Poetry

Even though I've submitted my second TMA the course continues to rumble on and I am knee deep in poetry at the moment. Glorious bonkers poetry.  Now it just so happens that I used to write poems horribly naive poems of teenaged indulgence.

It is weird putting poetry to the forefront of my mind again, I feel like I'm squeezing back into skin I've not used in an awfully long time. I've started drafting three different poems this week and it feels like I've been working muscles I've not used in aeons.

I was tidying up my office/geekspace at home yesterday to tidy away some xmas decs when I paused at my poetry shelf. (Yep studied literature long enough to amass a shelf of poetry) and flicked through some old favourites. All the annotations that I used to make and it was weird, I was that person am I still?

I'm certainly fond of poetry, in a free verse ignore the rules kind of way but I'm not sure if it is who I am now.  The course book lists some ways of generating poems which feel clunky and I'm not sure if I'm generating anything worthwhile.

But on the flipside, it's fun and it is a different way of working, if I could write prose in the same picky way, contrstructing and crafting on a micro level it would drive me mad, but in a 12 line poem it is something else.

Well here's a draft of a poem I wrote today.

Between Two Nowheres

There is a rock, cragged old granite,
Fissures deep and wider than two fingers.
Heavy it dominates the plain.

The sky is open here, a dialogue
of weather converses with the land
Shaping and changing it like opinions
And reasoning win arguments.

Place a hand on the ground flat
Palm down, absorb the resonance
Slow throbbing vibrations, a gong
Last hit millennia ago still reverberating.

There is a path, nothing official
No signs or stiles or steps
Just the memory of a thousand feet
Taking a thousand more steps.

Happy New Year

I think that is is fair to say I really sucked at blogging last year, hard to explain, but the mojo just upped and left and that was a bad thing.

Having said that I've been writing quite a lot since september for my OU course, it is just that it hasn't really been visible to any one but those I've been brave enough to share my work with.

I love writing, I feel that when I reach that zone, I can come up with stuff that entertains and is interesting.  Time as ever is the enemy, I never seem to have enough of it or I seem unable to settle.  I need self discipline and I know from experience I need this in all areas of my life.

So what do I need to do to counter this? Control, that is what I need and I'm taking control of myself this year and giving myself a bit of a talking to on one level and then setting myself reasonable boundaries and rules to help me make the most out of this life I've been given.

I may blog more about that at some point but I feel it's important for me to get into my head what I'm doing first and then share later if I feel that is is appropriate.

I've just submitted my short story to the OU for marking and I'm pleased with it, having never written any science fiction before I wanted to write something that felt honest and authentic, I don't think it's perfect but I do think that it is reasonable if not without flaws.

I hope that my tutor enjoys it, I felt like I've had a rough trot of late with the OU but I'm tenacious and I don't go down that easy.

The next unit is poetry and I have some reservations about the methods that the Big Red Book is suggesting but I'm swallowing the grump and giving it a go.

Yatta!

I've had my results for my Second ETMA in Start Writing Fiction and grab on to something, I got 90% again.

I am naturally thrilled, thrilled because the second ETMA was much longer and had more potential to go wrong, and  also because I am consistent.  What I'm less thrilled about are the comments about comma splicing which I had worked quite hard at removing and had enlisted the help of Phil and Rob in order to try and reign in some of my wild fancies where punctuation is concerned. I need a punctuation guru to guide me because I'm clearly comma blind.  I keep wanting to lengthen sentences and clearly this must stop.

It is far too easy to focus on the bad, because I've done exceptionally well, 90% in such a subjective area has to be hard to come by.  Part of me is dying to know what the others got because inner competitor wants to see where I fit in the bell curve, the final overall grade will be issued mid-march after they have been moderated - I may loose marks then.

So where does this leave me? I know I can write effective stories and those friends who have read these stories have enthused at me about my writing. But again this makes me wibble as I wonder if people are just being nice...  (again rational brain has to step in here and say I've had impartial feedback from a few quarters which has been good though pointing out the commas).

1. I need to stop wibbling, gain confidence by writing more and writing regularly - by doing both of these things I can improve my style and learn where to commas should be and you know, add some full stops in too.

2. Join a writers group, need to find one locally and join, more pressure to write and present and get some interesting feedback and perspective.  Continue to make use of friends who can nit pick and question my decisions and make me make my work better. Rob made a fantastic point about my latest work where I had disengaged from the characters in the short story to drop in background info and he suggested featuring the characters in that background to make it more vivid.

3. Write more, write everyday if I can. Set weekly goals.

Things my tutor said were : This is another excellent read, Jane.  I absolutely raced through it, it was so gripping. Right from the start, I was pulled in. This is boring old Northampton but something strange and alien has happened. Then there is a steady build up of threat and good, detailed description of neglect and poverty.

You give just enough of the back story, bit by bit as we go along for us to understand what is happening but the reasons why you reveal slowly...

Your time shifts are neat and clear and your presentation good except that slight tendency still to link sentences with commas.  I've marked a few.  It can be 'pacey' in action scenes, but not as a regular feature.

I am ridiculously proud of myself, it is something that I can do ;)

If you'd like to read the story, it's found here.

Tenterhooks

I've officially finished my OU short course in start writing fiction.  I'm awaiting the marks of my second assignment and as usual I am bricking it.

It is rather silly, I should have more faith in my own ability, the first assignment result was a huge boost as was the response from my readers.... Somehow that confidence evaporates the moment you submit for assmessment.

I wonder how real writers cope?

Also this week as a small challenge to myself I'm trying to write a 1000 word Zombie story in first person present tense.

Rock on.

On getting unexpected feedback...

I'm always pleased to have someone read my work, it gives me thrills to know that someone is moved by my words and the images that I paint with them.

I don't overly pimp my work, I don't want to force anyone out there to read my words if they don't want to, I'd rather they read them because they were generally interested rather than from a sense of duty.

My long time friend from Uni Emma read my work recently and she enjoyed it and that's lovely, but the needy irrational part of my brain says that Emma only likes it because she's your friend. What a lovely brain I have. That is beside the point, Emma passed on some of my work to one of her friends who I don't know, I can't know as they live in Australia and Emma then passed on her assessment of my writing back to me.

At first, I was dismayed, I like to have a semblance of control as to who get's to read at the moment, I know I'm deluding myself but I cling to it non-the-less. I get butterflies when I let people I know read it anyway, because I feel deep down I want people to like me and like what I do.

This is what the friend of a friend wrote:

From someone who loves writing, I think your friend has a way of just going straight into the heart of the readers and just leaving a mark. That’s how I felt while I was reading her two pieces.

I like how it’s almost feel like real- the characters and that you can feel their pain. I don’t know her but I think she likes to write about pain and hope, and strength. Very intuitive.

She also has a rich depth of vocabulary. I always think it’s very hard to describe something- a place, a person, a movement, etc. to the point Where the readers can feel that you’re actually witnessing it, but she has it.

The only thing that I think might be worth revisiting are some of the sentences can be really long, and can be a bit distracting.. but that’s about it.."

For a while I thought I had lost the ability to write and to write something convincingly but then I thought: if I can move someone I've never met; who has no vested interest in being nice about my work then maybe there's some actual talent there and I just need to apply it.

Yes I have a long way to go, my punctuation and grammar can get a little sketchy but at the heart of what makes a piece of fiction interesting, apparently, that is something I can do.

I'm still not going to pimp my work overly, I'm sure you don't want to hear me banging on all the time, but I'm going to post more of it and I'm going to hone the skills I've got.

More about me

I thought I'd give you a little catch up. This year has been a big year for me to take on new things, I went on a personal development course in the spring which put into a motion a desire within me to do something creative and see where it got me.  Well in true fashion I signed up for an Open University course called Start Writing Fiction

I'm now in my second week of block one and I am loving it.  The course is posing me a number of challenges to write in ways I haven't thought of before and giving me an insight into what established authors do.

It's early days and I've worked through the first block and I'm waiting to publish some of the thoughts on the block website so my fellow tutor group members can read what I've put and see if they like what I've done or not.

I'm looking forward to writing the assignments, which must mean I'm a bit of a sick puppy.

I'll let you know how I'm getting on.

In other news I've been laughing myself to death over this video.  Sheer genius.