Jenny lay with a paperback novel open across her breast, staring at the lazily swaying leaves above her. She could hear the whine of a remote-controlled plane from across the field, changing in pitch as it banked and swerved. Beyond that came the gentler, resonating sound of a ball striking a bat; the sound of a father playing cricket with his children. On the grass next to her sat Mike with his knees drawn up into arches. He was watching a dragonfly as it flew up the incline, hovered a few feet from his face, then darted away over the trees.

“Dragonfly,” he said.

“Mm?” said Jenny.
(more…)

I just watched the first half of a ‘Documentary’ I downloaded from the internet which may or may not have been called “spiritworld” (I wasn’t paying that much attention). It’s one of those conspiracy documentaries rather unoriginally about UFOs, the moon landing and the US Governments involvement with Nazi scientists. The three reasons I continued to watch it were that 1) it was something to have on in the background, 2) several parts made me laugh and 3) I like watching things about UFOs and aliens. (more…)

I can barely believe it’s nearly three already. Still, I suppose I got up late. I read the second half of a short story by Angus Wilson earlier, which I was supposed to read and analyse by tomorrow. Well, I intended to get onto analysing it, but then I read another Raymond Carver story. It was one of his better ones, in my opinion, since some speak to me less than others. It was about a man who felt his life was falling about going to abandon his children’s dog because he hated it. Having read that, still procrastinating, I decided to reread William Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow. (more…)

Recently, since reading Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, I’ve come to a new appreciation of the short story. I’ve always written short stories, but I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, to tell long, grand tales over hundreds of pages. Consequently, I’ve always read novels rather than short stories. And novels are worthwhile, fulfilling experiences. But they take a long time, and it just hit me that maybe, and I think this is true of myself, though I can’t speak for anyone else, I generally don’t enjoy novels while I’m reading them, only afterwards, when I look back on them. (more…)

This is an essay that I wrote as part of my university course, a little heavy-going perhaps, but it was something I enjoyed writing and I suppose some people may enjoy reading, so here it is:

Only one reason is shared by all of us [novelists]: We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is¹ – John Fowles

‘Real’ is subjective, changing from person to person and with the passing of time. Because of this indefinite nature, the representation of what is ‘real’ both in literature and in other art, has always been difficult. While all novelists may “wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is,” absolute ‘realism’ has not been the primary goal of every novel ever written: Many seek only to create enough of an internal realism to sustain suspension of disbelief. For example, no one would mistake a fantasy novel such as The Fellowship of the Ring² or even a Magical-Realist novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude³ as reality because of the implausible and fantastic aspects of them. But there have been various movements and individual novels over the last century-and-a-half that have sought to represent the most ‘realistic’ real possible, to get as close to life as art can.

Three movements for which this has been the goal are Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, and three novels that typify the objectives of these movements are George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). Each of these movements and novels has sought to be ‘realistic’ in a different way.

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I knocked on Elle’s front door. The street was silent but for the distant whoosh of traffic, the calls of children in a school playground and an aeroplane passing overhead. The door opened. Elle’s brother, Nick, stood there. He wore a white t-shirt and tight-fitting black jeans with a hole in the knee. His hair was wet. He looked at me.

“Is Elle in?” I asked.

“Rob, right?”

I nodded.

“No, she’s not in,” Nick said, “I think she went to college.”

“Oh,” I said, “she doesn’t usually today.”

“No,” Nick said, “she had to hand something in or something.”

“Oh.”

I rocked back on my heels, pushed my thumbs into my jeans pockets, looked at the door-frame.

“I think she said she wouldn’t be long. Have you tried texting her?”

“I don’t have any credit.”

Nick looked past me for a moment. I turned to see a lady in a brown coat walking a long-haired dog. I turned back round.

“Do you want to come in and wait for her?” Nick asked.

(more…)

Just a quick post:

I went to a writing careers fair at the University of East Anglia today. Besides reaffirming my ambition to study on the MA course in Creative Writing there (the places for which are very competitive) it was interesting.

One of the most interesting parts of it was that I met Stephen Foster, a published author. While I can’t say that I’ve come across his work, being, as I am, stuck in a bubble of mostly pre-War literature, talking to him was a positive experience, particularly because he had studied on the course that became the course I’m on now, and he had the same tutors as me, and it was on that course, in his final year, that his final submission was marked by someone who worked at Faber, resulting in him being offered a publishing deal straight off the course. Which is encouraging. He also went on the MA Creative Writing at UEA, since he had already applied for it when Faber picked up his work, and said he would highly recommend it. Since then he’s written I think four or five books, all of which were well reviewed, though not all of which sold particularly well, until the fourth one which was more of a bestseller-type book.

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A man driving a red sports-car overtakes a funeral procession. His wife, in the passenger seat, with the seat tipped back, is in labour.

“Sorry,” he mouths silently to the driver of the hearse as he narrowly avoids an oncoming lorry.

SCENE FIVE

Harry enters hesitantly from SR and looks around.

HARRY: (To himself) I’m pretty sure I didn’t write anything about Lucy running off crying. What happened? Guess I’d better set up the next scene.

Harry drags TABLE 2 over to CSR and places it on its side to represent Esmerelda’s bedroom wall. He also moves one of the chairs a little way behind the table and faces it towards the audience. Then Harry exits SL. Esmerelda enters SR. She sits in the chair and mimes combing her hair as if looking in a mirror. Horatio enters SL and mimes throwing stones at Esmerelda’s bedroom window. Hearing the sound Esmerelda rises, walks to the table, and throws open the ‘window’.

HORATIO: Oh beauty! Oh Emma-

ESMERELDA: Esmerelda.

HORATIO: Oh Esmerelda! I apologise for the lateness of the hour, but I had to see you again. Can I come in?

ESMERELDA: My parents are asleep and I’m getting ready for bed.

HORATIO: Do they despise me, your parents, like Juliet’s despised Romeo’s? Can they not see the beauty of our love?

ESMERELDA: I have not yet told them. It’s all happening so fast (aside) without any real plot development.

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Fluorescent supermarket strip-lighting lit her blue eyes, though romantically he considered they might have sparkled anywhere. There were other checkouts open, some with shorter queues, but he had chosen hers: There was something about the lines of her hair as they swirled behind her ear to the loose doubled-over ponytail above her neck, and her slimness, not just in her frame but in her precise economical movements that he liked. He stood, watching her serve the customer in front, feeling inadequate with his frozen pizzas and microwave ready-meal.

“Hi,” she said with a smile.

“Hi,” he repeated, reflecting the smile with a quick honest tightening of his own dimples. Their eyes met, momentarily. Blue. Brown. Did she smile like that for all the customers, he wondered. Perhaps that was why they hired her: that smile. A smile like that brightens someone’s day. A girl like that brightens someone’s day.

No, she didn’t smile like that for everyone who passed by, certainly not for the old drunkards smelling of fags, buying own-brand vodka and whisky, in whose eyes glinted a little semi-concious letch; nor for the shaven-headed twenty-something males in tracksuits nonchalantly dropping packs of Carlsberg onto the conveyor belt; nor even for the haughty middle-aged, middle-class women buying pre-packed, adjective laden, fillets of salmon: for these stereotypes, the basis of which had been one or two regulars, but the labelling of which had been applied whole groups that had all blended into that single entity known as ‘customer’, her smile always felt forced, strained. Not that they noticed.

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