Toys

“...a quickfire trilogy of posts designed to fill you in on the last few sessions before the break.” I said that, didn't I? Quick fire? Like what? A musket?

Anyways, I’m back, and things aren’t good. Motivation’s low, esteem even lower. Symptomatic of this was the final session before the Easter break which… well, I just didn’t go. Simple as. In fairness, there was an element of illness involved, with my Myathenia proving problematic, but--and my friends’ll vouch for this--if I really want to do something, Myasthenia won’t stop me. I’m too stubborn.

So why didn’t I go? I dunno, it just seems that, recently, the sessions have lost direction. Useful exercises on challenges like Show, Don’t Tell; dialogue tags, and internal dialogue have been subsumed by interminable feedback sessions. That’d be all well and good if the feedback was actually incisive and constructive, but I’d have more luck trying to cut my wrists with abutter knife. Maybe it’s because the group is made up almost entirely of dilettantes and dreamers that the feedback I get doesn’t exceed vague mumblings of “Yeah, that’s great”, and “Sorry, were you saying something?”

Case in point? Poetry. Every poem I’ve read out in class has been well received, and yet I’m convinced it just can’t be that simple. A few months ago I wouldn’t touch poetry with a barge pole, but now I’m suddenly good at it? Just like that? I don’t think so… Take this for example:-

BIN
Straight on the ‘net, straight on e-bay,
Wondering what you can buy today.
Scowering each and every category,
For stuff like Fighting Fantasy,
Grail Quest and Choose Your Own Adventure,
Dungeons and Dragons, Melf and Venger,
Transformers, Crystar and Darth Vader,
Daleks, Action Man and Secret Wars
Power Lords, He-Man and Skeletor
Zoids, Action Force and GI Joe,
Terrahawks and Sergeant Major Zero,
V.I.N.Cent, Old B.O.B and Maximillian,
Captain Scarlet and Ulysses 31.
But in the end it does no good,
You can’t buy back your childhood.
The holes too big for toys to fill,
All you get is a nasty Visa bill.

That gem’s a poem I knocked up to e-mail to Angry Angelina and one of the Three Witches (“Hubble bubble, boil those bones. Look at us, we’re all clones.”) in the Easter break for, guess what, another feedback session when we returned. Joy of joys.

What feedback did I get? Well, tune in next post and find out. But don’t expect any surprises.

Eight Line Poem

Class started a little late this week, mainly due to a very poor turn-out, and most of those who did turn up weren't on time. Hence, teacher gave us a quick exercise to do whilst we waited. Given the title The House is Empty, we were told to write, and to not stop until teacher said so. Quickly dispelling the thought of teacher in a dominatrix outfit (not a pleasent image, I assure you!), I thus trotted this out:-

The cottage is empty now, subsumed by dust and the smell of old, stale air. I look about, my feet planted firmly on the bare stone floor just as my hands are thrust deeply in my pockets.
I used to sleep over there. jammed onto a sofa because the cottage only has one bedroom. Beside me is the place the dining table used to sit, and I can picture the table laden with food, napkins and Christmas crackers. To my left is a staircase leading to the landing and, beyond that, the single bedroom.
When I think of the time I spent in that room and this, of the games I played and the toys I cherished. Of the family, of the love, of the meals and the not-so-endless summers. When I think of what we lost when Granny died.
I came here to remember, to try and recapture the warmth of those halcyon days. But the cottage is cold, and I leave, empty handed.

So, that was fun. Went down well with the class, which is always nice, but, strangely, inevitable these days. More on that thought next post...

Eventually, after that first exercise and a brief break, we moved onto the main business of the evening: Another feedback session! Because it's like, weeks since we last had once, right? And, as with the last one, I wasn't all that well prepared. I really did mean to have a new piece ready, officer, really I did, but I was so busy with the Valentine Chronicles I didn't get chance. Therefore, not wishing to be a wallflower and sit out the session, I dug this up.

An old piece (well, two or three years old), it was originally written as part of an ongoing series of shorts depicting a week in the life of WPC Constance Bullock, a faded, jaded copper in a near-future Manchester. It never came to fruition, with only two such shorts written in total, but one never knows, does one? I might go back to it one day.

Or maybe I won't. I'm never sure if old writing is like an old love affair: It doesn't pay to rake over old coals. It all seems like a good idea at the time, but nine times out of ten you leave--as with the opening exercise of the night--empty handed...

Stalakdrama

Easter breaks are great, aren't they? Universally used to catch up on vital R&R, DIY, TLC etc, my current four week break from Uni (Yes. Four weeks. For Easter. God, I wish I was a teacher...) has given me a chance to forge ahead with the Valentine Chronicles, (check out this week's concluding part of Hearts and Bones, folks! You'll thank me for it!) pursue some interesting opportunities in the field of comics, and even get my pencils out to do some artwork for BBC's Casualty.

All of this has left my Blog lacking in recent weeks (okay, a month), so here I am, trying to address the balance with the first in a quickfire trilogy of posts designed to fill you in on the last few sessions before the break. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll realise there are better ways to spend your time on the internet. But, most of all, you'll be bemused at the notion that Jesus gave his life for this.

So, first up we had a session examining drama. Y'know, plays and the like. Now, unlike poetry, I like plays, so no grumbles there. It was fun a session. We read extracts from the likes of Beckett, Pinter and Wilde, and did some exercises including a brief six line play where only variations on one word were allowed, and another where characters A & B discused a subject without expressly mentioning it. Strangely, most of the group went for racism, with all manner of metaphors ranging for football managers, squirrels and--my personal favourite--gobstoppers being employed.

The best part of the session, however, was the final exercise. Asked to create a brief premise, we were then instructed to create a quick exchange between two characters a la a normal play, but with one difference: We were told to expressly describe each characters thought processes. Me, I had a lot of fun with this, but Comrade Knobski (a playwrite with a few plays under his belt, including one which debuted at that week's 24 Hours of Drama event at the Uni) was enraged by such a "nonsensical" idea, which undermined the "purity" of the medium, and "reduced the distance between drama and conventional prose". I think he needs to get laid.

Anyways, here's my effort:-

Drowning in the Belly of a Whale: Being an extract from an original play by the renown Paul L. Mathews.

(Boy and Girl blunder into each other whilst lost in the belly of a whale)

Boy: Oh! Hello! I didn't expect to see you here! [Thinks: I knew it! I knew she was having an affair with the captain of a Japanese whaler!]
Girl: Oh, thank God! I'm so pleased to see you! [Thinks: You make me sick, you fat, corpulent slug]
Boy: How did you get here, anyway? [Thinks: As if I couldn't guess. Just where is Whaler-san, anyway?]
Girl: I... errr, swam.
Boy: Swam? Into a whale?
Girl: It was dark?
Boy: It's noon out there.
Girl: I, ahem, had my eyes closed.
Boy: I'll bet.
Girl: What about you?
Boy: Err... I was looking for you.
Girl: You were?
Boy: Yes. Definately.
Girl: You know I can tell when you're lying, don''t you? [Thinks: Hmmm. Maybe he is having an affair with balloon-chested lifeguard Pamela Anderson after all...]
Boy: You can?
Girl: 'Course I can. You look up and to the left, but then you try and compensate and just go cross-eyed.
Boy: Damn. Busted.
Girl: Anyway, ever mind that. How are we going to get out of here?
Boy: Um. Not sure. Maybe if we had a knife, or something, we could cut our way out. [Thinks: I'll bet loverboy's got one, hasn't he?]
Girl: That makes sense. If only we had some sorta balloons, we could use 'em to float to the surface. [Thinks: Where is Pammy, anyway?]
Boy: Sounds like a plan! [Thinks: Cool! All I need to do is kill you and the Whaler, and me an' Pammy are home free!]
Girl: Ohm, yeah, it's a plan, alright... [Thinks: But it doesn't include you]

Like I said, much fun, and No, I didn't take the exercise all that seriously. But
will I do some more drama? I don't think so. It's the wirdest thing. Every since we did those sessions on poetry last year, I've been knocking out a steady trickle of poems, but I can't see me doing the same thing with drama.

Why? Well, for me, drama is just too close to prose. If I have a story I want to tell, I'll write just that: a story, not drama. Not to decry drama for one second--it's a fine, fine artform, and one it'd take me a lot of time to even begin to explore the subtle nuances, tricks etc. So, in the meantime, I'll stick to prose. At least I've spent enough time on it that I'm starting to find my way around. Just...

The Boy in the Bubble

Last week's session was a feedback session. Feedback sessions are great--they're sessions entirely dedicated to the giving of... you guessed it... feedback.

Forewarned, the modest this week’s modest turn-out (including the return of Whispering Harry, still in his mock Victorian army jacket!) were all armed with various works in progress, poems, missives and--in Lord Laurence of Loud’s case--the latest sprawling, tedious instalment of his sprawling, tedious fantasy epic.

Me? Well, hard at work as I am on the Valentine Chronicles (check out chapter 2 of Hearts and Bones, kids! It’s Calci-yummy!) I decided to take a punt on a new poem I’d written. It went as follows:-

Bubbles
I stood and raised my voice today,
To make my feelings clear.
But nobody paid attention,
Because nobody could hear.

80 gig iMmersion chambers,
That save them from the trouble,
Of listening to me ranting,
As they drift by in their bubbles.

So if I want to reach them,
To get into their heads,
I’ll have to make an MP3,
To broadcast on the web.

Now, the thing that worries me about this poem isn’t how easy I’m finding it to write this shit, but how well it’s received in class. Split into groups of three as we were, my two victims (Auntie Agnosta and that dormouse woman whose name I can’t remember) were uniform in glowing praise. Auntie Agnosta even went so far as to say she “always looked forward” to hearing my poetry, and I was “a true poet”. One suspects--as much as I like her--she just doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe I can tell her I’m a plumber too. And a plasterer.

As for their work? Well… I honestly couldn’t say what it was like. I was distracted by my iPod.

All the Things She Said

Hey. Have you missed me? I know, I know, I’ve been AWOL a week or so, but I have an excuse. The Valentine Chronicles. God damn, it’s like a pit, and all my time and energy’s just being poured into it. But, damn me, I love it.

So, let’s get back to business, with one of my personal bugbears: dialogue tags.

When I started writing a few years back, my work was loaded with very word I could think of other than “said”. Enthused, blasted, spat, muttered, hissed, roared… You name ‘em, I used ‘em. Why? Because—as I’ve said elsewhere—“said” is such a boring word, isn’t it? It’s just so… invisible.

But that, it appears, is the point, and it was a point teacher illustrated in last week’s class. Said is meant to be an invisible word, with readers so conditioned and familiar with it they don’t “see” it when they read. Only by replacing said with something else do you grab a reader’s attention and, sometimes, jar him out of the story. If this is your intention, all well and good, if not, well, that’s a bad thing.

Another trick is to limit the people in a scene so there are only two people actually talking. Teacher illustrated this technique with Hemmingway’s Hill Like White Elephants. Once the order of speech between two characters is established, you don’t need to ascribe dialogue at all, thus eliminating the need for those tricky tags in the first place. Genuis! This is an approach I need to think about very carefully, as I have a history of cramming scenes with more bodies than a Roman orgy.

This is an approach I used in the writing exercise for the week, in which we were asked to write the dialogue from a scene. Truth be told, I think I went a little overboard and limited the scene to nothing but dialogue:-

“What did you say?”
“I said: ‘Who’s paying for the cab?’”
“Oh. I though that’s what you said.”
“Well, are you paying, or am I?”
“Well, I paid last time.”
“Well, yeah, but, last time I looked, your paycheck had more noughts on it than mine.”
“What’s that got to do with bit? You share my bed, we share the bills. It’s a simple equation.”
“But I work in Wendy’s, you work on Wall Street. Analyse that.”
“So much for little miss sexual equality…”
“Oh, for God’s sake… Hey, driver, here’s thirty bucks. Keep the change.”
“Hey, wait, where are you going?”
“I’m getting another cab.”
“Another cab? Where?”
“Anywhere away from you. And, by the way, you wanna tip?”
“Yes please!”
“Not you—I gave you ten bucks already.”
“Yeah, butt out, wet-back. What tip? What are you talking about? Get back in the cab. It’s raining out there! Come on up for a coff—”
“No. Keep your damn coffee, and your damn salary. You wanna share? Try the NASDAQ. Me? I’m going home. Alone.”

And off she goes, presumably, into the rain, looking for another cab. Me? I'm off to do more work on the Valentine Chronicles, but I'll be back next week. How do you know you can believe me?

Because I said so.

Growing Up

Today is a special day for me. Today my little baby website, www/thevalentinechronicles.com, is one year old.

This is a big deal for me. A year ago I had no web-presence, a questionable knowledge of HTML and a little ambition. A year on, nothing's really changed, but at least I chug on!

I'm sure one day I'll look back at the Valentine Chronicles and cringe. I'm sure the stories, like new serial Hearts and Bones will seem badly written and embarrassing, but, right now, I don't care. All writers grow up in public, stamping their feet and crying for attention, and the Valentine Chronicles is no different.

Here's to many more years, and many more embarrassing stories.

Train of Thought

Last week's class was all about characters, and, speaking of which, we did have a higher turn-out than the previous session. The usual suspects were there (Angry Angela, Lord Lawrence, Comrade Knobski etc), but we were also blessed with the heavenly Nigella. I’m pleased to report she didn’t get a breast reduction for Christmas…

So, characters, yeah. Funny old things, aren’t they. I can’t write ‘em, but I can’t write without ‘em. One of the problems I’ve been having recently is a reliance on interior dialogue, thought process etc to convey stories and a character’s stimulus/response process. Reams and italicised reams of the stuff. I never used to do this, but my continual struggle with Show, Don’t Tell (when I’m King, I’m outlawing that bloody phrase…) drove me to start showing a characters internal responses rather than telling them.

One solution I’ve stumbled across is the use of dialogue to show how the characters are feeling/reacting, as well as actions and physical description to convey a characters personality and attitudes. Here’s a sample I did in class when we were asked to do a character description:-

Wheezing as he shuffled into the room, Cyril paused by the kitchen table. Propping himself up against its edge, he scrabbled about in the pocket of his grubby overcoat, fingers searching through lint, tab-ends, mints and old lighters.

Finally he found the inhaler and withdrew it with a hurried motion, putting it to his lips the same way he would gin. One deep inhalation later, a pause as his head sank and he slowed his breathing, and he drew himself to full height, the dull light from the old bulb making his sweaty forehead gleam.

“You alright, Cyril?” his brother asked. Older than Cyril, he was just as threadbare. Presently he was watching his brother through wide eyes, a cigarette burning between his lips. Stock still, he looked like a knackered old hare caught in the headlights of Cyril’s infamy.

“Where’s ma?” Cyril said, his voice and breath soft and clean as shitty gravel in a fish tank.

“In there,” his brother said, nodding toward the living room. “She arrived in a cab twenty minutes ago.”

“For God’s sake, Bill,” Cyril said, lip curling back to expose ruined teeth, “why does she keep pestering us? Why doesn’t she just die? We could use the money.”

“Cyril, please, she is our mum.”

“She’s a vicious hag, and we’ve both got the scars to prove it, haven’t we?”

With that, he pushed by his brother, wiping his forehead with his sleeve before stepping into the living room and—with an expansive sweep of arms and a wide smile—declared: “Ma! It’s good to see you!”

So, no interior dialogue, no thought processes, but it seems (to me, at least) as though Cyril and Bill’s personalities and feelings are pretty well portrayed. This, and Penetration (yes, an unfortunate term, I know) may well get me out of this italicised rut of interior dialogue I’ve fallen into recently.

Only time will Show, Don’t Tell…