WriteWords Blogs

SW: Interns - opportunity or exploitation? Guest post by Lynn Michell

This recession is taking a heavy toll on students as graduates search in vain for jobs. In September 2011, BBC News reported that 28% of UK graduates who left university in 2007 were still not in full-time work three and a half years later.

Worse, I sense a growing climate of blame and diminishing sympathy, as if young people are not doing enough to help themselves. Claire Rogers, writing recently in The Independent, strikes me as naive and out of touch: �There are several different ways a graduate can fight off the depression of being unemployed while simultaneously improving their chances of landing the right job. One thing that all disenchanted graduates should certainly do is get work experience, even if unpaid.� So off you all go - take what�s going, don�t expect any pay, don�t complain and don�t get depressed.

A Kind of Co-dependency: Charles Dyer's Mother Adam at Jermyn Street Theatre

Press nights at Jermyn Street Theatre seem to be packed with luvvies come to support their fellow thesps. They aren't hard to spot in the tiny 70 seat theatre down some steps in Jermyn Street. Last time I came it was for a musical version of She Stoops to Conquer, and I saw Stephen Fry and James Coden. The latter slept through the second half, which I thought was odd (and rude) until I read that his wife had given birth to their first child three days before.

This time I saw one of my favourites, the actress who plays Mrs Warboys in One Foot in the Grave , in the row in front of me. Further along was another actress who played a very watchable Inspector Gina Gold in The Bill. Actors certainly make an appreciative audience ; they know the hard work goes into making difficult parts acceptable, and always shout 'Bravo!' at the end.

What time are you talking about?

I've been working flat-out on the WIP, and I can now see the end of the story, in the sense that I know pretty much how I'm going to get to the end which has always been there, though I still need to imagine-out-and-write my way through all the exact moves... So I didn't get out for my statutory walk till after ten last night, and halfway round it I had a qualm. The last few days' writing is quite brisk because there's lots happening; there's not much expansion of setting or atmosphere, nor much in the way of flashback, exploration, thinking (in the ruminative sense), or a sense of the world outside the small house I've got four people penned up in, in a thoroughly unstable stew of relationships.

I do think a rhythm of tension and release, action and reflection, systole and diastole, is absolutely essential to a good story: one reason I work looking at two full pages of MS at a time on screen is because I can see - literally, see - the pattern of dialogue and narrative, short paragraphs and long. But is this bit too briskly, plainly, forward-moving, I worried: is there not enough human flesh on the lay-figures' bones, for too long? I thought back to the last time I was writing multi-layered and richly (I hope) evocative stuff, and realised it was a whole week ago. That's ages for the reader to be plodding along with bare dialogue and stage directions; should I cut, fillet, amplify lavishly?... delete? Is the fact that it felt unsatisfactory to my memory as I walked, telling me I'm on the wrong track altogether, without scenes which get my best writing out of me?

Except that it isn't ages at all, it's about 5,000 words ago.

Of Courage and Chickens

This morning I got my courage up and went through the poems that have been sitting in folders for two months and more. Many I tossed as unusable ideas. Some I rewrote and reshelved in a new folder. There were some, however, that I still felt good about even after the two month period of rest I use to clear myself of new-poem bias...Read More Here

Pretentious in Florence: Mark Mills' The Savage Garden

Personally, I like my crime to have a more literary flavour than your average Agatha Christie affords , but Mark Mills could take a few tips from the 'Queen of Crime' with regard to plot development. Nobody in the library crime reading group liked this, a Dan Brown-style mystery/murder set around a villa in Florence.

The main problem is that the murders happened some years before, during wartime, so there's no sense of urgency, although it does have some bearing on who is the rightful heir to ownership of the property. It's not particularly well-written and the narrator is too immature and lacking in character for us to empathise.

Favourite Things: Launch of Linda Stratmann's' Daughters of Gentlemen'

When they get to my age, some people like a good funeral. I prefer a nice book launch :

It's an excuse to visit a (usually) posh part of London
The bookshop ambience is convivial
The author gives a little talk about his/her next book
There's a chance to talk to friendly book-readers
Not least, there's free wine and nibbles

SW - Ta-DAAAAAAH!!!

The fanfare is to welcome our new Strictly, Derek Thompson, who has manfully stepped into the shoes of our beloved Rod, who is off to poetical pastures new. We�ll miss Rod�s wit and wisdom hugely, but Derek will be bringing his own brand to the party, as a comedy writer (among other things) and occasional coach. So, on behalf of all Strictly followers, we decided to plonk the new boy down in the hot seat, direct a bright light into his eyes, and interrogate�er, that is, interview him:

Kaleidoscopic Nightmare: Emoticon at the Brockley Jack Studio

This is another one I saw but failed to blog about at the time. I went with an ex-colleague who still lectures at the same local South London College I left in 2004. Even so, she gasped at some of the language.I thought it was pretty toe-curling,too, accustomed as I am to the grittiness of some fringe theatre shows. It reminded me a bit of a film called Romper Stomper, (1992) but maybe it was a coincidence that the playwright was Australian.

Stalin-crossed Lovers: A Warsaw Melody at the Arcola, Dalston

I must catch up with my blog
I must catch up with my blog
I must catch up with my blog

Something I never learn: I can't be out and in at the same time. When I'm at home I'm usually sitting in front of the laptop, but having made the review deadline I'm caught by some other attention-grabbing event. Maybe I should cancel my subscription to Time Out.

Almost Promethean: U3A Creative Writing Day at Canada Water Library

Had Lewis Carroll and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn been partners in building design they might well have come up with Canada Water Library. In fact it was designed by Piers Gough, and opened in November 2011. It's said to have solved the problem of how to build a library on too small a site, as if the fact of a new library were not miracle enough in a time of widespread closures. Inside, it was warm and cosy; not at all like the set for a Murnau film.

The U3A �Day for Aspiring, Self-published and Published Writers� attracted some 40 enthusiasts, from London and other regions. I know because I was i/c of ticking off names.

Con-Grad-ulations

Yesterday's lessons went well but spring fever has officially hit the Upper Peninsula and attendance is falling off as a result. We celebrated International Poem In Your Pocket Day at the music store and...Read More Here

World Book Night in Lewisham

There was a good turn-out at Manor Park Library, and I spotted some reading-group members among the standing-up throng. They should have come earlier, I thought. But they'd been vulturing in the adjoining room, where the giveaway books were laid out. By the time I got in there it was almost bare. Never mind, I enjoyed the delicious home-made snack - canapes, they've been called at other minglings I've attended. Especially memorable were tiny jerk vegetable patties and spiced mini potato- cakes. Shame I was off the wine that day, because there was plenty of that.

The making of it

I�ve just heard that my novel, The Making of Her, will be published this Friday. Even as I write this, it�s at the printers being turned into A Real Book. I�ve never had a baby, but I guess this is the nearest I�ll come to it. So please bear with me, because I�m going to blog about its story. Not its plot, but the story of how it came into being.

Death doesn't always become you[r story]

A couple of posts ago, in Nothing but the truth, I found myself saying

new writers and unconfident writers, paradoxically, seem to gravitate towards... well at one evening of short fiction readings, nine out of the ten stories read were centrally, chiefly, about death. And competitions sifters say the same. I used to think crossly that it was just a cheap thrill - some instant gravitas - but I'm a slightly nicer person these days.

and a blog reader got in touch, because she's neither new nor unconfident, but often writes about death. Is it really such a Bad Idea? Such a marker of a writer who doesn't (yet) know what he or she is doing?

So I raised my head from the sum I was doing, about how old my main (orphaned!) character's long-dead beloved would be if he'd lived, to say the following:

Adventures in e-publishing Part 12 - interview with Matt Curran.

Thirst eDition Fiction is a new e-publishing venture that launches today April 23, with the release of three titles: A Proper Job by Ian Hocking, Dragonchaser by Tim Stretton and Mean, Mode, Median by Aliya Whiteley. Future titles include Basic Theology for Fallen Women by Frances Garrood and a re-launch of my own The Bridge That Bunuel Built (interest declared). The man behind Thirst eDitions is Matt Curran, who as MFW Curran is the author of the Macmillan-published fantasy novels, The Secret War and The Hoard of Mhorrer.

RM: Matt, I called Thirst eDition Fiction an “e-publishing venture”. How would you describe it?

MC: Hi Roger, “an e-publishing venture” is probably the best way to describe what we’re doing here. Or perhaps a “self-e-publishing venture” to be more exact. I’ve heard it being called a writer’s co-operative, or a “writer’s group with added benefits” even. But it’s easy to get hung up on definitions. What we’re doing here is working with commercial authors on non-commercial projects, or projects trade publishing deem as too risky to get behind under the current financial climate, but it’s the author who is driving the publication. In essence it is self-publishing but with a whole lot of support from other, commercial authors.

A-Smelting We Will Go

The smelt have finally started running here in the U.P. For my readers from other locales here is the backstory. The Upper Peninsula is a wilderness that is difficult to describe. Wild, yes. Rural, yes. But there are many parts...Read More Here

SW - Rosy Thornton on Landscape and Theme

I suppose it came to me while I was walking the dogs. We have two of them, both lively and requiring a lot of exercise, so I spend a good deal of time out in the countryside around my home, in all weathers, alone with my spaniels and my thoughts. It�s actually when I�ve done a lot of my best �writing� over the years, for all that I carry no notebook or pen: I�ve constructed dialogue, solved log jams in plots, and reached understandings of my characters� motivation.

Not Me Me Me at all

It's been a bit quiet here lately, for which I apologise. I tried to get Jerusha Cowless to stand in for me, first while I was going full-steam-ahead with re-building the first 100,000 words of the novel, and teaching an OU tutorial and a six-week Writers Workshop online course in Self-Editing Your Novel. And I tried to get in touch with Jerusha again just before I headed off to France to research the novel (6 days, 2 planes, 1 dead & 1 live (hire) cars, 10 novel-settings, 270 photos, 1100km, ∞ bad French/good food/great ideas...). Eventually I got a message carved on a coconut shell saying that Jerusha's been slightly wounded while in hand-to-hand combat with a wombat she was trying to interview for her next job ghosting Dr Seuss books.

But now I'm back, and just as I was psyching myself up to tackle the Open University marking which descended while I was being sunburnt and then snowed on in the Pyrenees, I heard a friend, whose book is being published by a very small press, saying how hard she's finding it to do the promotion which is basically up to her. She finds it excruciating to stand up (or write/phone/email/blog/Tweet) and talk about herself and her work. 'Twas ever thus, to some degree, but although I don't think the barbarians are at the literary gates in the least, it's undeniably true that because publicity budgets are contracting, and the possibilities for promoting your own work are expanding, authors feel they must do it themselves more than ever. And lots of them find it extremely daunting.

FREE BRIDGE

Many words have been used to describe my e-published collection of short stories, The Bridge That Bunuel Built: bizarre, quirky, surreal, dark, weird, certifiable, brilliant (that wasn’t me who said that, but someone did, I promise!). Now we can add “free” to the list. That’s right. For a few days only this stylishly designed and durable e-book will be available on amazon for a cost so low it is literally not a cost at all. It is free. So it’s a good time to buy it. Or not buy it. Because it’s free. Steal it, legally. It’s okay. You can even put an eye-patch over one eye and pretend to be a pirate if you like.

Every Day Poets

Today one of my poems is published at Every Day Poets. It's the second of three pieces they have accepted. (The third poem will be published May 21st.) The folks there are serious about making poetry available to everyone, every day. It costs nothing and...Read More Here