Sometimes a story just clicks with you because it’s the right story at the right time, because it somehow reflects the things you’re going through in your own life. That’s the power of stories, of narratives, when they transcend entertainments and distractions and become an affecting mirror of your own experiences.

For me, The Rainbow is the right story right now. It’s beautiful and it’s honest, with less of the literary self-awareness of other novels of the time I like, such as those of Joyce or Woolf. Admittedly, I’m only about two-thirds of the way through, but unless it has a really bad final third, it’s shaping up to be one of my favourite books in a long while. Which surprises me, actually, because I didn’t previously rate D. H. Lawrence that highly, even if he is probably the most famous writer to have come from my home city.

I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover a few years ago, and I admired him for the frankness with which he described physical love-making (you’ll probably notice his influence in some of my more explicit work), but I found his writing style to often be quite blunt, almost crude, a little thrown-together. He has a tendency to repeat himself quite a lot as well, like he might use a word or a phrase and then you’ll see that word or phrase again half a page later, as if he can’t quite let go of it and wants to make sure you’ve noticed how good it is. He does that in The Rainbow too, sometimes to greater effect, sometimes to lesser.

(more…)

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…)

I’m not sure if this is the same for all writers, but I have to really feel what I write. I suppose it probably is the same for all the best writing, otherwise fiction is just churned out soullessly. That’s kind of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s well-written, no doubt, but I didn’t really get any feeling from it, like he didn’t feel anything when he wrote it. If I don’t feel anything when I write, my writing becomes lifeless, and lately I haven’t been feeling anything.

You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.

(more…)

Sat now, alone at the party, my can empty in my hand, dented in several places where I had absently crushed my thumb and fingers into it, I considered getting another one, scanning the crowd for either an opening I could push through, or someone worth talking to, and was just about to stand when an unfamiliar girl threw herself down onto the sofa next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was thin and sharp, with a narrow nose and green eyes that looked away as I met them; cheeks rose-tinted, vasodilated; hair the colour of dry leaves, or of beer held to the sun, sticking out like straw, jagged and uneven because she cut it herself. In her hands, which rested on the patchwork fabric lap of her dress, she held two slim bottles. I did not think she was pretty.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, pressing the lager can between my fingers until it clicked and crinkled.

“I’m Remi,” she said, laughing nervously. Her laugh was not musical. “My name’s kind of a joke.” She looked down at her hands, tapped her fingers on the glass of one of the bottles.

(more…)

Stories aren’t emotions, aren’t ideas, aren’t people and places: stories are just a series of words on a page, placed in a certain order, separated by various grammatical signposts we call punctuation. Less than that, they are a jumble of twenty-six different abstract shapes we call letters, jammed together into discrete bundles. It’s amazing therefore how certain words in a particular order can elicit a strong emotional respons, how a good story becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a good story. I supposed it must have been since I remembered significant portions of it from a single reading in my childhood, but these were only fragmentary and vague, and it was not until I finished it for the second time last night, maybe a decade after my first reading, that I realised how good it is, how nearly perfect even, it is.

Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

(more…)

As usual I’m getting sloppy with updates again, but then, since my second-to-last post (my last one being something of a cop-out anyway), I’ve started uni again, and apparently this year they actually expect us to do work. A little at least. It’s not too bad: I’m doing a 50% dissertation, which means that 50% of my final degree comes for a 10,000 word essay I have until April to complete, and the other half comes from an 8,000 word prose project, of which I’ve already written the first 4,000 words of the first draft (more on that in a minute).

I’d be lying if I said I’d been devoting myself entirely to uni work and that’s the reason I haven’t updated, at least partially. Other primary influences are, to a small extent my job, which remains amazing, because a) there’s very few customers, and, unless they ask for wine recommendations, are generally low maintenance and b) I work with some pretty cool people who I have both opportunity and inclination to converse with at length.

(more…)

I’ve had this theory for a while about why we would choose to read a particular work of fiction. I was discussing it last night with someone I work with, and he seemed to not disagree, so I shall expand on that theory here: I believe that there’s two reasons we read what we read: either it’s i) a well-written work or ii) it has an interesting story. Obviously these aren’t mutually exclusive criteria and a work can be both or neither, but I think that, to an extent, one can compensate for the other, although there’s a minimum level of each anyone would be willing to accept.

Here’s a bar chart I made illustrating the point, although the y-scale is comprised of competely meaningless arbitrary numbers:

(more…)

Lately I’ve been reading Marcel Proust’s Rembrance of Things Past (aka. A la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time), which I supposed would be quite an undertaking, but am actually finding quite readable. I get the impression, and had the impression myself, that Remembrance of Things Past, like The Odyssey, is another of those classic novels that scares people away because they think it’s too difficult to read. Admittedly the sentences are often quite long, as is commonly the style with Victorian novels, but I think the main reason people are put off reading the novel is its length: I thought Ulysses was long at over nine-hundred pages, but the complete Remembrance of Things Past is about three-thousand pages long (which is practically inconceivable to me, whose longest work currently stands at about 120 pages). Daunting, certainly, but not so much when you consider it is split into seven volumes.

(more…)