Tag: writing

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A Short Spell of Reading

I have a group of pals who hold a readathon approximately every three months, typically coinciding with the equinoxes and solstices. It used to be an intensive twelve hours but has settled down into a more relaxed two-day format.

Ahead of the most recent one on Friday and Saturday, I went to the library and found two short story collections, namely:

  • Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
  • The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan.

I started with the Kirsty Logan one. I’d enjoyed her novel The Gracekeepers, and I even met her at a launch on its release. But the esteem in which I hold the novel didn’t translate to that collection.

Back in July, I wrote an entry about short stories and how readers need to feel satisfied before the end of the narrative. I also prophetically ended the entry by saying I would park the thought for the moment with the intention of returning at some point. This is that point.

In the case of the Logan collection, I’d like to turn to a different metaphor. Each story is a jigsaw puzzle rather than a picture. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and a few of the stories worked. However, it’s necessary to make sure all the pieces are there so the reader can mentally assemble them and this didn’t work in a lot of cases. A story about a coin-operated boy simply baffled me towards the end.

I’m only part-way through the other collection, but all the pieces are present, so I’m enjoying the stories much more.

Taking the time to read has also encouraged me to continue with other projects. For instance, I submitted a 50-word-story to a competition run by the Scottish Book Trust. I’ve then continued some overdue work on my stage monologue. Who knows what else I’ll manage to tackle when I next dislike a book?

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Backing Dvorak

If you look at the keyboard settings in your operating system, you’ll often spot several different layouts that the computer can understand. For instance: a French keyboard has its letters in a slightly different order, while a Russian one uses a completely different alphabet. Among them, you might see one marked ‘Dvorak’.

Despite its Czech name, the layout was invented by an American educational psychologist for use in typewriters. It’s well-known that the QWERTY design was introduced to slow down typists and avoid jamming the mechanisms, but by the 1930s, machines had improved to the point where fast typing wasn’t a problem. That’s where August Dvorak came in.

About a year or two after I began writing fiction, I began to develop Repetitive Strain Injury in my fingers, so I wanted to explore other options such as writing by hand, voice dictation, and a different keyboard.

With the vowels and most common consonants on the middle row, and the least often used on the bottom row, your fingers don’t need to travel so much. This is also the principle on which Scrabble letters are scored, but that’s a topic for a different time.

Dvorak does have downfalls. When I started using the system, I needed labels on the keys as reminders, graduating to a custom-built external keyboard, before I was able to rely on muscle memory. I also can’t change the keyboard on my workplace computer so I need to switch mentally between that and QWERTY.

Additionally, I mentioned how the layout was designed by an American, so a few of the keys don’t operate as expected, especially the pound sterling symbol.

To circumvent this, I use a program called AutoHotkey. On start-up, it loads a script that maps keypresses to other keys or to a subroutine. So if I press Ctrl+3, Windows can display the missing ‘£’ symbol rather than the ‘#’ produced by Shift+3. I have a few similar shortcuts for these special cases, although I still rely heavily on memory.

On balance, using the Dvorak keyboard has been a help more than a hindrance, and I’ll probably be using it well into the future.

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Deliberately Not Reaching the Target

The end of November signals the end of National Novel Writing Month, which is a global challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. Regular readers will know I’ve run the Dundee & Angus region for the last eight years.

Although it’s a tough challenge, the only real competition is against yourself. It’s run largely on an honour system, where participants self-report their word counts, and there’s no sanction for not reaching the target. As such, we always remind members that there’s no shame in not hitting 50,000 words.

When I took over the group, I quickly realised that organising and encouraging group members is sometimes incompatible with achieving my own goals. I have previously managed to reach 50,000 words while running the group, but the quality of my leadership suffered.

So for the last few years, I’ve made more of an effort to focus on the running of the group. This is in the full knowledge that a decent word count is unlikely to be possible. At the time of writing, I’ve recorded just 1,178 words.

However, there has been a noticeable improvement in the running of the region. This has been particularly true in the pre-pandemic period as my co-leader and I have gradually developed and trialled different ways of working.

The way I see it, if the members are able to focus on their projects and don’t notice how we run the group, then we’re doing a good job.

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Until the Last Moment

I’m a member of a monthly poetry circle called the Wyverns. We each typically write a piece ahead of the next meeting to be read aloud and discussed. There is always a broad prompt to assist with choosing a subject.

In most cases, I submit my work relatively quickly, but I’d let it go in October because I thought the focus of the November meeting was entirely given over to discussing an upcoming pamphlet project. Around 48 hours before the meeting, it transpired that I’d misunderstood what was said. We were discussing the project, but there would also be time for poetry.

It was time to knuckle down. The prompt was ‘Being Human’, which coincided with the theme of the aforementioned pamphlet and is also why I misunderstood the brief. By coincidence, I’ve been learning a lot recently about the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, so I wasn’t short of material.

Much of the online communication in the group is done using an email discussion list, so I posted my ten-line verse there as soon as I was satisfied with the wording. I also printed off several paper copies for those who might not have checked their emails.

As a result, I was able to gather feedback on it, which was more favourable than some pieces where I’d spent days thinking about the wording. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there.

If you’re local to Dundee, incidentally, you can come and hear poems from the pamphlet being performed tomorrow at the Global Room in the University of Dundee.

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Writing Just Enough

As writers, I think we’ve all had the experience of starting a poem or a story with a great idea, but it fails because there simply isn’t enough material to sustain a complete story.

I remember one instance when I was invited to write a poem inspired by a botanic garden. I was particularly taken by a species of tree where the seed is sealed with a natural glue that can only be opened when it melts with heat. As such, in a natural environment, it requires a forest fire to reproduce. Despite writing many lines to this effect, I found only the first two and last two were strong candidates, so the end piece was much shorter than expected, but much punchier as well.

I’ve also experienced the opposite effect at least once. I set out to write a little joke for my online pals about how YouTube videos used to be sent out to customers by post. The fictional history of the company became so detailed that I eventually turned it into a 2,000-word short story.

The same unpredictability also happens in non-fiction. The Wikipedia page for Kirkton, Dundee is relatively short because it’s mainly a residential area, albeit with four schools and excellent transport links. On the other hand, the riot that erupted there at Hallowe’en in 2022 is given a separate page that’s around twice as long as the main article, simply because there is so much to be written about the incident.

Having written this blog for a decade now, I can generally predict how long my entries will be. Something else will occasionally occur to me while writing that extends their length. Every so often, I’ll run out of steam, leaving me with a draft entry that goes nowhere.

As these drafts are beginning to build up again, I’m going to see whether I can revisit them and add enough to create a fully-fledged topic.

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Inform the Troops There Has Been a Complete Breakdown in Communications

Because of other commitments, I sometimes don’t write my blog entries until the last few hours. Most of the time this isn’t problem; I usually have at least one idea ready to go.

Today, however, the Internet connection isn’t co-operating. As such, I’m going to write this short entry and keep trying the Schedule button until 8pm.

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Typing as Fast as You Can Speak

A typical computer uses a standard keyboard with more than 100 buttons. Many of these will have a secondary function, activated by modifiers such as Shift and Ctrl modifiers. This is more than enough to encode the entire alphabet in upper- and lowercase, numbers 0 to 9, a selection of everyday symbols, and common functions that interact with the operating system.

On the other hand, a stenotype machine has less than 25 buttons, which is not enough for all the letters of the English alphabet, never mind the numbers and punctuation marks. This is because the operator is more interested in the sound of a word than the spelling, and it allows a speed of more than 200 words per minute while moving the hands as little as possible.

Incidentally, the one punctuation mark on the device is an asterisk, used to mark corrections. In some messaging applications, where messages can’t be recalled, users will typically type an asterisk underneath, followed by the corrected word underneath.

However, the stenotype is now decades old and technology has now moved beyond that. Below is a video about live subtitling for proceedings in Parliament.

A video hosted on YouTube with an overview of how subtitles are produced for Parliamentary sessions.

In this application, voice recognition is used. However, it’s far easier to program a computer to understand just one voice instead of many, so an operator listens through headphones to the words spoken on TV and repeats them.

You’ll notice from the video that the operator speaks in something of a monotone regardless of how passionate the MPs are feeling, and this helps the software to provide a consistent result. Punctuation also needs to be added manually, not to mention switching between different people; colour codes are often used to help viewers work out which person said what.

Such software is also available for home users. For a period when I had RSI, I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking to give my fingers a rest. It worked to a high standard, I found, even straight out of the box and with a Scottish accent. However, it produces its best results when connected to the Internet, as it can benefit from deep learning techniques. If it can’t, the audio is processed locally and there’s a noticeable decrease in quality.

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Rewriting the Handbook

As mentioned in the last entry, our open-mic night for writers – Hotchpotch – held its first event in four months.

The bottom line is that the evening went well: we attracted a sizeable crowd, the event ran on schedule, and people embraced the new donations system. While there were a lot of variables outside our control, it helped to have a robust plan to remove as much guesswork as possible.

When I brought an assistant on board earlier this year, I composed a document to show her the structure of our events, as I’d previously done it from memory.

This is not an exhaustive textbook, but rather a handbook to give an overview of how the event is run, plus best practice gained from years of experience. For example, it reminds the host to recap the introductory speech after the first break for the benefit of those who arrive later.

Because our format evolved on the pub circuit, where we could finish later in the evening. I rewrote the handbook to include a stricter end time and added in revised best practice advice.

As the handbook is a living document, it will likely be updated every month or two with new tweaks, but it really did help with our event last week.

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Helping Novelists Through November

National Novel Writing Month is a not-for-profit initiative that encourages people to draft a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. In 2023, NaNoWriMo – as it’s affectionately known – celebrates its 25th anniversary. 

As the organisation operates globally, it relies on hundreds of volunteer co-ordinators around the world to welcome members, arrange meet-ups and raise donations. After joining the Dundee & Angus region as a punter in 2010, I’ve been running it since 2015.

During my time in charge, we’ve started additional weekly meetings during the rest of the year. As such, I like to have a co-organiser to help with tasks such as sending out bulletins, reorganising our Discord server, and covering for each other if we’re busy on a given week.

Even with this, November still remains our busiest month ahead of the novel-writing. By tradition, we organise a launch party in October, a Thank Goodness It’s Over party in December, and an additional weekly meeting on each Saturdays in November.

From our members’ point of view, NaNoWriMo will start on Wednesday 1 November. For us, those conversations need to start right now, and that’s what we’ll be doing over the next four weeks.

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Fragments of a Whole

If you’re a fan of the 1996 film Trainspotting, you’ll be familiar with the opening Choose Life voiceover.

Here, the phrase is repeatedly used to describe aspirations such as owning a large television and having fixed-rate mortgage repayments. It almost tells a story, but not one with a linear narrative. We as listeners have to mentally join the dots.

Later on, the film also features the dance track Born Slippy .NUXX by Underworld, and that takes a similar approach. In an interview from 2010, the lyricist Karl Hyde reported struggling with alcoholism while recording the vocals, so they were presented almost as snapshots rather than a complete image.

I’ve recently been experimenting with similar stream-of-consciousness work. A few months ago, on the way home from an event, I thought up a couple of lines of poetry that I quickly noted down. Over the following month, I added and added to it, one fragment at a time, creating a non-linear piece that straddles the line between prose and poetry.

When I’m performing it, I would normally omit any explanation, instead allowing the audience to interpret it.

When I submitted the piece to my poetry circle, however, I included some further details to aid their analysis. I wasn’t deliberately emulating the style of the Beat Generation, who actively fought against convention in poetry, yet it ended up taking that path.

The difference between my piece and the examples from Trainspotting is that mine doesn’t have music behind it. The Choose Life segment likely wouldn’t work as well without Iggy Pop in the background, while Born Slippy .NUXX would be markedly different if spoken at an open-mic night.

In fact, as I was writing that, I considered I might try it. If I do, I’ll let you know what happens.