Monday 22 October 2012

Finder

The last time I was in the U.K., one of my friends in the group dubbed me "the finder," because (drumroll please)  I tend to find little things.


Frequently.












Since this has been going on for quite a while, I've got a little wooden box of the best things I've found, usually one from every important place I've been. When I'm in residence somewhere for a while, I take them out and spread them on a windowsill, as a reminder to go back to the important places.






Hopefully, this will work. After all, I did come back to the U.K.

They're also the source of some of the laziest creative non-fiction I've ever written. I chose a dozen or so, then wrote a paragraph about how each was found, tweaked them until they all played on a central theme, and then arranged them in a way that made sense. 7,500 words and deadline met in two hours.

Ekphrastic writing is traditionally based on art or music, but I've found that when I'm short on ideas, inspiration, or time, almost anything can be a jumping-off point. My college advisor's favorite game was to have us choose five objects at random and write a story that incorporated all of them. Several of my coursemates based writing on popular music, and I often plundered paintings for ideas - some of which have since been quite well-received.

And in case anyone is wondering, this is where I usually bugger off to when I do my buggering off:


Sunday 21 October 2012

Stones and strings


In short fiction the other week we took a stab at automatic writing. I doubt it was the first time for any of us, as it’s the sort of thing a professor can have a class do with no preparation, no special equipment, and that passes the time and gives her room to figure out what comes next. Not to say that’s what our professor was doing, but were I a professor that’s exactly how I'd be likely to use it. She had us fully empty our minds for three minutes, then begin with the words "I remember." It met with mixed results. Some people put down a mess of words they couldn't really use, while some of us found that the exercise skimmed the best bits off the soup of ideas we'd not yet come to grips with and got them out in the open where we could work with them.

But it brought home again the message that the best way to go about writing is to sit down and do it. There is no mantra, there is no magic, there is simply the application of butt to chair or bed or however you prefer to work, spitting out words until something useful comes up, finding the end of a thread and then following it to its conclusion. I’d been struggling for the past week or two to get down anything in the fiction mode that satisfied, and in less than five minutes of in-class exercise I not only had a lovely and gripping opening, but an intricate plan for the entire piece laid out, in this case in a zig-zag spiral patter from the center of the page. The story was there, lurking somewhere in my hindbrain, and all it wanted was a moment of pure nothingness and the two words “I remember” for me to pick up the string and begin to follow it.

In my case, unwritten stories exist as one of two types: either a pile of stones that must be made into a wall, or a string played out through a labyrinth. The stone ones are the difficult ones, as I begin only with the knowledge that I need to build a wall, and quite often without any stones at all and so must go find them on my own, or with the wrong stones or the wrong mortar and no plan whatsoever for how it should be done. Whereas with the string stories, all I must do is take up the end of the thread and follow it, winding it up as I go, so as to have a finished ball of string when I find the end of the labyrinth. The string kind, you can probably guess, I tend to like more in the moment of writing, because they are easier, more natural, as they only demand that I follow what I’ve been given without any deviation. The stone kind usually involves a lot of tears, bad masonry, and many moments in which I despair over whether they’ll ever take a proper shape at all. But when the stone kind is finished, if they turn out right, they tend more towards complexity, beauty and pattern and symmetry, with a purpose and a message and an overall feeling of craft and control.

I’ve been advised, occasionally, that I should only write the string kind, since they are faster, easier, and take up less time. But anyone who knows how this sort of thing goes, or anyone that’s read her Greek myths, knows that the gods tend to be capricious, and the Vatic Voice runs dry from time to time, for days or years without any guarantee that it will ever return. No matter how gifted we are or how string-ridden our lives tend to be, it’s always a good thing to develop our bricklaying skills. One day those bits of string I follow so easily may run out, and I’ll be left with nothing but a pile of stones and a trowel. 

Thursday 18 October 2012

Here we are, at last


The program has begun with a vengeance, for most, and a whimper for some. There’s a degree of chance in picking classes, choosing professors, and now that the chips have fallen some of us find ourselves buried in reading, while others are bewildered with what to do with all the time on their hands. The U.S. system requires more interaction for English students, more classroom time, so those of us coming from it and similar systems are doubly gratified by the amount of freedom we now have.

We have been divided for workshop, but endeavor to make up for this both by drinking together as often as possible and by holding a workshop of our own, neither of which am I involved in as much as I should be due to the amount of traveling I’ve been doing and have yet to do before I can truly settle down. The settling part has taken longer than any of us thought it would, and though we are all unpacked and know where to get our groceries from and how to get to the postgrad-only bar, we still generally feel the need to get wedged in. To move beyond resident to comfortable, to familiar, to at home and confident in our new environment. To being part of the landscape, one with the woodwork.

It’s strange to be surrounded by writers. Not people that “have a novel in them” or “might write something one day” or who “dabble a bit in poetry,” but people that struggle with the written word, read with an eye to craft, slip into the minds of invented people like slipping into their socks in the morning. And all of us are, seemingly, consumed with guilt over not writing more, reading more, experimenting more. No posers, but all workmen, with a shared technical language that I have so rarely heard, much less been able to use in company, before. There is a joy in being allowed to be frustrated because a narrative won’t get off the ground, an experiment refuses to coalesce, a novel has ground to a halt and you can’t figure out how to start it up again. And we’re able to talk about it, to work it out, over a drink or while sharing dinner and not have to translate every word.

"Over a drink" - that's a key part of it. I can't quite see this sort of atmosphere existing at a U.S. university. We're too competitive. Too image-conscious. Here there are pints and lots of hugging, and we do what we do in public or private and are proud of it. And quite often it's our professors that are doing the pouring. 

Tuesday 16 October 2012

inbox candy!


Had the best of presents on my birthday the other week – offers from two different anthologies for two pieces! There’s still all the contract and editorial mess to get out of the way, but the first should come out at the beginning of November, and the second at the beginning of December. And so my summer of languishing quietly in the depths of illness without a “real job” is justified. The other two anthologies for which the contract mess has already been completed should also come out at that time, and since I’ve never done this before I’m keeping my head down and hoping that they don’t need anything else from me, as I’m not very tech adept at the best of times and school seems to turn me into a frantic Frances.

The other writers make me feel very out of my depth, as most of them appear to have finished school at only the best places quite a while ago and have moved on to teaching, moving, and shaking in the sort of places where Broadway plays and films noir are set. But my writing appears to suit, and no one’s thrown me out for being a foul impostor yet, so we shall see how all of this anthology-ing goes.  

Call me lazy, I was traveling

It's been longer than I intended between posts, but life does have a habit of happening, unfortunately, on a daily basis. And in my defense, this and the next three posts were written two weeks ago, it's just taken me this long to get my internet sorted.


It’s probably been proven – or just listed as one of Murphy’s Laws – that the best way to ensure that one is compelled to do something is to declare categorically that one will not do it. Somehow I failed to realize that, having flow in to Heathrow, I would have to either spend a great deal of money to change my port of departure or else fly out of Heathrow. So I found myself for the second time this month lugging my trans-Atlantic suitcase through the underground, thankfully sans cold this time, but blessed with a semi-torrential rain that thoroughly drenched me and my case while running from train to tube to train again. 

The plan was to land in the U.S. on Friday morning in time to be whisked to a wedding rehearsal, then the actual wedding on Saturday, a hurried packing and disposal of gifts on Sunday, and be whisked back to the Airport by lunchtime in order to land in Norwich around breakfast, to hopefully spend the day acquiring groceries and working through the week’s assignments in time for workshop on Tuesday. Everyone I’ve mentioned the trip to goes a little goggle-eyed at the timetable, but I get so keyed up over flying I haven’t really considered the thing in its entirety. My job is to get through customs, stay upright, sober, and dry-eyed through the ceremony, change out the contents of my suitcase as quickly as possible – in retrospect, leaving all of my warm clothes behind with the intention of bringing them over on this trip was a trifle misguided – and get to the airport once again with my baggage of appropriate weight and, hopefully, containing nothing exceptionally illegal. Though I look forward to the day that I can no longer fly and am therefor set free to write an essay on things I've not had impounded from my checked luggage, but that's for another time...

And now a word about food.

We generally think of presents as showy things: jewelry, clothes, exotic or expensive or big things, at the very least impressive things, but the best presents seem to be the smallest. The exotic seems to be available anywhere, but the mundane is not, or not affordably at least. Wine gums. Crunchy bars. Polos. The Swedish cider Kate and I grew addicted to while we lived in Reading. Stick-on Soles. Marmite. Marmite. More Marmite. A massive tin of ghee that will hopefully be let through customs because it’s the closets thing to butter my little sister can eat and at home it’s too expensive. 99p tubes of henna paste, also for my sister, because she can’t eat candy.

While I was here for undergrad my entire house, gathered around the kitchen table for dinner or just to drink, would wax poetic about the junk food of home. Kraft dinner. In–n–Out burgers. Real Mexican food. Root Beer. Bad Chinese thick with cornstarch and swimming in MSG. Oreos. Strawberry Twizzlers. The last I craved so badly I actually e-mailed the company, after failing to find a way to mail order the candy, asking if they distributed to the UK, if they might one day distribute to the UK, if they would perhaps consider dropping a ton or so of Twizzlers – not Red Vines, the two taste nothing alike – on 153 Whiteknights as an act of mercy to a poor student. They never got back to me.

Going home only lengthened the list of treats to miss. We whined about the lack of cider, or cider that didn’t taste like apple juice, water, piss, vinegar. No more pasties. No more coke or candy made with real sugar. No more English candy, full stop. Ribena. Digestives. Toasted brie and bacon sandwiches smothered in cranberry sauce bought in a train station halfway between Reading and some soon-to-be-explored town. Real bacon. Tea so strong it formed a scum on the surface of the cup. Lychee juice. Nine different types of cream, and goat’s milk whenever I wanted it. Being able to afford Halal lamb, fresh fish, and French cheeses on a student’s budget. In the year and a half that it took me to get back to England, I would frequently dream about chocolate-covered flapjacks from the BP near the University and bottles upon bottles of fizzing, sweet elderflower and lime cider.  

Sometime in the first months after we’d landed, when everything was still a little strange, a little off-center, David offered to make me breakfast. It might have been three in the afternoon, or three in the morning - and frequently was, as there’s something about undergrad that makes everyone an insomniac and scrambled eggs especially appealing. Regardless of time of day, he always made me breakfast, because in the Venn diagram of life, “things Sara can eat” and “things a 19 year old male will have in his house” have a very small overlap, at the time containing almost exclusively the value “omelets.” And omelets, to me, are exclusively a breakfast and especially a Sunday occurrence.

The first one had rosemary, and marjoram, and garlic in the egg, and in the middle Stilton and mushroom and onion. And corn.

We - my house of American students - had noticed the tendency before: corn on pizza, and in the sandwiches at the BP, and on offer to be put into pretty much anything you wanted, and we all thought it was pretty weird. But you never complain about the contents of a free omelet, especially a free omelet that is being made for you while you sit like a princess on the counter, dripping on the omelet maker’s kitchen floor because it is pissing down outside, interrupting his work because his house is halfway between the train station and your house and you’re just too wet and tired and miserable to go a step farther. 

Omelet makers tend to have a maternal streak, so coming to them soaked and tired and mentioning that you haven’t eaten all day should get you satisfactorily clucked over, wrapped in a blanket while your socks dry on the radiator, and sat down somewhere warm.

I don’t say it because it was free: Stilton-mushroom-sweetcorn omelet is tasty. And at the time it was one of the weirdest things I’d eaten - this being the week after I’d roasted a lamb’s brain whole in our communal oven and dragged Kate to the local Japanese joint to keep me company while I sucked down sea urchin ovaries raw. It was a cultural difference. We came from the U.S., land of corn syrup and cornstarch and corn derivative in pretty much everything, but we couldn’t warm to the idea of fresh corn on pizza.

The afternoon before I flew back for the wedding, in between plowing away at “Heart of Darkness” for the seventh time and reading my workshop pieces, I nipped out for a sandwich. A salami sandwich because salami must have crack in it, with all the salad they had on offer because I’d been lax recently about getting my five a day. Halfway through, a kernel of sweet corn tumbled out onto my skirt, and I remembered that first omelet. At some point in the time since, corn on everything had stopped being odd. It had been obtrusively sweet, slightly crunchy, that first time. This time, I hadn’t even registered its presence on the salad bar.

When thrust into a new environment, sometimes the only comfort to be had is knowing that, sooner or later, it will all be familiar.