My first success!

I won a competition on Tuesday! It was the Christmas open mic evening at the Flying Goose in Beeston, and the competition was to write a triolet about liquid soap… yep, you read that right.

The Flying Goose poetry evenings are excellent – run by the wonderful John Lucas of Shoestring Press, they’re great value at £3 for a glass of wine and some wonderful poetry (and prose) readings. They run Oct-Mar on the third Tuesday of each month, and I was introduced to them this spring when Anne Stevenson read – wow.

So far this season we’ve heard Nicola Monaghan, Wayne Burrows, Derrick Buttress and Cathy Grindrod, all of whom were fabulous.

And then came the Christmas Special. I don’t remember much detail of the poetry readings, as it was the first time I’d read in front of so many strangers and I was very very nervous (the mulled wine possibly didn’t help much either). I was quite overawed by how brilliant everyone was though.

We read our triolets after the break – I wasn’t quite so nervous, as the first poem I’d read seemed to go down ok. Judgement was by public acclaim, and Eireann (bless her) bolstered my applause by cheering and clapping wildly, so I won joint first prize along with Deidre O’Byrne (who deserved to be the outright winner, but I’m not complaining). My prize was the lovely Life Class by Glyn Hughes, which is an autobiographical poem that is a pleasure to read.

So, I thought I’d give you the pleasure of reading my PRIZE-WINNING (!!!!) triolet.

Liquid Soap

I never saw the point of liquid soap
You may frown, I don’t care what you think
Perhaps I’m just a grumpy misanthrope
But I never saw the point of liquid soap
It’s yet another way to push the envelope
And I can’t abide the dribbles in the sink
I never saw the point of liquid soap
You may frown, I don’t care what you think.

See, it isn’t very good, is it? Must have been the way I read it – I put everything I had into performing it!

As it’s nearly Christmas, here’s another triolet just for you. I like this one a lot more.

A Prayer for Love

Barefoot on the grass with the pigeons, praying.
Your dark eyes held mine as you passed. Over
a shared banana split we first kissed, cleaving.
Barefoot on the grass with the pigeons, praying
our spring would last for ever, dreaming
of summer. Through six seasons you were my lover,
barefoot on the grass with the pigeons. Praying,
your dark eyes held mine as you passed over.

Why I Like Poetry

So much for all my good resolutions… haven’t written a blog post for days and days.

An Anthology of Stress

I’ve been busy getting the student anthology properly off the ground (it’s quite nervewracking when you go to a meeting with a potential source of funding and she says, ‘They’re assessing bid proposals this afternoon, can you write one for us now?’ This being 75 minutes before a meeting half an hour’s drive away, and you’ve left the car five minutes’ walk away and you promised to collect a friend on the way… AAARGH!

Still, I got to the meeting on time, the bid proposal was accepted, and I’m now waiting for information about submitting the actual bid. And fretting about whether we’ll get enough submissions, and worrying about the design of the blasted thing, and being very very thankful that other people on the team are being active and constructive and Getting Things Done.

Be my mentor, Jo Shapcott!

The Arvon Centre at Lumb Bank

Between then and now I’ve been trying to write a 1200 word statement to persuade Arvon they want to fund me to be mentored for the next year. Three options – scripts (not my thing, I don’t think, despite excellent ideas about gravediggers and pandemics), fiction and poetry. Fiction – well, I’m 1/3 of the way through a first draft of a novel and went on two Arvon novel-writing courses last year, so one would have thought that would be obvious. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go for poetry. I love writing poetry. I really love writing poetry, and I really want to be good at it.

I wrote all sorts of stuff, all of which I believe, but none of which really gets to the bottom of why I love poetry. I think it’s the most visual of the creative writing disciplines in a strange kind of way. A good poem will make you see not only the image represented by the words but all the links and associations and history and future and everything that goes with it. And that will be stuff that’s in the poet’s mind and stuff that you add for yourself as a reader, to make the poem yours for the few minutes it takes you to read it.

Damn. Wish I’d put that in. (in flowerier words, of course)

I don’t really hold out much hope of getting this mentoring thing, but you never know… I do know my poetry is getting better all the time, and I can’t pass up a chance to help it improve even more.

It’s epic

Epic theatre, that is.

This is a story about how Della Galton rescued me.

One of my courses this term is Writing for the Stage. A lion also attends classes, although he hasn’t said much:

The B6 Lion

The course manages to be really enjoyable and a hard slog at the same time. Our tutor is so enthusiastic and knowledgeable that each lecture has been fascinating and stimulating, and has left me fired up with ambition to write the next Mother Courage or Hedda Gabler. Then I sit down to compose sublime dialogue and riveting action, and I realise that while I love watching plays, writing them really isn’t my thing.

But… it’s my first diploma-level course, and as such the mark will contribute to my final degree grading, so I really want to do well…

The first assignment wasn’t too bad, but I’ve been struggling with the second one for weeks. I have to write a fifteen-minute epic play. Now, epic theatre aims to make the audience think about the message of the play, which is usually political or social in nature. It is about ordinary people trying to do their best in extraordinary situations. The audience is aware at all times that they are watching a play, they don’t engage with the characters, and the playwright, director and actors all go to great lengths to ensure this is the case.

So not only do I have to come up with a story to tell, but it has to have a message, and it has to be set in a context of external upheaval of some sort. And on top of that, I’ve got to write the characters so that the audience doesn’t identify with them.

This is different to just about everything I’ve ever written! It’s very scary… and I was floundering. I just couldn’t come up with anything epic enough. No message, no characters, no desperate situation, nothing. So I trudged into Caffe Nero this morning and snuggled into my usual corner with my usual two diet cokes, and stared at a blank page of my notebook for a while.

Then I started writing. I didn’t want to set it in the context of war – no real reason, mainly a matter of principle. What horrible things are going on outside people’s control at the moment? Ah, I know, recession. So let’s have an Ordinary Bod who’s been hurt badly by the credit crunch, and then maybe an MP who tries to help Bod out, MP discovers he can’t do anything because the system is corrupt and evil… ta-da…

No.

Nonono.

That’s rubbish. I know I’m not supposed to emotionally identify with the characters, but I can’t even rationally work out what’s going on and why. And the message is so cliched. And I’m blowed if I can come up with any flesh to put on the bones of this deformed monstrosity.

So I stared at my now-full page, and scribbled it out in a fit of pique.

Time to go back to basics. Rather than start with a global context, let’s start with a character and a problem…

Hang on a minute, that rings a bell. At Caerleon, Della Galton gave us a fantastic tool for generating short stories. Come up with a load of random characters and a load of random problems, pick one of each and go. And the character we had to write about was a gravedigger – which is ultimately appropriate for epic theatre, isn’t it?

Hoorah!

So I wrote down ‘Gravedigger’. Then I thought, what would give a gravedigger a problem?

I sneezed. Snot, yuck. People looking sidelong at me to make sure I caught all the germs in a tissue which I then discarded before disinfecting my hands and every other exposed bit of skin.

Genius!

Pandemic!

I have my story. Well, at least I have the beginnings of one. So I’d better go and write the play now. I may regale you with a scene from it in due course, as long as you promise not to become emotionally involved with any of the characters.

Look out world, I’m back!

My good friend Adrian phoned me yesterday and berated me (don’t frown like that, Adrian, you know that was a berating!) about not keeping up with this blog. I hemmed and hawed (people didn’t half look at me strangely, I was in WH Smith at the time buying book tokens) and was forced to agree that I have been somewhat dilatory. What’s the point having a blog if you don’t post? No-one will read it, and indeed, why should they?

So. This is my New Pip Resolution – to write a blog post at least twice a week from now until the End of Never.

What I did on my holiday

Not exactly a holiday…

When I last posted, a couple of months ago, I was on the way down into the gloomy depths of a recurrence of my perennial depression. I didn’t get all the way there, thank goodness. Or I should say, thank the generosity of my therapist, who gave me a couple of free sessions and reminded me I do have the tools to kick my own ass into gear.

I’ve been thinking about depression, I wonder if it’s a common writer’s affliction… I suppose it must be. Good writers, anyway. I have to say, most of the blisteringly self-confident writers I meet aren’t brilliant, it’s the insecure ones that question their own worth and eternally strive to improve. Or give up and fall by the wayside, which is something I’m determined not to do. Maybe I’ll turn out to be a good writer, maybe I won’t, but either way I want to look back in a decade or two and be able to say I tried my hardest.

Anyway, things I have done:

• Spent a week on an amazing Arvon course at Totleigh Barton.
• Kicked off and am now running a project to publish an annual student anthology for the Creative Writing degree course I’m on.
• Lots of poetry writing, which I think/hope is getting better.
• Been involved in a fantastic new (ongoing) project at my writers’ group.
• Got quite enthused about <luvvie voice> the theatre </luvvie voice>.
• Analysed the English Patient to death and loved every moment of it. Good job he was dying anyway.

So considering I’ve been thoroughly miserable at times, that’s not a bad list! I shall write about at least some of the above in more detail over the next couple of weeks.

Oh, one other thing, I’ve fallen in love with this cutie – a new arrival at a friend’s house:

Polly the Puppy

I’m glad to be back. Hope you’re glad to see me

National Poetry Day

Happy Poetry Day! Here’s a poem for you…

Spindrift

west backing south-west, gale 8
increasing severe gale 9 for a time
squally showers
good

blown off course we scream down
the throat of the Devil’s Limekiln
bounce then bounce again
sheep scatter and we’re down
doubled and running
rotor blades dip towards us
like the king’s sword
or the executioner’s axe

St George’s bloody cross
slices through the clouds
above St Helena’s tower
while the Hangman’s Hill flagpole
rusts beneath gorse and heather
and a wren’s nest

we lean against the storm
and watch a herring gull
wings bent awry
beak wide in defiance
too young to know the wind
will always win

the sea rides the air
stolen from our mouths

Present Imperfect

I am writing.

Did you see what I did there? (sorry)

Wabi-sabi

I stole the title for this post from a post on the Strictly Writing blog by Susie Nott-Bower. She wrote about wabi-sabi – the Japanese art of imperfection and impermanence – and how the concept can be used to whack the Inner Editor over the head and churn out a Shitty First Draft (SFD).

As it turned out, that post couldn’t have come at a better time for me. If you’ve been reading my blog lately, you’ll know that (a) there hasn’t been much of it to read and (b) I had fallen into a pit of procrastination and self-doubt.

I’m 40,000+ words into the SFD of my novel, and it is so S it’s painful to re-read. I tried to emulate Katie Fforde – write 1000 words every day, and before that, edit yesterday’s 1000 words. That might be OK if you’ve got the skills to make your FD not quite so S, but all it did for me was allow me to convince myself that my writing skills are non-existent.

I also find myself having to check back through the text on a regular basis to find out what X was wearing that morning, or what the weather was like, or who was in the room when Y said Z. That’s another opportunity for my Inner Editor (who is vile and vicious, and I believe is trying to make me start smoking again) to tell me how S my writing is.

Three Golden Rules

After reading Susie’s post, I sat myself down and had strong words with myself. Then I imposed three rules:

1. The First Draft of anything I write is expected to be Shitty. No, actually, it’s required to be Shitty.
2. Do not, under any circumstances, edit anything until you’ve finished the Shitty First Draft.
3. Make notes of all important facts in another place so you don’t have to look at the Shitty First Draft until it’s time to turn it into the Barely Adequate Second Draft.

And hey presto, I’m writing again. I know it’s shitty. I know it’s going to take a long time to edit into something resembling a novel. And I expect I’m going to have to impose a whole new set of rules for when I start work on the second draft. But I can’t work on the second draft till I’ve finished the first.

My Tomatoes Aren’t Ready

They’ll be ready to harvest in an hour and a half. So I thought I’d catch up on reading blogs and #fridayflash, and I found this wonderful meme at dovegreyreader’s blog, which I couldn’t resist having a go at. The most difficult part is remembering which books I’ve read this year – if I inadvertently cheat I apologise.

“Using only books you have read this year, answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title. It’s a lot harder than you think!”

Describe yourself: The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickham

How do you feel: Still Breathing by Cathy Grindrod

Describe where you currently live: Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Your favorite form of transportation: Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins

Your best friend is: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

You and your friends are: Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress

What’s the weather like: May Contain Traces of Magic by Tom Holt

You fear: A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin

What is the best advice you have to give: Eternity is Temporary by Bill Broady

Thought for the day: When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson

How I would like to die: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King

My soul’s present condition: Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

Jesus Finds Sammy – #fridayflash

Sammy took extra care over his appearance that Saturday. He persuaded Anna to iron his blue shirt, the one with a collar, and he borrowed Jim’s pair of nearly smart black leather shoes. He even pulled a comb through his hair before leaving his room.

‘Sammy, you can’t go out without a coat,’ Anna called after him as he shuffled down the corridor towards the front door.

He took no notice. His trench coat stank, and his saggy brown cardigan would spoil the effect he’d achieved. He looked at himself in the full length hall mirror with approval. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think the slightly scruffy 43-year-old man looking back was just like anyone else.

Suddenly Johnny appeared, his grey scrunched-up face sneering over Sammy’s left shoulder, eyes glittering. ‘You’ll never be normal, you won’t. Look at you, can’t even button your shirt up right.’

It was hard to ignore Johnny, but Sammy managed it. He hastily adjusted his shirt and opened the door.

‘I know where you’re going. You’re pathetic. They won’t want you.’ Johnny’s voice whined in Sammy’s ear like a mosquito following the scent of blood.

‘Shut up shut up shut up…’ Sammy muttered to himself over and over again as Jim’s shoes rattled over the gravel path outside The Oaks. The wind lifted the tails of his shirt and swirled around his torso, icy teeth biting at his chest and belly. Sammy didn’t notice, not really.

He turned left along Oak Lane, trying to pick his feet up when he walked, the way Anna had taught him. It felt like Johnny was following him, but he didn’t turn round to see. He was afraid he would stumble if he looked up.

As he walked through the alley between the newsagent and the launderette, he strained to hear the jingling of tambourines and the joyous sound of singing voices. Maybe they weren’t there this week? He hadn’t been able to sleep the previous night for worrying.

When he heard the music, relief filled his mind, leaving no room for concentrating on his feet. He tripped, put out a hand to save himself, and was horrified when he felt it sink into wool-covered flesh.

‘Get off me!’

Sammy backed away from the indignant old woman. She glared at him, then wrinkled her nose, pushed past him and stalked away.

Johnny sniggered. ‘See, you do smell. No-one wants Stinky Sammy.’

It took all his willpower not to cry, but he managed it by focusing on the singing.

‘They do want me,’ Sammy said. ‘They do.’

He started shuffling towards the shopping precinct again, all thoughts of lifting his feet up forgotten in his need to reach the source of the music.

‘Jesus loves me, Jesus loves you,
Come rejoice, accept His love.’

Sammy stopped at the end of the alley, and an enormous grin spread over his face. There they were. A circle of people. Men and women, dancing and singing and clapping, and children waving tambourines in the air. He jiggled across the block-paved pedestrian area towards them, trying to clap in time with the music. He knew the words to this one, he’d listened to it for many Saturdays, so he joined their circle and sang along as loudly as he could.

Johnny was laughing so much he could barely stand up. ‘Oh, Sammy, you’re such a dickhead.’

‘Piss off, Johnny. You’re the dickhead,’ Sammy yelled. He’d finally come to accept Jesus’s love, and he wasn’t going to let Johnny spoil it.

The people around him stopped singing. Oops, thought Sammy. Jesus probably didn’t like bad language.

‘I’m sorry. It’s just Johnny, he doesn’t love Jesus like I do. Can we sing again please?’ Sammy started to sing another of his favourites. A couple of the children joined in, but the adults continued to stare at him, and a man with a bright red pullover walked quickly away.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Sammy.

A warm hand clamped around his arm. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong, sir, you’re disturbing these nice people,’ said a very large policeman.

Johnny chipped in, ‘That’s right, Sammy the dickhead’s disturbing the God-freaks.’

‘Shut up,’ Sammy shouted. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Policeman, but Johnny won’t shut up.’

The man in the red pullover said, ‘There’s no-one called Johnny here. He’s obviously one of those nutters from The Oaks. Can’t you take him back there?’

‘Nutter, nutter, Sammy’s a nutter,’ sang Johnny.

Sammy wasn’t quite sure what happened next. The man who’d called him a nutter somehow had red all over his face as well as his pullover, and Sammy was on the ground with the policeman on top of him, handcuffing his hands behind his back. Then he was being hauled past the shops, past crowds of people with cold eyes like Johnny’s.

‘Where are we going, Mr Policeman?’ he asked. ‘I’m looking for Jesus, I want to accept his love.’

The policeman jerked Sammy’s arms upwards. ‘I’ll show you Jesus’s love, you weirdo.’

‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’ said Sammy. He could hardly believe his luck. He’d thought the people singing would help him find Jesus, but he’d been wrong all along. He shuffled docilely through the car park and into the police station.

‘Is Jesus in here?’ he asked the policeman.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ said the policeman, grinning.

‘Of course I can.’

‘I’m Jesus.’ The policeman was laughing aloud now, obviously really happy that Sammy had finally found him.

‘Do you love me?’

‘Of course I do. Now go and sit in there.’

Sammy entered the cell and sat on the wooden bench. The door clanged shut, but not before Johnny slid in.

‘You don’t really believe he’s Jesus, do you?’

Sammy’s eyes were closed and his face was radiant. He couldn’t hear Johnny any more.

The policeman shook his head as he walked back towards the front desk, followed by Sammy’s quiet off-key singing.

‘Jesus found me, Jesus loves me,
Rejoicing, I accept His love.’

Writer’s Speed Bumps

I don’t seem to have had much to say lately. I even missed last Friday’s #fridayflash for the first time in months. I’m not quite sure what’s going on, I suspect it’s one of those writerly things that every writer comes up against once in a while.

Only read on if you’re really interested in an apprentice writer’s insecurities…

My novel is rubbish

I’ve written about a quarter of the first draft of my novel now, and it’s getting really difficult to continue. There are several problems:

• It’s rubbish! Yes, I know, it’s only a first draft, and it’ll be much better once I’ve edited it… but all I can think is it’s badly written and uninteresting…
• It’s hard work. I knew it would be. Writing 100000 words and polishing them was always going to be difficult. But when it’s rubbish it makes it even harder…
• It’s so big. I keep forgetting plot details and back story, so I have to read back through what I’ve written so far, which just reminds me how rubbish it is…

All of which means I’m not getting much joy out of the writing process at the moment. Which wouldn’t be too bad if I thought it was worthwhile. But, at the moment, I don’t. The book is going to be rubbish and isn’t going to make me any money and I’ll lose my house and end up living in a skip and drinking meths to block out the fact that I’m an utter failure. (melodramatic, me? never!)

Procrastination

All this leads to major procrastination.

For instance, I’ve spent hours creating a spreadsheet that will tell me how much I’ve done, what my target is for the day (1000 words per day, and if I don’t manage 1000 words it accumulates, but if I do over 1000 words it doesn’t), average words per day, and lots of other stuff, even the estimated finish date. And there’s a graph, which is a simple bar chart showing how far through I am as a percentage. That took me ages to work out how to create.

Also, I’ve become addicted to FarmVille (a stupid Sims type game on Facebook). My house is tidier than it has ever been. I’ve persuaded myself that a glass of wine in the evening will help the words flow, but half an hour after drinking said wine, I need to have a game of Combine (also on Facebook) because I play that so much better when slightly tipsy.

I have, however, stuck to my resolution not to watch TV all evening every evening. I do in fact get a lot of writing done in the evenings, in between Facebook games. Usually the 950 words I haven’t managed to get written in the daytime, admittedly.

The worst thing…

The worst thing about all this is, I don’t enjoy writing at the moment. I really don’t. And that’s sad. I haven’t written any short stories for a couple of weeks, despite having a list of competitions I really want to enter.

I’m hoping two things will get me back on track:

• Uni term starting. I’m not doing particularly inspiring courses this term – playwriting and literary criticism – but I love studying and maybe it’ll help me see there is life beyond my rubbish novel.
• Arvon. I’m booked on a course in October entitled Work in Progress, which is absolutely perfect. The blurb starts: ‘Being stuck in the middle of your novel isn’t much fun, sometimes you need to step away from the Work in Progress and just enjoy writing again.’ – exactly what I need.

It’s not all bad

In the meantime, there are enjoyable writing-related aspects of my life:

• Poetry. I’m in a poetry group that meets weekly, and I do enjoy it hugely. It forces me to come up with a poem every week for workshopping, and means I spend an evening with people who are equally enthusiastic about poetry. That renews my energy levels for a day or two at least.
• Writing group. Our fledgling writing group is showing promise, we’ve talked about starting a project that could turn into something fantastic if we can get it off the ground. Meeting tonight… hopefully we’ll get something started.

Thank you…

… for listening to my ramblings. It’s been cathartic. And despite all the doom and gloom, I think I’ve reminded myself that there is a positive side to this writing game.

Cliché or not cliché?

I’ve been mulling this one over for a while. It takes all sorts, and there’s no accounting for taste… but is it OK to use clichés in proper literarily-acceptable writing?

(is literarily even a word? do I care? nah, you know what I mean…)

Six of one, half a dozen of the other, if you ask me.

The Cat's Pyjamas

Incidentally, I have recently acquired a copy of ‘The Cat’s Pyjamas – the Penguin Book of Clichés’ by Julia Creswell. Good fun, and a tough act to follow.

Why one should use clichés

Everyone uses them in everyday conversation, more often than not. They are phrases that have become so much part of the language that everyone knows what they mean, and everyone knows that they do not mean what they say. (Don Rumsfeld, eat your heart out.)

George Orwell said, ‘Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’ As so ably pointed out by Mark Liberman, ‘If you really tried to put that advice into effect, you’d find it difficult to write anything at all.’

And isn’t it ironic that so many clichés have arisen from Orwell’s work?

The point of a cliché is that it is a figure of speech that does the job it was intended for so well it has become generally accepted as an integral part of the language. So why not use it, if it’s appropriate?

My ultimate aim as a writer is to communicate my ideas and thoughts to whoever’s reading my ramblings. If the best way to do that is to use a cliché, then that’s what I shall do. Being original for the sake of being original seems daft. There’s nothing worse than tweaking a cliché for the sake of it. After all, a nod’s as good as a curtsey to a blind diplodocus… (say whaaa??)

Why one should not use clichés

A cliché will not give the reader any information above and beyond the understood meaning of the phrase. The actual meaning of the phrase is ignored. If I want to really make the reader think, really draw them into the story I’m telling, I do need to come up with something striking and original at appropriate points.

Saying someone’s eyes are as cold as ice is fine, it gets the point across. Saying ‘her glance sent slivers of ice into my heart’ is much more powerful. (I know it’s corny, but it was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment, and I still contend that it’s stronger.) So if at this moment it’s really important to send a shiver through the reader, the second version is appropriate. However, if it doesn’t really matter that much there’s nothing wrong with using the cliché.

Even science agrees

I was delighted to read this blog post by Keith Oatley last week, which explained the different reactions based on proper experimental psychology research. (The On Fiction blog is full of fascinating stuff, by the way.)

A brief summary would go as follows:

• When we carry out a specific action, say, falling, a particular area of the brain is activated to make the appropriate muscles do their thing.
• When we think about falling, the same area of the brain is activated even if we don’t actually fall over anything.
• So when we read, ‘The boy fell to the floor,’ that area of the brain which would make us fall down is activated.
• It seems reasonable to assume that this makes us ‘feel’ the act of falling.
• However, when we read, ‘The boy fell ill,’ that area of the brain is not activated.
• The assumption here is that the reader does not actually ‘feel’ the act of falling.
• Interestingly, the blog post doesn’t tell us if that area of the brain would be activated by, ‘The boy hit the dust.’ Or whether an alternative area of the brain is triggered instead.
• So I’m not sure if I have proved my point… I only spotted this while I was writing this summary… maybe I should go and check the source research papers…

Anyway, it all backs up the theory that one shouldn’t use clichés if one wants to make a real impact on the reader. I think.

Discuss!

(and there are no prizes for correctly counting the number of clichés used in this post)