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stuff and things

Wrote 400 words of a new short story yesterday. (Go me!)

After the thoughtful discussions here and on facebook yesterday about settings in fiction, I found myself having a very clear idea of when and where these new characters were. It’s interesting to remind myself that the very fact of writing about a place adds an element of fiction to a realistic setting. This can play out in lots of ways. For example, in my story ‘A Rose is Rose’, I had the same setting twice – once as a fictionalised version of a real place, and then as a highly stylised fictionalised version of the same place, where the added fictional elements came from the imagination of the character in the ‘realistic’ setting.

Setting is endlessly interesting and, in my opinion, central to storytelling of all kinds.

I am currently reading ‘Baba Yaga Laid an Egg’, by Dubravka Ugrešić, which is not as good as I want it to be. But maybe I’m being a bit unfair – I’m waiting for my copy of 1Q84 to arrive, which I think is going to be awesome, and  I’m just passing time with this book until it arrives.

Am still lurgified. Dog is depressed because of the fireworks every night. I’m thinking about buying an early bird membership for WFC 2013 in Brighton.  Going to try to get a bit further with my new story today.

Until tomorrow, then!

 

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love medicine

I am lurgified. My head feels like it has been stuffed with bees. In case you are not sure, this is a bad thing. Please feel sorry for me.

Anyway. On with the blogathon.

Recently I read Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich. It is beautifully written. Her characters are so vividly realised that you can see them, hear them speak. They walk off the page and sit down next to you, telling their stories.  Not only that, but their homes, the towns in which they live, the shape of the reservations, are made utterly concrete and real through Erdrich’s prose.

It made me think about how good writers are detailed and authentic in their settings. I think setting is the most difficult thing for many writers to master. If you do not come from an interesting place, a strong culture, a turbulent history, how do you create deep, realistic settings in your stories?

I am pretty sure that this is one problem that drives many writers to fantasy and science fiction. Writing fantastical worlds is easier than making the truth of how we live now come to life on the page. Not that there is anything wrong with fantastic or futuristic settings – as long as they are well rendered (honest, plausible, detailed), they are a vital element of good storytelling. But isn’t it a little bit easier, when you can draw your own map of your own world?

I’ve travelled a little bit and lived in a few different places, and whilst that definitely feeds the imagination, there is also a lack of depth in my knowledge of places. I currently live in a city that is rather uninspiring to me, although I happen to know it extremely well. The ideal is probably to live in a place that you know deeply and which you also find inspiring. I think writers in such circumstances are lucky indeed!

The issue of setting comes up in my writing all the time, and it is what I struggle with probably more than any other aspect of my writing at present. Do you struggle with setting, or does it come easily to you? Which writers do you think handle setting well? And do you think I should move to another city in order to improve my writing?

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uninspired

I suspect I might be succumbing to the lurgy that has been going around here for the past two weeks. I’ve done my best to avoid it but a lot of sick people have been breathing near me recently, coughing without putting their hands over their mouths, sneezing and not immediately rubbing everything down with alcohol wipes or better yet, bunging everything they’ve touched in one of those sterilising machines you see at the dentist’s surgery. They clearly want to infect me.

This may explain the general lack of inspiration I feel at the moment. I know, I know. We writers are not supposed to need inspiration. We have to sit here, through the pain and boredom of having no ideas and nothing to say, just so we can say we paid our dues. And sometimes, just sitting there, just working, is enough to get you back into the flow. But other times, it really isn’t. It’s putting words on a page, then looking back and thinking, jeez. I am really bad at this.

Well, that’s what the past couple of days have been like for me, writing-wise.  All I can hope for is that the lurgy passes swiftly, or alternatively, that it wreaks havoc on me, sending me into a fever in which I hallucinate wildly and creatively…  and maybe travel through time or to another dimension. I quite like that feeling you get when you’re ill, of being in another world. Not that I want to be ill. I just want to be a better writer.

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the daily george

I’ve decided that it would be a cool challenge for me to blog every day between now and the end of the year. The aim is to blog about what I’m writing and reading, of course – but inevitably there will be detours into dog-walking, alcohol, work and other adventures. I can’t help it. Be patient with me – I am finding my blogging feet.

Yesterday when walking the dog, I saw a cat sitting halfway up a tree. I don’t think it was stuck. It seemed to be perched there, trying to work out what the hell to do next. Luckily the dog didn’t notice it, and therefore did not try to chase it down and destroy it with loving chews. I hope that it has found its way home now.

It made me wonder: what is the best pet for a writer? Most writers I talk to have cats. They love their cats, post pictures of their cats making allegedly funny faces, ascribe to their cats all sorts of mysterious intelligence and clearly love them a lot. In fact, it’s tempting to believe that without a cat, you will never be a real writer.

Now, I’ve got nothing against cats. Oh, apart from their inherent EVIL, that is. (Torturing birds, biting the heads off rabbits, looking snooty…) But I think that a dog is the perfect pet for a writer. They are intelligent, peaceful, playful, always willing to listen, and they get you out of the house on a regular basis. This is important: writers who stay indoors all day long and don’t take long, leafy perambulations end up starved of inspiration. We need to go outside. A lot. Dogs make this happen.

Didn’t get as far as I wanted to yesterday with the new short story, so I’m going to turn off the internet and try to finish a first draft today. In the meantime, you can argue about whether cats or dogs are the best pets. (Clue: the answer is ‘dogs’.)

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a confession

I don’t know how to tell you this, but… I’m not writing a novel.

I know, I know. I’ve led you on terribly.

The truth is, I’m writing THREE novels.

I don’t know how I got into this mess. First, it was just the one novel, and I was totally devoted to it, but halfway through I got this feeling I just couldn’t ignore, and I had to go off and write something else. That novel, I finished the first draft of. But as soon as I had finished it, I started drafting out an idea for a totally different novel, and now that one has seized my imagination fully.

I’ve been such a fool!

When I write short stories, I usually have at least five or six stories on the go at once, each in a different stage of development. So I suppose I’m doing the same thing with these novels. IT IS SCARIER WITH NOVELS. Three novels = a hell of a lot of work. I keep trying to make myself choose between them, but that leads to despair and deep confusion. I think I have to write them all.

Somehow.

Meanwhile, I have decided to spend the day writing something completely different – a new short story. I have no ideas or inspiration for it, but I believe that if I sit quietly at my desk for long enough, the story will come to me. Let’s hope so, anyway.

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writing is rewriting

So I plucked up courage and read the first draft. It was everything I expected it to be: sloppy, solipsistic, boring. But after reading it, I wrote a list of everything I liked about it, and there were FIVE WHOLE THINGS! So much of the story became clearer to me as I read, particularly towards the end. I realised that there were layers and layers to this story.

I also realised that it’s the kind of story that, if it is not done brilliantly, will be dreadful. It is difficult material and I am terrified of fucking it up.

But I’m working on the second draft, nonetheless.  Two thousand words today. Having the basic story already worked out, more or less, allows me to have a much more interesting time with the writing.

I hope that I can catch up with my short story writing soon, too. Novels are great but very time consuming.

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the fear

I’ve got the fear.

It’s half-term next week, and it’s about two months since I finished the first draft of my novel. A good time to start editing and revising. That was the plan, anyway.

So this morning I printed out a paper copy, with the intention of reading it through once and taking it in. No notes, no criticism, just see what’s there and how I feel about it.  It was quite satisfying to see the big wodge of paper  sitting on top of the printer. I felt a little bit proud.

But when I went to pick it up, to take it in my hands and start reading – I couldn’t. I sat there, staring at it, trying not to read any of the words on the page. I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Part of a sentence: “…clattering out of slots…”. Awful words. Terrible. This whole thing is a mistake, I thought. Abandon ship!

At some point I am going to have to gather up my courage and actually read the damn thing. Writing is such a head-fuck sometimes.

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your dreams and what they mean

Last night I dreamt about apostrophes. I was writing sentences without apostrophes, so that my students could rewrite them with apostrophes and… well, that’s about it, really.

I guess this dream means I’ve either got serious problems (possibly a punctuation-based meltdown in the near future?), or no problems at all whatsoever. My subconscious mind is apparently free of the usual nagging worries about the overwhelming futility of human existence and the urge towards evil that lurks inside all human hearts.  For obvious reasons, this disturbs me.

So, as always in times of doubt, I turned to a dictionary. There are several dream dictionaries online, but they are rubbish compared to the brilliant ‘Your Dreams and What They Mean’ by Nerys Lee. I found this gem in a charity shop somewhere, many years ago, and I’ve kept it with me ever since. Not only does it have a gorgeously suggestive cover illustration (The Dream, by Henri Rousseau), but inside it has all sorts of information that I have never read anywhere else, from a brief description of the history of dreaming, to advice on how to deal with a psychic or incubus attack whilst asleep.*

Amazingly, there is no entry for ‘apostrophe’, ‘comma’, or for ‘punctuation’ in general. However, I did find out that a rhinoceros is traditionally a sex symbol, a whale is symbolic of the feminine self (“the womb of mother nature”), and that a jay is a messenger from the dead.

Perhaps you already knew.

Well. Even apostrophe dreams are quite interesting when looked at from a certain angle. Indeed,  I get many of my best ideas from dreams, and from dream books.  I already wrote a story called ‘Your dreams and what they mean’ (It is here) and now I’m scouring this fantastic book again to see if inspiration strikes.  I am somewhat tempted to write an epic poem about a rhinoceros and a whale. Watch this space.

 

*In this section of the book, I just found a small yellow moth, dried and pressed into the pages.

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teething

As you can imagine, for a site with such great big teeth, I’ve been having a few teething problems, but things are slowly getting sorted out. Thanks to everyone  for your comments and links. And those of you who have complimented me on the fantastic design of the site, I have to tell you it was all my brother’s doing. His name is Matt Bruce, and if you pay him vast sums of money, he might just be persuaded to design something for you.

In other news, I started back at my day job last week so have been swamped under a pile of lesson plans and new students, and have hardly written anything at all. What I have written is quite a lot of personal stuff about being ill and fucked up, and I’m not sure anyone actually wants to read about that. I am considering how personal I want to get on this blog. I know everyone has a different approach – I haven’t worked out yet what I want mine to be.

Your thoughts? Do you get personal on your blog, or do you keep it strictly business?

 

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convent geometry

My story, Convent Geometry, is published in Ideomancer this month.

I’m very happy to have a story in Ideomancer – it’s a great magazine that has published many, many fantastic stories, including this one by my fellow writing group member, Ilan Lerman.

Perhaps it isn’t the done thing to say so, but I really love this story of mine.  Obviously it has its faults, but there is something compelling, to me, about the characters and setting. After writing it (which I did over the course of about a year) I did a lot of research about the characters and their world, and about sacred geometry, with the vague idea that there might be room for a novel here. But in retrospect, I think I just wanted to live in their world a little bit longer. (I don’t recommend doing the research for a story after you’ve written the story, by the way. I suspect there’s a better method. :))

There are three women in the story, each of whom speaks to me quite clearly. I love Nocturna, and feel that she loses so much. She is not such a nice person – she is controlling, rigid, jealous – but she is innocent, and very simple in her wants. And Lumiere just wants to be free: she has a genius for geometry, and she is forced to use her talent any way she can, even though it ends up being so destructive. Then there is Joan, who is so damaged, so unprepared to find beauty and wonder in the world. I don’t know why they are so important to me. Perhaps they represent three battling elements of myself. Maybe it’s just the power of three – in sacred geometry, three is the number that creates the universe.

I don’t know. Some stories just live. That’s a good feeling, to write a story like that.