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.

February 6th 2023 - Stacking a new poetry habit

One of my favourite podcasts started up with its second season this month. The Bricklane Bookshop Podcast features a different writer in each episode who reads from one of their short stories and then discusses the story and the wider short story form.

This episode featured Manuel Muñoz and the one bit of advice I took from him was to start reading poetry as early as possible in your writing career. Poetry is something I've always struggled to engage with consistently but have enjoyed when I have. I often fall into the trap of trying to do too much at once. So instead, this time, I'm going to try stacking a poetry habit on top of my showing up at my desk habit.

Habit stacking is essentially where you rely on the success of one habit to create another habit which directly follows it, creating a routine of sorts. So once I'm done at my desk each morning (whether I've written anything or not) I'm now going to kick off the day with a single poem. 1 poem a day still means 365 poems a year and that's 365 more than I'm currently reading...

I'm 3 days into this habit and so far enjoying it. I have plenty of poetry in the house too so there's no need to rush out a buy a load of new books I don't have space or money for.