I've just won Write Invite's weekly competition: you can see my entry here WriteInvite website. It's an interesting format; at 5pm every Saturday, three themes are posted up, and you have half an hour to write a story. The editor chooses the shortlist, and all members vote for their favourite.
I've always liked writing exercises, because they send you off on tangents you wouldn't have thought of otherwise, and that can be a rich source of material. So it was fun to do, and I didn't expect anything more of it. But if you win, your story is up there for all the world to see, and that's another ballgame altogether! I suffer from perfectionism, and I've spent far too much time not doing things as a result. Here's a quick test: have you ever been given one of those beautiful books full of blank paper? And if you have, what did you do with it? If you put it away and never used it, or gave it away because you couldn't bear the silent challenge it posed, you're probably a perfectionist. And it kills creativity. The pages stay blank. Of course, stories need honing and re-drafting, and you do the best you can before you put them out there. If I'd been writing the Write Invite story in the usual way, I'd have done a lot more work on it before I was satisfied. But it's too late now, so there it is, warts and all. It's very confronting! And a really useful lesson, too. Imperfect as the story was, it was good enough to win. And since perfectionism is arrogance in disguise, that's a nice take-down. If you're a fellow sufferer, I recommend it.
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This was our latest book at my lovely book club. It's a sequel, by Barry Unsworth, to his Booker prizewinner 'Sacred Hunger'. It's obvious that there is history behind it, but the story stands in its own right. That wasn't a problem.
What interested me was how many of the 'rules' of writing Unsworth breaks. There are several characters with very similar names - Stanton/Spenton, for example - and great big 'information dumps' from time to time, not embedded in dialogue or used to move the story on, but just lodged like boulders in a stream, interrupting the flow. And when there is dialogue, he has the disconcerting habit of 'head-hopping' each time someone speaks, telling us their thoughts or a bit of back-story as well as what they say. Some things, like the long descriptions of landscape or people's appearance, are in keeping with the period he's writing about, although in general you wouldn't get away with it nowadays. But established writers of literary fiction, it seems, can do all sorts of things that are not allowed when you're starting out, or if your writing is more commercial. And clearly, it doesn't disqualify them from being seen as the very best in the world. And another thing. Nobody in the book club except me noticed any of the issues above. We all enjoyed it, but they enjoyed it more because they weren't worried about the rules. So who's to judge what's right and wrong? In the end, surely it's the readers. Isn't that who we're writing for? |