February 28th 2023 - A high to ride

This evening I shared my writing for the first time as part of the Goldsmiths course I'm attending each week. I was feeling very nervous. I haven't opened myself to criticism in this way since university, and that was a very different environment. I'm not sure what reaction I was hoping for or expecting, but I ended up feeling genuinely overwhelmed by how nice and considerate the responses were. One classmate used the word beautiful. A word I wouldn't think applied to my work but a word I was honoured to hear. There were meaningful discussions around the structure, form and layers of meaning. People were pulling things out of the story I hadn't even considered myself - something I've done so many times with writers I admire, and here was a group of people doing it for something I wrote! This evening has given me such a boost in confidence and such a feeling of relief and reassurance in myself. I'm going to ride this high for as long as I can. The work I'm doing is paying off - I just need to keep going.

February 13th 2023 - The messy bit

There comes a point whenever I'm writing a short story where it feels like I lose control of it.

Somewhere along the line, it morphs into a sticky globular lump that can't be made sense of.

How to push past this phase is something I've yet to figure out. I suspect that it's endless revision and re-writing. Something I've always struggled to keep the momentum with.

I may switch to another project so I can have some relief between revisions on this one. But I will try and push this through some edits. I expect this is the story I will be sharing with my course in a couple of weeks so it would be good to revise as much as I can.

February 11th 2023 - Gary and Tessa

I met up with my writer friend Gary for one of our regular writing workshop-type sessions yesterday. It was good to get into more detailed discussions of the kind of things we've talked about in class about characters, desire, action and conflict.

With regards to what I'm working on - I have my series of vignettes which give a snapshot of this character's life but we talked a lot about whether it's a story or not. For me, one of the things I'm interested in is how we can accurately reflect life on the page. But the difference between my story and one of the inspirations, Kick the Latch, is that Kick the Latch follows an entire life and so has a narrative arc already in place. My story covers just 30 or so years of this character's life and so doesn't have a natural bookend of birth and death - I need something else to bookend the story which would give the individual vignettes (which hold no overarching narrative) their place in the story. So I'm going to try and build that in.

The other bit of advice I had in my head was an out-of-context line from Tessa Hadley from the London Library event I attended. I looked up her interview in Reverse Engineering II and found this quote which I think is a good fit for this story:

"In fiction there's so much space for misinterpretation. Which sounds a negative thing - it is a negative thing, in life. It's frightening, perhaps, that we misread each other so much, even as we manage to rub along together. But that potential for misinterpretation allows something lovely inside a story - an openness, avoiding final judgement. You can hold in your story these two contradictory versions of what happened: unreconciled, not sorted out, there they sit side beside each other on the page, aesthetically bonded together. It's something generous that fiction does that individual subjectivities can't easily do: sustaining, side by side, two different contradictory versions of what happened."

I think this will also help bring the story away from the autobiographical beginnings it had. Another point Gary made was to have a "point of divergence" at which the story takes a path away from my life. I think having this character make a decision that was different to m life, and for that decision to be a misunderstanding that another character could have an alternate view of, would be a good mechanism for this story.