Writing inventory

Yesterday I received a preliminary notification of my grade from the OU writing course, subject to possible moderation later. I passed! That and the end of the Great Greek Slog prompted me to check out all the various bytes lurking in different directories on my desktop and laptop. It turns out I have one complete novel first draft, one two-thirds completed, and another with 8000 words written. These are supposed to form a trilogy and the least complete one is chronologically first. I also have three other items of several thousand words each, none of which have a complete outline, nor have they declared to me whether they are going to be short stories or novels - like a lot of my writing, they started life as single ideas or even images and I have expanded them a bit but not given them much structure as yet.

My short story for the OU has the potential to be a novel when it grows up, too, according to the tutor. There are also a ton of little ideas from my courses, and a few from conversations with my writer guest last week. I am not sure which I shall work on next - but I think it might be an idea to pick ONE and structure it a bit, towards the goal of actually finishing something for once.

Having said that, I was writing another piece for the first novel of the trilogy in a cafe today. I haven't touched that story in months, but this place was somewhere my main character would go so I started describing it and took it from there. I went to church today without my Greek New Testament (I am taking a few days off from that) and had an afternoon of cafe-writing and gallery-hopping instead of going to the library with a ton of textbooks, which had been my usual Wednesday afternoon practice for a couple of months.

Backed up with paperwork (the writing course finishes)

Late last night I submitted my second and final assignment for the OU course. This was a 1500-word story and an accompanying explanation - we were supposed to explain why we chose the narration method we did, ditto the tenses used, the place where we began, etc. For the story we had a list of words to pick from as inspiration, ranging from the more abstract to concrete stuff like "hair" or "prison". I used "abandonment" and "music" for my jumping-off points, writing a story about a young woman who was abandoned as a baby and then adopted into a family which was surprised by her musical talent. 

I found writing the explanatory text somewhat clunky. I knew exactly how I wanted to write my piece, so although I dutifully tried out a few alternatives in the way of tense and narration, this exercise pointed up how inferior they were. 

I was reminded of an art talk I attended a couple of months ago. The speaker was talking of her own very intuitive way of working, and one of the many fine arts undergraduates in the audience bemoaned the fact that her college insisted on tons of supporting documentation for any piece. It was not enough to plan and execute a painting/sculpture/installation, nor just to log what you did and keep early sketches, you also had to have a cogent game plan for how you had planned your work and what you hoped to achieve, and had to write this up formally. 

OK, to some extent, this is going to stop someone sitting in front of a tableau of roses/ elephant dung and just doing the same-old same-old term after term, but on the other hand, too much bureaucracy and paperwork seems to be deadening pretty much every area of life. The visual arts are likely to be full of people who communicate better with imagery than words, all of whom are required to submit long written reports. I think Edward Hopper had something to say about this, "If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint." 

If we are hearing complaints from so many areas of life about paperwork - as well as the ever-present statements of teachers, I have heard priests complain about management jargon working its way into the church, and I have experienced wildly excessive performance review procedures at a lot of large companies - probably something is up. Some areas cannot be measured purely on obviously quantifiable criteria, and when we try to use something measurable as a shorthand people will soon start to game the system. (NHS waiting times, anyone?) Then we react by changing the measure, probably by adding new stuff and increasing the admin burden, rather than replacement. Finally we wonder why our artists, scientists, technologists and engineers don't seem as "creative" as they used to be, and our public sector projects have massive overspends and overruns in spite of all the measurements taken. 

"Creative" vs "innovative" is a whole other can of worms - people attempting to excuse bad behaviour by explaining the person is "creative", for one thing. I am wondering, though, if there is really a type of person who simply cannot fit into corporate bureaucracies, and if such people aren't vital (in both senses). I read an interesting book last summer on Managing Creative People set in the ad industry, but with some useful things to say for other areas.

new draft and the fragility of the writing impulse

OK, that maybe came out a bit more pretentious than I meant... today I managed to redraft my final assignment for the OU, due in next week. That was my first bit of writing in a couple of weeks. Writing seems to happen in blocks for me: a fertile time, then a period where I don't consciously think of myself as "blocked" but do other things. In some of the fertile times I can write thousands of words every day for weeks on end, even if I have other things like A Job to do. Then it can stop. And stay stopped.

Painting, on the other hand, is very much a struggle against almost always feeling blocked and unworthy and rubbish and too tired and ... yet at the moment I am successfully making myself draw every week or so, which sounds like nothing but is a big improvement on much of the time I was working for Big Corporation Plc.

This last period of not-writing coincided with the assignments not being that inspiring to me, and with a surge of revision for Greek.

writing hiatus

I haven't managed to engage much with the final block of the OU course. Several reasons:

• lots of the exercises seem to be about writing and re-writing, and re-writing, the beginning of the piece required for the final assignment - I have this aversion to hacking away at it for weeks on end, wanting to keep it fresh.
• I'm busy with other stuff, most notably revising for the Greek exam - and some of the newer tenses and participles (Greek has a LOT of these!) are beginning to look familiar
• it's a bit quiet on the online forum - there's an obvious solution to that involving ME posting more stuff: pieces of my own, responding to feedback requests, etc.

I am starting to notice more about novel construction when I am reading, though. Then again, maybe that is making me feel less confident about ever being as good as the average novelist.
Hmm..

Reading for comprehension

-- a ubiquitous insult on the web if someone thinks their crystal clear point is being misinterpreted by an opponent, which reminds me that I tend to read ultra-fast for "story" rather than to slow down and savour prose, or figure out how a writer is achieving their effects, including making me want to find out what happens. These days, I am reading a lot less fiction, and writing a lot more. I think what I need to do next is to spend more time figuring out these effects and constructions so that I can learn from them.

I took about ten days off writing - completely: OU activities and journals and everything prose-related - after handing in the first assignment. I've just re-started, and raced through a couple of weeks' worth of activities in a few days. The course so far: a little disappointing in its interactive component, in that very few of the people on the course list seem to participate at all in the online discussions (which are a bulletin board format, so can be accessed at any time).

I've learned a fair bit already and some of the suggestions trigger ideas immediately, others not so. I am lucky in that the second assignment is one piece of continuous prose, which suits those of us whose shopping lists tend to be longer than the OU standard word limit for single questions. The assignment is essentially to respond to a list of words - concrete items like "a comb" and abstract nouns like "abandonment". I read through the list, thought, "Hmm," went to bed, and couldn't sleep. About 3am I gave up and started writing about the ideas I had.

Abandonment, unlike the previous "child on a city street" assignment, gives me a lot to work with. I am choosing to write in the persona of a woman abandoned as a baby in the classical dramatic circumstances, on the steps of a city centre church. Although her subsequent adoption has gone well, she wonders about all the things most children take for granted: roots, looking like your parents, where her musical talent has come from.

Talking of churches, I was out photographing and drawing one midweek, for its website. The drawings were quite light pencil, and won't work online - they were for ideas and possible use elsewhere. The photos were designed to give me a set of background and incidental images to work with.



I am also learning Greek at the moment, and have an exam in a few weeks. If past history is anything to go by, I shall probably get increasingly nervous about it.

This is not with the OU, it's a real life evening class, and a very good one. We have been studying for nearly two terms. I did some Latin at school, and I've learned Spanish as an adult, so I am not completely new to the idea of complicated grammar. I also keep hearing that Greek is supposedly easier than Latin (not sure why?) and also that this form of Greek, Koine or New Testament Greek, is the easiest there is. There still seems to be rather a lot of it to take in.

On the plus side, although there are five or six thousand different words in the New Testament, ninety percent of the actual occurrences are of a much smaller core of six hundred words, so a lot of modern textbooks concentrate on making sure you are familiar with those.

Doing this has already proved illuminating. Greek, for example, has several different ways of giving an order or suggestion, all of which tend to get flattened into one form of imperative in English, as it can be hard to get across all the nuances in translation.

First deadline

I have handed in my first OU assignment. I have to say I absolutely hated the first question - which involved writing in the voice of a child. I don't have children, or nieces or nephews in this country, or friends with small children. I've never taught children or worked with them. I grew up as the only child in a house in the middle of nowhere, miles away from the nearest other child, and I didn't exactly get to be a child much myself. All in all, writing as a child is not exactly the most obvious assignment for me.

When I was a child, I read voraciously (still do). That was one of the things that got me through being on my own, but it also meant I lived through books rather than real experience some of the time.

On the weekend writing course, a lot of people said they had 'always' written. Looking back on it, I guess that is true of me too, but I hadn't really thought about it that way. I wrote stories as a kid, and started a journal when I was about fifteen. That had to be kept hidden from family, and later partners, and for most of my twenties and thirties that was all I wrote. I would occasionally get an idea for a short story, and write it out longhand on file paper over a few days, then that would be it for a couple of years. It took several years of doing morning pages, on and off, before I started finding myself writing fiction.

First assignment

I am battling with my first eTMA for the OU course (electronic Tutor Marked Assignment in OU-speak). Yesterday I struggled valiantly with it by reading two novels completely unrelated to my chosen subject matter in one day instead of getting on with any writing as such. Today I opened up the files to find much what I expected - I have three five-hundred word pieces to write, and I already had a draft of the first one and nothing but ideas for the other two. I now have a painfully short draft for the second and too much for the third, but at least there is something there which I can build on.

Recently, writing has been coming quite naturally, but my only ideas have been for pieces of my own - patching further incidents into a novella-length thing I started a couple of months ago, mainly. Once again, I have a "compulsory assignment = block" problem. This didn't happen when I was away for the weekend, there, something would come up within a minute or two at most when the tutor announced the next question, even though there were ten or a dozen of these per day. I think the seriousness level is higher for me - only 3 lots of 500 words to showcase whatever skills I have.

Writing in libraries; writing away from home

Yesterday afternoon I took my laptop, notebooks and course notes and wrote in a library in the city for a few hours. I found the lack of internet distractions and the different location very conducive to work, and also made a few appearance notes and character sketches of some of the other visitors as part of one of my activities. Finally I am getting some ideas and images for the assignments in this course. I started on the second block yesterday and found it relied mostly on extended extracts from a very helpful and witty writing book. I think this, as well as the new setting, really freed up my imagination.

Tomorrow I leave for a weekend writing course in the country. It’s in a big house with extensive grounds, both beautiful and neglected and secret-garden-ish in places, on the outskirts of a small city. I know this because I have been there several times before for pottery, and this is my first trip for any other type of course there. I am, obviously, really looking forward to it, and it will be interesting to see how it contrasts with the OU course. Given that it is IRL not online I will have to meet actual other writers and probably show people my writing fresh on the page, for the first time ever. That could be nerve-wracking. From the course flyer, it looks as though it may be pitched more towards how to go about selling and publishing your work than the OU course, so I’m eager to find out how that plays out when I get there.

Keeping going

I'm still trying to find the right mix of spontaneity and planning. Several of the exercises on this course suggest sitting down at the computer (or notebook etc.) and just writing in one form or other. Others suggest looking at a newspaper or turning on the radio and then picking from the stories you find there, writing one of them from the point of view of one of the people involved or using them as a jumping-off point.

I am also considering how to adapt Morning Pages to serve my new routine. Ever since I heard about these in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way I have been using them (on an off) for regular journalling. (There's a brief definition on Cameron's site) Along the way they helped me to download all the emotions from some very stressful projects, and to find out what I really thought about making art and why I got blocked doing that so often. I have never really had fictional inspirations when using them, and I'd like to change that. The last few days I have taken time to describe a few things I have seen on my walks, or images from the train window, so that I have some material which could turn from description to mood to narrative, maybe (fingers crossed).

Even if that doesn't happen, the morning pages are still good. I feel more serene when I am in the habit of doing them, and since my normal default mode is not serene at all, in fact bears comparison with headless chickens, that is no bad thing.

With a lot of small sessions of writing, I am hoping I shall patch together enough material to complete my assignments on time.

If I have to, I won't

I've realised that the moment I have a writing assignment, rather than just an idea or two, or an inviting blank page in front of me, (yes, some of them actually are inviting) my flow of ideas dries up.

I think it's the syndrome that if something is optional, I can use it as yet another form of goofing off, so I get ideas about a novel set in a post-apocalyptic future when I am supposed to be designing a database. Tell me my job is to write a novel about a post- etc., though, and I start creating databases right left and centre, not a charred landscape in sight.

The way out is probably to allow myself lots of time to mull over ideas, and keep a notebook with me almost all the time to capture them. I am not going to be able to procrastinate and then cram for a creative writing course - especially not when I have ample opportunity to dither over a Greek course.

And some of the assignments! Describe something happening in a city street from the point of view of a child. Great, except (i) I grew up in the country, so none of my own memories are of cities, (ii) I was an only child and have no children myself, nor nieces nor nephews etc. in this country, so don't interact with children very often, (iii) I didn't really get to be a child myself, being more of a four-foot high carer for incapable adults than a kid. Apart from that, then, no problem.

OU "Start Writing Fiction"

The OU course is about to start officially, but the website and forums are already live. I've started looking through the course materials. The main thread of the course consists of five blocks on the website with small activities interspersed throughout. There is also a print anthology and an audio CD of author interviews, where the compilers have divided the content up into sets of responses to single questions, e.g. you get to hear how three or four authors began writing, or how they divide up their working day. The information on getting started with writing at the beginning of the course is all common sense once you've heard it but, not having had any instruction before, it's still useful to me to get a simple introduction.

I had a few days about a week ago where I wrote every day, mostly little bits and pieces in response to the OU questions. This week has been very unproductive, partly due to being busy with other things and partly due to a piece of bad financial news which had a huge impact on my creativity, peace of mind, ability to sleep etc. etc. I am now back in a more rational mode, mostly, trusting I shall get out of this one, that I still have all the skills I had before The Big News hit, and so on. I tend to suffer from a feeling that I am endlessly chasing my tail: trying to get things done in computing, art and writing as well as being very active in my faith, working to get much fitter as it has positive ramifications in all aspects of my precarious health, and fighting procrastination and this deep-seated loathing I have of any and all paperwork and administration.