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Archive for April, 2010

Rejection!

Posted in rejection on April 30, 2010| 1 Comment »

This is something we are going to have to get used to, I suppose.

I had a letter today from UEA, rejecting my application to their Creative Writing MA. My application was always a predominantly speculative one, as it is the best course in the country and I am very much a beginner writer.

A friend of mine mentioned that she had applied for the same course a couple of years ago and hadn’t been invited to interview either. She’s a very good and experienced writer, so I know my rejection isn’t necessarily directly related to a lack of anything in my work…

Even so, this has highlighted to me that I seem to have omitted a Plan B from my imaginings of how the next year will pan out.

I applied for three MA courses, and have yet to hear back from two of them. I’m not sure what I will do if I don’t get a place at the remaining two… I didn’t really make a Plan B. Ah well, let’s see what happens!

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Hello Monday, My Old Friend

Posted in A215, characters on April 28, 2010| 2 Comments »

He’s back, only this time he’s female. I have a recurring character, and quite frankly, he is beginning to get on my goat.

Since I read this article, I’ve been constantly aware of a recurring character in most of my stories. His age changes in each story, but he’s basically the same:

At first, he’s always called Sam or Pete. Then I think of a more interesting name and change it about 500 words into the first draft. He’s miserable: he doesn’t enjoy his job and his relationship is probably bitter and riddled with problems. Either that or his girlfriend has recently left him. He is melancholy, directionless, and feeling sorry for himself. He wants to get down onto his knees into the flowerbeds and bury his face in the dirt. This is because he lives in a smoggy city and he needs to feel the countryside. He wants to stand on top of a hill and scream into the wind.

Sometimes, he’s not even a character at all. He can be a general feeling of pervasive melancholy or a whimsical sentence… but he’s always there. Sam/Pete is indulgent, repetitive, boring and irritating and he won’t go away.

In the story I began tonight (draft 1 of TMA05), the main character is a girl of my age. She is also Sam/Pete. So is the story.

On the plus side, I think the Sam/Pete Effect tends to dissipate between Draft 1 and Draft 2. Perhaps it’s just something I need to get out of my system. I’ll keep you updated.

Does anyone else have a Sam/Pete?

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Precocious

Posted in where we live on April 26, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Walking through tube stations this Sunday afternoon, I came upon a family making their way home from the London Marathon. The two young girls must have been four or five or six years old (probably about waist height, for those who can tell these things), both wearing pink cowboy hats fringed with white feathers.

“Mum!”

“MUM!”

“Muuuuuuummm!”

“Yes?” the tired mother (still with Marathon running number attached to her t-shirt) turned, holding the handles of the pram she lugged up the stairs.

“I’ve just seen a celebrity!”

My best friend turned to me and whispered, “And that’s what’s wrong with London.”

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Hello

Posted in blogging, procrastination on April 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Oh dear. Procrastination stations!

I’ve gone back to Twitter. Not only that, but I’ve linked my twitter account to this blog, and linked my Facebook to the new account. Therefore this blog is a little more public than previously.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been thinking that it’s a shame I don’t have a public blog. I have a private and anonymous one which has been going for about three years, but there’s a lot of stuff on there which I don’t want real life people to know about.

The fact is, I like social networking (this is a little embarrassing to admit), and I like blogging so much that I am vaguely involved with at least five of them: Birmingham Conservation Trust, once there was, this one, my private one, and a couple for work. But none of them enabled me to share inanities with friends, so that is now what this one has become.

It’s still going to be mainly about writing, because that is what I think about and talk about (shame I never actually sit down for ten minutes and actually do it). But it’ll also have some life-related stuff as well, I hope.

All excellent news, and all excellent procrastination tools, no? 🙂

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Anecdote Monkey

Posted in A215, Life Writing on April 22, 2010| 1 Comment »

I found that Life Writing turned me into something of a windbag. Did anyone else feel like this?

Not only was I scuttling off to write down any exciting anecdotes people told me, but also it seemed to open up a wealth of interesting little tales and quirky events from my past, which I just had to share with someone. Immediately.

Every time I opened my mouth to talk, years of ‘back story’ and ‘scene setting’ tumbled out before I got to the actual point. And I thought it was fascinating. All of it!

Poor buggers who had to listen!

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Be Careful What You Remember

Posted in beginnings, editing on April 21, 2010| 1 Comment »

I went to school in America for a couple of years, from age 8 (second grade) to age 10 (fourth grade). The school I attended for fourth grade was an elementary school in Texas, and from what I remember, it wasn’t particularly academically high-flying.

Our history lessons began in 1620 with the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock, and ended at the Texan war of independence in 1836. A music lesson was interrupted by a radio broadcast of the OJ Simpson verdict.

One aspect of this time of my education which has particularly resonated over the past year or so is English. I remember writing a lot of stories at school, which is excellent, and I enjoyed it even then.

But I also remember a handout sheet of paper, with a symbol at the top: the word ‘said’, with a giant red cross through it. Underneath, a list of words which one could use instead of ‘said’:

shouted, yelled, whispered, muttered, called, mumbled, shrieked, expostulated…. you get the picture.

Now that I have started reading blogs and books about writing, I’ve learnt that this is wrong. Here is an example from one of my favourite writing websites, the Blood Red Pencil:

If you do use taglines, it’s better to stick with the word “said”, rather than trying to come up with substitutes such as cry, interject, interrupt, mused, state, counter, conclude, mumble, intone, roar, exclaim, fume, explode. These are “telling” words. Let the words in the dialogue show the emotion. And you can NEVER smile words, or squint them, or laugh them.

So, it just goes to show, not all of what you are taught at school is correct.

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Editing Time!

Posted in A215, editing on April 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I’m excited about the current topic on A215.

This is what I have been waiting for: how to edit your work.

I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts. Hopefully.

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Aims and Results

Posted in A215, eTMAs, Forums, procrastination, working approach on April 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »

My aims in doing A215 were to find out whether I could be an adequate writer, discover whether I can apply myself to writing (this is still in question), to improve my writing and ultimately take a step towards applying for a Masters in Creative Writing (if I still wanted to).

I’m moderately pleased with what I can achieve when I set my mind to it: I’m pleased with my marks and I am beginning to have a vague understanding of the very basic rules of writing. I work well to a deadline (but not at all without one, damn me), and I can write quickly.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that my first drafts (like most people’s), are absolutely awful but redeemable, generally.

And I have applied for places on three MA courses, starting in September 2010.

But very little of what I have learnt in the past few months is due directly to A215. True, the main things I have been writing are the assignments, and it is motivating me, but I’m learning more from self-editing, friends, and reading writing blogs than I am from the (occasionally vague and waffy) BRB chapters.

Admittedly, some are useful, and I am looking forward to the Editing section, but it seems that a prior knowledge or backup research is always necessary to get the most out of the BRB, and actually that the chapter content is better approached as a structural guide for further reading than an actual reference book.

I would love the interactive nature of the course if it worked. I’m sure that many people get a lot out of the forums and their tutor groups, but that’s not the case for me. My tutor group is silent (I’m as responsible for this as anyone, after my initial flounders), and the course forum is too huge.

My conclusions about this course are that I am glad I did it: it has fulfilled the role for which I wanted it. But I couldn’t recommend it to another prospective student, particularly not one working full-time.

Is this fair? What does anyone else think?

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Putting a Piece of Yourself into Poetry

Posted in A215, eTMAs, Poetry on April 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I must admit, the subject I chose for one of my poems for the poetry TMA caused me to sit on my sofa, laptop on me knee, sobbing my heart out for hours. We do it to ourselves, don’t we?

I nearly didn’t write it.

“I’ve started to write a poem about something, for my next assignment. And when I was writing the initial draft, I just couldn’t stop crying. And I thought… well, how arbitrary can you be when you’re editing if the subject means that much to you? It would be impossible. And there’s no guarantee others will relate to the subject matter, if it’s so emotive to the author. You can’t write about it clearly, surely?” I said to a colleague, Poetry Guy (swoon).

“But…” he paused, thinking. “But that’s what I think poetry is. For me, a poem is completely from the heart. It doesn’t matter whether it rhymes, or whether it’s in iambic pentameter… if it contains a little piece of the author’s heart, it’s a poem.”

(swoon, slobber, faint, etc).

So I wrote the poem. And gosh, it was hard. And gosh, I can’t show it to anyone I know, except very close people (not even Poetry Guy has seen it, although I think he deserves to).

I showed it to my parents and it made them cry. I felt a little proud. It can’t be that bad, right? 🙂

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Poetry Thoughts

Posted in A215, Poetry on April 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I loved the opportunity to read poetry and learn about the mechanics of it. I love the way that a poem is a whole: every aspect of the poem contributes to the meaning – line length, number of lines, word choices, word sounds, rhyming (or not), assonance, enjambment, syllable count. Every single choice made by the writer is made for a reason. I think that is great.

But the BRB didn’t explain that.

In my opinion, the BRB barely even touched on the mechanics of poetry, or its importance. I understand that poetry is hard to teach and hard to explain, but the BRB didn’t even try.

The advice broadly shared between the A215 students was to read Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. It’s a good book… or, the first half of it is. I didn’t finish it.

I love poetry. But I wasn’t ready to write any: I didn’t have the right.

It’s a beautiful, complex and exciting art form, which I would recommend learning. But once you start to understand the mechanics at the heart of your favourite poems, you’ll start to realise how little you know.

And you need to break through that barrier by acquiring more knowledge, before you can go on to write poetry.

So I’ve got a theory:

There are two groups of people who can write poetry:

1) Those who understand thoroughly how poetry works: rhyme, metre, form. They know how to break the rules, and they can.

2) Those who have absolutely no idea how poetry works, and write from the heart.

The third group, in which I remain, are those who know a little about the mechanics, but not enough to throughly understand. We develop writers’ block as soon as the suggestion of writing a poem is bandied about in front of us. After all, you can’t write an essay on philosophy in French, if the only thing you know how to say is “one beer, please.”

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