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.

February 2nd 2023 - First of many

I'm back home from an event organised by Scratch Books at the London Library. It was an event discussing short stories. In particular, short stories that appear in Scratch's second book Reverse Engineering II. Which is an anthology of stories that sit alongside interviews with the writers, deconstructing how the story came to be.It's a great little book. And there are 2 of them. So far.

At the event were Tessa Hadley, Wendy Erskine and Ben Okri in conversation with Alison MacLeod. Three very different writers. They all shared brilliant excerpts from their work and discussed the craft.

I had a fab night. I was apprehensive about going. I'm socially nervous at the best of times, especially in loud rooms where I need to make myself heard. Soft-spoken fellow that I am. But I met someone outside the door who I had a good chat with throughout the evening. Then I met some attendees of the Goldsmiths course I'm in which was great. I met the creator of Scratch Books who I'd been in contact with only via email before. I even had a brief chat with Wendy before I left. Pretty good I think. Even if I now need some time to recharge my social batteries - I think I did well.

I hope I can make these kinds of events a regular thing. I'm reminded of Austin Kleon's advice in his book 'Show Your Work'. Creativity rarely happens in isolation. The myth of the lone genius is dangerous. Writers, even though we do the majority of our work alone, I do believe need a network. A group of people who will share the same passions, debate their ideas, or just be the one you can get drunk with on occasion. These events I think present a great opportunity to find those people to build your creative network. Though I will continue until my dying day to hate the term... "networking".