CUE: Today's Writing Prompt!

Write a story which begins with the words:

Melanie felt a strange urge come upon her...

What I've learned about writing this week...

How many words is not enough?
I'm trying to write an essay; it is a piece of coursework for my Masters course in Creative Writing.  We have to write about one or two specific texts that have influenced our own writing.  We are instructed to analyse these texts (or text) in detail, showing a good level of knowledge and understanding about the effects of language choice and authorial method, and then relating these things back to our own writing.  We also have to show a knowledge and understanding of our wider reading-about-writing and the course material.

We have 2,500 words.

It appears, at the present moment, to be impossible.  Like filling a pint pot with two pints of lager (something only ever attempted after you've filled your pint-sized stomach with several pints of alcoholic beverage), or attempting to stuff a pinata with an entire Woolworth's pick 'n' mix counter, it just can't be done without tears before bedtime. 

I've written around 2000 words so far and barely touched on my second book, or on how either book has affected my own writing.  I've done all the paring down devices you're taught to do - cutting repetitions, contracting and condensing points, ruthlessly stripping out redundant words, trivial ideas or things which look like they're turning into digressions.  I've taken many finely-wrought phrases and rendered them down until they make the same point in fewer, if much less elegant, words.  I've restricted myself to discussing only three specific literary devices/stylistic conventions the novelists have used.

At this moment in time, my essay is like a professor's study in a 1930's film noir after it's been searched by a criminal gang desperate to find the secret documents hidden in the ceiling light.  

Or like an explosives expert who is really bad at his job - there are bits all over the place.

I was following a rough plan, but somewhere along the way I got lost, and now I've written too much on one topic and not enough on several other topics, and I've not included any quotations from my wider reading or the course materiel.  Thank god for Microsoft Office!  At least you can move stuff about.

                                   

So, what have I learned?  That sometimes less is more. That it's often better to write about one book well than about two books superficially. And that the Open University has a weird idea of the appropriate number of words to give students to write the essays they set.

What I'm reading now...

Jennifer Egan A Visit From The Goon Squad

First published in 2010 and covering a period of around 50 years, from the 1980s to the early 2020s, Egan's novel is famous for breaking literary conventions. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, propelling Egan into the higher echelons of the literary world.

                                                                     

  
A Visit From The Goon Squad is not an easy read, though each component is a joy in itself.  Consisting of thirteen chapters, each a self-contained short story (Chapter 4, 'Safari', was originally published as a short story in The New Yorker), it concerns a large group of characters, loosely focused around music producer Bennie Salazar.  The chapters are not arranged chronologically, however, so it is difficult on a first reading to follow the story.

[If you wish to read the chapters chronologically, by the way, read them in the following order: four (1973), three (1979), eleven (1990), ten (1993), nine (1997), six (around 2000), seven (around 2002), five (2005), eight (2006), one (2005), two (2006), twelve (early 2020s), thirteen (Winter 2021-2).]

The novel draws on several other works of fiction, including Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past, T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and classical mythology.  However, Egan often playfully undermines such works as well as using them to support her central exploration of the effects of time.  For example, in one chapter, an uncle searches Naples for his missing niece and sees a picture of Orpheus and Eurydice, failing to recognise that he is himself enacting the story.  Many chapters consider the sterility of modern life, echoing Eliot's conclusions.

The novel's title is explained  in a conversation in chapter seven (“You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right?’).  This is a novel that plays with time, stretching from the known 1980s to the unknown 2020s (the book was first published in 2010), drawing parallels and contrasts between characters and eras, held together by the central trope/motif of the music industry. It juxtaposes different periods in the history of the ensemble cast of characters so that they can resonate in unexpected ways. For example, Sasha, one of the most frequently recurring characters, is first presented in the novel in Chapter One ‘Found Objects’, at which point in her personal timeline she has a good job as a PA to a highly successful record producer, but she is in therapy due to her kleptomania. The following chapter, ‘The Gold Cure’, features Sasha in her role as a highly competent PA, but moves the focus to her boss, Bennie. Straight away, in the first two chapters, Sasha’s vulnerabilities and capabilities are aligned and connected, the chapter where we see the world from her viewpoint revealing her weakness much more than when we see her from the ‘outside’.  Later, in one of the most inventive of the chapters, Sasha's daughter writes the entire chapter in the form of a Powerpoint display, and we see an older Sasha from a new viewpoint.

This is all very imaginative and inventive, but ideas alone don't make a novel readable.  I would argue that Egan's writing style is itself the thing that is most compelling.  The opening chapter, focusing on Sasha and her kleptomania, is fast-paced, darkly funny, poignant, verging on satirical in places, and full of life and energy.  The change in focus and often in style in each chapter is skilful and enjoyable, once you have decided to open your mind to it.  I was reluctant to read the novel at first, but in the end it drew me in and drew me on, right to the final page. And, though the individual components are each worthy in their own ways of accolades, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jennifer-egan

RATING:
A Visit From The Goon Squad    

**** 

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

What I've learned about writing this week...

When is a story not a story?

This is what happened to me a few days ago:

I waited in all morning, from 8-1, for a heating engineer to service my boiler (and, no, that isn't a euphemism).  At 2:00, he hadn't turned up and I needed to go to work.  I also had a bad cough so I didn't really want to phone up the company (Homeserve), so I spent about twenty minutes trying the Live Chat facility on the website before realising that I had to talk to someone directly.  It took ten minutes to get through to the right person and just as he was about to sort things out for me, my phone's battery went dead.  It was the landline phone which I had placed beside me at the computer all morning so I could work without having to get up when the engineer phoned me to tell me he was on his way (yes, I'm lazy).  Eventually, Homeserve agreed to pay us £30 compensation for their failure to show up, and I managed to make another appointment.

That same evening, we discovered that the radiator in our downstairs toilet was leaking, so my partner range Homeserve and they organised an appointment for Friday morning, two days later, when an engineer would come round to investigate. He turned up this time, fiddled with the radiator, gave us some unconvincing story about how radiators degrade much more quickly in toilets than elsewhere (?), and failed to get the faulty radiator on the top floor working. He said we needed a replacement radiator in the toilet and he put in an order for one and told us it would be delivered and installed in the next few days. He also said we could turn the central heating back on.

An hour after he left, we found that a much bigger leak from the same radiator had now ruined our recently fitted carpet. Rusty streaks of water festooned the tasteful cream, and using the toilet was like sitting on a tree trunk in a marsh in your bedroom slippers. Smelled much the same too.  So my partner, now incandescent with fury (he's a mild-mannered bloke and I'm not used to seeing him lose his temper so it was quite a shock), rang Homeserve yet again and demanded they send round an emergency engineer immediately.  

The engineer arrived at ten o'clock that evening.  We both had terrible colds. We also had our five year old great-nephew staying with us.  We had taken him to Macdonalds for his tea (we see our role as being to fill him up with empty calories, buy him stuff he doesn't need but really wants, then take him home), but we hate Macdonalds ourselves so we hadn't eaten yet.  Nephew wouldn't go to bed til he'd seen the engineer. In fact, he kept asking 'What IS an engineer?', which is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. So it was a wearing evening.

Anyway, a few days later they fitted us a new radiator and the carpet dried out and we are, apparently, going to get some sort of compensation.

Now, this IS a story.  It has a beginning, a middle and an end.  It has a problem, a conflict, a resolution. It has a kind of foregrounding subplot (The Boiler Service That Never Was), which is resolved but then the story takes on further complexity (The Tale Of The Incompetent Heating Engineer), and events that complicate the situation further, before it reaches a final conclusion.  

But basically, if we're honest, it isn't really a good story, is it?  It's barely more than an anecdote, the kind of thing your best friend might spend half an hour telling you about over coffee in the garden centre, and you'd listen politely, nodding in pseudo-outrage, because, although you feel you'd welcome euthanasia, she is your best friend, after all.  

It's a story that might well be dramatic and 'an emotional rollercoaster' to you - a tale of betrayal, loss, disappointment, wrath and injustice. But to anyone who didn't experience it, it's just another everyday story of mundane incompetence and domestic bad luck, isn't it?

You can imagine a really clever writer making it into a cracking comic story, if they used a great deal of artistic license, or maybe it could be transformed into a dark post-modern reflection on Johnson's Britain told by the Competent Heating Engineer.  Or a weird child's fantasy about the mysterious 'engineer', a person with magical powers and a boiler suit.  But let's be honest, as it stands, for most of us this isn't going to cut it as a story people might actually want to read.

So, what I've learned this week is that not all stories are good stories, and no readers want to read about other people's plumbing problems (and that isn't a euphemism, either).

                                                    

      

CUE: Today's Writing Prompt!

Write a story about something unusual that happens involving a TV set. 

What I'm reading now...

Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series

I read the first in this series soon after it came out, as the premise intrigued me. I mean, a librarian with magical powers who works in a library that maintains the balance between Chaos and Order in the universe - who wouldn't be intrigued?

                

  
Cogman's novels are set in a universe consisting of numerous parallel worlds which exist on a spectrum from those entirely ruled by the Dragons (who represent Order) to those entirely ruled by the Fae (representing Chaos).  The Invisible Library is the human institution that exists in the middle, the librarians acting as spies, diplomats and book thieves in order to maintain balance on all the different worlds.  Librarians live much longer than normal humans, as they don't age within the library itself; they also learn the use of the Language, a magical form of speech which enables them to control the world around them to a limited extent, though its use exhausts them and causes headaches.

The Dragons are a formidable bunch who can look entirely human, though they are much better looking than the average human and most of the powerful Dragons have affinities with specific elements.  Our heroine, librarian Irene Winter, is given a young Dragon prince, Kai, as her apprentice in the first book in the series, and as the novels progress they eventually become lovers, though not without the disapproval of Kai's high status family.  Dragons in this universe are clever, wily, political, and weirdly they all seem to be Chinese.  The Fae, on the other hand, are creatures of narrative, generally taking on the personalities of fictional archetypes such as 'the innocent princess' or 'the manipulative cardinal'.  One of my favourite characters is Lord Silver, a Fae with the persona of a libertine - louche, libidinous, seductive, often very funny.  Another of my favourite characters is Vale, a Sherlock Holmes-type human detective from a steam-punk world where the Fae exist.

I have enjoyed the novels, which is why I'm now reading Book Six, The Secret Chapter, which promises to be a heist story with a James Bond-type super-villain, so therefore a variation on the previous six stories.  Perhaps Cogman intends it as a little light relief.  Which brings me to my criticism of the novels.  I downloaded Book Five, The Mortal Word, when it first came out, but I was reluctant to start reading it.  I kept putting it off and reading other things instead, and I made a couple of false starts.  I finally read it in the past few weeks and it was pretty good overall, but I realised that what I was finding difficult were the very long stretches of dialogue - the long speeches about political nuances that I can't really follow (not because they are too complex but because I am not prepared to put in the mental effort required for a series of novels I'm reading as light entertainment over my lunch or to help me nod off at night).  Don't get me wrong, Cogman can write action sequences brilliantly and the novels often begin with gripping fast-paced escapes and daredevil feats.  They don't lack verve and dynamism. But they do contain a lot of scenes where characters discuss things at length and, between the bits of speech, there is a lot about Irene's thoughts and reactions, and who she needs to be polite to and what such-and-such truly meant by the words he's just uttered.  Often, these long scenes of jibber-jabber end with a revelation that is intended to be shocking but often I can't really understand what the big deal is.  

I think my lack of understanding is because I haven't fully committed myself to this Dragon-Fae continuum, original and imaginative as it is. I don't really understand why the theft of certain books from certain worlds helps to restore the balance, or how ordinary human beings don't appear to have cottoned on to the nature of the world in which they are living.  I'm not fully invested in the universe Cogman has created.  Which isn't to say that the books don't have their strengths - the villainous ex-librarian, Alberich, who first appears in Book Three, for instance.  Cogman is great at writing action scenes and the characters are mostly well-drawn, some very well-drawn, others more off-the-peg.  When she lets herself be funny, the novels come alive, and it is nice to have a feisty, clever, able female protagonist who takes the lead in every adventure. 

The Invisible Library (book 1)

The Masked City (book 2)

The Burning Page (book 3)

The Lost Plot (book 4)

The Mortal Word (book 5)

The Secret Chapter (book 6)


RATING:
The Invisible Library    The Masked City     The Burning Page    The Lost Plot      

****                             ****             ****             ***

The Mortal Word           The Secret Chapter

***                 Not yet finished but so far ****

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

CUE: Today's Writing Prompt!

Write a story or poem about the wind.