Month: Aug 2023

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Pen at Work

Two weeks ago, I spoke about seeing a one-woman monologue at the Edinburgh Fringe. It particularly appealed to me because I’d previously written my own play with a similar theme and presentation.

With the festivals now over for another year, my attention has turned to giving my own work its first major rewrite for some time, including a new snappier title.

In particular, the main character has always been an English literature student who keeps a video diary I changed the subject to a music and video production course, giving her more reason to use a camcorder. I’ve also restructured the narrative to include self-interruptions where she looks back at her student days from 15 years in the future.

If I really give the piece my attention, it should be roughly redrafted by next week, and then I need to start reshaping it neatly into its new form.

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An Element of Emulation

For an upcoming project, my poetry group has decided to look at forgotten poets from Dundee and bring them back to the forefront once more.

As part of our research, we were invited up to the central library to look at archived copies of The People’s Journal. This was in print from 1858 to 1986, and the editions we looked at were all issued towards to the beginning of that period.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t inspired by any of the poets. I was much more interested in reading the articles and creating poetry from those, but that wasn’t the intention of the exercise.

I eventually found one I could work with, although from a book rather than a newspaper. Someone called David Tasker had written a poetic account of a sawmill fire in 1863 titled A Conflagration in the City. I was able to find just one reference to the poet online. The piece reminded me of a furniture store that burned down last November.

I took the approach of using as many of the original words as possible but including more up-to-date imagery. We would have limited space in our publication so I made this poem significantly shorter than the source material. My favourite part was discovering a wordy quote from a witness of the 2022 fire that sounded like it could have been written by a Victorian poet. I was sure to cut this down slightly and squeeze it in:

“I am on the other side of the Tay so quite far away, but can comfortably say I have not seen a fire of its scale in all my time here.”

The last 150 years have marked a shift in how poetry is presented on the page. Before the 20th century, new lines were universally started with a capital letter, whereas that only happens today when a new sentence begins. One of the poetry group pointed out that this distracted from the enjambment. Although I agreed with this sentiment, I felt it important to retain the style of the original for greater effect.

Based on feedback from the rest of the group, my piece is not quite finalised yet, but I’m making good progress.

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Looking Forward, Not Back

Like I do every August, I’ve been spending time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But the most outstanding one for me is one that I didn’t intend to see.

Almost Adult is the story, told in monologue form by Charlotte Anne-Tilley, about a young woman who leaves her hometown in Macclesfield for a job in London. While watching a five-minute preview, I realised the concept was similar to a one-woman monologue I wrote. This evolved from a dissertation I wrote as part of my MLitt degree.

There were a number of similarities. Two of the characters in Almost Adult had the same names as mine, the narrator was portrayed as naive, and both plays were set in locations away from home. Ultimately, they went in different narrative directions, plus mine wasn’t based on a true story.

The playwright was selling copies of the script outside the venue, and we had a chat about some of the themes in her work. At the age of just 23, she’s already written what I consider an exceptional piece of work, and I look forward to what she produces next.

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Next Story, Please

In yesterweek’s entry, I talked about reaching the end of a series I’m currently writing. I’m pleased to report I’m making good progress with this, and my thoughts now turn to the next long-form project.

Of all the options, the current frontrunner is a piece of memoir. Part of me wants to announce the subject right now to create some accountability for the project. The downside is that I might start to write it and find there isn’t much mileage in the idea. As such, I’m keeping it under wraps for the moment.

As I write, I’m reminded of a time – maybe ten years ago – when I attended a series of university evening classes all about life writing. This encompassed types of writing such as memoir and biography, and discussed the subtle but important differences between them, plus the ethics of naming people in such writing.

While it’s unlikely I would personally attend another series of life writing classes, aside from a one-off refresher, I recommend the genre to anyone interested in learning to express yourself. It was a good grounding for moving into the poetry scene, where there is more of a convention to figuratively bleed onto the page or stage.

Indeed, it happens that the life writing class in question no longer exists in its current form because of restructuring at the university. After that change was made, a few of the members did form our own poetry group, which survives to this day.

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How to End a Series That Was Never Meant to Be a Series

For the last three years, I’ve been writing a fantasy series under a pseudonym on a well-known website.

To set your expectations, this has been purely a passion project. I’m not at a stage where I wish to claim public ownership – and I might never be. As such, there will be no links to the series in this entry and only vague references to the plot. However, I feel now is the time to bring the series to an end, so I’ll be discussing the mechanics of this.

Back in September 2020, I published the first part, intended as a one-off story. It received a positive reaction, plus I found there was more I could do with the characters. I went on to write a sequel, then a third instalment, then a fourth. All the while, I’d been peppering my introductions with hints that the next story might be the final one.

In the early days of the series, my greatest hurdle was adding characters and moving them to new locations once the plot was exhausted in the first location. I was able to do this by taking unnamed side-characters from the first two stories and applying some retroactive continuity, known as retconning. Around the fifth story, the series had grown enough legs that it could stand up as its own self-contained universe.

Three months ago, I posted my 23rd part, and the 24th will definitely be where it ends. It’s taken so long because I wanted to tie up the loose ends while taking all the necessary space to explore that ending. So while most parts of the series have ended up between 1,500 and 2,500 words, the finale is likely to touch 5,000. There is even a circle back to the early days with the surprise return of two characters.

After that, I’m considering compiling the parts into a single volume and giving it some more editing, but that’s a long way off at this stage.