Category: Writing

Last night was the ninth Not for the Faint Hearted session that Ellen and I have run. I still feel the same excitement about the event that I felt for the first. We're also still bringing in new people along with our regulars. That mix of friends and newcomers is one of the things that keeps it fresh.

The prompt images that we used last night were:

• 8 minutes
• 5 minutes
• 3 minutes
• BREAK
• 3 minutes
• 3 minutes
• 3 minutes
• 3 minutes
• 2 minutes

This time we used several black and white archive images. Weirdly I found those more difficult to write about than modern photos.

My favourite thing about these sessions is hearing the different responses people have had to the same images. For me, one of the challenges is finding a good idea in the time available while still having time to write it.

I know now that I can write and edit a basic story in about 90 seconds – although I prefer to have longer. This gives me time to sift through ideas, abandoning the first few until I encounter one that surprises me. This reminds me of some advice that the journalist Caitlin Moran was given by Alan Coren:

"The first idea that occurs to you, will have occurred to everyone. The second idea that occurs to you, will have already also occurred to the clever people. But your third idea – only you will have had that one."

On Saturday we had the latest of the Brighton Creative Writing Sessions workshops, on Writing and the Tarot. Ellen and I were very excited as we had a guest tutor for the event, poet and tarot-reader Naomi Foyle.

The tarot has an interesting history as a tool for writers. Italo Calvino described it as a "machine for telling stories", and used it as the basis for his book The Castle of Cross Destinies. (Apparently there was supposed to be a third part of this book, called the Motel of Crossed Destinies, which was never written).

The workshop explored the Major Arcana and Fool's Journey. We played with relating the archetypal symbols on the cards with stories. For me it was most interesting to see how different people interpreted the cards, and the way these symbols could be used, something I want to continue exploring. I was also fascinated to learn that Ted Hughes collection, the Birthday Letters can be analysed in terms of the Major Arcana – more information here. 

I had a fascinating day – thank you to Naomi for running the workshop, and to Jake for providing the space. Ellen and I are now planning 2011's workshops. We have a Top Secret session planned for January, and Writing Brighton in February. Details to follow!

Raymond Chandler once gave the following rule for writing: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."

You can certainly see that in Chandlers' work. When the Big Sleep was being adapted for cinema, Chandler was asked whether a certain character had been murder or had killed himself. He confided in a friend, "dammit I didn't know either."

When I am writing at the Not For the Faint-Hearted events, I have a number of tropes that I fall back on if I am stuck. One of these is clowns. They're so easy to write about. They're supposed to be having fun all the time, so if a clown unhappy you have an immediate question to work with. A clown sitting at the side of a street, with a half-empty bottle of whiskey: why?

I've shared my clown theory with my friend Louise Halvardsson. Her first clown story, Clowntown, was recently read at a short story night. I think there should be more stories about clowns. As Louise advises, "add a clown to your writing whenever you get stuck."

I'm very excited to have a story published in the recent Hint Fiction anthology. The books contains stories of 25 words or fewer and I am thrilled to be published alongside people like Jonathan Carroll, Joe Lansdale and Peter Straub.

I'm fascinated by how small a story can be. Much very short fiction is disappointing, little more than summaries. But when someone gets it right, the effect is stunning, like the Baby Shoes story that is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. So simple, yet so surprising. The anthology's editor, Robert Swartwood, says that Hint Fiction "should be complete by standing by itself as its own little world", and the book contains some great examples.

There's an interesting discussion at The Millions here and a New Yorker review here. The latter includes some examples, including Bob Thurber's Shipwrecked and LR Bonehill's Cull, two of my favourites from the book.

People who follow the weblog or twitter will know how much I fret about writing author biographies. Hint fiction has 25 word biographies for each of the writer, and Michael Martone's entry is the best example I have seen yet.

Thanks to Robert Swartwood for organising the anthology.

I'm a little tardy in posting this, but I have an article in the first issue of Friction magazine, which is published by the Newcastle Center for the Literary Arts:

"If the current growth in creative writing courses continues for another 70 years, more people will be learning to write than taking driving lessons.

This unlikely and invented statistic underlines a genuine problem. I am bombarded with invitations to paid creative writing workshops and courses. While some of these are probably excellent, the barrage of announcements makes me want to weep. (If you’re attending or, please god, holding a course in social media ‘platforms’ for writers, you need to stop and think about your life)." (More here)

There are some fascinating pieces in the first issue. My favourite was Alex Lockwood's article on The Responsibilities of the Novelist, which discusses Nick Royle's novel Quilt and Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y. I enjoyed reading Nick's novel and it's good to see a thoughtful response. There's also a fascinating story by Max Dunbar.

Someone once asked Raymond Carver how he wrote his stories. Carver replied "I write the first sentence, and then I write the next sentence and then the next."

On Saturday, we held the fourth and final session in this season's Brighton Creative Writing Sessions events. People worked throughout the day on writing stories, starting with first sentences and building on them until a story was completed.

The first part of the day was spent coming up with first lines. Ellen and I provided prompts, as well as a 'magic box' filled with inspiring objects. We heard some strange and provocative ideas. Selecting the most promising from these, people then produced first paragraphs. 

In the afternoon, everyone took their favourite opening and developed it into a finished piece. The session was intensive, with lots of writing, so Ellen and I provided distractions to give people a chance to relax, including party poppers, fortune telling fish and sweets. Despite the hard work, everyone seemed to have a great time, and we heard some fascinating stories.

Running the four sessions in this season has been fun. We've met some fantastic people and enjoyed leading the groups. We were particularly excited when one of the students arrived for the session with home-made cake. Thanks, Sandy!

We have one more session planned for the year, about the Tarot and Writing which we should be announcing soon. We are also going to be involved with something exciting for White Night. Details to follow…

 

• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 

(from Jack Kerouac's Rules of Spontaneous Prose)

The theme of the third Brighton Creative Writing Sessions workshop was the Beats, and we had various activities based around the work of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. To set the mood, Ellen and I started with a reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl. We read the whole of part one, taking turns with the lines. Howl is a powerful poem, and an amazing thing to read out loud.

We warmed up by writing about morning routines, capturing those little details of life that are easily overlooked and forgotten. This was followed by discussing the impressions of the beats we came to the workshop with, and an outline of the group's history. 

We then picked the most mundane objects we could think of and wrote pieces casting them as Great Things, just as Ginsberg did with a soot-covered flower in Sunflower Sutra. We also looked at the Ginsberg and Kerouac's transformation of the rules of Haiku into English, and played with producing examples.

In the first part of the afternoon, everyone experimented with William Burrough's cut-up method. To set the mood I showed an excerpt from Towers Open Fire, an experimental film produced by Burroughs and Antony Balch. The group cut up newspapers and stories, making new texts from them. Some of the results were amusing, including a text made by slicing up the lonely-hearts ads from the Argus.

Ellen and I did a lot of work to prepare this session, including finding audio samples of Ginsberg and Burroughs discussing their working methods. Everyone was encouraged to consider writing in new styles and responded in interesting ways. I was pleased with how it went.

We have one more session in this season, One Sentence at a Time (tickets available here). We also have a very exciting workshop planned for December – more news soon!

Thanks to Jake Spicer and Tom Hume for providing photos (Tom's flickr set from the day can be seen here).