Tag: plot

Uncategorized

An Abundance of Apples (Part 2 of 5).

For the five Mondays in June, I’m taking a break from discussing and analysing the world of writing, and make one of my stories available free online. This one is called An Abundance of Apples.

Last week in part one, we met an orchard owner who started off with too many apples apples, traded them for blackberries, and the blackberries for carrots, and he wants to continue up the alphabet in this manner. In part two, below, he is in possession of a flask.

Flask

I checked You & We the next day. More people had shared the link, and I found an e-mail waiting for me. Tom Jeffreys offered to swap my egg cup for a flask. If I wanted it, I only needed to go around there at my convenience.

I must’ve spoken to him on the porch for less than two minutes. During this brief time, Margaret didn’t say a single word to me, but continued her dusting in the hallway behind him, sighing at least twice and making sure she saw me checking her watch.

Golf club

It took further days and a couple of online updates before I could trade again. This time, a friend of a friend offered me a golf club she’d been left in a divorce settlement.

It turned out to be a large, expensive driver, and I asked Irene several times if she felt sure about this, as I could only offer her a flask that held barely a cup of coffee.

“I’ve no use for it. Neither did he, that’s why he didn’t take it.”

I thanked her, and spent the rest of the evening at the driving range before advertising it for swaps.

Throughout this time, I’d still been working in the orchard all day, but instead of reading at night, I would update my Web presence. I decided to merge all my activities from the home-made Web page onto You & We as I seemed to get a lot more reaction there.

Unknown to me, another user had tipped off the local press. I received an e-mail from a journalist who wanted to interview me and arrange another swap.

Helicopter trip

The journalist introduced me to a businessman who ran experience days, and who wanted to give me a voucher for a short helicopter trip in exchange for the golf club and an article in the paper. I gladly accepted it.

When Mum and Dad read the article out, Daniel immediately danced around the room and told all his You & We contacts he would be going up in a helicopter.

Once he’d calmed down, I took great delight in reminding him I would be exchanging the the voucher for something beginning with I.

“But that’s not fair. That’s my reward for helping you.”

“Helping me? How did you help?”

“Well, I said you’d swapped apples and blackberries, then them for carrots, then that for a doorstop.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And the egg cup. I seem to remember you couldn’t care less about that, or the flask, or the golf club. And now because it’s something you want, you expect me to hand it over to you.”

“It’s only fair.”

“All you’ve done for the last fortnight is watch football. You haven’t lifted a finger to help, so don’t expect me to give you anything.”

“But that was then and this is now.”

I ignored him. I turned to my parents, who were now re-reading the article to themselves with smiles on their faces. Before I could say anything to them, Daniel had bounded over to me and punched me in the shoulder. He hadn’t done this for years, but my reaction remained as sharp as ever. I kicked him in the shin.

“Stop it,” shouted Mum, “don’t you dare do that. Daniel, get to your room now, it’s way past your bedtime.”

“Yes, Daniel, you just get to your beddy-weddy.”

“And you stop winding him up,” she shouted at me.

“Hate you all,” stated Daniel as he slammed the door shut.

“How am I winding him up? He knows I’m going to swap it and he hasn’t done anything to earn it.”

“He’s only young,” soothed Mum, now calmed down from her shouting.

“I had more sense than that at his age.”

They both laughed.

“You were exactly the same,” said Dad.

“No I wasn’t.”

They laughed even harder.

Now the paper had published my You & We address, my one e-mail every few days became half a dozen a day. I had to sort through them.

I first deleted those who failed to grasp the concept, offering items that didn’t begin with I, such as bookshelves. I then put them in order of relative value, disregarding any below the value of the voucher, such as a model igloo. I narrowed it down to two possible items.

Italian Grand Prix programme, signed

I decided against the offered iPhone from an electronics dealer because it had been used. But after a few inquires, it seemed the signed Italian Grand Prix programme was worth more than the helicopter trip, although I’d never heard of the driver.

I arranged a meeting with the seller. He appeared smartly dressed and wealthy, and we exchanged items.

On opening the envelope containing the helicopter voucher, ripped-up pieces of paper fell out. I’d left it near the door so I wouldn’t forget it. I could only apologise to the seller, who told me he understood, and would hold the programme until I obtained a replacement.

I drove home, ignoring every speed limit sign, to find my parents watching TV while my brother played his football game. I grabbed the computer from his hands, threw it across the room and gave him an overdue beating. It would have been worse if Dad hadn’t pulled me off him.

I told Mum and Dad what he’d done, and showed them the ripped pieces of paper. They expressed disappointment with him rather than anger, while I spelled out to him exactly what it had cost me, not just in monetary terms, but wasted time.

Daniel said a pitiful, “I’m sorry.”

“You will be,” I countered.

Happily, the helicopter company saw the funny side and replaced the voucher, allowing me to swap it for the programme.

 

Next week: Jigsaw.

Uncategorized

An Abundance of Apples (Part 1 of 5).

For the five Mondays in June, I’m going to take a break from discussing and analysing the world of writing, and make one of my stories available free online. This one is called An Abundance of Apples, and it totals 4500 words. Part one commences below.

Apples

Last year, we ended up with too many apples. We experienced just the right weather conditions, we harvested at the optimum time, and we ran out of storage space. The supermarkets would take the bulk of the crop, but as a family-run orchard, we wanted to sell as much as possible.

Blackberries

I phoned around the other farms to ask if they needed or wanted any of our surplus. Only the blackberry growers did. They said they couldn’t pay us, but offered to swap for some of their surplus. Mum agreed, so my brother and I drove there.

My brother Daniel is 13. Even before I reached his age, I’d been collecting and trading items: cards, coins, books, tokens from cereal boxes, anything I could. The skills I’ve built up over the years have stood me in good stead, so I’ve tried to pass on as many as I can to the boy.

Mum looked again at the three large boxes of blackberries as we unloaded them from the car. “I can’t use all these. I thought you said they only had a few left.”

“They did. This is it. Their yield’s been good as well.”

“By the time I make jam with the first box, the rest of them’ll be rotten. You’ll have to get rid of the rest.”

“How?”

“Phone Margaret Jeffreys. See if she’ll take some off your hands.”

“Oh, not Margaret Jeffreys,” Daniel and I complained in unison. We dreaded seeing, phoning or dealing with this family friend and her gruff, short attitude.

Carrots

However, her son Tom answered the phone. He was the polar opposite of his mother, and happily agreed to pay for the berries, throwing in half a dozen misshapen carrots from his vegetable patch. Mum wouldn’t complain about vegetables.

On the way home, Daniel stared out of the window in a thoughtful manner. “Did you know we’ve gone up the alphabet?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we had too many apples, so we swapped them for blackberries. Then we had too many blackberries, so we swapped them for carrots, so we’ve gone A, B, C.”

I thought about this, “I suppose we have.”

“So what are we going to swap them for?”

“The carrots?”

“It has to be something beginning with D. A doorstop, darts, maybe even a dog.”

“You begin with D; I’ll swap you for them. No, but let’s not get too carried away.”

“But can we? It would be great if we kept swapping for bigger and bigger and bigger things and got to Z and got a zebra.”

Doorstop

Mum never got to see the carrots. As I drove Daniel into town the next day, I told him I knew a bloke who owed me a favour.

We walked into the ironmonger, where we told him about our adventures in swapping items alphabetically. He hesitated and asked us a few questions, but gave us a doorstop in exchange for the carrots, bursting Daniel’s hopes of obtaining a drill.

The shopkeeper played his part perfectly. Although we’d made a genuine exchange, I’d arranged it with him the previous evening.

Egg cup

A few days later, I received an e-mail with the subject line Offer to swap doorstop for egg cup. It couldn’t possibly be spam with such a specific heading, so I opened it. The sender made reference to a website, which I didn’t click on. The message had been sent to my address and Daniel’s, so I confronted him.

He excitedly showed me a page he had made, detailing our swaps so far and appealing for help with the next letter.

“What have you done that for? Get that down right now,” I ordered.

“But I thought you wanted help with it. It’s a great way of telling people, and they can give us all sorts of things.”

We argued about this for some time and we came to a compromise. He could keep the page up, provided he removed our details. I contacted the woman who offered the egg cup and explained the situation. As she had taken the time to write, I decided to take the time to meet her in a café and arrange a trade.

Despite his initial eagerness, Daniel’s interest faded in the space of a week, and he became engrossed in football. I didn’t share his enthusiasm for the game, so I left him to it.

I started to consider the egg cup meeting again. It felt like being a kid, when you had two identical trading cards and finally found somebody who also had duplicates. You’d work out which you could swap, and what you had to buy. It’s how youngsters learn the value of items without risking large sums of money.

I chose to make a go of it.

Daniel gladly handed over the password to the site. I rewrote his posts in adult-speak, adding an appeal for something beginning with F. I opened a fresh e-mail account that I didn’t mind getting spam into.

But after another week, I had no replies, and the hit counter hardly rose. I asked him how it had come to the attention of the woman who offered the egg-cup after 24 hours, yet I’d had nothing for seven days.

He’d posted the link to our page on an apparently massively popular website called You & We. His list contained over three hundred contacts. I hesitated to say friends because I doubt even the Pope knows that many people personally, although he insisted he did. He’d posted the link, two people had given it to their contacts, and it spread exponentially from there.

I’d never previously paid attention to these sites as I would usually be working, reading or asleep, but I joined You & We out of curiosity. Once I added Daniel, the site made suggestions based on his contacts about people I might know. In just under two hours, I’d connected with more than fifty people from real life.

Next week: Flask.

Uncategorized

The Finish Line.

Every April, there’s a contest called Camp NaNoWriMo, an offshoot of November’s National Novel Writing Month. In November, the aim is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Camp, by contrast, allows participants to choose a word goal starting at 10,000 and to work on any type of writing.

I intended to do more work on one of my unpublished novels, which is mostly written but needed extra scenes. I did write a few thousand words of it, but I didn’t feel the same enthusiasm as I did when I edited it a couple of months ago. Rather than bore myself stupid with it, I changed focus.

A piece of advice often given to new writers is Finish what you start. It’s rare that I don’t finish work, but I did have a few short stories that had gone nowhere. I therefore used the opportunity to finish two of them.

One had started off as a little self-indulgence but rereading it after this time allowed me to work out and deliver the message I was trying to convey. The other one should have been written in one session, but I was interrupted and never went back to it. I now have a satisfactory ending for both pieces and they’re ready for a second redraft – and a ruthless reduction in their word counts. As for the novel, I will redraft it when my enthusiasm returns.

Camp NaNo is traditionally done without a group leader and without meet ups in person. In Dundee, however,  we’ve been fortunate enough to have active members who have met up every Tuesday in April to work on their respective pieces. I set my own target at 10,000 words as I also had a university paper to hand in around the same time, but thanks to these meetings, I managed to reach the goal.

If you’re also in Dundee, by the way, there’s a new monthly Literary Lock-in at the George Orwell up the Perth Road. There are no speeches or readings, just an opportunity for writers to mingle and speak with each other. The next one is on 25 May.

Uncategorized

Two-Hour Masterclasses.

Part of me thinks a real writer should sell their television set and denounce anything audio-visual. Yet another part thinks that screenplays are a great way to learn and improve our writing techniques, and I’ve seen many this past week.

The first on my list was Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. There is not a wasted word or action over the whole two hours, and the number of back references is staggering. From the bell at the very beginning to, “I wish I had a million dollars,” to where Mr Welsh punches George Bailey, each one of these is a set-up to a later plot point. A tight script is the accepted Hollywood convention, but Quentin Tarantino is one of the few writers who allows his characters to speak about matters unrelated to the plot.

Dog Day Afternoon runs to a similar length but takes place almost exclusively in one location. Yet there are so many characters interacting that it lends the film a rapid pace and never feels as though the director is padding out the action. It’s also worth a look at the more recent Phone Booth.

2001: A Space Odyssey — Three of the Discovery...
2001: A Space Odyssey — Three of the Discovery One crew are in a state of hibernation, ostensibly to conserve resources for the voyage. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I went to a special limited-run screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey on Saturday. I’m still trying to work out fully what happened at the end, but the journey there was a masterclass in show-don’t-tell. There must have been about 600 pages of stage directions and two of dialogue. It would do little justice to describe it on the page, so try watching even just ten minutes to gain a sense of Stanley Kubrick’s style.

Incidentally, it’s only one of two films I’ve ever seen where the cinema has provided an intermission. I don’t know why these fell out of favour, as it’s quite handy for nipping to the bathroom, and also for the house to make money from bar sales.

As well as the above-mentioned films, I also had an opportunity to see new short films made by 16- to 19-year-olds. The screening was at Dundee Contemporary Arts and made with the assistance of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Each one was inspired by an archive of experimental films from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the one that appealed to the individual the most was played before their piece. Almost all of them, old and new, explored ideas beyond the conventions of ordinary filmmaking, from a lonely girl in a room full of friends and balloons to two musicians swinging guitars by the neck while playing them.

I managed to chat with Scott Funai, the director, producer and star of Road to Nowhere. This short piece is about a schoolboy who doodles on his exam paper, effectively ruining the chances of him finding a job, with the title repeated in voice-over by him and the other characters. He told me he takes the Mike Leigh approach to scripting, preferring improvisation over dictation. Scripts are supposed to be a bare outline and the director fills in the rest, but Leigh doesn’t even begin writing one until he’s confident the actors fully inhabit their characters.

Although the approaches from the above writers may be different from each other, the end result is the same in the sense that the approach works for that particular screenplay. And that principle can be applied to any type of writing, from a 50-word poem where each phrase must have significance to a novel written purely in stream of consciousness. The approach will have a great influence over the result.

Have you considered changing your approach? I said before that I tend to think about my pieces for a long time, then write them very quickly. But when I was about 15, I wrote a fragment of a song lyric. I revisited it over the years and tried to compose the rest of the song, but it wasn’t coming together. It was only when I was twice that age that I decided to treat it as a poem and it slowly came together into six verses. I now consider it a finished work but it was written over a much longer period than I would normally devote to a piece.

Albert Einstein is attributed with saying, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” As far as I know, he never wrote a screenplay, but he makes a good point.

Uncategorized

What Are the Chances?

On 4 December 1956, an extraordinary coincidence happened. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash all happened to drop by Sun Record Studios in Memphis, which resulted in an impromptu jam session. The engineer had the foresight to record the session, and it’s now a celebrated event among rock ‘n’ roll fans.

On Wednesday of last week, I experienced a similar such meeting. I arrived 15 minutes early for a particular class, but nobody else had arrived after a five-minute wait. I then doubted myself and thought I should perhaps be in another class on the other side of the campus. I immediately headed there.

I had to excuse myself through hundreds of other students, coming the other way, aware that time was ticking away rapidly. When I reached the entrance, I happened to meet Classmate A and explained the situation. As we made our way through the crowds, we met Classmate B by chance and brought him with us. As we approached our destination, we happened to see Classmate C, who joined our small group.

Had you written either of these situations into a novel, the reader might have some difficulty suspending their disbelief. In short, coincidences don’t work particularly well in fiction, even though they happen all the time in real life. It’s related to the broader deus ex machina, when a seemingly unsolvable problem is abruptly resolved by some unexpected intervention.

One way to help the reader maintain that disbelief is to set a few parameters. This could be as simple as dropping a few hints earlier in the story. To demonstrate this, let’s break down my classroom anecdote.

My three classmates and I knew we could only be in one of two particular classrooms, so Classmate D had gone to the second room first, since she was just as unsure as me. And although the rooms were at opposite sides of the campus, there is a main thoroughfare that most students would use to travel from one to the other. So the crowds were not a hindrance to the four of us meeting, rather they were subconsciously leading us to each other.

If I included this incident in a fictional story with that background detail worked into it – Show, don’t tell, said Elmore Leonard – it’s more likely that the reader would see the meeting as quite a reasonable coincidence. It might even be possible to deconstruct the Million Dollar Quartet in a similar fashion. For a start, the label’s owner had brought along Jerry Lee Lewis as an instrumentalist for Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash later wrote that he had already planned to see Perkins’ recording session that day.

Identify the parameters to help the reader believe those coincedences.

This blog has been available at http://www.gavincameron.me.uk since it began last year. But from today, if you type http://www.gavincameron.scot into your browser, it’s no coincidence you’ll also end up here.

Uncategorized

Tabletpunk.

Nothing marks out a generation more than the slang it uses.

If we concentrate on right now, February 2014, you’ll hear people say they’ve, “taken a selfie,” or say, “because,” followed by a single word rather than an explanation. Back fifteen years, and it wasn’t unusual to, “tape that programme,” or answer the phone with, “WASSU-U-UP?”

So when writing a piece that’s going to hang around for a while, most notably a novel, it’s a good idea to decide whether you want to incorporate the slang of the day to make it a period piece, or create a more timeless tale by using more generic terms.

If you want a photo taken properly, do it your selfie.

I recently wrote a story where a major plot element is a pager. This immediately sets it in the 1980s, and I felt safe using the term data bank to describe the device’s storage, rather than the more modern memory. I tried not to overload the piece with dated words, but I did allow myself a yuppie, as the pager’s owner described himself.

But while the eighties is over and we know what it was like, writing a story set in the future is different. One day, selfie and because _____ will be as embarrassing as fab and groovy. For my first novel, where the action takes place in the 2500s, I used, for instance, sound system rather than iPod or even MP3 player. I decided not to try predicting the future term, and write something a little more bland, as would distract from what I was trying to say.

There is an elegant solution to this problem, and those of you who write steampunk know what I’m talking about. This genre imagines modern or relatively recent technology as people in the 19th century might have seen it. There are many literary examples of this, but an accessible non-literary one is the TV series Warehouse 13.

Which leads me to wonder if there’ll be a genre of the future where writers of the 2110s envision their everyday gadgets as we in the 2010s might have viewed them. This decade’s most popular invention is probably the touchscreen computer. So, a hundred years in advance, I’m going to label this predicted genre as tabletpunk.

I’d like to be around to see the look on some geek’s face when they unearth this entry.

Uncategorized

NaNoWriMo: One Week In.

If Bridget Jones had inhabited me in a Quantum Leap style. I’d say I was typing out a v. v. quick update on my National Novel Writing Month process.

I have a very organised Municipal Liaison, or ML, who gives us writing space in a friary. While I’m not religious by any measure, the calm, quiet sanctity of the place is very conducive to writing.

But equally, so is a certain coffee shop in the town centre, where I tried writing on Sunday. A friend happened to be in the area, and she forced me to go to the pub across the road and drink red wine – forced, no less – leaving me 2,000 short of my intended target.

Despite this small setback, I still bagged a mammoth weekend total. The daily target is an average of 1,667 words, which equates to 11,669 on the seventh day. As of last night, I’ve banged out 12,539. I’m just about to start hacking away at today’s total.

If you should like to follow me on the NaNo website, please do so. It’s helpful if you can also send me a message saying you saw it here so I know where you’ve found my profile.

Uncategorized

The End of The Beginning.

Ye gods! I knew I was living under a rock with LiveJournal, yet I didn’t realise the exact extent until other users started hitting the Like button. I’m unaccustomed to such a response, and I much appreciate it.

I chose WordPress over sites such as Blogger because I have a couple of friends here already. Even the range of basic features are bewildering; when I typed Like button in the previous paragraph, it gave me a Wikipedia link to the Like button page. After a little more kicking the tyres, I’m sure I’ll soon crawl into the 21st century.

Today I’m talking about endings. I recently read two short story anthologies by the same publisher: one from 2011, the other from this year. It struck me that a high number of the pieces in both of these did not have a proper ending, in fact the editor seemed to prefer this style. In some cases, the author would conclude with a limp or vague paragraph. In other cases, it would simply stop, leaving me checking for a missing page and in a couple of cases, asking, “And?” out loud.

It was disappointing rather than annoying because a lot of the stories in the anthology contained great ideas that were let down by their execution.

I try to give my stories a twist ending, or at least a clear marker the reader has reached the end. I don’t always manage, however. I recently received a rejection from a publisher looking for funny stories because, “… the ending lacked a good punch line.” To me, a rounded ending is important in a short story. Even if the reader is meant to be left in some doubt, there ought to be enough clues or information in the body of the story to narrow it down to two or three possible options about what might happen next.

One important exception, however, is autobiographical writing. I’m going to come back to this in more detail on Monday. For purely fictional writing, however, an ending is king.

Photo of mug with,
Not The Booker Prize, nor The Nine O’Clock News.

I was going to leave it until Monday to post about the Not the Booker Prize run by The Guardian, but the deadline is midnight on Sunday.

In my last entry, I mentioned my writing sensei Zöe Venditozzi. Her novel has been shortlisted, and I encourage you to click on the photo above and vote for it before the deadline of midnight on Sunday.

That’s not just because I know her, but because it’s a cracking character-driven piece from a début novelist, featuring alongside established authors Neil Gaiman and Kate Atkinson. It also happens to feature a chap with my very initials who happens to volunteer at hospital radio, just as I do.

To cast your nomination, you’ll need to create a Guardian account and write a short review in the comments. As the paper says, Comment is free, and so is your vote.