March 5th 2023 - Upheaval and Endings

My writing routine had a bit of a sledgehammer taken to it over recent weeks as I've been moving house. Everything suffered a little except maybe my day-to-day journal. I haven't updated that short fiction site for a while now so I'm keen to bring some consistency back to that. I am now onto an 11-day streak with "showing up at my desk" each morning so the regular fiction writing is also starting to happen again.

In other news, my Goldsmiths course came to an end yesterday. After 10 weeks, those of us who had made it through to the end, read out what we'd been working on. There was an impressive variety of writing. 1st person plural stories of asylum seekers coming to Britain, insights into the work of Russian translators, and a couple having breakfast as the wife begins chemotherapy.

I shared my story Objects of Silence that I'd been working on throughout the course. A story that began from a place of memoir/autobiography but branched out to become a story of the changing relationship and communication difficulties between Will and his father. I drew a lot of it from my own life but made great efforts to keep it fictional. The relationship I show is not the relationship I have with my own dad. But I'm glad that I did draw from my own life, more so than I have before. It illustrated to me the breadth of areas that must be drawn from, in order for a character to feel real. I think that's definitely a lesson I can take forward to other projects. I had some great responses and more great feedback.

It would be great to keep in contact with some people from the course. There was definitely a shared interest there I think. Though there is always an awkwardness to these things I feel, exaggerated by only ever meeting one another virtually. We'll see what happens. It's been a great 10 weeks and I've come to the end feeling as though I've learnt a lot, met some great people and gained a good deal of confidence.

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.