Dissertation Update
Okay so it's been a few weeks since lectures ended. With them went the best part of the course, the fiction workshops. For a week or so I floundered a bit and felt lacking in direction. Then I realised the obvious: The only person who is going to motivate me is me. Charlotte, family and friends can nag and that's awesome... but it only goes so far. Anyway. I made myself this...
I'm sitting at 9k words, which represents three chapters of the novel. By the end of this week I need to have written another 3k. The complete dissertation will be 15k prose and 5k commentary.
I have to admit to liking the schedule. It gives me the structure I need to guilt myself, should I fail to meet my target word counts. I also highly recommend a desktop countdown telling you exactly how many days are left until the deadline!
So how's it going? Quite well I think. I've got the plot outlined (a bullet-point document of many levels) and I'm still really enjoying the story. The next part is going to be really fun to write and I've been looking forward to it for quite a while. The last couple of weeks have seen a few logic kinks ironed out and a shift in the themes of the story away from abstract ideas and more towards something people can relate to. One of my course-mates put me in touch with her nephew (who sits right in the middle of my target age-range) and he gave me some great feedback too.
We've also organised our own workshops to continue where the official ones left off. It's great to have a group of knowledgable and talented people to review your work and bring you down when you need it 
ONWARD!
That One Perfect Sound
I'm always questing. It sounds pretentious? Nerdy? Daft? Well it's true. I'm always questing for that one perfect album or song that reverberates throughout my innards and lances down my back before lodging in my hind brain and demanding replay.
When writing the sounds that come packaged with the world seem insignificant, yet filled with distraction. Even the silence of deep night is deafening in its annoyance. But into this mess flow my favoured sounds; a wall of noise that grants a curious mixture of relaxation and blazing energy. Then I write.
It's not a quest that can ever be completed. My tastes, opinions, feelings and those of people around me are fluid and malleable. My brain won't tolerate stagnation. I guess the best I can hope for is a cycle of new to old, as previous favourites fade in memory and their attraction grows anew. But for now my quest continues.
The Hazards of Research
I have a love/hate relationship with research. It's necessary but it can create a whole mess of issues...
First there's procrastination. You're really into the idea behind your story. You want to know more so you can understand it better. You read and discuss and read and discuss (ad infinitum) all under the guise of better understanding your characters. You know that if you keep it up for long enough you're going to get that fantastic little insight that will make your story unique. But of course you aren't writing. You aren't getting the story finished. An unfinished unique story is always worse than a well written, finished piece without a shred of original thought.
Next there's world building. The world in your mind is so amazing, so fantastic and so awesome... If only you knew enough to anchor it in a reality people can relate to! The problem here lies with balance. As soon as you fall in love with your world more than you do your characters the balance is off. I'm sure there are people who love to read well crafted descriptions of interesting worlds where nothing really happens, but for the rest of us you need to reign it in. Your characters live in the world not the other way around. The other problem with over-building your world is one of credibility. The more you write, the more people have to pick holes in. You want to write just enough to make your world believable and enjoyable. Nothing more!
Then there's lack of focus. The things you research have to relate to your characters and their immediate world. It's so easy to imagine how your idea could have wider reaching implications and let your mind wander so far that your passion is for the idea rather than the story. Worse yet, you could find that the characters you've just written about for ten thousand words aren't nearly as interesting as those that just popped into your head. The chances are if you've written that much then it's worth forcing yourself to stick with an idea and see where it takes you.
You can scare yourself too. When dealing with big ideas it's easy for a writer to come to the conclusion that it's too big for their story. The idea that there are too many complications, implications and variables to keep track of just isn't true. Even the biggest idea can be boiled down to the following question: How does it affect my character? Your readers aren't there for an essay on the next big idea. They want to be engaged by interesting characters that experience interesting things. You're more than capable of doing that so don't be afraid.
This is far from exhaustive but those are just a few of the issues I've faced. They can be overcome with confidence, determination and blind ambition.
Career Writing? LOL
I'd like to start off by saying that I already have a career. I'm happy with that career. I don't expect to ever make significant amounts of money from my writing. This isn't pessimism based on a lack of confidence in my own work. Rather it's based on observations and teachings. If there's one thing that my MA course has hammered into me over the last two years it's that there is very little chance that the time I spend writing will (on a £/hour basis) rise above (or even come close to) minimum wage.
But like I said at the start, I'm comfortable with that. I'm not so sure that can be said for many other people on the course.
The following article pretty much confirms my feelings and emphasises the importance of taking away transferable skills...
Is Creative Writing a Pyramid Scheme
Here's a Guardian article by Ian Jack making the point with a little more fervour...
The Age of the Gifted Amateur Has Returned
Someone else agreeing with him...
An article responding to Ian Jack and attempting to shift the blame away from creative writing courses and back onto publishers...
Creative Writing Courses are Protecting Our Literary Future
Regardless of how this reponse shifts the blame, the fact remains that a successful and financially dependable career in writing is far from a choice. Other issues with the refutation are described in the following article.
Depressing? For a lot of people probably. For me not so much. I love the idea of doing things myself, publishing online, offering e-books and printing on demand and just getting my stuff read.
But then you have to remember what a publisher really is: A marketing machine. Don't think of a publisher as someone who turns your words into a book. Think of them as an entity with the power to force people to read your book. Three for two in Waterstones, window displays, train station billboards etc. etc. If no one (other than friends and family) reads your work then is there a point to the writing in the first place?
The internet is a game changer but the issues of publicity alone are a problem and that's before you take into account people's dislike of reading more than 3k words on screen, the allure of the book and the horrifying lack of quality control in self-published work. If you think the average blockbuster novel is poorly written, imagine what the world will be like when everyone has equal ability to have their work read...
Anyway... Lots to think about... Some believe the solution is to diversify their work as it relates to literature. But that brings us back to the first article.
I maintain that writing is a fun hobby and not a career choice.
The Significance of Workshopping
Okay I'm going to make a sweeping statement. When you are doing a Writing MA the single most important thing you will do is take part in workshops. Forget the lectures where you write a few tricks of the trade (in a notebook that you rarely open), forget the critical essays (in which you do your level best to stay on the polite side of passive aggressive while ticking off points on the marking criteria) and forget the day schools where a few successful exercises make you feel extra-special. Workshops are where you will actually learn.
This blog left off shortly after my first experience of workshopping. The result was a sad Sam! You see I'd submitted something I'd worked hard on. I thought it was good. It wasn't. This is the first thing workshops will teach you: You aren't even close to being as good as you think you are.
The next time I submitted it was with something fresh, vicious and cold. The feedback was far better. It wasn't perfect by any stretch but it was a vast improvement. The prose was stronger, it was more focused and it had pace. I was jubilant. I went away feeling as if I could carry on that story and make it my magnum opus. Arrogance. I submitted the next section to a jury of my peers and it was already losing its way. My focus was slipping.
So I switched tack. My third workshop submission was a mostly-autobiographical childhood piece. The narrative voice was less distinct but the prose remained strong. I thought that, for my first venture into real world fiction, a reportage from my own past might allow me greater emotional investment than something I made up. It worked to a degree but it was also a backward step. The narrative was broken. The emotional significance I saw in the work wasn't there for anyone else. My own mind was taking shortcuts.
Again I was left despondent and this is the second thing workshopping will teach you: Don't get clever. You still aren't as good as you think you are.
The fourth thing I submitted was a piece I'd been dying to write. All through my previous submission this idea had been rattling around at the back of my head. My brain was putting it together and every now and again it'd poke me in the back of the eye and question why I hadn't started writing it yet. Once I'd cleared the backlog of commitments and put pen to paper it just flowed. Of course the first draft was pretty horrible but by the time I sent it off I was pretty damned proud of it. The feedback was good too. Best thing I'd written. Want to read more. Big improvement.
I went home happy and confident I could do that well in the future.
You might wonder why I'm bothering to tell you all this instead of explaining how workshopping actually helps. The answer is I don't know. It's a subconscious thing born of being torn down, rebuilt and doing the same to your fellow students when it's their turn. Every time you take your red pen to another writer's piece of work a little of your own harshness bounces back and sticks in your gullet ready guide you in the future. It just works and the experience is nothing short of astounding.
So what's the final lesson workshopping will teach you? I'm not really sure since I've got there yet. I expect to discover it's an iterative process. No one's writing is consistently good and even the best writing can be judged subjectively. I've got one more workshop left and I expect that for me the final lesson will be: You still aren't as good as you can be. Keep working your arse off.
Gender Politics
Dangerous ground this. I never feel comfortable talking about writing female characters, beyond saying that I don't feel confident in my ability to do so. In the same vein I don't feel comfortable talking about other women writing men because I tend to resort to stereotypes and in an ideal world any character could behave as they wish without the constraints of social opinion.
Let's break it down into simple and somewhat offensive terms.
Man writing woman as tomboy (yet still hot) = empowering.
Woman writing man as feminine (looks irrelevant) = not attractive.
So are the details of male and female in the character's attitude? The way they react to things? Is it overt or is it in the little details?
I'm thinking damn it!
Update
So I went on holiday. It's the first proper holiday I've had in a long time. That's to say it's the first holiday where the soul purpose was be a tourist, relax and take photos of things my camera isn't nearly good enough to take photos of. Anyway the whole thing was just great but I also figured out a way around multi-tome epics. The answer is not to pay attention to what volume you just picked up. I thoroughly enjoyed book four of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series and by the end was pretty sure I didn't need to read the previous three. Score!
Then I came back and started writing again. I immediately ran into tense issues. The story is in first person present and there are flashbacks to when the main character is a child. So do I re-write in third person past, write the flashbacks in first person past or try and write the flashbacks in the voice of a child. I'm not sure if the two character voices would be too jarring...
Anyway... At least I'm writing again .
Less than two weeks till class starts up again. Trepidation!
Rat’s Tail
That's the working title of the project I've set myself. I've got a world history. I've got a piece in the anthology that sets up a shit ton of questions. I've got another piece of back story. I've got the beginnings of an interview with a character who probably won't even be in the story much.
I don't have much in the way of characters. I don't have an overarching plot. I've only got a vague family tree.
But I do have priorities!
Update!
It's been nearly two months since I last updated. The lack of classes over the summer combined with a general winding down has resulted in less writing and more reading and even more thinking about writing. In short I've been relaxing and making notes. I keep promising that I'm going to write more and be more disciplined but it's just words... I mean it's empty promises to myself. The mood to write comes and goes. I've have been writing, but I'd be lieing if I said I was writing every day.
So... Current Projects... I've got two large projects in mind at the moment. I've found that a lot of the short pieces and exerts that appeared in my writing practice lately can be slotted into one of the two worlds. What they're lacking at the moment are overall plots but ideas continue to emerge and they're taking me in some interesting directions. I don't want to talk too much about them yet as they're likely to change as they mature but I'm finding that one of the most interesting things is trying to work out how the world in which I set one story can evolve from England as it stands now. I've been talking to knowledgable friends and I'm hoping to have a recent history timeline done by the end of this weekend.
It's only two months till I'm due to start classes again and I'm damned well going to have something significant written by then!
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First Draft Complete
I'm officially declaring the first draft of my dissertation prose complete. Five fairly long chapters and 15433 (according to Scrivener) words later and I'm relaxing a little. Tomorrow I can start editing.
The plan is...
That should about cover it.
Onward!