should.
"This looks like a nice little pub," said Fred.
What is missing here? Why do we instantly know that the piece will be lightweight, that nothing will hurt? Note how the words are from the first 300-400 words of the average vocabulary, the phrases are simplistic and/or clichés, that nothing remotely surprises or challenges. Nothing gets "fired off by connection" here, there's no sense of place, no colour in the expression. It's ersatz, terribly bland.
Could this ever get under the skin and move someone? Ummmm…
We just know the moment we look at lines like these that nothing of importance could ever follow. It's mindless. Trivial.
I'm trying to explore the idea that when we watch TV, or see a film, or read a book, or read a short-story or a poem we either open up in a real, slightly-dangerous, exposed way (inside us there are many mansions) or we simply deal with the piece like that cheap hotel. We know all the tricks, every push-button, chuck it here, oh right, got that.
The cheap hotel has been tarted up lately. Next to the womag ballroom, and The Mills & Boon Lounge there's the chick-lit bar. What matters here in the land of no challenges, the place where the biggest surprise you'll get is that oh-so-recognisable twist at the end is that everything is safe and you will never have to think.
Clichés and stereotypes, stock characters, stock scenes, obvious dilemmas stand in the doorway of the cheap hotel. You don't even need to go all the way in! At least there's Horlicks and Seroxat, pillows...
Am I wickedly cruel to include chick-lit with womag? After all there's no questioning the writers show more skill, greater variety. Yeah, maybe. I could vomit reading some womag stuff and the best of chicklit isn't that bad. We rarely get "scared Johnny" on his first day at school who turns out to be the headmaster!
To be fair my correspondent did say Chick-Lit was Layer 2, but she also said: Sex and Shopping and nothing else. It's mechanical, obvious and clichés door-to-door.
But I'm not here to give you that. The content is not really my point (well it is but we are talking about delivery.) Again it's the mechanical nature, the fact that you can cut and paste language from different authors and it's seamless, almost impossible to spot. Though I'll admit this fiction at its worse is better than womag (and at it's rare best shouldn't be lumped in the chicklit bucket at all) the vast majority of it still abounds with stock phrasing and the language never surprises. It's de-languaged to the point of banality, triviality. Even if there is a decent story somewhere in there, the story stands alone, set aside from the delivery. The delivery is THE STANDARD delivery for "all chick-lit. The language doesn't matter.
We get more of the obvious lines, lines that do almost nothing, lines that are "chat" writing, stuff we hear in the office. She beamed. "You're a love." "While I washed the dishes." "She raised her eyebrows but said nothing." "Dave went to the back door for a cigarette." "I've had ironing up to my eyeballs." "I ached to phone him."
Are there "OK" stories? Sometimes. But everything, or almost everything is so superficial. "Upset" is throwing myself on the bed and beating the pillow and screaming bastard. And of course it's just upset, not grieving or suicidal, or frightened, or really worried. Do you think she's already read the last few pages and she knows Prince Harry is there?
My problem with all this sort of fiction is its glibness, its triviality, it's quick-fix nature (but that's not the point) and the fact that the language also gives off the boy-band, girl-band, washing-up advert level of language. There's no variety, no charm, no individualism in the diction. The next word is always the obvious word and probably a cliché.
In poetry too we start out with (though I shouldn't say "poetry") the verses inside birthday cards and then the glib dum-dee-dum awful rhymed stuff we see in certain quarters. We can dismiss that but above this level there are published poems such as the one that triggered this article where they're "OK" but are simplistic, relying on a neat closing couplet (the equivalent of a twist-ending) say, a neat expression for loneliness but the journey there is nothing more than thinking, OK, but your point is? And then we get the point and go, Oh, yeah, I suppose…
But if I read Eliot:
Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
I feel things, all the foggy things ever, all the smoky things, all my Decembers, everything. Something here reaches into me straight away.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
Sure I see the obvious, remember dads and Granddads on Barry Island beach, blokes with knotted hankies on their heads (do they still do that now?) and all those Barry or Porthcawl outings, sand and fish and chips, but I also feel an ache, some old bloke, just feeling it savouring the experience of age.
The difference is these lines are three-dimensional, they can contain as many meaning as we want them to.
The winter evening settles down
With smells of steaks in passageways
Same thing. I love the language, the difference, the surprise in the words but what they illustrate isn't singular, it sets off thoughts, links, memories
It isn't "cheap-and-cheerful" writing I despise, it's its homogeneity, the way "writers" prostitute themselves, fall into line, go with the flow and take out every last vestige of originality of thought just to be published.
This is from a novel-in-progress called The Bella Archipelago. The guys have invented a writing machine:
Maybe this gets close to what I see as the problem.
We were half-way through our second tumbler when I asked Jeremy what could IMARITA do with other texts. Could it work on stuff already in print? How would it deal with his namesake's work, for instance?
"What d'you have?" Jeremy said, so I leaned over, closed my eyes, did a lucky dip off my bookcase, and came up with Germinal.
"Try Zola," I said. "I'll read it out to you."
Jeremy grinned and began typing.
On a pitch-black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Monstsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet. He could not even make out the black ground in front of him, and it was only the feel of the march wind blowing in great gusts like a storm at sea, but icy cold from sweeping over miles of marshes and bare earth, that gave him a sensation of limitless, flat horizons. There was not a single tree to darken the sky, and the cobbled high road ran on with the straightness of a jetty through the swirling sea of black shadows.
Good old Emil! I'd forgotten the miserable bugger. At the end of that first paragraph I thought maybe I'd read him again.
"What setting?" Jeremy asked.
"What's the range?" I asked back.
"You can have straight-through, no changes, and there are twenty down-grades from there. The first ten take us down to zero, then we have minus settings."
"Try five," I said.
Push. Brzzt, phmmmm.
It was pitch-black as the man walked alone along the road to Monstsou, The icy wind blew across the beet fields and the
stranger bowed his head low towards the cobblestones at his feet.
I could live with that. It wasn't Zola any more, but not criminal.
"Try two?"
Brzzt, phmmmm.
It was a dark and stormy night.
"Minus two?"
There he was out in the dark and miles from town. He couldn't see his hand in front of his face! Oh boy, he'd done it this time!
"Minus Five?"
It was dark and windy as Johnny walked to town. "Oh, what a fool I was!" he thought ruefully. He should have listened to Jenny. "Look before you leap, John Watkins!" she had warned him forebodingly.
For now I'll have to rest my case, But I'm only warming up.
But then I realised that there are many stories where something like this happens. (It's slightly longer-timed in the story but that's a word-count thing more than anything else.)
They get in, get out, and barely create dust. A week later you cannot remember the plot, theme, character, but more importantly, the emotions, the weight, the smell have disappeared.
But my reaction to the poem is whispering something to me, something like my "napalm" idea but not quite the same.
This: when you want to convey into the reader a certain set of emotions, it is not only the semantic content you have to think about, but the musicality, tone, pace, pacing etc. Part of the reader is hypnotised.
Some musics stick, get under, start to burn, some just bounce off.
Worse (and this is only a partly-formed idea right now) some use a cheap trick to get, not under the skin at all, but into some cheap hotel in the head where all the responses are well-known and we are too lazy to walk out in the rain, get wet, risk getting mugged, because across the street is a place that's alive-alive-alive and the Devil drops in on Thursdays.
What I will say next, may or may not be connected to my thoughts above (but that's the point really, should all connections always be the perfectly crisp, neatly-packaged ones that don't unhinge us?)
Yesterday, scouring second-hand bookshops for biographical stuff on T S Eliot (and when I quote him I might be able to show how some lines go straight up under the ribs) I picked up, for a throw-away pound, the stories of Sean O'Faolain. In the foreword to his collection he says:
"I must, if only in my defence, tell the reader of this volume that it opens with three stories from my first collection, Midsummer Night Madness and that although I have chosen them because I like them very much they contain things that make me smile today – and yet I have been unwilling to rewrite them. I should like to explain why.
They belong to a period, my twenties. They are very "romantic" as their weighted style shows. I should have to change my nature if I were to [rewrite and] change the style, which is full of romantic words, such as dawn, dew, onwards, youth, world, adamant or dusk; of metaphors and abstractions; of personalisations and sensations which belong to the author rather than to the characters.
They also contain many of those romantic words "and" and "but", which are words that are part of the attempt to carry on and expand the effect after the sense has been given. Writers who put down the essential thing, without any cocoon about it, do not need those "ands" and "buts". The thing is given and there it lies; whereas the writer who luxuriates goes on with the echoes of his first image or idea.
His emotions and thoughts dilate, the style dilates with them, and in the end he is trying to write a kind of verbal music to convey feelings that the mere sense of the words cannot give. He is chasing the inexpressible. He is interested mainly in his own devouring daemon. He is, as I was in my twenties, drowned in himself.
French writers, on the other hand, often spoil their stories by adding too much analysis in their obsessive pursuit of clarity at all costs.
Hemingway is the real man. He writes short sentences because with his genius for seizing on the essential he can also seize on the simple image to convey what he wants to say. If we sometimes think that he is saying something obvious that may well be because only a man of genius can see and say what, once he has seen and said it, we flatter him by thinking of as obvious."
***
I'm not sure if I needed to drift into discussing Hemingway but it seemed polite to allow Mr O'Faolain to finish his page! From here on I'm on unsteady ground, trying to write an article while at the same time, trying, for myself, to articulate what I'm feeling. I'm well aware that I could write the article, "discover" and then edit it to death until it actually looks like I'm expert and always was. In fact I was expert before I was born.
This is a complex thing. It's to do with many things and they are not all concrete; language, pace, pacing, the removal of the author, obliqueness, appeal to memory and myth, allusion, language again, tone, voice, the colour of words, rhythm (as emphases, rise and fall, musicality, tone) all these things can combine to direct the story "underneath and inside."
We have all heard the person who cannot tell a joke well. It's not the joke, it's the way yer tell 'em. So we know the delivery is part of the meaning.
A good poet is a good poet, a great slam-poet is a performer. Many poets and writers cannot read their own work well, some are brilliant speakers and enrich the poem beyond what we can see on the page. I think it was Eliot who on hearing Yeats read a poem said to fully understand them, to completely feel, you needed to be Irish, speak as an Irishman, know and feel Ireland's history. I've probably made that up, but I don't care.
If I write, "Married and not even pregnant, there's posh for you!" that is so Welsh I can see red shirts at The Arms Park, miners clopping home along black streets, wives with arms folded standing in doorways. For all I know that might have originated in London's East End, or in Newcastle or might have been invented on the stage, but my reality is I hear it from my mother's mouth and the voice, the lilt, the wry commentary open up all my Welshness, the different sensibilities of a South Walian and alter my experience.
This is even wilder, crazier, when I remind myself my mother was Irish!
I think most writers understand the nature of the woman's magazine story, the "womag" story. As an email correspondent wrote; "They are trilling, shallow, meaningless. They avoid the uncomfortable core of human existence and even when "an issue" is raised it is dealt with in a blink of an eye, simplistic, no ripples, no complexity, no doubt."
Now look at the phrasings of some womag stories.
Things were different for Jimmy at Grandma and Grandpa's house.
It all started when a job came up at the local school.
I finally found a recipe I could understand.
She was worried that he wasn't settling in to school as he should.
"This looks like a nice little pub," said Fred.
What is missing here? Why do we instantly know that the piece will be lightweight, that nothing will hurt? Note how the words are from the first 300-400 words of the average vocabulary, the phrases are simplistic and/or clichés, that nothing remotely surprises or challenges. Nothing gets "fired off by connection" here, there's no sense of place, no colour in the expression. It's ersatz, terribly bland.
Could this ever get under the skin and move someone? Ummmm…
We just know the moment we look at lines like these that nothing of importance could ever follow. It's mindless. Trivial.
I'm trying to explore the idea that when we watch TV, or see a film, or read a book, or read a short-story or a poem we either open up in a real, slightly-dangerous, exposed way (inside us there are many mansions) or we simply deal with the piece like that cheap hotel. We know all the tricks, every push-button, chuck it here, oh right, got that.
The cheap hotel has been tarted up lately. Next to the womag ballroom, and The Mills & Boon Lounge there's the chick-lit bar. What matters here in the land of no challenges, the place where the biggest surprise you'll get is that oh-so-recognisable twist at the end is that everything is safe and you will never have to think.
Clichés and stereotypes, stock characters, stock scenes, obvious dilemmas stand in the doorway of the cheap hotel. You don't even need to go all the way in! At least there's Horlicks and Seroxat, pillows...
Am I wickedly cruel to include chick-lit with womag? After all there's no questioning the writers show more skill, greater variety. Yeah, maybe. I could vomit reading some womag stuff and the best of chicklit isn't that bad. We rarely get "scared Johnny" on his first day at school who turns out to be the headmaster!
To be fair my correspondent did say Chick-Lit was Layer 2, but she also said: Sex and Shopping and nothing else. It's mechanical, obvious and clichés door-to-door.
But I'm not here to give you that. The content is not really my point (well it is but we are talking about delivery.) Again it's the mechanical nature, the fact that you can cut and paste language from different authors and it's seamless, almost impossible to spot. Though I'll admit this fiction at its worse is better than womag (and at it's rare best shouldn't be lumped in the chicklit bucket at all) the vast majority of it still abounds with stock phrasing and the language never surprises. It's de-languaged to the point of banality, triviality. Even if there is a decent story somewhere in there, the story stands alone, set aside from the delivery. The delivery is THE STANDARD delivery for "all chick-lit. The language doesn't matter.
We get more of the obvious lines, lines that do almost nothing, lines that are "chat" writing, stuff we hear in the office. She beamed. "You're a love." "While I washed the dishes." "She raised her eyebrows but said nothing." "Dave went to the back door for a cigarette." "I've had ironing up to my eyeballs." "I ached to phone him."
Are there "OK" stories? Sometimes. But everything, or almost everything is so superficial. "Upset" is throwing myself on the bed and beating the pillow and screaming bastard. And of course it's just upset, not grieving or suicidal, or frightened, or really worried. Do you think she's already read the last few pages and she knows Prince Harry is there?
My problem with all this sort of fiction is its glibness, its triviality, it's quick-fix nature (but that's not the point) and the fact that the language also gives off the boy-band, girl-band, washing-up advert level of language. There's no variety, no charm, no individualism in the diction. The next word is always the obvious word and probably a cliché.
In poetry too we start out with (though I shouldn't say "poetry") the verses inside birthday cards and then the glib dum-dee-dum awful rhymed stuff we see in certain quarters. We can dismiss that but above this level there are published poems such as the one that triggered this article where they're "OK" but are simplistic, relying on a neat closing couplet (the equivalent of a twist-ending) say, a neat expression for loneliness but the journey there is nothing more than thinking, OK, but your point is? And then we get the point and go, Oh, yeah, I suppose…
But if I read Eliot:
Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
I feel things, all the foggy things ever, all the smoky things, all my Decembers, everything. Something here reaches into me straight away.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
Sure I see the obvious, remember dads and Granddads on Barry Island beach, blokes with knotted hankies on their heads (do they still do that now?) and all those Barry or Porthcawl outings, sand and fish and chips, but I also feel an ache, some old bloke, just feeling it savouring the experience of age.
The difference is these lines are three-dimensional, they can contain as many meaning as we want them to.
The winter evening settles down
With smells of steaks in passageways
Same thing. I love the language, the difference, the surprise in the words but what they illustrate isn't singular, it sets off thoughts, links, memories
It isn't "cheap-and-cheerful" writing I despise, it's its homogeneity, the way "writers" prostitute themselves, fall into line, go with the flow and take out every last vestige of originality of thought just to be published.
This is from a novel-in-progress called The Bella Archipelago. The guys have invented a writing machine:
Maybe this gets close to what I see as the problem.
We were half-way through our second tumbler when I asked Jeremy what could IMARITA do with other texts. Could it work on stuff already in print? How would it deal with his namesake's work, for instance?
"What d'you have?" Jeremy said, so I leaned over, closed my eyes, did a lucky dip off my bookcase, and came up with Germinal.
"Try Zola," I said. "I'll read it out to you."
Jeremy grinned and began typing.
On a pitch-black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Monstsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet. He could not even make out the black ground in front of him, and it was only the feel of the march wind blowing in great gusts like a storm at sea, but icy cold from sweeping over miles of marshes and bare earth, that gave him a sensation of limitless, flat horizons. There was not a single tree to darken the sky, and the cobbled high road ran on with the straightness of a jetty through the swirling sea of black shadows.
Good old Emil! I'd forgotten the miserable bugger. At the end of that first paragraph I thought maybe I'd read him again.
"What setting?" Jeremy asked.
"What's the range?" I asked back.
"You can have straight-through, no changes, and there are twenty down-grades from there. The first ten take us down to zero, then we have minus settings."
"Try five," I said.
Push. Brzzt, phmmmm.
It was pitch-black as the man walked alone along the road to Monstsou, The icy wind blew across the beet fields and the
stranger bowed his head low towards the cobblestones at his feet.
I could live with that. It wasn't Zola any more, but not criminal.
"Try two?"
Brzzt, phmmmm.
It was a dark and stormy night.
"Minus two?"
There he was out in the dark and miles from town. He couldn't see his hand in front of his face! Oh boy, he'd done it this time!
"Minus Five?"
It was dark and windy as Johnny walked to town. "Oh, what a fool I was!" he thought ruefully. He should have listened to Jenny. "Look before you leap, John Watkins!" she had warned him forebodingly.
For now I'll have to rest my case, But I'm only warming up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)