A215

By the skin of my teeth

2006-05-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

I submitted TMA02 at 23:43 tonight. Rather too close for comfort but of rather better quality than I'd expected earlier in the week!

An experiment

2006-04-25T14:02:00.000-07:00

Last night, after talking it through carefully with Andy, we decided that I would give up on A215. Well, not exactly give up, but try and defer until next year. That way I could carry on writing - trying different things - but be under less time pressure with assignments (a year less pressure!) My thinking was that this year isn't going to get any less frantic than it is now, and I'm barely managing enough time focusing on writing and gathering material as it is. The last month has just vanished.

I was drinking tea with my friend down the road tonight, and telling her about this. She asked me a really important question, "What feels like a burden: the writing or writing well?" It made me realise that the pressure was how well I was expecting myself to manage to write. We decided I would experiment with writing and submitting a pretty ropy TMA. Instead of thinking and planning carefully, I'd simply slap down a draft. Twaddle if necessary. Then I'd play with it afterwards. Come the deadline (next Friday) I'd submit whatever I had and in the 'Reflection' discuss what got me there and why I hadn't got any further. I left her house rather excited about trying to slap down some of that twaddle tonight.

4 hours and 1,200 words later I have backache, but also half my TMA drafted and a pretty good idea of how to make the rest flow out on Monday. It may still be unpolished but I don't think it's twaddle, after all.

I do sometimes feel I make heavy weather of all of this. How many times do I need to be reminded that perfection is not necessary? That I can do it?

Frustrating. But at moments like this when I beat it. Exhilerating.

Cheating and winning

2006-04-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a blowy, April day with drenching showers picking their way across the city, soaking one part while ignoring the next. Andy played damp disc golf in South Park while I fed the worms and weeded the borders in sharp sunshine. I interspersed these chores and writing, lazily. Babe curled up in a sunbeam in the spare room.

I played with the course exercises and cheated quite a bit. In fact, quite a lot. I took each activity and twisted it, so I could use it to develop ideas I've been working on. So, for example, I took Activity 7.5 (writing from the point of view of a forgetful narrator), and used it to develop an incident from my children's fiction idea, from the perspective of one of the characters writing years after the events. She turned out not to be as forgetful as perhaps was meant, but I fleshed out my ideas a bit more!

After all, this is for fun, isn't it.

Some inspiring things

2006-03-26T09:54:00.000-08:00

I may not have managed to write much today, but I have found a few really thought provoking and useful web resources, both thanks to Kate Harrison's blog. This web site, by Caro Clarke, has lots of useful advice. The practical tips (such as the four most common mistakes in first novels) are all explained with examples, so they make a lot more sense. I also enjoyed this speech by Arthur Levine. It suggests that authenticity is all important, i.e. writing as you. Now that gets me thinking...

Writing to find out

2006-03-26T00:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to a seminar about 'Science in Fiction' where Maggie Gee was in discussion with Philip Pullman, Brian Aldiss and John Carey. At one point Philip Pullman said, 'If you knew what was going to happen when you started writing, you'd go mad. You write to find out.' Everyone wholeheartedly agreed, which surprised me greatly. I imagined that writers all work out the plot completely before they start. How liberating to think you don't!

Cliche spotter

2006-03-24T13:53:00.000-08:00

Andy (my partner) is brilliant at critiquing my work. In particular, his pedantry means I don't get away with anything at all. I've posted Activity 6.3 (about the character who can't forget the history of a place) into the cafe for more feedback because Andy pointed out so many things he 'didn't get'. I want second, third and fourth opinions! He looked at my Pitt Rivers piece (Activity 6.2) and picked out the phrase, 'her voice sounded far away' as a cliche. To prove his point, he typed it into Google. How useful was that! It's an immediate cliche spotter! There was some pretty terrible writing up there... Try it.

Unblocked

2006-03-21T11:17:00.000-08:00

It's strange how disparate things can come together and inspire. I came home from work in a low mood after another difficult day, and checked to see if my TMA was back (for the 57th time). It isn't. Then I thought I'd have a quick bash at Activity 6.2, which asks you to describe a place twice, and conjure two completely different moods in the setting.

I'd wondered about the idea of a woman with morning sickness being freaked out by the creepiness of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the same woman, feeling well, loving the atmosphere (after reading someone elses 6.2 which used morning sickness). I'd played around with it at the weekend and left myself uninspired. Today I had some feedback in my tutor group about another exercise, that starting 'in the middle of the action' worked well. This made me think of starting with the woman staring at a shrunken head and her reaction to it. Suddenly, it just poured out of me, and I got really into refining and refining, working on each word. I'm quite happy with the result, so got straight on and did Activity 6.1. Could it be starting to flow again? I must remember that the way to get started is just to do something, just start, even if I'm not in the mood.

Blocked, stuck, miserable, decaffeinated

2006-03-18T09:30:00.000-08:00

I'm stuck, stuck, stuck. I just don't seem able to start writing. I'm still working on chapter 5 weeks after I last posted about it. I've been feeling more closed up each day, more unable to think of anything to write, and more self-critical. Perhaps it is 'real' life intruding: work has been stressful to the extent I've arrived home each night and just wanted to curl up in bed, escape in a book and then blank my worries with sleep.

At times like this I feel as if I have a nagging, critical monster on my shoulder, whispering in my ear all day: 'Do you really think you can write? You may have written a story for the TMA that a few people seemed to like but now you've got to write lots more words, and you realise that you can only really write in the first person, don't you?'

Today I'm standing up to it and having a go, but I'm struggling because every attempt feels banal. I know the theory is that you write even if it's rough and unpromising, because there will be gold in the muck. Right now I just feel over my wellies in muck.

I'm trying to do activity 5.2 at the moment. The task is to take a stereotypical character (like an old fashioned elderly person) and write a description of them that makes you realise they are more complex. I'm going to try a freewrite to try and get started, after another cup of tea...

Characters are 'found'

2006-03-06T13:25:00.000-08:00

Chapter 5 of the A215 workbook quotes Elizabeth Bowen saying that characters are 'found' in much the same way as someone slowly becomes visible across a dimly lit railway carriage. Rubbish, I thought: you make them up, don't you.

Over our snowy weekend away, I was thinking about the character of a 12 year old boy that I have been developing. His family are important to my story, and his elder brother in particular, so I decided to 'round the brother out' as the workbook suggests, by deciding what he looks like, what his biggest disappointment in life is, what makes him laugh, what names his brother might call him and so on. Having thought this would be tricky, I found it exhilerating. I circled round and round the character, finding that each fresh thought or question filled him out more, and sparked more ideas about my main character, about their relationship, and about the plot of my story.

I always thought the hardest thing in any story was naming the characters. As a child, the names I made up sounded false, like badly fitting wigs. By contrast, as I thought about my character and his brother, their names just came to mind, and fitted perfectly. I could immediately hear the banter between them, how they shortened their names, the versions they'd like to be called and the ones they'd hate.

It was at this point that I thought back to the description of characters being 'found' and understood it better. It's not as if they pre-exist and you uncover them, but it did feel as if making up one part of them seemed to 'reveal' another; they seemed to take on a life of their own. After a little while, I started to feel I knew what would be right for them and what they wouldn't like me to say about them.

A few weeks ago I read some thoughts in a blog about a character the writer had 'on her mind' and I couldn't relate to it at all. I had no experience of feeling like that. It's good to feel I'm moving on. I still can't figure out how to use colons and semi-colons correctly, though.

Stories in everything

2006-03-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

I rather think writing is changing my life for the better. It's not the act of writing: it's the transformation of the everyday. On a snow spattered moor in Derbyshire this weekend, Andy indulged his joy in peculiar sports (disc golf) and where I might previously have sneered and retired to the pub with my notebook, instead I decided to go along for a while. I stayed until lunchtime, following the group around the moor and watching what was going on. The difference is that now there is so much to see, hear, wonder about. There is a possible story in everything, even prints in the snow.

'Rules we live by'

2006-02-26T08:53:00.000-08:00

Cognitive Therapy says that we each have a set of beliefs or 'rules' we use to interpret the world, including our perceptions of ourselves. We may not always be aware of them, and certainly we aren't always aware of the effect they are having on us. If we are depressed or anxious, we can find out what beliefs we have that might be underlying how we are behaving and feeling.

A215 suggests a few different ways of thinking up characters, but I wondered whether starting from these 'rules' might be an interesting alternative? If someone believed these things (but didn't necessarily know it) what might happen? How might they behave?

"My sister is better at everything than I am."

"The truth gets you into trouble."

"Whatever I do, it won't make any difference."

When I combined the various rules with characters of different ages, genders, professions and so on, it sparked off a few ideas.

Boredom = fear of failure

2006-02-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

I've come up against a wall today. Or rather, an upswell of boredom has overtaken me. I've just started the first chapter of the fiction section, and have been reading about different approaches to creating characters. Each time, I come to an exercise, I 'just don't fancy it'. I took myself out to Queen's Lane cafe hoping that richer stimuli than the fire and the motionless cat would knock some enthusiasm into me. But no, I just felt mildy bored, with a cup of tea I didn't fancy and had to pay for. Insight came when my musings organised themselves into work thoughts. I'm sure that as they did, I must have visibly slumped in my chair: work makes me comatose with boredom quite frequently at the moment. That's when I got it: I feel bored when I'm scared of failing at something! I turned it round in my mind a bit to work out if it's right, and it just felt more convincing.

I've found plundering memories and sensual detail easy: I've even had some good feedback, so it's started to feel safe and the temptation is just to go on doing it, rather than search for characters less related to my experience.

After that, I just did the next couple of exercises. I don't think I did them particularly well, but that's the point. I have to be much, much better at risking 'failure', and seeing far fewer of the possible outcomes as failure in the first place.

Dialogue

2006-02-22T23:47:00.000-08:00

Last night, our tutor group conference got going: we all started posting pieces and commenting on them. I got some very positive feedback, which is encouraging! In particular, because some comments were about the Silver Jubilee poem. I feel quite uncomfortable about poetry at the moment. I find it the easiest thing to write, but I'm not very convinced that I'm doing it 'correctly'. I'm looking forward to finding out more when we get to that part of the course.

Our tutor group has been very positive and pleasant, even while sharing honest criticisms. The main conference is a little more 'prickly'. I had an interesting discussion last night with Andy about conference etiquette. Mornev had posted some work into the Cafe for comment and others had replied to her with suggestions. Then, one person started a new thread and commented that her work needed more action and less waffle. I thought he hadn't handled it very well. I'm quite sure Mornev wouldn't have minded that comment directed to her but starting a new thread and talking about her in the third person was, to me, a little like going to the next table in the pub and starting to criticise someone behind their back (but in a loud enough voice for them to hear!) Andy thinks that with all conferences you just have to take a deep breath and never take anything personally because the medium of email just breeds misunderstandings about intention or tone. After reading the A215 Cafe for a few weeks, I have to agree! Funnily enough, I read Mornev's piece after reading all the feedback and had to laugh when I found it quite free of waffle - clear, simply written and evocative!

My one frustration at the moment is lack of time. I'm itching to spend all my time writing, thinking about writing, blogging or reading or commenting on people's work.

Just flowing

2006-02-15T13:58:00.000-08:00

On Sunday I did the freewriting for TMA01. I started with a cluster about 'ring'. After depressingly circular, paralysing marriage associations and some lame divergences into ring tones, things started to drag. A break: a drizzle dash to the dripping log pile to get the fire going, yet more tea and then another try. This time I started from 'road sign' and things started to get going. First an excursion into bizarre road signs like this one.

Then I started thinking about the place name signs you drive past and just wonder - why? Cold Slad, Nether Wallop, Fryup. This led to thoughts about the legends behind place names (inspired by the mythology around the village I used to live in, Osmotherley).

I've been working through Chapter 3, collecting memories, associations and sensory details from hot summers in the 1970s to write an autobiographical account in the present tense (Activity 3.6). I think this is what made it all came together in my mind, and off I went. First of all, a proto-poem about the fancy dress my brother and I wore for the Silver Jubilee street party: the Queen and Knave of Hearts. I started writing in my brother's voice about my huge strop when he stole one of my tarts (imagine my mother trying to keep a straight face) and suddenly an idea for a story sprang up: village legend getting mixed up with reality in a small boy's mind, all written in his voice. I splurged out a rough draft of 400 words or so and I'm itching to work on it more!

The reflection part of these writing activities motivates me tremendously: I'm learning so much from how ideas are released, worked up and transformed.

Last night I dared to show an old friend my student poems, and she did a critique that was immensely useful, including suggesting I just knock the last verse off one of them. I feel I'm over a hurdle: she can make suggestions and I just enjoy it and don't feel like giving up!

Captured in dialogue

2006-02-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

My tutor has set an activity for us before the day school: writing down twenty things we say often (and getting the help of our family and friends to decide what they are). The group are going to use them to write autobiographical poems. So far, Andy has contributed, “Are you making tea?”, “Will you rub my shoulders”, “Ca-at, chipstick, where are you?” and “I’ll get up in five minutes”. Hmm. I’m not sure this is a self-portrait that I feel comfortable about! It’s an interesting thought, though. I think I’ll be noticing what other people frequently say over the next few days!

At the Guildford day school I gate-crashed last week, we started with a group chant(!) and then wrote a poem or short story using each letter of the alphabet in turn. The silent writing was difficult under time pressure, but starting from the only thought in my head (ANXIETY) I managed something. It was interesting because it didn’t occur to me to start anywhere but A, where it did to others. It just shows again how you need to think around things, look at them in different ways. When the tutor asked for volunteers I forced myself to read aloud to break down the fear. I couldn’t look at anyone, I was so tense, but I did it and felt more relaxed afterwards!

I had to love the buildings at the Surrey University campus. This one runs parallel with the railway. Can you tell?

Perhaps there’s a transport theme?

Be a Magpie

2006-02-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

This is my big lesson for the day, or the last few weeks, really: there is something in everything. Even the banal or everyday can be tipped up, peered at with half closed eyes, questioned or otherwise manipulated into something fascinating.

It slows life down deliciously. I’d already worked out the way to experience life at the speed of a child; notice every bit of everything (even cleaning your teeth); never autopilot through days; and get close up, look from different angles, get physically close. Have you lain on your back on your upstairs landing lately? I did last week, in my pyjamas, bare feet against the cold wall, while Andy brought in the Tesco shopping. I’ve never had a relationship with the hall before, now it’s something more than a transit zone.

Every course exercise at the moment is about taking bits and pieces from here and there, asking questions about it, letting it take you on tangents, and using it when you can. Today in the Day School, as three of us developed a group story from the characters each of us had created, those details started to pop in from all the freewrites, memory associations and even from eavesdropping on the train, and everything got richer.

Next steps: focus a bit, grab some of the swarming snippets and do something with them. Tomorrow.

Emotion, but no 'tension'

2006-02-10T20:00:00.000-08:00

I wrote my first poem in years this week, tears streaming down my face. I got up in the night, feeling miserable, and headed downstairs for a hot drink, the company of the cat by the dying embers of the fire, and to write. Then I did what I used to do in all those years when I wrote a diary: I just wrote, and out it all flowed. At first it was rational, in sentences, organised, coherent, and then gradually it was staccato lines, raw, with repetition and suddenly there it was. A thing, which could be a poem. It's pretty stark now, and it surprised me when it just appeared like that. Afterwards as I sat there looking at it (feeling much better, as it happens), I remembered back to the last time I wrote poetry at just such times.

I've never really shown anyone those poems from student days. My English teacher, Mr Thurlow, always said that good poetry needed "emotion and tension". I interpreted 'tension' as technique and never credited my ourpourings much. Now's my chance, though, to see them as drafts, as starting points and try to make them better.

Hey, it's exciting - maybe I'll even dare to post the raw new poem when I've worked on it a bit (or in the less open forum of the tutur group conference).

While my nerve is on the ascendent, I'm going to share one of the student days poems. I'm just dying to scrawl some self-deprecating justification but no, I'm just posting it.

More A215 inspired changes

2006-02-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking again about how things have changed since I started the course, because it isn't just that all my senses seem more open than before.

It takes far longer to read anything: I become more deeply immersed, wrapped up not only in the plot and the characters, but in the writing itself. This has happened to me before, in fact it's what inspiring writing is for me: I keep being brought up short by the sheer power of the words. One of the best examples is in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. Will loses several fingers in a knife fight, they fall to the floor and he sees them lying there, ’like an apostrophe’. I had to put the book down for a few minutes to recover from the horror of the image.

Sylvia Plath writes like this too. No description of insomnia ever matched this one for me:

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole --
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

(whole poem)

The new experience is that I'm slower at reading all kinds of writing, because I'm taking it to bits, thinking about why it's bad, or what makes it powerful, exciting, or emotional.

It extends to every media. Last night I watched two episodes of 'Life on Mars', the story of a policeman who is run down and apparently transported to 1973 (or is he really in a coma back in his own time and imagining it all?)

<Aside: can you believe that Wikipedia has an entry for this already!?>

As I was watching the scene where the testcard girl leaves the screen to harrass him, I couldn't help thinking I could really see how you might get to this plot from clustering/ freewriting about the 1970s!

Back pressed against radiators

2006-02-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

If you were looking for the younger me, you’d find me leaning against the nearest radiator, knees up, my face in a book. You’d need to take hold of my shoulder and shake me, to snap me out of it. Being lost in a story, and the itchy heat between my shoulder blades in a draughty house were intoxicating.

My early life was lived in story snippets; face down in the long grass, breathing in the earth and creating small life stories in the yew bush (The Castle of Yew, Lucy M Boston); up a tree, in the woods, surviving bravely for an afternoon (Brendon Chase, BB); scribbling in a notebook then discovered, explaining my own poisonous scribbles to my Mum, tears streaming down my face (Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh).

The books that mattered were those which conjured up hidden worlds (The Borrowers, Mary Norton); suggested I could do anything (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Roald Dahl) or left me tearful during the final chapter, at the thought of no longer being with the characters (Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido).

Seeing more, hearing more

2006-02-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

It's Sunday afternoon. Having taken most of the day to get started, birds are singing in the street as the light fades. I've only noticed because my desk is getting dingier and the pool of light from the lamp has become too small. I need to turn the overhead light on. The mist hasn't lifted all day. When I was running, the sky and the still river were the same grey, so the river looked as if it flowed straight into the sky.

It seemed quieter than an average Sunday. I noticed the footbridge over the weir squeaks rhymically as you run over it, and carries on alone as you run up the slope on the other side. Some eights were out, and they must have been better crews than I was ever in. They slipped up behind us with only a couple of audible strokes of the blades, and then silently glided past. In an unbalanced boat there is always the chaotic noise of water on blades as the boat is tipped to one side or the other. I remember how perfect it felt, the first moment we balanced the boat and heard only the hull slicing through the river.

I'm working through the activities from Chapter 3 today and the focus is on 'writing what you know' and trying to make use of all your senses in your writing. I think it has made me notice more in daily life, as my run helped me see.

Poised

2006-02-01T11:54:00.000-08:00

A215 officially starts on Friday but from the high frequency pings as new posts pop into the online conference and the many blog posts, it feels well under way. It's rather like being poised on my bike at the top of a steep, rocky, loose downhill, handle-bars gripped tight; full of fear but exhilerated; no idea what'll happen on the way down but ready for it.

A215 is a tough downhill for me. Since school I've had a tiny belief that maybe I'd be good at writing and a gargantuan fear of failure and derision.

I'm convinced I have nothing of interest to say, my life experience is inadequate and I'm far too lazy to get anything done. I picture my inner critic and my self belief as badly matched warriors, so maybe this picture sums up the course for me (Google Image Search delivers an image for every occasion as ever) .

Imagine how happy I am... I've dipped into the first two weeks of activities and it's a revelation. The focus is short activities to prompt ideas and get the writing habit started. I thought I hadn't a creative thought in my head, and within a few hours I was proved wrong. Haikus were fun (although Andy says they shouldn't span a line break as most of mine do) and best of all I'd managed thock my inner critic on the shin, and feel small stirrings of contentment with what I'd written.

Phew. I hope it carries on like this!

My two favourite Haiku

2006-01-23T11:17:00.000-08:00

If error messages were Haiku
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
David Dixon

Haiku by a 7 year old
Haiku is not nice.
I really do not like it.
But I can write it.

Haiku

2006-01-22T08:01:00.000-08:00

Haiku inspired by looking out of the window over terraced houses in East Oxford, early on a Sunday morning

From the window
Grass made pastel by
frost, white rooftops blur into
early morning haze

Sheds' Union
Long gardens with sheds
at their feet, gathering to
gossip about us

Cowley Road
Minaret and crane,
skyline guardians, culture
and construction twinned

Almost a room with a view
“Dreaming Spires View”
At night, in winter, only
when floodlights are on

Thinking of that time

2006-01-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

February 1991

Thinking of that time
when we lay on the grass by the fire and
idly passed words between us,
threw out dreams to whirl and dance
in the cloud of popping sparks,
I become quiet.

Thinking of that time
when you drove me through unknown country
to places I have never found again,
when each turn was carefree
and all directions smiled and beckoned.
I become still.

Thinking of that time
when, lying with you, your skin became my own
and I was a sleeping valley with a wide river
spreading slowly over me
pooling and resting, sun-dappled and warm,
Tears fall and dry.

Leaning on the clacking gate,
watching the darkness of that field
where our figures dance and walk
around me still,
I feel empty.

Activity 6.2: emotion in setting

2006-01-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

The Pitt Rivers Museum (Activity 6.2)

Version 1
Bel stared at the shrunken head and it stared back dustily; miniaturised and doll-like with its downy hair and neatly stitched eyes. How deliciously gruesome; her class would love it! Her hand went to her belly and rested there for a second. ‘Come on all of you, look at this! What do you think it is? Can you all get close enough?’ Her flock gathered around her, jostling to press their noses against the glass of the packed display case. She loved the way they plucked at her clothes to get her to listen to them! ‘That’s GROSS! Look Miss! It says they put hot rocks in the scooped out skin to make it shrink!’ Bel closed her eyes. The museum’s cool settled her after the sweaty, laughing picnic on the lawn outside, and calmed her slight sickness. ‘All that downy hair on the head tells us it’s a fake. It’s been made from a monkey head to sell to tourists,’ she told the class. She drifted away. All around the display case, eager faces gazed in wonder. She pressed her hand to her belly. Soon she’d have her own little face gazing expectantly at her, in wonder.

Version 2
Bel stared at the shrunken head and it stared back sightlessly; child-sized, with the clenched, stitched eyes of a torture victim. The sullen, constant nausea rose and drenched her mouth with saliva. ‘Step back, all of you! Step back! Stop pushing! Keep quiet! It’s a museum!’ The wave of children surged around her to press their noses against the dusty glass of the display case. How loud-pitched they were! ‘That’s GROSS! Look Miss! It says they put hot rocks in the scooped out skin to make it shrink!’ Bel closed her eyes. The museum’s cold chilled her after the sweaty heat of packed lunches on the balding grass strip outside. She gritted her teeth and carried on. ‘All that downy hair on the head tells us it’s a fake. It’s been made from a monkey head to sell to tourists,’ she told the class. Her voice sounded far away. Behind the glass, the dreaded damaged baby of her nightmares stared back, muttering: ‘You didn’t listen, did you? Should’ve had the tests shouldn’t you. Look what you did.’ She wanted to stroke the downy hair and sob: ‘I’m sorry. It’ll be alright, it’ll be alright, it will.’