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.

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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.

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I recently read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in a single day, firstly because it’s short, and secondly because it was really good. It had a wonderful immediacy that very few novels do, certainly not the long, slow novels I’ve been reading lately, like Crime and Punishment and Night and Day. Particularly surprising was the accessibility of the work, for something that was written two-and-a-half centuries ago, a little after Shakespeare was alive.

What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

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I have been terrible at updating this site, and in being creatively generally, not only since the start of this year, this new decade, but a little while before. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block exactly, it sounds like an excuse, but I’ve certainly had a dearth of creative output. Well, I’ve been writing my dissertation, but that’s only been here and there. No, I just haven’t been inspired for a while, and I’ve been busy, well, busyish. What have I been doing? I’m currently addicted to two games for a start: Forza Motorsport 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. The first is, as the name implies, a car game. I’m not even that into cars, a few months ago I couldn’t tell an R8 from a Veyron, a Dino from a Testarossa, but somehow I’ve been addicting to driving around in virtual sports cars, and it’s time-consuming. The second of those games is an epic fantasy game of the really geeky sort, with elves and dwarves and mages and such. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of that sort of thing, though I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s such a well-made game that can’t help but love it. Girlfriends take up time too, but I can hardly complain about that.

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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:

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I recently watched the first season of The Hills, an MTV reality drama series about a girl called Lauren who used to be on another reality TV programme I’ve never watched, called Laguna Beach. For me, the show was interesting in two ways: firstly, it offers a voyeuristic look into American life, and secondly, more interestingly, it creates a strange interplay between the real and the fake. For example, the show is structured as a television drama serial, with each episode centring around a particular subject and leading to a climax within the episode, in the same way each season builds towards a climax, and all the ‘stars’ of the show are presented as characters, with certain traits enhanced through the editing. It’s certainly not a documentary, the way it presents this skewed view of its subjects, and instead, with the title referring to Beverly Hills, the city neighbouring Hollywood, becomes a reality TV show in a town where everything is fake.

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Read Part One

“So there’s this girl,” Matt said suddenly, having taken a sip of his tea and now clasping the mug with interlocked fingertips.

Wondered why he was quiet so long. Here we go.

“She works in Sainsbury’s.”

Her.

“You wrote a story about her.”

He nodded. He always gave Viccy his stories to read. She liked guessing which bits were real and which bits he had made up.

“I gave her a rose.”

February. Valentine’s Day. Bunch of roses from Jack. Dinner out. Chocolate mousse for desert. No more or less than a girl could expect. Some time between the sheets afterwards. No more than a boy could want. Wish he was. But I get too snappy at him this time of month, always can’t keep his hands to himself. Can’t blame him. I would too, if I wasn’t. Talk to him later. See him in a couple of days.

“Oh.” (more…)

Sometimes she wanted to beat her fists against it. But how could one beat one’s fists against life? She threw the puzzle across the room and it splintered against the wall, sending shards of transparent plastic flying and minute silver balls skittering across the floorboards. Her stomach was cramped and it agitated her. She picked up her digital pen and drew another few lines, almost haphazardly. The window went blank. Frozen again. Need a new computer. She growled and hit the keyboard. Processor’s fault really, or the graphics card. Maybe just a new graphics card would do, cheaper. Birthday at the end of the month, could ask Daddy, or Mother.

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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 a follow-on from my explanation of modernism)

Thinking about Modernism a little more, I’ve decided that a big part of the reason I like it is that it seems to extend beyond the story to encompass the whole human experience, rather than just how the characters feel during the events of the book.Now, with a lot of books, and films, this is something that’s always bothered me: books and films always have an ending. Usually they end with the hero saving the world and/or getting the girl. Sometimes they end with a life-changing revelation or an optimistic message for the future, but they do all end. Which is, of course, in sharp contrast to life. Life has only one ending. Rarely, of course, a film will end with the death of a main character, which is generally very climactic and poignant, but this is still in contrast with life: in life when people die they just die, and everything goes on as normal around them. (more…)