@libby
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I love your story, Seagreen. Congratulations!
Janette, Alex, Sandra – all great stories. Thanks for setting the competition, Squidge.
When My Favourite Employee Really Gets Going, He Quotes Churchill
(300 words)
I stop in Steve’s doorway. He looks up from his laptop. Angled at his side, his PC screen glows with the photos and primary colours of our online edition.
At the opticians recently, he told the young woman he’s a journalist on the local rag and when off duty he reads classic French and Russian novels. She’s given him glasses big enough for windscreen wipers.
“That man charged with bigamy,” I say, propped against the doorframe. “He’s been convicted. How about a piece on bigamy?”
Pause for Steve’s cheek blowing. I wait for a complaint about lifestyle columns. Steve is what both romantics and cynics call an old-fashioned newspaper man, which in his case includes his physique. He takes more care of his job than himself. It’s not his grey hair but his roundness. His wife wants him to retire and take up gardening because pushing a wheelbarrow will do him good.
But he doesn’t complain about my suggestion. “Michael Garton, 45, of Winslade Road?” he says. “A-ha, not just bigamy. Financial irregularities with the council’s lighting contract.”
“The same Garton? That fraud isn’t definite.”
“The council was overcharged for street lamps and Garton worked for the lighting supplier.”
Steve rubs thumb and forefinger together. His next silent message is just as clear. A smile.
“Time for some interviews?” he says.
This is how he works on me. He knows I know he’s our best proper journalist, as he calls himself. We both know he loves investigating the apparently never-ending combo of dodgy deals and local politics.
“Go on, then,” I say.
On one of his corkboards is a card from colleagues depicting Sherlock Holmes and his pipe.
Steve picks up his mobile. As a phone rings out somewhere on his contacts’ list, he says, “Beaches, landing grounds, never surrender.”
Congratulations @squidge A fabulously tense story.
Thank you Sandra for setting such an interesting challenge.
Picture Gap
296 words
The woman standing at the dining table carries an unsmiling, get-to-work concentration. Her hair is grabbed into an updo clip, and beneath a lit pendant lampshade she shifts paperbacks from the tabletop into a box, tucking away volumes of sky-blue, white and pink. Beach reads.
The woman, or someone, has chosen Scandi décor for this room. Waxed wood, bone-coloured walls, a straight-edged sofa, no ornament bar a painting of cornered shapes. The space would be soulless but for her, her shoulders square with energy. She seals the box with brown sticky tape, slaps her palms down onto it and tips her head back. Her ribs swell in slow inspirations as if she’s on holiday by the sea.
Outside, a car blazes its headlights through the open slats of a blind. The brightness flattens her features until it is switched off and a man walks in, seeming ready to help though he doesn’t remove his coat. The woman acknowledges him with a nod. While she lifts white dinner plates from a sideboard he picks up a half-full binbag and slides his arm inside. The woman frowns, she pauses. He pulls out a photograph, a flash of white, the cone of a wedding dress. He is shaking the photo at her, its torn edge quivering.
The woman’s mouth is half open but she doesn’t speak, only stares at him rummaging in the bag and finding the picture’s top half. He breaks off some sticky tape.
Her finger is jabbing towards the front door, her mouth is a wide mechanical run of words.
The man drops both halves of the photo, still unjoined, on to the table. With his jaw clamped, he leaves.
The picture’s rip is horizontal. In both halves, parts of the man and woman are touching.
Some more thought on influences. Every novel and short story I’ve enjoyed is an influence in a composting kind of way. That’s not very helpful here though.
Carys Davies’ short stories. I tried to improve one of my own stories this morning and for inspiration I once again looked at the openings of several of hers.
Katherine Mansfield. Same thing. The naturalness of her in media res beginnings when mine are so awkward.
D H Lawrence. The specificity of detail. The seriousness of tone. I forgive him the daftness.
Elizabeth Bowen. More details, especially domestic ones. And general brilliance of description. I have an ongoing note to myself: work on the important, telling detail. Bowen is often funny too.
Deirdre Madden. The coolness of her prose. So cool that in Molly Fox’s Birthday Molly never appeared and it didn’t matter.
Kevin Barry. When I’m being rubbish at the rhythms of my sentences I try to imagine what Barry would do with them – apart from ignore them.
Tessa Hadley. You can do what you want with adverbs and POV changes. Just get them right.
I agree, John, this is a difficult one. I’ll have to think about it.
Some influence comes from writers whose style I don’t like. I make mental notes not to do things like ‘whoever’ (they’ll remain nameless :-))
Then there’s the memory of a feeling a book created at the time I read it. They include authors I couldn’t or don’t feel drawn to read now. Thomas Hardy’s prose, for instance, feels like an effort too far these days but like you I loved him when younger and I hanker after evoking place and tradition as meaningfully as he did. I still think of those novels frequently.
What terrific stories. So much horror too. I began to wonder if the topic of building work had raised deeply traumatic memories!
@clebs ‘Behind Closed Curtains’ is very atmospheric, rich in detail and perfectly titled. I felt a few words could be cut, such as the second mention of Jimmy’s bowl, and I wasn’t sure if I got the story’s message. Was Marjorie’s house the one meant to be renovated? Did it catch fire and the electrician die trying to rescue her? I’m sorry if I’ve obtusely missed the point. Overall I liked the story a lot.
@athelstone ‘Brutal’ is another great title, the play on the word. The use of dialogue to describe pouring concrete is brilliant, nightmarish and emphasised so effectively in the last line. It sent a shiver like horror in a Hitchcock film. My only small criticism was what I felt were a few unnecessary words: ‘with rage’; ‘then’; ‘with terror’. But I’m not going to forget this story. It could give me bad dreams 🙂
@alex ‘Fallen’ is another wonderful title full of meaning and potential meaning. The father’s emotions as he tries to do his best are palpable. I think “She looked like her mom, four-years-old and already with the same cute dimples” would be better turned round to, “Four-years-old and already with the same cute dimples, she looked like her mom” to remove the suggestion that mom is four years old. I wasn’t sure if I was meant to find the final sentence chilling but I did and thought it worked very well, making a good story a memorable one. I also felt the story could work well at a slightly longer length if you wanted to show more of the father’s emotional situation, for example – maybe how he feels about his partnership with mom and whether he has any worries there? Only a suggestion, it’s good as it is.
@Janette ‘The Mausoleum’ is a wonderful mix of horror and humour. I love the ironic reference to Romeo and Juliet. I like the clever use of the first paragraph that sets the scene so economically. There’s further background detail worked into the story without feeling rushed. I thought some cutting would be beneficial, such as “This pile … him down” which is beautifully, and to my mind better, expressed in the dialogue that follows it. I thought “claustrophobic” could go too. Overall I’m impressed by how much you’ve portrayed in 300 words. Very enjoyable.
@sandradavies I loved the humour and irony in ‘Right man for the job!’ The voice is very good. My only criticism is that I felt there should be a full stop after ‘Arran-wrapped’. Otherwise I think this is a perfect story. The ending achieves that difficult thing of being a surprise but perfectly logical and I couldn’t find any words to cut!Congratulations, @sandradavies and over to you.
July monthly comp reminder – three more days to post an entry 🙂
Tell a story of building work that suffers some kind of mix up. The wrong site, the wrong builder – anything you like.
Deadline midnight 31st July.
300 words maximum
Hi Janette – feel free to tidy up! I see no reason why software idiosyncrasies and confusions therefrom should affect anyone’s chances in the monthly comp.
I haven’t yet read your submission so I won’t know what you change. I think you can delete the original post if you wish.
Thank you @Seagreen ! This is a lovely surprise. The standard of entries is so high – I loved all the stories.
Thank you too @sandradavies for your congratulations.
Right, now I must try to think of a comp theme that will be as good as Seagreen’s …
398 words exc title
Content warning: threat of terminal illnes
The Road to the Hospital I’ll be Visiting Tomorrow
The old sports model is red and open-topped, a Noddy car for the middle-aged and young elderly. How sniping I am today. From my hatchback I criticise the driver’s grey hair sticking out from his baseball cap. The passenger wears what looks like a gardening hat, old string knotted under her chin. Not that tying down is needed; we’ve come to a halt. On the motorway but motionless, my clawing hope to be somewhere else grows by the minute except that somewhere else, even in the philosophical sense, isn’t available.
While we are pinned here the couple must be my distraction, make themselves useful. He has one hand curled round the steering wheel; the other rests on the gear lever until he turns his wrist to see his watch and she lifts her wristwatch to do the same. He takes hold of her hand and she puts hers over his. Unlike me they each wear a wedding ring and, as the three parallel queues start to move, I believe – am convinced, with nervous imagination – they should have life jackets and helmets. The lorries behind us are rumbling and flat fronted as mallets. Air brakes hiss. The couple in the Noddy car are already hardly off the tarmac.
The woman reaches into a fabric bag and takes out a letter showing the NHS logo: blue rectangle – don’t think of coffins – and stamped white letters. I can’t see which one of them the letter is for but it jolts me. When the traffic moves freely she puts the letter away.
My hatchback has crumple zones and head rests. It has closed windows and air conditioning to exclude damaging fumes. At my exit the red car indicates too. I let them move in front and we speed along the main road until they slow for the turn to the hospital where I don’t want to slow behind them for superstitious reasons. But there’s no room to overtake, traffic is coming the other way.
The woman lifts off her hat, hair glossy in a smart French twist. Glamour is re-assuring. Perhaps they’re visiting someone or are here for some minor nuisance – home by teatime. Perhaps I should think about how most lives are long and mine will be too.
I watch as, between one blocky hospital building and another, the little car drives forwards, open to the elements and brighter than blood.
Richard, did you hear the recent item on Radio 4 on the anniversary of the loss of the Penlee lifeboat? Unexpectedly they played the last call between the lifeboat captain and Falmouth coastguard. The shock of hearing it made me weep.
Thank you, Richard. As I read your account I wondered about Hawthorn’s personality and possible similarities to some of the heroes of the two world wars – talented and determined men whose skills and outlook were sometimes too abrasive for civilian life. This piece seems to confirm that On This Day: Mike Hawthorn, Just what DID happen on 22nd January 1959? | HistoricRacingNews.com
My mother’s childhood autograph book contained Mike Hawthorn’s signature. She wasn’t interested in motor sport but her father was keen on all activities to do with cars, so I suppose that’s how the signing came about. I assume Grandpa didn’t get beer thrown over him or she might have said.
On the lighter side of motoring enthusiasm, Grandpa gave me my first driving lesson. I was five or six. He sat me on his knee on the driver’s seat and I held the steering wheel while he drove along the quiet road outside his home.
Congratulations on Action this Day, @Daedalus
I look forward to reading the paperback when it comes out.
What a lovely place and beautiful countryside, Richard. I’m not surprised you like it. I can’t comment on St Patrick, being very ignorant when it comes to saints, but I enjoyed watching the re-enactment and the story of the Romans.
So many mining areas have been returned to nature that it’s now impossible to fully imagine what they used to look like. It’s interesting too how surnames in small, or not very small, communities sometimes reflect the arrival of miners and other workers from different parts of Britain and Europe. History threading through current lives.
I use reviews too. They’re not my only resource when making choices but they let me know what’s out there in general – what some of the trends and hits are, and the interesting new names.
Then there are the books I want to read because I’ve read the author’s previous book(s).
There are the usual chance factors: browsing in bookshops both new and second hand; recommendations from friends; books by people I know or sort of know. Buying Denizen Hilary Taylor’s debut novel Sea Defences (recommended) led me to buy the publisher’s antipodean bundle – good value for eight books and a way of accessing books from Australia and NZ. If the author is dead I buy second hand. They don’t need the royalties and hopefully it helps the planet.
During the first Covid lockdown I bought some of the books the bookshop happened to have in stock and could post out to customers. I signed up to CB Editions’ deal of a certain number of books delivered over a few months for a set amount of money. When we were all stuck at home this link with the wider world was cheering and apart from, I think, two titles, I let them choose what to send. At that restricted time the link to, and arbitrariness from, a stranger felt important. All the titles were well worthwhile and none of them have gone to the book recycling bank.
Talking of which, the book banks round here have disappeared. The council says recycling banks of any kind attract anti-social behaviour. This, of all things, is affecting my book buying. I mostly read library books but the house has only so much space for anything else and it’s becoming difficult to pass books on. Charities shops have never been very accessible for me. I’m thinking of putting my next lot of unwanted titles in a box on the verge outside the drive with a sign inviting people to take them.
Congratulations @hilary
I’ve ordered a copy of Sea Defences. I’m highly unlikely to be in Suffolk in January but have a great time at the launch.
Congratulations too for the flash win. Does the Bridport site post the winning stories? I couldn’t find any but the site isn’t the easiest to use.
That’s brilliant, Sandra. I still have a couple of books on my TBR list from last year’s festival.
In the end I didn’t sign up for this year’s Edinburgh events as I diverted my money to doing the School — Galley Beggar Press critical reading course.
Thank you for a fascinating blog, Richard.
I don’t know that things improved when coal was nationalised. The Aberfan disaster suggests not but I don’t know the details. It seems that in general workers in all industries had to wait for health and safety legislation and that the general public sill has a long road ahead of applying pressure when it comes to environmental dangers.
As Richard says, this is seems more about style, and a rigid editor, than about the rich possibilities of first-person narrators.
I’m the first to agree that repetition of ‘I’ can be a problem, just as repetition of any word can trip up the reader. And the over-repeated ‘I’ can be hard to get rid of, as I know from my own efforts.
It can also make the reader feel kept at a frustrating distance from the first-person character. Some of the answer lies in goes further inside the protagonist’s head. It’s easier then to cut back on some of the I’s. See the great Emma Darwin
Emma Darwin on psychic distancexIf you don’t already know Emma Darwin’s blog, it’s a treasure trove. It’s only downside is the search function – useless – so when you find a really helpful post (and most are) keep the link or whatever.
Another point is that there are times when an author may want to keep the first-person narrator at a distance so the reader can keep a bird’s eye view of them, so to speak. Have a look at the first page of Asylum by Patrick McGrath. The narrator is pompous, opinionated, and frequently wrong. McGrath wants his readers to judge this man, to think for themselves what’s really going on in this story. He does that by using the character’s pomposity and the frequent use of I, me and my.
Hi @Daedalus
Thanks for taking time out to answer my thoughts.
I hadn’t thought of it that way before, that film/video is better at placing significant information in the background of shots. That’s something that can be difficult in writing — at least I find it difficult — and often requires a setting to be introduced earlier than the action. Obviously film does that too but the written version seems especially analog but also more rationed in order to keep the story moving.
I haven’t seen Heat but will look for some clips.
The whole business of psychic distance is interesting, particularly readers’ and viewers’ varying perceptions of it and their different needs as to what makes a narrative come alive.
PS No need to reply to this unless you want to!
Congratulations @alex . Well deserved.
I loved Ath’s and Knicks’ stories too. So atmospheric and full of life’s complications.
I think ‘potentially static’ probably referenced one of those generalised statements that crop up when creative writing is discussed. There could be a nugget of wisdom in there but as shorthand it’s too cryptic to decipher and I couldn’t reverse engineer it to anything that might be a pitfall we should be aware of. It doesn’t seem to be like the statement, ‘changing POV equals head hopping’, for instance, which often doesn’t add ‘unless you know how to do it.’ So I put the idea out here.
It make me think about staticness — characters who don’t want to change or who want to but can’t. Or just ordinary status quo. Present-continuous tense could help show some of that, keeping the reader in the character’s moment. But as Ath says, there are a thousand ways to avoid present tense being static, and I think that applies to writing in general and it’s the writer who loses narrative drive. I’d love to blame grammar for my own failings, but…
I tried to come up with reasons not to use present tense and couldn’t apart from, as Richard says, the feeling of remove that past tense gives. I enjoy that sense of space and reflection but I don’t miss it if the story isn’t told that way. Like first-person, I suspect present tense can seem simpler to write than it is. When I’m reading, flashbacks have to be handled well or else I forget that a move to past tense isn’t the story’s ‘now’. I can lose track. But that could be because past tense is so familiar. Richard points out that past tense might be natural for historical fiction. I agree but I don’t think it needs to be the default and that point of view has stronger control of the sense of scope. Is tense more about what the writer prefers? In the various meetings between your own mind and the story’s soul which will hopefully make the story work, choice of tense seems among the least complicated. To me, point of view asks a larger number of questions about whatever parameters we want or like.
It is odd. Almost as if the commentator was doing a list for a creative writing course: what are the pros and cons of etc etc. But among the reasons I have for not enjoying a novel or short story, static-ness (?) isn’t among them. Slowness, yes of course, and an apparent lack of narrative thread, and straightforward dullness, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced doldrums. Not really.
Hmm, essay alert — me pontificating. I think Modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf had an excellent grasp on the categories of psychic distance, although they probably didn’t call it that, going instead for stream of consciousness, free indirect style and omniscience. They announced themselves to be influenced by cinema and used it to alter how they portrayed the world in a more chopped-up style. The Victorians also wrote intense locked-in emotion and characters’ wobbly uncertainty about their own perceptions, though – generalisation here – did they tend to use first person rather than third to do it? Their accretion of detail and metaphor to build scenes and emotion can be seen as distant these days, especially if the metaphors are now hard to understand, though I don’t think the best writers can be accused of remoteness. They were keen on handling the differences between close and distant narration.
Dragonflies are increasing Dragonfly species are colonising the UK ‘at a greater rate than ever before’ | Natural History Museum (nhm.ac.uk)
I can’t remember if it was last summer or 2020 that we had dragonflies in the garden even though there are no ponds nearby.
The Big Butterfly Count starts today if you’re interested — and can cope with the heat!
Many thanks for this, Daeds. You sum up very well my feeling about prose vs film: “Film and prose fiction seem to be two media divided by a sort-of common language.” It’s the seem and sort-of which interest me.
“So I think what I was reacting to with Midsommar was that the director, Ari Aster, was finding ways to put us closely within characters’ heads while staying ‘wide’.” This aligns with my thoughts about seeing a correlation between the psychic distance slide and the camera zoom or staggered zoom (thanks for explaining that – I didn’t know about the SZ).
The following may be illogical and mistaken. I don’t watch many movies these days.
I think a correlation doesn’t always exist. To me that’s good news; they’re different art forms and the point is that that they’re, well, different. I just fear it when other commentators on writing use camera shots as examples as if it’s the best, even the only way, to think about psychic distance. A novice writer could have their imagination limited, especially at the far ends of the PD scale of omniscient narration and stream of consciousness. Could any long shot be able to capture something as wide as the opening of Dickens’ Bleak House: “Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.” Maybe it could — I don’t know much about film techniques. At the scale’s other end it seems to be the skills of the actor in conjunction with the camera operative and director which show thought. Close-ups help, but I’m not sure they’re necessary. A character can look confused, panicked, euphoric or whatever and show a series of reactions in a shot that includes, say, another character on either side of them.
The cowboy shot is interesting for being able to show what the cowboy sees, assuming the shot is from behind him, at the same time as a scene-encompassing view for the audience. I’m sure there are examples from non Westerns but I can’t think of any at present. In that case I do see a correlation with level 3 on the psychic distance scale, “Henry hated snowstorms” in John Gardner’s example, putting the reading in both the narrator’s and the character’s point of view, or either of their POVs depending on how we want to see the scene. Or we’re sliding from one to the other.
I like you drawing attention to how the camera POV can be fixed while the characters move in and out of shot. To me it can be very atmospheric, showing the way a house, for example, is a character itself while the human characters move through it and use it in different ways. As you say, it is, “telling its own story or part of a wider story, but which we might not even notice as we concentrate on the characters in the foreground.”
I’m glad you reminded me about James Salter. I hope I’ve remembered this right but I think it’s in Light Years where the narrator comments on the Hudson River that the river is self-cleaning. It’s not of course, but at the time — the 1970s? — rivers were often complacently seen this way, a reason not to do anything about them. If I read it properly, it summed up the character’s thought at that moment, his approach to life in general and the approach of a whole society. There was a panoramic view of attitudes all in one phrase. Of course all this be achieved in film but I think it would need dialogue or foregrounding or something, in addition to views of the river, to present the information so neatly.
Or maybe Light Years has been filmed brilliantly. But thanks for raising the questions about cameras vs words.