Monday morning and I have the day job to get back to. A couple of things happened over the weekend, though.
The first is that my 'first readers' both came back positive regarding Still Life. This surprised and gratified me in equal measure.
The second is that I came up with two story ideas which have potential to get to a draft stage quite quickly. The first is another vamp story set in 16/17 century China; the second comes from reading some of the post-referendum chatter here in Scotland. I've already started sketching in the latter, though it may put the 'short' in short story. I have my core metaphor, three distinct characters, the setting and the action clear in my head, and they all came surprisingly quickly. All that is required (!) is actually to write it.
Watch this space.
Monday, 22 September 2014
Wednesday, 17 September 2014
Vamping up is hard to do
The most recent story has reached something like a first draft stage, at last. I am not sure what to make of it - I've wrestled with it so much that I don't have any objectivity about it, so it has gone to a couple of first readers for initial comments before I take it further.
The breakthrough in writing it came when I realised what it was actually about, which allowed me to scrape of the surface layer and tinker with the canvas and the undercoat. It was also heavily influenced by an interview I heard with M John Harrison. This probably made the writing a lot harder to do but also made it a lot more satisfying once I typed "END." I'll link to the interview once I find it again. Much as I like The Executry of Edward Moorehouse--my story written after the holiday in Sutherland--it is a very straightforward, linear narrative, whereas the latest, Still Life, is not. I think that's progress.
The other thing I did was to be ruthless in excising anything that didn't need to be there. Whether I went too far (or perhaps didn't go far enough) is something I'll need to come back to. And right at the end I remembered something Hilary Mantel said about deleting your first paragraph. In this case, once I worked out what the first paragraph was (I restructured the scenes quite a bit as I went along), excising it worked beautifully to throw the reader in media res, I hope.
I'll see what comes back by way of comment. In the meantime there is work and the Independence referendum to distract me before I start to work up the next story. I should add that the two I have written so far in this sequence are essentially the first and the last, so I now have to fill in the middle. This means that the story I have just "finished" will undoubtedly change again to harmonise with whatever I write next.
The breakthrough in writing it came when I realised what it was actually about, which allowed me to scrape of the surface layer and tinker with the canvas and the undercoat. It was also heavily influenced by an interview I heard with M John Harrison. This probably made the writing a lot harder to do but also made it a lot more satisfying once I typed "END." I'll link to the interview once I find it again. Much as I like The Executry of Edward Moorehouse--my story written after the holiday in Sutherland--it is a very straightforward, linear narrative, whereas the latest, Still Life, is not. I think that's progress.
The other thing I did was to be ruthless in excising anything that didn't need to be there. Whether I went too far (or perhaps didn't go far enough) is something I'll need to come back to. And right at the end I remembered something Hilary Mantel said about deleting your first paragraph. In this case, once I worked out what the first paragraph was (I restructured the scenes quite a bit as I went along), excising it worked beautifully to throw the reader in media res, I hope.
I'll see what comes back by way of comment. In the meantime there is work and the Independence referendum to distract me before I start to work up the next story. I should add that the two I have written so far in this sequence are essentially the first and the last, so I now have to fill in the middle. This means that the story I have just "finished" will undoubtedly change again to harmonise with whatever I write next.
Saturday, 6 September 2014
Getting there
This latest story continues to be a grind. I think it may be getting there, after a change of title, complete restructure and a shifting of the narrative from past tense to present. I cut the original text back to under 2000 words in the end, then brought it back up to 4000 or so, then took out more.
The second cutting of the text was different, though - I ruthlessly cut out every extraneous sentence and clause to distill the thing down to raw spirit. It currently sits around 3300 words. In many cases this involved replacing a paragraph with a single sentence. There is a lot more to do to get it to a complete first draft, though.
The part of my mind that is disinterested and analytic is observing how the initial idea that spurred the story has become background rather than the main action. A lot of the stuff that I have cut was exposition, and what I'm trying to do is leave that to hint and inference and write something else.
The second cutting of the text was different, though - I ruthlessly cut out every extraneous sentence and clause to distill the thing down to raw spirit. It currently sits around 3300 words. In many cases this involved replacing a paragraph with a single sentence. There is a lot more to do to get it to a complete first draft, though.
The part of my mind that is disinterested and analytic is observing how the initial idea that spurred the story has become background rather than the main action. A lot of the stuff that I have cut was exposition, and what I'm trying to do is leave that to hint and inference and write something else.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
