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.

February 9th 2023 - People vs characters

We had a good discussion in our Goldsmiths workshop this week regarding character.

It was said that one of the things all characters need is desire. They need to want something. As Vonnegut said, even if it's only a glass of water, they need to want something.

I explained how I'd always struggled with this idea. Having a preference for realist fiction, I can't always see how there is a clearly defined 'want' in my life that drives what I do.

A great point was made that there is a big difference between people and characters. Characters serve specific functions within the story. They are there for the story.

And also that 'want' doesn't have to be a massive over-arching thing in the narrative. In Claire Keegan's story Antarctica, the protagonist wants to have an affair, but then throughout the story, she wants to go to a bar, wants to follow the man she meets, and wants to take a bath - her wants continually prompt action and subsequent story.

My own writing so often doesn't contain enough wants and therefore not enough action. I think I need to drastically re-think my understanding of desire in writing because without it I'm never going to accomplish stories that have any conflict or drama.

February 7th 2023 - Workshop update and review struggles

I'm working on a short piece for my Goldsmiths course. It was prompted by a combination of a few things. We had a discussion about objects as a starting point for fiction. My first thought was Jon McGregor's book, So Many Ways To Begin where each chapter is titled with a different object such as 'Tobacco tin, cigarettes, Christmas card, 1914'. We'd also done a brief exercise in the class called 'I remember', where we simply started new sentences with 'I remember' and kept writing freely all of the things that came to mind. I've just finished reading Kathryn Scanlan's novella, Kick the Latch, which I adored but am struggling to review because it's so good and there's so much to say. Stylistically I've also taken some inspiration from that. I'm also leaning more into auto-fiction so a lot of what I'm putting down is coming straight from my life.

So the piece is a series of short vignettes (similar to Kick the Latch) prompted by memories (like the I remember exercise) titled with an object (similar to So Many Ways To Begin) that will hopefully culminate in a picture of a lifetime. The only difficulty is, Kick the Latch covered an entire life whereas I'm only 28 so instead of depicting a whole life I feel like it should depict some other common thing that threads through it. I think there's maybe something in there about relationships between fathers and sons, definitely some things around sexuality. We'll see what we end up with.

Otherwise the course is going well and I hope to get this review done by the end of the week ready to publish next weekend.