I’ve been going over some of my old stories recently, and I’ve just been looking at one which I posted two versions of a while ago, alternately called ‘A Ghost Story‘ and ‘The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue‘. Generally, I’m not in the habit of creating two different finished versions of a story and I only did so for this story at the recommendation of my tutor.

Both versions follow exactly the same plotline: a slightly naive fourteen-year-old boy, Ben, invites his friend to spend a night with him in a haunted house and Ben’s friend invites some other people. Ben is obsessed with ghosts and with seeing a ghost and photographing it. The other kids don’t care about ghosts, but just want to have a party in this abandoned house. Tensions rise between Ben and the rest of a group because he’s something of an outsider. Two of the group, Gavin and Michelle, go off together and have sex in an adjacent room. Naive, over-imaginative Ben mistakes the sounds of their sex for the moaning and bumping of a ghost, and so convinces himself that he has had a paranormal encounter.

The difference between the two versions is that one is written as if it had been written by fourteen-year-old Ben and the other is written as if it was written by an older Ben looking back on the experience. Purely looking at the writing style, the second, alternate version, is clearly superior; the sentences are more considered, the vocabulary is more expansive, and the imagery is evocative. This version, we’ll call it Version 2 to save confusion, was written more in my ‘natural’ writing voice; it was written in the style of someone who is, say, studying a BA in Creative Writing.

(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.

(more…)