28 December 2013

Revisiting old stories can be very strange. I’m reworking a couple of old stories for upcoming competitions, and they seem to be fitting very well. The startling thing is that I’m only now really discovering what the stories are about. Not what happens in them, not the plot – that hasn’t changed, not really – but what the actual theme is, what the story means, potentially, to anyone who reads them. And these stories are both about a year old.

In the case of one of them, it’s been a very pleasing revelation, because I was always aware that I didn’t actually know what the story was about. I mean, it was a good story, it pottered along from beginning to end, it got the job done. And it got good feedback; people seemed to like it. But me (and, crucially, my inner editor)? I wasn’t quite satisfied. Obviously, I was being a bit more harsh on it than many of my readers were, but I tended to be left with a sense of ‘yes, very nice, but so what? What’s changed?’

Actually, lots of things had changed in what was a relatively short story (under 2,000 words), but I wasn’t convinced that my characters had learned all that much, that they themselves had been altered by events. And I wasn’t quite sure how to solve it. In the end (or at least, the original end), I decided to use my lack of certainty as a writer as a plot point: the characters themselves voiced a lack of certainty about how things were going to turn out. Now, if that sounds to you like something of a cop-out, I’d be the first to agree with you. But it seemed that most of my audience were perfectly happy by my cheat, finding it pleasingly ambiguous. Of course, sometimes the writer should shut up and quit while they’re ahead, but I was never quite satisfied. Then this competition turned up which appeared to be tailor made (with a couple of alterations) for this story, and I knew that I needed to make the ending neater. I just didn’t quite know how.

I’ve argued before (here, probably) that whenever I’ve had a problem that I couldn’t solve in my writing (or directing, or indeed in most any type of story telling), that I have already written the solution in an earlier part of the story: that plot point B has to happen, because I’ve already written plot point A, and they beautifully support each other. Such a shonky mantra, and yet it’s never let me down. I thought I might fail on this one, however. I had no idea how the two central characters could resolve their issues. There was too much difficulty to overcome, and roughly 80 words to do it in. And, it seemed, nothing that I’d already written in the first thousand words was giving me an exit plan.

And then I spotted it. I had the reveal: and I’d hidden it in the God-damned title. In the title. As if I’d always planned it that way, and that I’d named the story after I’d worked out the resolve. And while the rest of the story didn’t exactly write itself (I had to get involved a bit), it further strengthened my belief that a lot of stories are not so much created, as discovered, buried things that already exist, waiting for us to use the correct tools.  

Saturday 29 June 2013

So, this time last week (God, has it been a week already? How the hell did that happen?) I tried to organise a picnic/barbecue thing on the beach. Of course, I know, and you know, that as soon as you say those sort of things out loud, then the weather will be against you. And so it came to pass that there were pretty healthy winds all day long, which effectively (very effectively, in fact) put paid to any chances of spending time whatsoever outside. This Saturday, things are different. This Saturday, there was a full day rehearsal with the youth theatre, so it was pretty much inevitable that today would be the first day of 2013 where there would be more than two hours of uninterrupted warm sunlight (please don't message me to tell you that, actually,  you've had loads of days of brilliant sunshine: we're talking about my experience here. My experience may admittedly be significantly a lot more boring than yours, but we happen to be on my blog, and not yours. Of course, you could argue - very successfully - that the reason that you don't have a blog is precisely because your experience is less boring than mine, and I'm really not going to argue with you on that point). 

Like most people who write a blog (with the honorable exception of Richard Herring) I've let it go a bit fallow without updates this month. This is mainly because of the festival fringe production I was directing (which I really, really will chat about in more detail in a couple of posts time), but a few other things have happened in the meantime. I guess the main thing most recently was turning forty. This, in fact, was the main reason for attempting a beach picnic/barbecue type of thing. Many people have been asking me - quite intensely, in fact - if I've bothered by this milestone. They ask with such intensity, in fact, that I've begun to wonder if it isn't to facilitate their own sense of glee at a fellow human being falling apart and crumbling to dust before them than any actual concern they might have for my well-being. But the fact is, I feel like I was born at the age of forty, so getting to the actual physical age is no great hardship. Of course, traditionally, this is the point in time when a man is supposed to have a  mid-life crisis, but since I'm not exactly adverse to the idea of suddenly having a classic car and a girlfriend who's all sorts of wrong for me, I'm not exactly sure that it will be any kind of crisis at all. 

There are probably lots of things that did or didn't happen while I was far-too-busy to keep the blog updated, but the thing that springs to mind was getting to the long list for a writing competition. Now, I'm hopelessly naive about these sort of things. I wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as a long list. I know, logically, that there must be - that would make a lot more sense of the phrase 'short list', but it wasn't really something that I gave much thought. So when I originally got the email telling me that I hadn't made the short list, I took that as a standard rejection, and thought no further about it, other than to redraft the story (for what was probably about the tenth time, now). I rewrote it with the critical eye of a story that had, in fact, been rejected. I think the changes that I made were actually pretty important, and vital - indeed, how had I missed them the first nine times? - and made the story a helluva lot better. That done, I sent the story off again (to its third chance). 

I hadn't really read the rejection email until weeks later, and it was only then that I discovered that my name was on the long list. Sure, it was still a 'rejected' entry, but I wasn't exactly sure what long list actually meant, believe it or not. For a moment there, I did wonder if it was simply a list of all the stories that had been entered - literally, a long list. Turns out, not. Apparently, there was over a thousand entries, and the long list was under 100 stories. As 'rejections' go, that's pretty good odds. As I say, I have already redrafted the story and improved it. The long list (now that I actually know what that phrase means) gets announced at the end of next week. It might not be third time lucky. 

But, then again ..