[Libby]

346 words excluding title

Learned Habits

Her flatmate said she wanted a chat, about the apartment. She called it an apartment but with its beige kitchen units, its shower over the bath, its dingy paintwork, it was an old-fashioned flat.

Both women were in their early twenties.

Jess sat down on the sofa. The sofa, said the flatmate. Its fabric was threadbare on the arms and cushions. Jess had the skills to make new covers. She could mend the sofa. Please.

They’d had this conversation before. Again, Jess explained it was hard to find the right fabric even though they’d already agreed on something like the old one. She didn’t explain that her job at the bank was boring, her friends were drifting away and her life had petrified. That the shabby flat was claustrophobic. Couldn’t say the flatmate no longer seemed a friend, that it was hard to relate to someone with an exciting career in advertising, a loving partner and a bursting social diary. Didn’t say that the wide horizons of the flatmate’s life were too bright to bear.

Jess smiled. The flatmate sighed and a few days later cooked a lasagne so they could eat in. The job in advertising was tiring and quite often she didn’t get back in time for a meal at all but she’d made a special effort. They needed, she said, to talk.

They sat on the sofa with trays on their knees. The lasagne was delicious. The flatmate had asked Jess to buy paint to redecorate the living room. Was there any update on this? she asked. After all, the flatmate would do most of the painting herself. Jess only needed to –

Jess said she hadn’t had time, and smiled.

The flatmate’s face was dull with disbelief. She was almost pale with it. Jess’s behaviour rasped at her endurance. But she didn’t say anything. It hadn’t worked before when some slight criticism had left Jess sulking for days.

Jess pushed aside most of her lasagne and enjoyed her own smile and the fib about not having time. The lie fizzed like an assault.

[Libby]

Congratulations, Doug. Sounds like you’re on a roll. It’s lovely having that feeling of not wanting to stop.

[Libby]

Congratulations @seagreen. I love the voice in your story.

[Libby]

Untitled

And the theme for this evening is Armageddon. Car after car heads west into London under a roseate sky, a bursting bloom, seepage of orange and crimson, a lure like a turn-on.

I drive. We all drive.

Earlier today, Clare’s voice on the phone.

– Who is Emily?

Emily. Emily naked.

– Dunno. Why d’you ask?

– You left your office mobile behind. It rang. Your office number. I answered because I thought it would be you.

I was in the office when she told me this. At my desk I searched my keyboard for a grasp at normal. Caps lock and qwerty.

The cars in this queue stretch like a narrow audience in front of a screen but a few drivers come the other way – night workers going to all the offices in the suburbs. Most people agree it’s better to work in the ’burbs where each building has its patch of greenness and there are soothing lakes to walk around, keeping everyone cool.

We day workers are so calm we lose track. I forgot my phone and Clare has found out. When this happened last time she made a threat.

I look through the windscreen. These sunsets are quite common, and Clare and I watch them from our apartment opposite the British Museum. The view of them is interrupted by buildings but living in London is cheap and although we don’t see the sun sink low we do see its flare. All our neighbours love the way the sky’s hugeness is like a gift. The space in the suburbs isn’t the same and we come home for real life.

To recognise what home means to us, the floodlights playing the walls of the Museum are coloured like a rosy sunset. The colours slide across the steps and the portico. During the day, pinks, reds and yellows shine from the flowers in beds dug between the street and the Museum. The roses crowding together and growing up arches are a favourite with most people, and a public vote picked the most comforting varieties: China Blush, American Pillar and Peace.

I don’t know what’s right or wrong but understanding politics is difficult and sex is easier. It’s easier even though everyone should be in a couple and single life is made difficult.

When I get home Clare will throw me out.

Emily already has a partner.

I drive. We all drive.

398 words

[Libby]

Congratulations @Janette! I really enjoyed your story. And I loved @Athelstone’s too. So creepy …

[Libby]

I’m impressed by your research @kazg

My mother used to read books by Monica Dickens, Charles’s great-granddaughter (just checked that one on Wikipedia 🙂 ). I enjoyed some of them too when I was a teenager. I don’t know if anyone still reads Monica Dickens.

I also enjoy your blog posts on https://www.karenginnane.com/

[Libby]

Thank you for this post, Richard. I didn’t know the Manchester-Liverpool route was the first intercity connection. My WIP features the Manchester Ship Canal in the 1930s. I believe, though I haven’t checked my notes, that the Port of Manchester docks had the largest private railway system in the country at that time.

Thank you for the pronunciation guide! One of my few skills, although it can hardly be called that, is knowing how to pronounce a fair bit of Welsh. When younger, I had Welsh-speaking flatmates. My partner also speaks the language a little and puts me right when I go wrong.

[Libby]

I agree with all you say, Jules. It’s especially worrying that schools will teach misleading literature.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Libby.

[Libby]

Looking for Paradise

“… it was the one-eared cat from next door, a noted flâneur in other gardens.”
To the North, Elizabeth Bowen

From the window of the flat where I’m living, I look down on a dull garden. There’s a lawn with shrubs around it, and from up here the bushes are fat and green but bare soil dries between them. The shrubs flower sometimes but never in sync and I can’t say the garden is abundant. This summer its owners, a couple as old as my parents, have several times invited me downstairs for a glass a wine. With one of their diffident smiles, either the husband or wife – they copy the smile from each other – tells me I might enjoy the coolness. They mean the garden.

So we sit in canvas chairs with cushions behind us where the canvas has stretched. We don’t all want, says the husband, to get backache. I don’t say I’ve never had backache. In the shade of their garden umbrella the husband stretches forward towards the table and pours the sweet rosé because the wife has chilled it in the fridge and carried it out on a tray with glasses and they are an equitable couple. The wife says the rosé is such a nice colour and I wonder silently why she doesn’t plant some pink flowers in the bare soil.

We watch a cat jump down from the garden wall. It stretches out several metres away in a patch of sun. They are so calming, says the wife, and the husband says this cat has been in the wars. I say yes, not wanting to remain silent. I think about how, from the flat, I can see into the gardens on either side, crammed with big, rich flowers, with climbers on trellises, with shrubs bearing different coloured blooms and leaves.

The cat, says the wife, knows all the gardens around here. Its own garden often has children playing, running around, calling out. The cat likes sanctuary. She gives me one of those smiles.

From the flat I’ve heard these children as if distantly or through glass, even when the window is open. Their voices are light-filled and energetic and full of plans. Let’s do this, they say, let’s see if – . I listen with the attention of someone wanting the distance between me and their garden to shrink, someone wishing for plans.

396 words including title and quote

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Libby.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Libby.

[Libby]

I outline before I start by knowing the probable ending or at any rate an ending I’m heading for – it could change though hasn’t done so far. And I know what the midpoint or turning point will be – the tightening up when the main character(s) are stuck with what’s happened and have to deal with it in a focused way. This applies to short fiction as well as novels. In my current novel in progress there are three characters whose stories are seen from their own points of view. They each have a midpoint in their own stories. All three stories have to weave together so I had to plan roughly how and when this would happen.

That’s pretty much it on the planning front, though I did decide geography early on. Where do the three characters live and how does that affect their trajectories? Two live together, which makes life easier, but that relationship has to have its own dynamic or else it would be boring.

The rest I make up as I go but that does include brief chapter plans and updating them as I firm up the story and check that it’s on course. Some of the timing of meetings and other events has changed as I’ve tightened the draft as a whole. This isn’t a particularly efficient way of doing things but it does prevent me getting bored. It means there is still plenty to think about though several rounds of edits. The aim of the edits is to reach the point where all I’m doing is improving the sentences, phrases and the occasional word.

[Libby]

Congratulations, Squidge! I really enjoyed your story and everyone else’s too. Thank you, Jill, for the themes and the comments.

[Libby]

MIDSUMMER MADNESS

Mia and Danny’s cottage had a petite living-room. Mia was tall with long limbs. She stood with her arms open wide.

Danny asked, ‘Why are you being so theatrical?’

‘I’m not.’

She realised there was a martyr-ish aspect to the pose and perhaps a hint of upcoming transformation. This was good; it could mean something. She must tell Danny about the yearning, about the intangible need to find something, to be someone – .

In front of the window she held one hand floating above the TV and the other not far from the door. Blocking her own light, she saw her shadow blur the hearth rug. That was it! Her life wasn’t fully engaged; it had more potential. Danny, as usual, sat there staring, and it was clear he didn’t even begin to understand.

She must visualise a psychic space, an inner wide horizon, work out how to explain it all to him.

The effort of thought made her arms wave up and down. And in the cottage it was like standing in a small lift, the kind with no mirrors. Blank beige walls on all sides.

Danny, silent, was ignored in this groping for meaning. Mia sensed some kind of path. She wouldn’t mention to him the word “journey”. It would only make him groan.

‘By the way,’ said Danny, ‘next door are going camping while the days are at their longest.’

The following evening she walked into next door’s back garden and found her neighbour lugging a couple of folded canvas chairs from the shed.

‘I’m just loading the car,’ said the woman, a strand of hair getting in her eyes.

‘Shall I keep an eye on things while you’re gone?’ said Mia. ‘You never know.’

But never know what?

The woman squinted at the unmown lawn and the tall weeds climbing up the roses. ‘If you want to.’

Mia felt an odd vibration.

The next evening, alone, she returned to the garden. The roses were pink, yellow and orange, all large and double flowered. Their petals were a psychedelic swirl. The long stems clambered up the house and the fence and hung over the garden. Mia, feeling dizzy, buzzing slightly, lay down, a starfish on the grass.

From above, roses looked down at her.

Danny’s voice came over the fence. ‘Mia?’

She didn’t answer. The rose scent was a gateway. She could be someone else.

400 words including title

[Libby]

This forum is a great idea, Andrew.

Re show-or-tell, I can’t add much to what’s already been said so well. The only thing I can think of is that sometimes, even with telling, you might want to write quite descriptively. Emma Darwin gives an example in the showing and telling post Jane mentions.

[Libby]

The character questionnaire. I’m with Richard. I don’t doubt they’re great if you find them useful but for me they are disheartening.

The other ‘favourite’ which sends my spirits groundwards is the implication, sometimes a very thinly-veiled instruction, that creative prose should learn from film or TV. If studying that medium helps fire creativity, terrific. But surely the important things to consider are prose’s ability to do things visual media can’t, and – not least if you want to be published – the zeitgeist. Screen drama may reflect the current mood or sometimes lead it but the mood is still a separate and wider thing.

Sorry that sounds a bit tub thumpy. It’s a little beef of mine which everyone is free to ignore 🙂

[Libby]

I’m pleased the critique was useful, Jill.

I forgot to link names, and as we haven’t heard from @squidge here’s a direct contact.

[Libby]

All these entries are wonderful! Goodness, it has been hard to choose a winner. I love the way they all capture the detail of immediate surroundings at the same time as linking to a wider world, and how each one answers the competition’s brief in such interesting ways. All these pieces show acute sensibilities and curiosity, and I really enjoyed them.

For instance, in Sandra’s poem(s) these verses are among my favourites:

Frowning to stay upright
I dissuade all morning greetings
and omit to post the letters
I diverted for

Recycling bags
straight-sided and close-packed
along the half-dark pavement edge
An instant, urban Giorgio Morandi

This is so distilled it feels perfect. I like ‘omit’ rather than the more obvious ‘forget’. I like the Morandi reference, the feeling of the thingyness of things and how we see and interpret them. And, elsewhere in the poem, the light humour, the clouds pink and blue hedging their bets regarding gender, and the woman searching for clothes. What has she been up to?

The narrative voice and a sense of character is also clear in this verse:

Giant strides (bigger than mine)
and an apparently levitating dog
allow me to play detective.

The whole poem is very impressive.

In her prose Squidge captures our current moment in which any kind of travelling, even a casual walk, has been affected by coronavirus. The touch is light but the messages are clear: how do we and our communities respond? The problems and our reactions are noted with just enough emphasis to let the reader know what’s happening but without being heavy handed. I love the images too. ‘Hot grey asphalt, its dull top layer peeled back by sun and tyres …’ – the exactness, not overdone, is so effective. And: ‘Noticing – properly – the details on buildings, the individuality expressed among a street full of the similar.’ What a lovely example of telling it slant, of a subtle metaphor for the way the lockdown has overridden so much of our individuality but how we’re still here among all the rules and limitations.

Another thing I especially enjoyed was Squidge’s portrayal of wildlife or garden life. I can see she really knows what she’s talking about. None of the incongruous pairings of plants or confused flowering times that sometimes appear even in well-regarded published novels.

The winner, after much deliberation, is Jill. I think memories of childhood, whether in memoir or fiction, are especially hard to write well. That’s not to suggest any other form is easy but to me childhood recollections often feel burdened with the back projections of the adult writer; it can seem a particular struggle to have quite enough control or distance. There’s none of that problem here. The child comes across as clearly as if she is speaking herself. And I think what’s especially clever is the dual viewpoint, the early insertion of ‘ We children do not understand she is ill.’

So we know there’s an adult voice too in the background but it’s not speaking too loudly. The child is vivid: ‘On the top road I scatter sad thoughts and conjure up the seaside …’ The vocabulary feels like that of an adult yet it would be understood by a nine-year-old and possibly even written by her, or some of it at any rate. I like that uncertainty, the merging of two perspectives that’s part of how memory works.

Congratulations to everyone for such excellent entries. Over to you, Jill 😊

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Libby.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Libby.

[Libby]

Ten days left for anyone thinking about entering the May monthly Den competition 🙂

[Libby]

Thank you @Raine and everyone, this is a lovely surprise! I enjoyed the challenge of writing some non-fiction. I loved everyone else’s entries too. A captivating variety as always, and such good writing.

I’ll go away now and think of a theme for the May competition.

[Libby]

The Portrait

In the mid 1980s I bought a Victorian water-colour portrait of a young woman: anonymous, unfinished, unsigned. In the window of a London antique shop the half-profile head and shoulders were almost life size but only her face was complete. I stood on the pavement and dithered. Did I like this picture?

Part of the problem was her gaze. Downwards to somewhere beyond the oval frame, was it thoughtful or dully passive? What’s more she was dressed as a Roman, or perhaps an ancient Greek, and looking like a model for a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The internet says Alma-Tadema’s oil paintings are regaining interest but to me those handsome heroes and attractive young women, grouped around pillars or Roman baths, will always be kitsch. The skies are so blue, the flowers so candy pink, the ethos too unappealing.

I stopped on the pavement, undecided, probably as still as the portrait. Gold ribbon twice bound her dark curls, and a pencilled neckline implied a plain shift dress. The posture of her shoulders – the pencil outline continued – indicated one arm relaxed by her side, the other clasping something large. Cliché suggested a water pitcher. There was a strong hint of handmaiden, a bit player.

Finances came into it; I’d be disingenuous to leave that out. The anonymity made the picture cheap so I gave it more thought. Not quite finished, her dark-brown brown curls were a little blurry, her neck’s skin tones were too flat for life. The balance of her head on her shoulders was perfect. The face – features, shadows and light-catching cheeks – were precise, delicate, and pale as if not getting enough sunlight. An artist’s model stuck in studios. The wash behind her was grey and looked rainy – quite London. She had a city pallor, a hint of hair on her top lip and shadows under her eyes. That decided me. She was real.

In the years since then she has grown on me, especially now I spend more hours writing and therefore thinking. She is thinking too. And a painting interrupted, someone else’s work in progress or a project given up: a familiar part of creation. Then that message that this portrait, better than a finished picture, catches time in the moment work stopped. It’s my reminder that writing is about portraying time – its passing, its signifiers, its sense of a future pulling like a thread.

398 words exc title

[Libby]

Congratulations, Raine. Your story has made me shiver with anxiety! Well done – fabulous writing.

Thank you John for setting the competition. I’m sorry March passed me by in a blur, what with one thing and another, and I didn’t manage an entry.

[Libby]

Great news, Janette! So pleased for you.

[Libby]

I really enjoyed these stories. Each one had a compelling premise, good narrative drive and strong writing. All were serious contenders. In these circumstances picking a winning comes down, in part at least, to personal preferences over and above the quality of the prose. The latter was high in all cases.

I’ve added a few editorial points in my comments in the hope these are useful if you’re going to be developing the stories further. They’re only my opinions. As always with feedback, take what’s useful and ignore what isn’t.

The winner I’ve chosen is New Day by @johnalty. There’s such an atmosphere of history and anticipation in a few lines. I loved the sense of place and the feeling of a world, or in this case a nation, beyond the page. In the final paragraph Daniel’s character starts coming to the fore. I felt this could be a complete story or the beginning of something longer

If I have any quibbles they’re only that I couldn’t picture the ritual handshakes – a case here for show rather than tell – and the bracketed translations of amandla and awethu broke the spell a little. I can see the words need explanation; weaving clarification into the narrative would, I think have worked better. But these are small qualifications. The piece jumped off the page.

Taking the other entries in order, in Sandra’s @sandradavies entry, I was hooked by Luke asking when he’d get to see the wedding present. My curiosity remained piqued throughout this scene. There was a good sense of place too. As an aside, I’m always keen on mentions of big A roads – the combination of the mundane and the specific that we’re all familiar with in real life. And this story comes across as subtle and well capable of depicting complicated relationships and emotions. Occasionally I felt the narrative became a little too cryptic, perhaps because this is part of a longer story.

There’s more wonderful world building in Enter the Darkness by @raine. There’s a clear sense of a whole society, and the descriptions are so evocative that this piece could be a poem. I loved the premise – an event which is familiar but which, because of its significance, heralds a new period when happenings could be dictated by darkness. Who knows what might occur before they see the sun again. ‘We watch the horizon bleed,’ is wonderful. It captures the essence of the piece and conveys the point of view of a whole group of people, or the adults at least. I thought such a key phrase would benefit from being in a sentence on its own so the reader can savour it for a moment. Overall, there’s both a quietness and a sense of psychological complexity in this story. The writing captures the surface and the depths of life in one short piece.

The protagonist in A Spill of Tea by @janette is immediately attractive and I was rooting for her right from the start, whatever the story was going to be. The style is relaxed but gets its points across in pithy phrases such as, ‘I came to hate tomorrow.’ Lovely, economical writing with a sharp moment of change and character development, and depiction of a ‘baddy.’ I also liked the title a lot. It has a sense of movement, of something problematic happening. As such I thought it made putting ‘Of tea’ in its own paragraph unnecessary. In general the whole thing felt very satisfying. As a small point, I thought the final sentence wasn’t need as the previous one made a very good ending to the story

Shades of the Prison House – what a great title @janeshuff – was such a touching tale. The young boy was so well portrayed, there is a very effective twist at the end and the sentences were pleasingly tight too. The third paragraph in particular is so well written. The point that having no control of the pace of the day being a worry for a young child – well, anyone really – is an interesting one. If there’d been space I’d have enjoyed seeing that fear explored a bit more. But there was plenty to keep me interested – the unsympathetic mother, for instance. A very effective insight into a young child who loves nature more – presumably – than his fellow humans.

Finally Hilary’s @hilary novel extract is wonderfully assured. The painful gap between Rachel’s grief and Gail’s inability to help her is so well portrayed, so life-like. I was with Rachel every moment as she tried to cope. In addition, the sensory details are excellent. I could smell the funereal lilies and feel the rush of fresh air when she went outside. A very small quibble is that I thought ‘Yelled’ was unnecessary and perhaps an exclamation mark at the end of ‘I just want it not to have happened’ would have marked the loss of control more emphatically. It could, perhaps, portray Rachel’s teetering on the edge of this awful abyss in a slightly more distinct way. But a very sensitive and restrained scene overall, beautifully written.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Libby.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Libby.

[Libby]

Dear All,

A reminder for would-be or thinking-about-it monthly comp entrants that we’re six days from the end of the month on 29th February.

[Libby]

I just posted something which seems to have disappeared. Probably my error.

In brief, I liked this Literary Friction podcast about how we judge people by what they read.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/literary-friction-minisode-three/id1000387053?i=1000433931359

[Libby]

A brief reminder for potential participants that we’re half way through the month. Though as it’s a leap year we do get an extra day.

[Libby]

An author’s hypocrisy, offensiveness, crassness or general liverish misanthropy doesn’t normally put me off reading them. It depends what the benefits might be. Good writing, insights I might otherwise not acquire, my own curiosity – all are reasons to go ahead. There are some blocks, and adding money to the Roald Dahl estate is one of them. Supporting the finances of certain politicians is another. And I won’t be buying a copy of American Dirt but that’s more because I don’t want to support the publisher, who should have known better what the risks were and after the furore perhaps now does!

Personally, once this sort of thing is dealt with I decide whether it’s too irritating to give an author more of my time. This can seem an illogical category. Mid 20th century American white men and their sexism/somewhat underdeveloped views: John Updike no thanks, Philip Roth OK sometimes, James Salter, will read anything he’s written.

British Graham Greene, also no thanks. Greene seemed very uptight about disability, and when he included it in Dr Fischer of Geneva and the Bomb Party and decided a successful man with a bent spine must want to kill himself just because of the spine, as someone disabled myself I was troubled by the influence such a well known author could have on the perceptions I had to grow up with. In the same vein, Beware of Pity by Stephan Zweig is the only book I’ve ever wanted to throw out of the window. The novel itself is a melodrama but was made into a Hollywood film. These things have influence.

But I wouldn’t advise anyone else against reading them. In fact with Beware of Pity I’d like to know what people nowadays think of it. Zweig’s writing style is oddly seductive. It’s Jeffrey Archer’s favourite book – take from that what you will! I keep meaning to give it another go myself and give it more analysis.

There’s a different argument about contemporary authors dealing with whatever topic they want to address. For me it depends how much awareness they bring to it and, if necessary, how much research – which might include whose toes they could be treading on. And perhaps how sensitive their publisher is. But making authors nervous isn’t helpful.

[Libby]

A good question though, John.

[Libby]

Many thanks, @daedalus.

Having thought about it a bit more, I’m going to restrict entries to one per person.

Although lots of competitions allow multiple entries I think that as the Den monthly competitions are small, double entries would skew the chance of winning too much in a double entrant’s favour. If several people were likely to post two entries it might not be a problem but I suspect most Denizens only want or have time to post one piece per month.

I hope this is OK @johnalty. I’m delighted the competition has prompted two stories from you. I know they’ll both be good. If you’d like to post the second story elsewhere on the Den for feedback or just for us to enjoy, that would be great. Or save it up for another time.

If Denizens feel it would be right in future to allow double entries in the competitions that is something to discuss but for this month we’ll stick to one per writer.

[Libby]

Personally I think that would be fine, John. I can’t see anything in the rules against it. I don’t think you’d need a pseudonym either.

But before you go ahead I’ll check with a higher authority. @daedalus – over to you, please!

[Libby]

Thank you, @Janette !

[Author]

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