WRITING PROMPT

Choose an image from the ones above to inspire a story or poem.
 

Flash! Bang! What a picture!

 

                                  

I have a confession. A few days ago, in the lovely, brightly-lit ladies’ ‘rest-room’ of a local cafe, I spent several minutes taking selfies of myself. The woman waiting outside probably thought I was constipated! And it isn’t the first time I’ve engaged in this suspect behaviour.

 You see, I have very few photos of myself from the past two decades, which coincides (for some reason…) with my getting older, fatter and less photogenic. P is incapable of taking a flattering picture of me – it might be deliberate mischief on his part, though it’s more likely just incompetence and age-related poor eyesight. I’m always mid-squint or half-turned away, or my hair is fluttering in a gale-force wind as if I’m wearing a wig that’s about to blow off. Or my glasses are skew-whiff so I look like I’m going for a bad  impersonation of Eric Morecombe.  Or I appear to have no neck, or three double chins, or an arse the size of Texas.

 I’m not kidding. If you saw any photo of me from the past two decades, taken by P, you’d think I made a living providing those ‘before’ photos for companies advertising exercise regimes, groundbreaking diets or wonder-drugs.

Or maybe P's pictures are what I look like...😦

                                 

Anyway, when I get married in December, I’m going to need some photos to mark the occasion, and it’s one of the aspects of getting married that I most dread. I’m short, fat, wear glasses and have uneven teeth – I’m aware this makes me sound like a character in a Seth Macfarlane cartoon, but it’s true. So I’ve been trying to take some selfies of myself to prove that I can look relatively normal. Large toilets in cafes are often well-lit and you can guarantee not to be disturbed, as long as you don’t take too long. They’re a perfect opportunity.

                               

I can see why people take selfies. When I was a teenager, my friend and I were obsessed by those Photo-Me machines. In our town, there was one in Woolworths and one at the back entrance to Boots. When we did A Levels at our local FE college, we were forever hanging round these machines, checking our change to make sure we had the appropriate coins, Once inside, we’d sometimes try to sit together on the tiny swivelling stool, designed for one person, and pull faces into the camera, sabotaging each other’s attempts at looking good. Or one of us would sit behind the curtain for the first two of the four shots the machine took, and then quickly duck out so the other could take her place for the final two shots. Alone in the intimate space, we’d both rehearse our sexy pouts and significant glances, our mean-girl frowns or our goth-girl grimaces (funny, we never tried out a 'pleasant girl-next-door smile' or a 'kindly-great-aunt expression'). We’d experiment with monochrome and colour options (I think one machine only did black and white photos – they were always flattering and made us feel like Ingrid Bergman or Greta Garbo). Our self-conscious waits for the damp strip of images to emerge from the slot in the side of the machine is an evocative memory of those years: the whole experience made us far more excited than you’d think it would.

My photo albums contain loads of these strips of teenage faces – though later ones, taken for passports or official documents, are much less interesting, showing serious, emotionless faces beneath a series of mostly unflattering hair-dos and different styles of glasses, which change over the years like a flickering zoetrope. Those teenage ones, though, are full of exaggerated life – huge grins, tongues sticking out, thumbed noses, waggled fingers, hugs with cheeks pressed together. Our faces look like they ought to have three or four exclamation marks after them.

                                   

Young people these days aren’t much different, even though the notion of someone putting hard copies of photos into a photo album would mystify the average teenager. Yes, kids, I used to take pictures with my Kodak Instammatic and send the spool of negatives away to be developed. I’d wait a fortnight for the pictures to arrive and it was always a thrill. Once, we had a second-hand polaroid camera which developed its photos ‘instantly’ (in reality, it took several minutes), but the film was very expensive. I later moved on to much more expensive ‘proper’ cameras and I currently have a digital SLR one which cost a fortune and does all sorts of fancy tricks – but, guess what, I mostly now take photos on my phone, like everyone else.

 Digital photography, and particularly the brilliance of mobile phone cameras, has transformed our attitude towards photographs. When I was a teenager, we couldn’t imagine not having to pay for film and developing costs, and being limited by the number of exposures you could take before you needed to replace the film. Now you can snap dozens of pics and discard 90% of them if you wish. You don’t have to spend ages mulling over what images to capture for eternity. And teenagers can use photo booths for what they were designed for – passport photos, illicit sexual encounters and drug deals.

Attitudes towards self-portraits have been transformed in recent years. The sense of embarrassment we used to feel seems to have vanished, as taking selfies has become simply an everyday activity which everyone does. In the early eighties, our visits to the photo booths were covert affairs: we’d feel vaguely uneasy, waiting outside the booth, and would glance around furtively to check that no one was watching us, as if people might see us as vain or self-obsessed, or wasting time and money. When I first got a camera with a delayed shutter-release function, I used to painstakingly set up the shot in the privacy of my bedroom, and I suspect I’d have felt just as horrified, if anyone found me doing this, as I would if they’d found me snogging my teddy bear. But, these days, our natural desire to capture what we look like has become commonplace and unworthy of comment.

                           

Many of us feel an overwhelming compulsion – whether we’re at a beach, nightclub or a well-lit ladies’ room – to snap ourselves in various attitudes of hyperbolic emotion and stick the results on social media, presumably to prove we’re fully engaged in life. It’s part of a general obsession with our outsides. When I first started going for interviews, I was always told I had to be very conscious of my appearance – wear the right clothes, look clean and tidy, have an appropriate hair-style, make sure my body language exuded confidence but not arrogance, friendliness but not smarminess. However, later, when I interviewed people myself, I always found myself distrusting those overly shiny young people, scrubbed up to perfection, who shook my hand with the right degree of firmness and maintained eye contact like robotic sociopaths. Fair enough, we all need a bit of coaching on how to present ourselves in interviews and other such formal occasions – but, these days, people seem to feel it’s necessary to choreograph their every facial expression. A friend told me that, when her teenage granddaughter was visiting her recently, the girl spent hours in the bathroom. My friend eventually asked her what she was doing in there all that time, and the girl’s reply was ‘Oh, I’m just working on raising my eyebrow properly’...

                             

I’m not immune, however. And I can understand this urge. We all want others to like us, to think we’re cool or fun or intelligent or sexy, and we all suspect we aren’t any of these things. So a snapshot of ourselves at least exhibiting the outward signs of coolness, good humour, intelligence or sexiness can seem like proof that – at least for one second of one day in our lives – we really were. And sometimes, of course, it’s true.

 I’m just hoping I don’t look like Eric Morecombe in drag on my wedding photos…

                      

WRITING NEWS

 My story 'The Tall Man' will appear in the next edition of North American literary magazine, Goat Milk.

BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's Opinion

 Eoin Colfer

I have read and thoroughly enjoyed all Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl novels since I bought the first one in WHSmiths on Orpington High Street in the 1990s, though I’m told the recent film adaptation was less than successful. As a writer of action-adventure tales for young teenage readers and young adults, I think he deserves his superstar writer status. The Artemis Fowl series are amusing, exciting, ingenious and have interesting characterisation. It is significant, however, that a friend’s teenage son to whom I lent one of the novels didn’t enjoy it because he found all the ‘technical details’ boring. Personally, I enjoyed the ‘technical details’ and they enriched the stories for me, but I can see what this young reader meant.

               Colfer has a distinctive style, full of flamboyant similes and metaphors, jokey and lively, with lots of direct address to the reader. Reading the Artemis Fowl books is like being told a complex story by a particularly articulate and witty Irish uncle. I felt that his foray into writing a new addition to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy series was less of a success, however, as he didn’t really capture the ineffable sparkle of comic and fantasy genius of Adams himself. Nevertheless, I have read one or two other Colfer novels over the years and found them generally entertaining.

 

           


This year, during a lull in my reading, I decided to take another dip into the Colfer bookverse. Firstly, I read the first two of his new Fowl series, this time based on Artemis’s younger twin brothers, Beckett and Myles. These were acceptably lively novels for the younger teenage market, capturing some of the verve and humour of the Artemis Fowl novels but suffering from the lack of Artemis, Butler, Holly, Mulch, Foaly and, of course, Artemis himself. I wasn’t as enthusiastic as some of the many positive reviews of the series I’ve read, though I enjkoyed the contrasting personalities of Myles and Beckett, and I particularly enjoyed Book One. They weren’t as good as the original series however and I doubt I will read the third in the new series when it comes out.

RATING: The Fowl Twins & The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges ***

Having revived my Colfer appetite and still not ready to face anything more challenging, I took a look at the trilogy for older readers based on WARP (the FBI’s Witness Anonymous Relocation Programme). This is a time-travel story, featuring twentieth-century teenage FBI consultant, Native-American Chevron Savano, and nineteenth-century London teenage stage magician, Riley. I am often drawn to time-travel stories, but equally as often find them ultimately a little irritating. Colfer gets round the time paradoxes by inventing a ‘wormhole’ which turns out to be sentient and which interacts with those who go into it in a way that, frankly, I found confusing and mystifying. It might be that I wasn’t reading closely enough, but I increasingly found myself failing to follow the ‘logic’ of this wormhole, though that certainly didn’t make the stories unreadable.

      


These three novels have some definite strengths. One strength is Colfer’s creation of a superbly hideous villain, Albert Garrick, who seems simultaneously utterly plausible and preternaturally terrifying.  Garrick features prominently in books one and three, but is replaced in book two by another villain, Colonel Box, a psychopath with a military background who uses the wormhole in an attempt to create a world-wide Boxite religious dictatorship in the twenty-first century, providing an opportunity for Colfer to comment on such bullying and stifling tyrannies. Colfer gives the books international appeal by having US and British characters, and there are a number of vividly-drawn secondary characters who help keep the narrative alive. My particular favourite was the leader of the criminal guys, the Rams, who first appears in Book One and becomes a bigger character in Book Two.

               I have to say, however, that although the books were clever, action-packed, with amusing and convincing dialogue, plot twists right, left and centre, likeable heroes, and a magnificent array of appealing minor characters, I became ultimately rather bored by the seemingly non-stop action-sequences. I felt some were stretched out far beyond the point where my mind was wandering, particularly in the third book. In fact, I thought the novels would be substantially improved by being reduced in length by about a quarter. They did have the remarkable magic of Colfer’s imagination and creativity, but I grew bored with what began to feel slightly repetitive conversations and slightly over-described action scenes. I felt they could have been tightened up a bit more. However, presumably readers who are fans of Colfer’s style appreciate the length and complexity of these stories. And it is always nice to have a feisty if slightly implausible heroine.

RATING: The WARP trilogy: The Reluctant Assassin, The Hangman’s Revolution, The Forever Man ***

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way