Artistic Work

It never ceases to amaze me the liberties some people will take. I have just had communication from a fellow writer, a very talented chap, about an experience he's had on another blog site.


This fellow wrote a bit of local history in such a way that he captured the spirit of the 1960s high life + World War II drama + "It's a Wonderful Life" all rolled into a jolly good read. He did version after version to get the words and tone balanced in a harmonious blend that was a delight to read, and then he submitted it to the local blog site run by a committee woman of that town. You know the type... pearls and "Darlings" and a lot of pretension... a small mouth that makes moues and a weak chin. She is new to that town and, desperate to fit in, she has taken up the torch of town historian, though she is from a place far away.


My friend, who is a native son submitted his piece thinking that perhaps a chance reader would see it and remember. He looked forward to reading it himself! And then he did... and oh....


She'd chopped it up! She took out sentences that made sense of the lightness of feeling, and rendered dialogue to inane prattle, in one fell swoop. In effect she'd taken the paint brush out of the hand of an artist and said "Paint it THIS way!!!"


And that, Dear Reader, is a sin. In publishing or critiquing you can offer advice and suggestion, insert notes and queries, and brain-storm with the artist to your heart's content, and theirs. You can even say "I can not use this work in this form" and that is fair dues. Everyone gets rejected at some point.


But you must never ever do the actual re-write yourself. And should you stoop to that depth you must never follow through and print it... especially without the writer's consent. That is not only bad taste it is possibly illegal. I am no expert on copyright laws, particularly on the Internet, but I know they do cover the existence of your material.


So... writer and publisher beware. And be in communication. And be honest. But don't be spraying your graffiti over someone else's work. 


Good writing and reading to you!


Shar

Long Time No See: So you wanna be a writer?

My friend, the writer Kate Lovell, has written this excellent piece on a mind-hurdle that I find particularly difficult to clear - so I am reposting...

Long Time No See: So you wanna be a writer?: So life got in the way and I haven't posted on here for an age. Long time no blog! I shouldn't really say life 'got in the way' - life has b...

SEPTEMBER MEETING & THEME

Our group is meeting on Monday, 19th of September at 18:30 (that's 6:30 p.m. to us non-military types!) 

Our theme is: The ending it should have been.

 Take a story... any story... Romeo & Juliet for example, and write the ending it should have been. They get married, she gets pregnant right away and fights with her in-laws. Or.. they get married and struggle to keep the peace between the families, spending some holidays at with the Capulets and others with the Montagues, children instructed to be nice. You get the idea. So pick a tale... a classic, a movie you saw, or one from life and tell it YOUR way!

WRITING GOALS

Our corporeal group meets monthly and reads what we've written from the month before. We find this keeps our gears oiled, and really one of THE best ways to become a better writer is to WRITE!

In case you are interested in virtually joining us here is the following info for you:

July's writing theme(s):

1. Why are you scared of her?

2. Writers are secret psychpaths

DUE DATE: JULY 25th 2011

Pick either or both of the themes and craft a story or poem. We will read it at the group meeting and/or post it here and give you some feedback.

Please submit your work to writeonessex@gmail.com and our thanks to NAWG for the wonderful book they sent us to support new ideas for writing!

The enemies of creativity

This post is going to be a lot more open-ended than those I have written previously, because this time I’m not sure I have a solution to all the problems I pose.

A few weeks ago the UK enjoyed a succession public holidays equalling lots of long weekends. Like most people I spent this time visiting relatives, patronising the garden centre and lounging about in an indolent and despicably unproductive manner. However, all that was after breakfast. Before the morning repast, immediately upon waking, I wrote. I wrote more steadily and freely than I have in a long time. Before the rest of the household roused themselves for the day I found a quiet spot at a desk with a view over the garden and wrote solidly for about hour every morning of my holiday.

That which I wrote may be a long, long way from genius (I’m being too modest, I know), but it was words down on the page and I returned to work feeling a great sense of achievement.

Returning to my flat, work and the normal routine completely killed this creative drive. Try as I might, I can’t match the level of productivity that I reached over those few days in April.

Why is it so hard to write, when writing is what I want to do? I procrastinate, distracting myself with housework – housework for pity’s sake! Dealing with the humdrum tasks of my life seems to sap my creative juices. A break from the routine pulled me out of the rut I had fallen into. But now – I’m right back in there.

There seemed to be three key components to my productive weekend that I need to reproduce;

1. Most obviously, getting to work early in the day. My ideas seemed strong and vivid before the day caught up with me, and the sense of achievement was enough encouragement to wake up early the next day to do the same again. Of course, the answer is to get up early and write first thing. Trouble is I’m a lazy son of a gun. Can I have a volunteer to kick me up the backside at 6.00am every day?*
2. The novelty of a fresh perspective. For me it was a view over a shady, suburban garden. How do I refresh my brain sat at my kitchen table staring at the view of the factory chimneys?
3. A feeling of freedom. I couldn’t do any housework even if I wanted to, because my house was fifty miles away. When Virginia Woolf wrote about a room of one’s own, she should have thrown in a handful of servants too. How do you find time to write when there are always metaphorical potatoes to be peeled?
   

*Don’t all rush at once.

Publishing e-Stories

I'm writing this quickly... I have to wake my husband up in six minutes and start getting ready to go to work. But before I do, to say I'm e-reader obsessed is putting it mildly. I get obsessed easily, anyway, but this whole e-reader device thing has made my writing life sooo much easier!

Yeah, I have downloaded some fiction - ok a lot of fiction. Most of it free from Project Gutenberg and even some free books from Amazon!

And that's what got me noticing that Amazon is offering stories by famous writers... short stories... for mere pence. But not all of the stories are by famous writers, either. There are people I've never heard of putting stories on Amazon for the Kindle e-reader, for say 69p a go.

How do they do that?? Well, I am the queen of researching random stuff... so naturally I Googled it. And I share with you this little guide...

"How to Make Money Publishing Short stories For Kindle"

Ok... now I'm three minutes late. Gotta goooooo!

Shar

Summer time and the writing is easy!

Salutations fellow scribes.

I would like to draw your attention to this year's Guardian Weekend Short Story competition. They are looking for 2000 words on the theme of "journeys" by 13 June.

Last year's winner was published alongside the likes of Hillary Mantel and David Mitchell in the Guardian Weekend magazine's fiction special, and no doubt this year's line up will provide equally illustrious company for the winning author. So why not give it a whirl?

Me, Myself and I

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

“My attention was drawn to the spots on my chest when I was in my bath, singing, if I remember rightly, the Toreador song from the opera Carmen.”

“My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.”

It’s not a particularly startling observation that first-person narration is one of the most common methods of storytelling. The omniscient narrator, a style familiar to us from our nineteenth-century classics, has really fallen out of favour. Perhaps, as the reader’s understanding of the novel grew more sophisticated the notion that any narrator can be detached and objective seemed paradoxical. All narrators are controlled and directed by the author and reflect his or her tastes and concerns. We postmodern readers enjoy tales told by a first-person narrator because of their very unreliability. We know that we are hearing a version and that the story really could exist in many forms and be subject to any number of interpretations.

It does seem to me that the majority of novels are now written in this style. This current trend could be viewed as a move back to that early form, the epistolary novel. However, a significant difference, and dare I say advantage for the author, between writing a novel in the form of letters and first-person narrative is that the audience of the epistolary novel is clear – the intended recipient of the letters. The decision to freely write prose from the perspective of a character poses difficult questions that have to be answered – why is this character telling this story, and who are they telling it to?

I recently had a breakthrough with an idea I’ve been struggling with. I knew it was important that the story I was writing should be told directly by the main character, because I wanted the events to be seen only through her eyes. However, nothing I wrote seemed to have the ring of truth. Her mode of expression seemed false and too stylised. It was then I realised I had failed to address those fundamental questions. I remembered some advice from my acting training – why does this character have the need to speak, and what do they want to effect by their words?

Suddenly, instead of addressing an anonymous mass of critics and reviewers and disinterested members of the public browsing in bookshops, or indeed my Write On Essex comrades, I knew that my narrator was interested only in speaking to one person. She was making a confession to a very specific audience. The wrong kind of pressure, the pressure of critical opprobrium, dispersed, and the right kind, a compulsion to talk, pushed the narrative along.

I was doing myself no favours in imagining this hugely judgemental audience for my writing. If you write to someone with a fervent need to make them understand, and believe that they too will be desperate to hear what you have to say, it’s easier to get the words down on the page. Shar spoke about this at our last meeting in regards to her piece Children of Lesser Mortals. The person who needed to hear this family history was her three-month old granddaughter. Can you imagine a better audience for this story? I’m not suggesting that everyone write to a baby of their acquaintance but try to keep in mind a reader as non-judgemental and receptive and one that you simply have to tell the story to, before it is lost.

I can’t pretend to know how exactly David Copperfield, Holden Caulfield, Bertie Wooster or Kathy H. were created, but I definitely get the sense that these memorable character-narrators grew out of the authors’ knowledge of why they were telling these stories and who was listening to their tales.

Is that a poem in your pocket (or are you just glad to see the same old cliché …)?

How do you view your co-workers? In the maelstrom of the working day, are they friends, irritances, the grumpy boss, the techie boy who only talks to computers, or just the girl in the office who answers the phone? Do they have a cultural life? Do they think you have one?

Sometimes, an event happens that makes you think differently about people and shakes you out of your comfortable little world where everyone has their office role. Like last Thursday, 14 April – or Poem in Your Pocket Day, to be exact. If you haven’t heard of it before, the idea is to carry a favourite poem with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends. ‘Co-workers,’ I hear you mutter as you look round at them. ‘Do they even know what a poem is?’ Well, they might just surprise you! The first person to start it off in my workplace was someone I know is a keen poet, so it wasn’t really a surprise. She emailed a poem that was lovely, new to me and I enjoyed reading it, and I thought that would be the end of it. But then someone else sent one round. And then someone else after that. And another. Including the techie boy and the office girl. The mix of poems was eclectic and beautiful; poets ancient and modern, local, national and international. Soon almost everyone joined in and we had a veritable poetry avalanche. We even talked about them and shared ideas and links! I was amazed and delighted and I do now look at my co-workers with a different eye. I’d never imagined that the elderly academic in the corner was a Clash fan back in the 70s, who has never lost their love for punk poetry. Or that the seemingly hard-headed businessman is a sucker for the Romantics. My workplace now has a little buzz going, and is all the better for it. I can’t wait to see next year’s poems.

What poem did I send round? John Cooper Clarke’s Haiku. What, not his best known number, you cry? No, I’m too Evidently Chickentown for that - I need this job to pay the bills!

The Rough South of Harry Crews Part One

What does it take to be a short story/novel writer/poet? It takes work.

Updates!

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Write On Write Up – March 2011

This month we relaunched the Write On Essex blog as a space for discussion of all matters authorial. Members of the group are now avidly posting items in the hope of igniting the spark of creativity. The blog can be viewed and commented on by anyone and it would be great if we could develop it into a truly useful resource for budding writers everywhere.

Our monthly meeting on 28 March was an opportunity to have another go at the first-line writing exercise – excellent news as we could all show up unprepared and guilt-free! That being said, WoE member Shar shared with us a very honest and incredibly moving account of her parents’ marriage. The story flowed effortlessly; it was a strong and concise piece of writing that we hope to see in her completed short story cycle.

The first-line exercise was new to a few group members and although they found it something of a challenge (which is not to say that the rest of us found it easy, we’re just more used to it), it really is an excellent way to escape your comfort zone; in only five minutes of writing time you can only go with your first impulse and ignore the stifling criticism of the censor in your head. The exercise definitely yielded a few promising scenarios and gems of verbiage.

Our March meeting also saw us bid farewell to Camilla, who is departing for “the city of dreaming spires”. She will be much missed by us all, but I’m sure she’ll find plenty of inspiration in her new home. We hope she will keep in touch and perhaps continue to share her excellent poetry with us at Write On Essex. For the rest, the next meeting is on 18 April.

Adaptations II

Adaptations?  I generally hate them, for exactly the reasons that Sharmila describes. How often have we squirmed through slash-and-burn celluloid travesties of cherished novels, wincing at the wooden acting of Hollywood’s latest simpering starlet? How many times have we wailed “But they’ve left out the subplot/most important character/half the story! It doesn’t make sense without it!” Most of the time, I don’t want to see the whole inner world I’ve lovingly constructed so crudely dismantled, or the character’s faces I’ve decided on substituted for an unwelcome intruder. But sometimes, once in a while, just when you think they’re not going to, things work out well. One of the best adaptations I have seen in many years is Dexter, based on a series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, which just seems to get better and better. The first series began as an adaptation of the first novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter. The main character, Dexter Morgan, is a serial killer (yes, my fellow Write on Essex members, I can hear you all groaning), who is polite, friendly, kind to his wife and children, and all the other things monsters aren’t supposed to be. The books deal cleverly and wittily with Dexter’s inner life and explore how he reconciles psychopathy and a penchant for dismemberment with a ‘normal’ family and working life. Dexter kills only those who 'deserve' it; child molesters, wife beaters, other serial killers and all kinds of horrible lowlife. He is the hero, however morally ambiguous, and the reader cheers him on at every stage. Maybe it’s because he rids the world of those who really shouldn’t be in it, something we would love to do, but can’t; he is the agent of our revenge. So, how does it work on television? Besides other advantages such as excellent scriptwriting, strong characterisation, fine acting and quirky plotting, I think it is because the writers have used their source creatively. After the first series, the television Dexter has developed quite differently to the subsequent novels. Characters long removed from the television series remain present in the books and vice versa; the stories are different, but recognisably the same. The books and the TV series co-exist happily and I can enjoy both for what they are – and that’s how I know this adaptation works.

A few years ago, I did an interesting piece of work for a writing course. We were asked to dramatise the story of Cinderella, but find a fresh way of presenting it. While that might sound straightforward, it isn’t, and I soon found out there were big questions to be answered. How do you find that new approach in a story everyone knows? How do you make characters, in fact stock fairy-tale tropes, come to life on screen (or radio, which I’d chosen)? How would these people actually talk to each other instead of their communication being subsumed into the storyteller’s voice?  The process of adapting this piece did improve my writing, to answer Sharmila’s question, because it improved my reading. I went back to the original source. Although I know the Cinderella story, I don’t think I’d ever read the Brothers Grimm version. Looking for a different way to present it, I read it carefully and made a note of all the twists and turns and any minor characters I hadn’t noticed because the Ugly Sisters, the Fairy Godmother, the Handsome Prince and the Glass Slipper had got in the way. In fact, I’d missed a lot.  That’s how I found the new angle. I used a minor character’s perspective, in one of the settings that usually takes second place to Cinderella’s kitchen. Radio drama works largely through dialogue, so I chose to tell the story by adding another minor character; I framed it in a conversation between two courtiers at the ball, and went from there. I felt that I learnt a lot in the process of adapting Cinderella; how to manipulate characterisation and plot, and how to convey a familiar story in a different medium. It’s not always easy. I’m still not sure I like adaptations, though!

It wasn't as good as the book - the perils of adaptation

Does anything provide a more curious sensation of intrigue coupled with mild discombobulation than the news of a favourite novel being adapted for the screen? You can hardly wait to find out who’s directing and who’s cast. Yet you tremble with trepidation every time you read some nugget of showbiz gossip from the set, unconsciously repeating the imperative “Don’t screw it up!”

Never Let Me Go is a case in point. I’d been in a state of nervous anticipation about the film, ever since reading that Keira Knightley was set to star. Now having seen it, I must admit that Knightley was all right, but the film itself was rather boring. The narrator of Never Let Me Go obsessively rehashes the mundane incidents of the past and the second-hand gossip that circulated amongst her friends to make sense of her life. Maybe this sort of thing doesn’t make for the most thrilling of films. Strangely though, the adaptation jettisons the most filmic aspect of the novel, the slowly revealed “twist”. For me, it doesn’t really work as a film in its own right. You would need to read the book to understand the relationship between Kathy and Ruth, as the film doesn’t allow for a proper exploration of their characters.

Perhaps the television serial is the better outlet for the literary adaptation? Saying that, the recent Channel 4 effort with William Boyd’s Any Human Heart left me cold. Despite each of the four episodes lasting as long as a feature film the story was rushed, the characters hollow and the dialogue stilted and unnatural – and this was adapted by Boyd himself!

Of course there are plenty of adaptations that do work, often period pieces with a straightforward narrative structure. Yet sometimes the best results come when the adaptor boldly disregards the source material and makes something entirely new out of the story. I must admit, it seems to me that one’s judgement of the success of a literary adaptation is clouded by how much you cared for the original novel in the first place.

My dream adaptation project would be to write a teleplay of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. This was famously filmed in 1951 as A Place in the Sun starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. Although the film is acknowledged as a classic, even its most ardent fans must admit that it radically departs from the novel. I would want to dramatise Clyde’s youth, which A Place in the Sun entirely skips. The film romanticises the relationship between Clyde (George Eastman in the film) and Elizabeth Taylor’s character (Sondra in the book, Angela(!) in the film), creating a conventional love story at the expense of the satirical aspect of the novel. In summary, I would like to show it as the state-of-the-nation piece I think it is. Boardwalk Empire, the new series on HBO, covers roughly the same period though, so I guess has just beaten me to it – perhaps I could borrow their sets?

Share your thoughts on literary adaptations in the comments. Is there a particular novel that you would like to see on screen? Or, like me, do you intend to write that epic, twenty-part Bafta award-winning serial yourself one of these days?