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The Poetry of JavaScript

Despite our social media presence, a sizeable chunk of our Hotchpotch open-mic members still rely on our email bulletin. Almost exactly a year ago, I started the task of building up a new distribution list after the collapse of the old system. Here’s the story of what’s happened since.

After emailing everyone on the list individually, many people wanted to stay on it, a lot wished to stop receiving bulletins, and several never responded at all. The initial technical hiccups have long been ironed out and the number of subscribers almost doubled from 34 to 63 over the past 12 months.

The old list was not compliant with GDPR regulations, so it was important to ensure the new one was up to scratch, and that includes the ability to unsubscribe at any time. The easiest way is to have a public Web page with this functionality.

As we now had a basic website, there was an opportunity to publish more information there, such as our meeting times and standards of behaviour.

When I started this endeavour, I would copy open-source templates and simply strip out any unnecessary sections. One principle I like to follow is what YouTube creator Tom Scott calls the art of the bodge: cobbling together just enough code to do what you need it to, making refinements as you go along.

After a while of doing this, I slowly began to refresh and update my knowledge of HTML. Alongside that, I learned when and how to deploy CSS and JavaScript. The last time I dabbled in coding was many years ago before such elements were commonplace.

Perhaps I’ve been influenced by writing verse for so many years, but I can see a correlation between writing poetry and writing computer code. Every word has to be precisely the right one, each section is demarcated by curly brackets into its own ‘stanza’, and a detail as small as an incorrect line break can change how it’s interpreted.

But unless something in this current system breaks and has to be recoded, I”m leaving it alone, however poetic it reads.

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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.

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Embracing New Beginnings, or Something Like That

Regular readers will know I run an open-mic event called Hotchpotch. This is primarily for writers rather than musicians, and it’s been happening since 2010. Since I took over in 2015, the one constant has been the need to change venues from time to time. We are now in such a transition period again.

This time, we had several weeks’ notice from the venue. The owner intended to sell the place, but it unexpectedly closed before the sale went through rather than afterwards. The new place has not responded to our email asking whether they would honour the bookings for the remainder of 2023.

As a stop-gap, we held the July event in an open-air amphitheatre. It was a lot of fun, but the Scottish climate means this is not a feasible long-term solution, so it won’t be repeated any time soon.

On Friday, someone did reach out to us to offer assistance, and I hope it leads to a fruitful outcome, especially as a couple of other venues in the area have also closed suddenly.

For 13 years, we’ve been able to secure venues free of charge in return for members buying drinks and snacks from the bar. I’ve come to accept these days are probably at an end, and I’m actively considering how we might implement a new model involving donations.

That said, a fallow period of a month or two might give Hotchpotch a chance to reinvent and reinvigorate itself, just as we’ve done for the last 13 years.

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The Satisfaction Line vs the Finish Line

At the weekend, I was talking with other writers, which led to a discussion about narrative structure.

Unlike a theatre or film script, there is no standard or accepted narrative structure for a short story. While this can be freeing for an author, my experience also tells me it can lead to a disappointing story without a decent resolution. I’ve had some difficulty articulating exactly what makes a satisfying story, but I’m working on a way of explaining it.

Bear in mind that I’m still working out some details of this metaphor, but below are my initial thoughts.

I’ve started thinking of a story as having two endings. The first ending is where the author stops the narrative. The second ending is the point at which the reader feels satisfied; this will vary from person to person, of course. That second ending is the Satisfaction Line.

Ideally, the Satisfaction Line should come before the end of the narrative, as close as possible, but never after it. Note that the two examples I’m about to give both happen to come from The New Yorker, and the website often arbitrarily says you can’t read any more articles without paying.

The first one is The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. For me, the Satisfaction Line comes a few paragraphs before the end. Structurally, it’s one of my favourite short stories.

The second example is the notorious Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian from 2017. The story ends with a string of phone messages, which I found vaguely threatening but hardly a resolution. My own Satisfaction Line might have been crossed if the author had continued to a more dramatic ending.

I’m going to park this thought for the moment with the intention of returning at some point in the future, however distant.

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Skip to Next Week

I have half an entry written, with the intention of finishing it this afternoon. Unfortunately, something unexpected has arisen today, so there won’t be a complete entry.

Instead, I aim to have that draft completed by next Tuesday.

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When Non-Fiction Might be Fiction

When I was growing up, I ploughed most of Roald Dahl’s output and selected titles from Enid Blyton. Additionally, I kept returning to a children’s publisher called Antelope Books – not to be confused with the political publisher Antelope Hill – which would feature works by authors such as Penelope Lively and Anne Fine.

But as much as I enjoyed novels, I definitely spent more time reading factual volumes. On visits to the library, I’d stay around the non-fiction section, finding books about subjects like why the weather acts like it does, how nuclear energy works, what happens at an airport, and so much more.

I owned a lot of books as well. Easily the best one was a thick A4-sized Reader’s Digest collection called How Is It Done? with simple explainers about the logistics of staging an Olympic Games, how a building is demolished with explosives, how and why Christo and Jeanne-Claude would wrap landscapes in material, &c. From what I can gather, no updated version has ever been released.

All the non-fiction books I’ve mentioned so far have one factor in common: they were from reliable sources. They would typically be assembled by established publishers and/or have a bibliography for further reading. Even today, my non-fiction YouTube subscriptions are carefully curated from established channels and/or who link sources in the description.

However, I owned some books that played fast and loose with such standards. The pages would often contain lists of nothing but facts – and I use that word loosely – along the lines of:

  • From 1 June to 30 July 1987, a schoolgirl completely wore out a pair of shoes.
  • In 1970, Clive Bunyan robbed a shop in Scarborough. He hid his face with a motorcycle helmet but was caught because his name was printed in large letters on the front.
  • There is an African village where the women have to catch a once-weekly bus to go shopping, but it stops for only three minutes.

Looking back, I can imagine the authors going to the pub, sinking five beers and writing the most outlandish nonsense they could get away with.

However, while young readers tend not to have the type of critical thinking skills that older ones might, I was always happy to take what I read at face value and be entertained by all these ridiculous nuggets.