Some serious questions

Some disagreements have arisen as Gert struggles to extricate herself from the tangled web she has created with what has turned out to be a kind of murder mystery. We have had to consider:
does Pourgues want a sex-change operation?
is Gandharva a fraud?
why did Harry lend Alex the black Golf?
would you take a heavily-laden backpack on a romantic stroll in the moonlight?
is the headless body in the Walwa state forest just a red herring?
why, oh why, is Alex so mean?
and, crucially,
can you keep on loving someone who has called you a fat fool?
As we approach the finishing-line we have solved some, but not all, of these dilemmas.
We power on to a conclusion that has at least become vaguely clear with the motto, 'We can fix that up later' .

Gert flounders about

Nearly three weeks in and we are still at sea. The problem is the task we set ourselves of writing more naturalistically than usual. In previous books where everything is slightly (or a lot) larger than life we can indulge our taste for caricature and the bizarre knowing that our readers understand that's what they're going to get, and they'll happily go along with the unlikely logic of the book's world. But this time our setting is the unadorned everyday and our characters, though we're fond of some of them, not particularly memorable. We are about to murder our nasty woman but we're still not sure who did it - many have motives. We're beginning to have great respect for those sturdy writers who construct plots and work to them, rather than just seeing what comes along. Ah well, we're keeping up our 1000-wd-a-day-each regime, the story is moving, here, there and everywhere - and in the end, who knows?

Gert battles on

Two weeks down the track, 28,000 words written, but do we know where we're going? Not really. The saying 'you write to find out what you want to write' never applied more accurately to two writers. Where did we start? We thought we'd try a central character that was never physically described, who had a destructive presence, but not in any specific way, a self made Guru who with a close group of followers who struggle with his gnomic utterances, and a nice put-upon woman who is persuaded she has run over the destructive one. The nice woman is Freddie Todd. One of us found her uninteresting to the point of being annoying, and thought she had too much of a bland influence on the narrative. And where was the narrative? This was the first week. Now somehow we have a policeman with a feisty young daughter who teaches him how to 'do' the computer, and two gay men who have a loving relationship but financial worries made worse by a plague of mice.  Cats feature in the story also. Two men have bonded over weight problems, the destructive woman is spreading rumours and causing trouble in the town. Freddie Todd has attacked the destructive woman and turned into a complete virago. Some time in the coming week we plan to murder the destructive woman, have police come up from Sydney, and who knows what else.
And one of us has discovered an unrealized talent for writing slash fiction. e.g
She ran the knife oh so delicately down from the sweet dip in his throat, along the fluted sternum, plunged it just a little deeper into the yielding skin of his abdomen so that a fine trail of blood sprang up. She thought of the intricate intestines so close below the surface, of plunging the knife suddenly in, in and down, and dipping her hands… 

Aha, that got you in didn't it? 

Gert saddles up again

The time has come for Gert to take up her pen again. What will it be this time? Every time we start again we try to do something we haven't done before. Our first book Crane Mansions - a novel about the redeeming power of cake was a sweetly Gothic tale of redemption set in a school run by a man obsessed with pigeon-lore. Then followed Writing is Easy, the story of an epic battle of egos between two self-obsessed writers running a workshop at a luxurious country retreat. For something completely different, The Art of the Possible dealt with the wonder youth drug Optiviva.  Prime Minister Flattley didn't intend to let the truth about its real effects to get in the way of his financial dealing or his re-election, but he reckoned without Dr Frank Owlbrother and his mythical steed Hrafni. Next we wrote The Lies and Life of Bella Hatherley, the story of a little girl who isn't sure if she's a liar or just has a very good imagination.  A YA book was next, seeing we'd never tried one. In Dark Pools of Selena 14-year-old Ali leads a privileged life in the rigidly-structured society of Hadur but she can’t rein in her effervescent, questioning spirit.   Falling in love with the glamorous, charismatic cameraman Ash, she is drawn into underground resistance forces working to document the injustice and cruelty of Hadur. Not so funny, this one, a bit po-faced really. 

Now we're out to do something a bit against type, not so broad and rumbustious. Something slyly funny but with a touch of the melancholy of a Muriel Spark. We've discussed the general drift of it, at least where it starts, but as usual we really have no idea how it will unfold.  Monday June 18th is the starting day.  In thirty days we'll have a 60,000 word draft, good, bad or just plain plodding, but we will have that draft.

Orange Prize 2012

The Orange Prize for 2012, and the last of its kind has been announced. The winner Madeline Miller the fourth American to win over the last four years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/30/orange-prize-2012-madeline-miller

Comments in the Guardian cover predictable topics:

the folly of a prize just for writing by women
the bad writing of this particular winner
the moving and wonderful nature of this story
why should women have special treatment
where is the next women's prize coming from?
and so on

Short stories

Short stories


A friend has sent a copy of John Steinbeck's letter to one of his creative writing teachers, in which he says

Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in your class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyed and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb from you the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories.You canceled this illusion very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, you said, was to write a good short story. 
Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, you told us, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.The basic rule you gave us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from writer to reader and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, you said, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and technique at all—so long as it was effective.
 As a subhead to this rule, you maintained that it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of a story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three or six or ten thousand words.






We love that bit about "no rules". We're tired of reading well-constructed stories that follow the rules (someone has to want something very badly, etc). We're for a bit of madness in a short story.
Some we love:

A bullet in the brain   Tobias Wolff
Destroyed  Hilary Mantel

John Lanchester "Capital"

What a strangely likeable book this is.  Not really a novel - you’d have to think that if Lanchester didn’t already have a name his publishers might have said, “Nice ideas, but it doesn’t really hang together”.  And it’s formulaic:  a sweep through the lives of people living or working in Pepys Road, one of those London streets once home to poor immigrants and now sought after by the nouveau-riche, right on the edge of the great financial crash. The characters play out the formula: Roger, the markets man and his wife Arabella, close to caricatures; Mark, Roger’s narcissistic deputy who believes he can outplay the markets; Smitty, a kind of Banksy figure who has made pots of money from his challenging and illegal urban installations; Parker, Smitty’s wannabe assistant, with all the aspiration but none of the talent; Quentina, the rejected asylum seeker from Zimbabwe working illegally as a traffic warden; Freddie, the phenomenally gifted Senegalese footballer breaking into the bigtime; Zbigniew and Matya, Polish and Hungarian seekers after a better life in unfriendly London;  the  Kamal family who run the corner shop and have an uneasy relationship with militant Islam; and Petunia, the elderly widow who has lived all her uneventful life in Pepys Road. Interesting things happen to all these people, and there is a plot device that should tie them together and drive the story but just doesn’t.  Someone is harassing the occupants of Pepys Road, starting with postcards saying “We want what you have”, progressing to silent videotapes moving up and down the road and zooming in randomly on their properties and then an abusive website and dead birds posted through letterboxes. Unfortunately, a lot of the time you just forget about all that because you’re more interested in what’s happening to the characters in their individual lives.  It’s a pity that Lanchester tried to do too much, because he is a wonderful writer (The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips).  He deals with dark themes but swerves away in the end from the full consequences.  Quentina, for instance, will be deported to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, “but Quentina had a secret weapon.  She knew things would not be like this forever.”  Things go horribly wrong for Freddie, but there is still a happy ending for him. But with all that, it’s a book that makes you like the writer. It makes you feel we’re all in this together.