Hi all!

Well, it’s been over a year since my last post, so I figure it’s time to catch you up with what I’ve been up to recently.

I’ve been taking my masters in Creative Writing and Publication, as I mentioned I would be doing in a previous post, and I’ve loved (almost) every minute of it! So much so, that I’m currently going through the application process to take a PhD in Creative Writing. Fingers crossed that’ll all be settled quite soon – and in the meantime I’m looking for a ‘proper’ job (or, at least, one that brings in enough money to pay my bills and leave enough over for food!)

While a lot of the masters has been about longer-form fiction, we also had a flash fiction module which has strongly resurrected my interest in the form (not that it had ever really gone anywhere!) So I’ve been writing a fair amount of flash, and I’ve combined these flashes with my New Year’s Resolution, which was to try and submit at least 100 times this year.

I came up with this resolution because I do struggle with rejection – I’ll submit two or three pieces, have them rejected and then lose all my confidence for a few months! This way, even if pieces are rejected I have still achieved something positive, a result towards my 100 submissions. I can also recycle rejected pieces, immediately sending them somewhere else following a rejection, thereby quickly ticking off another notch. Hopefully this will help to prevent the two-and-three-month long doldrums, encouraging me to keep on sending work out and logging a few more successes.

In fact, this has already proven itself successful: from maybe three accepts last year, I am already on five positives: three for Pandora’s Inbox (link attached below), one for Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine which is shortly forthcoming, and one, the latest, for National Flash Fiction Day’s Flash Flood. My entry, ‘Soccer Mom’, will be released at 18:00 on the 15th June 2019 – do keep an eye out for it, if you are a fan of the site.

I have submitted perhaps twenty of the hundred pieces I am meant to be sending out this year, and we are already nearly halfway through the year! I am hoping to have a bit more leisure time during the summer, while I am working on my dissertation, to send out some more flashes and short stories and hit my target.

The PhD will be a novel-length piece of writing, as well as a twenty-thousand-word critical piece which, at this stage, is looking to be four 5,000-word essays on the themes and issues highlighted within the creative piece. I am very much looking forward to getting to grips with the next level of writing! 

 

Here’s a piece that I had published in Pandora’s Inbox that was also included in the print version.

Curtains

I really liked her shirt. It was white with lace flowers all around the bottom edge in a cheerful sunflower yellow, and nicely fitted to her figure.
When I was little, I loved our living room. We had floor-to-ceiling windows with French doors that were usually open onto a garden filled with hot-pink bougainvillea, smoky blue hydrangeas and flame-coloured zinnias. The curtains, white and almost see-through, billowed in the light breeze that carried the scent of roses into the room. I would have spent hours, if my mother had let me, just watching the play of sunlight through voile and the movement of the flowers in the wind, but she chased me away to the kitchen to play near the maid or out into the garden where Dad would be tinkering with the car or laying out another bed for the growing veggie patch he was putting in.

So, when I saw her shirt and smiled and said, ‘I like your shirt. It looks like curtains,’ I knew what I meant.

 

Here’s the link in case you would like to read it in situ (scroll down to my name and pick ‘Curtains’) or you can check out the other pieces, many of which are very good indeed. Alongside another short story, there is also that rarest of commodities, a poem of mine!

What This ‘Real’ Writer Does

I am an avid reader of blogs and sites offering advice on how to write, when to write, and what to write. I’ve read so many now, that I am well aware that there are some pieces of the advice that will always pop up as standard: write everyday, write what you know, write what you love – as well as some that are controversial: ‘write lots of bad writing to improve’ versus ‘write carefully from the beginning, craft every word’ etc. Unlike many of those other posts, I am writing strictly about my own personal experience, so there isn’t going to be much in the way of pontificating advice; rather, I’ll just tell you what worked for me and why…

Growing up in Zimbabwe, I have always wanted to be a writer. I did want to be a vet for about two years between the ages of seven and nine, but I realised that I wanted to be a vet so that I could write wonderful anecdotes about the job, a la James Herriott…

I always had something published in the annual school magazine – usually poems in which every line rhymed – and was the inaugural editor of the weekly school newspaper in high school. This meant that I was quite confident that I was good at writing, and I began to hunt around for work in that field. In those days, and in that place, there was precious little going. Any commissions were snapped up by journalists  and writers who had all the right connections, and my many, many letters of enquiry received multiple ‘no thanks’ or ‘we will keep your info on file’.

My first paid commission was an interview with a local news anchor.  I was paid something like ZW$45 for the piece, but ended up spending ZW$35 on a lunch for myself and the anchor in question. I also slaved over every word, coming in at exactly the requested word count, and including lots of interesting information about the man. When the piece came out, it had been slashed to about two-thirds the size, my carefully crafted words had been pruned massively, and the editor had switched around several paragraphs. After a couple of hours sulking I read through the piece as published, and then compared it to what I’d originally written. The printed piece was better; easier to read and the layout, in some indefinable way, looked more professional than my school-girlish offering.

This was my first lesson: Don’t be precious over your work. Editors know their onions!

Now, the way I got that first commission was an eye-opener too. I met my now-husband when he was renting a granny-flat on a property. The landlord’s daughter was the editor of the magazine, and it was my boyfriend telling her about me, and how I wanted to write for a living, that got me the job. My next commission in the world of writing was for a bunch of weekly crosswords for an independent newspaper. I compiled ten small crosswords and one big one per week (one small cryptic and one small easy for Monday to Friday, the big one for a Saturday being something of a mix of all types of clues) for the paper which came out daily, Monday to Saturday. I got that job through my tried and untested system of writing and offering my services. The only difference with this letter was that it landed on the editor’s desk at exactly the right time – his current compiler had been becoming more and more unreliable and had just arrogantly demanded an immense increase in pay for his work, believing that the editor would struggle to find a replacement. He phoned me on the spot and said ‘If you can submit two weeks’ worth of puzzles in three days’ time, you have the job.’ I said, ‘I can do it,’ put the phone down and, sweating nervously, set to work, getting them submitted to him with half a day to spare.

Second lesson: Be aware that work will come up in weird and wonderful ways – look out for opportunities and seize them. Traditional methods of finding work DO work – but often it’s very much a case of being in the right place at the right time…

I compiled crosswords for a few years, and it was great! I began work on a Monday, completing the weeks’ work on the Tuesday evening and submitting it on Wednesday. I worked from home, so I could look after the children and do the school run, using their nursery and nap times to get my work done and dusted. It was great, and for that two days’ work, I was paid about the same as a fairly low-level, but full-time secretary – more than enough for our needs, until rampant inflation made a mockery of the economy.

It was around this time that we gave serious consideration to moving to the UK – my mum was British, as was hubby’s dad – as our whole way of life were at risk. The children were rapidly approaching school age, and we  would need to raise school fees for them. Our home was a rented cottage on a farm that had been designated for seizure, and farm violence was breaking out all over the country as the economy tanked. And my crossword job was for an independent paper, which meant that they were a nuisance to the government who were making threats to shut down the independent media. The decision was more or less made for us: it was a case of move or starve, so we sold up everything in order to be able to afford our tickets, and set off.

Once we were settled in the UK – a matter of around a year, time made longer thanks to the vagaries of a viciously nutty sister-in-law (a story worthy of its own blog post one day!) I once again looked into writing for a living, sending out emails and letters offering writing and crossword services. However, my efforts came to nothing, and I (reluctantly) went back to work as a secretary/ admin assistant.

All this time, I wrote fiction in my spare time, occasionally entering competitions or submitting to magazines – but quite halfheartedly, I wasn’t terribly confident in my creative writing abilities any more after all that time raising the children and not having much in the way of adult conversation, never mind stimulating repartee…

As I could only work part-time because hubby’s job made the school run impossible for him, the jobs I could take were rather limited – and then I was made redundant twice in a row. After the second time, I decided that the ‘security’ of salary was maybe not as secure as it should be, and began to cast around for any kind of work that could be done at home, with a special eye out for any writing work.

I found work at home as an online call-centre operator, and it was alright. It paid the bills and offered advancement, but after a very short time I found the work soul-destroying. We had a very limited script, weren’t allowed to chat to the customers (and for some, I very much had the impression that these calls represented a large part of their total human interaction every day…) and had a fair number of hard sell products to persuade customers to purchase. It was during a particularly trying period that a couple of the other ladies who worked for the online call centre were chatting on Facebook, when one of them mentioned that she had just found an online writing site that she had signed up with for extra pennies.

It had been about five years since I had last looked for work at home as a writer and I was amazed! There was writing work available by the score! I signed up with Textbroker, the site mentioned by my friend, and pretty soon, I was writing so much that I was neglecting the calls. I was able to write up to 8 pieces a day, and this made me almost enough money to get through the month… Enough, anyway, that I was able to stop taking the soul destroying calls and write instead.

Lesson 3: Choose your compromises. I was happy to write for less money, but would have needed a lot more money in order to continue with the (better paid) phone calls… Ensure your sacrifices are manageable.

This was in 2011. I worked purely as a freelance writer for the next three or so years, and thoroughly enjoyed it, although the money  was highly unreliable. Some months I would do well, and pay all my bills and be able to treat the children; other months were a trial, constantly scrabbling to make sure that minimum payments were met and that there would be milk and bread in the house.

One thing I noticed pretty quickly was that I got very much faster at typing. I would begin to plan out what I would write as I read through the brief, and was able to strip down my research so that it didn’t take up too much time – when you are paid by the word, you learn to put words down faster!

Lesson 4: You will acquire skills without intending to, simply by practising your craft.

Then, in 2014, our eldest son was ready for university. My husband asked, out of the blue, ‘Have you never wanted to go to university?’ Well, yes, I had. In Zimbabwe I hadn’t been able to afford it, and I’d been working full time, or looking after children – but now… Our youngest was in high school, and I no longer needed to be home for the school run in either direction – I was suffering something of an almost empty-nest-syndrome. So I applied for a place at the local uni and was fortunate enough to be offered an unconditional place, which I accepted immediately.

While I was taking my degree, all the hard work on the writing sites started to pay off. I scored a couple of private clients, who are wonderful and send me work when they can. I still write for Textbroker and a couple of other sites as and when I have time, in between my on-campus job and my private writing.

My degree was fantastic, so good that I’m currently waiting to start my master’s in October. I’m much more confident in my creative writing once again, and have recently started writing a blog for another private client – he essentially buys our groceries these days! I’ve started work on my portfolio, and hope to have a good solid base of work that I can improve on and workshop  during the master’s.

Lesson 5: Write whenever you can.  If you have fifteen minutes and an idea, write. if you are on the train for half an hour, write. If you have a it of time while dinner cooks, write. Don’t say things like ‘Oh, I’ve only got twenty minutes, that’s no good.’ You will be quite surprised to realise just how much writing you can get done in a very few minutes, especially over time. At first, you might not manage any more than one sentence or the ghost of an idea, but with time and practise, you will soon be able to rattle out a couple of hundred words in that twenty minutes.

And, one piece of advice that still rings true comes from Jodi Picoult: You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.’ Write. Write a lot, but write with purpose. I’ve never been one for meaningless exercises – being paid by the word taught me to put a value on my time, and I won’t waste it unnecessarily.

As I said at the beginning (of this rather longer than expected blog post) this is not exactly advice – it seems to have turned into a ramble along how I got into writing instead of how I manage the process!

I hope you’ve found it interesting, and here is a link to my latest story that has been published by the University of Chester’s Pandora’s Box – click here. 

 

Nine Months Later…

I’ve been away from my blog for nine months this time – long enough to have a baby! (Don’t worry, I haven’t!) But it does serve me right for saying that I would do better than leaving three months between posts… in a way I did ‘better’, just not the way I meant!

In the interim, I have graduated uni with a first class combined honours BA, and have signed up for a Masters which will begin in October 2018, running for a year. After that, the real world beckons, but hopefully with a job in publishing, editing and/ or creative writing of some kind.

I’ve also completed my detective novel, the writing thereof anyway, but am struggling to find the time to read it through properly. I’ve gone through the grammar and spelling and so on, it’s seeing if the story hangs together on paper the way it does in my brain – that’s a bit harder to tell as I *know* all the bits that I might not have made clear in the book… Anyway, it’s pretty much done and when I have a week to read it through I will then start the slow, steady hunt for a good agent.

Preparatory to the masters, I’ve recently been going through all my writings to try and get all my bits and pieces of creative work in one place – there are hundreds of short stories and flashes mainly, but I’ve also found that I have a number of long stories – ten thousand words plus – and even two or three that are, or will be, novel-length when they’re finished.

So, despite my lack of blogging, I have not been unproductive – and my plan (ahem, please note ‘my *plan*’) is to send off many of the short stories and flashes to online publications, and then blog about the successful ones. Of course, that might not happen, so all I can say is: I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last blog and I hope to leave less time before the next.

But no promises!

I’ll leave you with a picture of tonight’s handicap to writing – you try typing with a solid furry body resting entirely on your dominant arm…

A Box Inside a Box, Inside Another Box

I’ve got a friend who is beginning to get slightly creeped out by my excitement whenever she joins me for lunch. The reason for my enthusiasm isn’t because of her food – no, that tends to the fairly mundane; healthy enough, but there’s not much excitement to be garnered from a sandwich, a few grapes or a cereal bar and a satsuma. The satsuma is important. Yes, really.

My interest is in her food containers. She has the most beautiful set of plastic boxes, that range in size from ‘generous sandwich’ (say four slices of medium-cut bread with a little headroom) to ‘not really big enough for anything’ – until she found that it can *just* hold a small to medium-sized satsuma. Told you it was important.

Anyway: she will sit and unpack her bag, laying out sandwich box, cereal bar or grape box and satsuma box, and then nibble her way through her meal.

Then, when she is done, she puts the lid on the smallest box. This goes inside the medium-sized box, and the medium-sized lid goes on that. Repeat for the largest, until you have what is apparently one box to carry home.

Mere words cannot describe the satisfaction engendered by watching this packing-up operation. It is partly that it is an attractive set – aesthetics are important – but it is more the way they fit together so neatly: so much storage space manipulated into such a small footprint. It is just pleasing to watch them clip together, almost like a magic trick. But a magic trick where you know how it is done, and it is still magical.

I think the reason I like flash fiction is the exact same reason that I am enthralled to watch my friend packing up her little boxes: there is a sense of something much bigger on the inside, so much more to be explored than what can be seen on the surface.

This analogy occurred to me tonight, as I sat reading my newest acquistion: Funny Bone: Flashing for Comic Relief (more about the collection below). Each story takes up a page or two, some only half a page. But you cannot rush through these stories as you would through a volume of ‘Dad Jokes’ or ‘The Bumper Loo Book: 1001 pieces of trivia’ (ahem, currently to be found in my loo, being enjoyed in instalments, so to speak) – each must be savoured, read over two or three times and digested, before moving onto the next. Read five or six stories, and you have visited five or six worlds, met five or six strangers and made them friends (or not!). You will also find yourself considering things from a different point of view, wondering why, exactly, you’ve never seen things this particular way before now…

And then, when you are done, you marvel at the apparent slightness of the story – it seems like magic that you haven’t actually travelled as far away as the moon. But it is magic that is understandable and no less magical for that. Just like the boxes.

Funny Bone: Flashing for Comic Relief

Published by Flash: The International Short-short Story Press; edited by Ash Chantler and Peter Blair.

Profits to Comic Relief.

A wonderful collection of sixty short stories, by acknowledged masters of the form: from David Gaffney to Tom Hazuka to Calum Kerr (and many more) there is something for everyone. From Superheroes suffering erectile dysfunction to parents trying to retrieve some kind of a sex life to foreshadowing the nostalgia of future empty nest syndrome, these little tales cover everything from alien invasion (cunningly foiled with the gift of rat-poison-laced cookies) to a day in the park with the kids (partly spoiled by loud sweary families): the full range from fantastical science-fiction to everyday mundaneity.

Do your bit for those in need by getting a copy (or two or three, they make great gifts!) of Funny Bones: not only will you be helping a great cause, you will enjoy the pleasure of reading the works of some of the finest short-short story-writers in the world!

Read more about how the book came about and buy it here: https://www.chester.ac.uk/node/40000

And here is some information on Comic Relief: http://www.comicrelief.com/

I’ve been working on a long piece of writing, what I hope will be the first in a series of detective novels, so I’ve not had a lot of time for flash. But here’s a link to Pandora’s Inbox which I am co-editing this year: browse through and click the links to read poems and short stories (including a couple of mine!) Teaser: one of the authors listed is the friend who owns the little boxes of joy! https://www.chester.ac.uk/node/23972

Oh and! Happy WordPress Anniversary to me! I’ve had my blog for a whole year, according to WordPress. Yay!

Checking in!

Hello everyone.

First things first: Happy New Year and I hope you all had a good one!

Next, many apologies for my lengthy silence, which is only partly due to the horrific fact of what happened in the USA on the 20th January. (And has continued to happen ever since – someone take his pen away, please (and his phone too, but at least his tweets just cause outrage and despondency rather than having a concrete, dismaying and potentially lethal effect on the very people he’s sworn to protect.)

Enough of him (only for now – I’m firmly in the ‘never normalise, never accept, never be silent in the face of atrocity’ camp) what have I been writing?

Well, a short story for my crime module is the short answer. I mulled it over and mused about it and finally got a spark of inspiration – the how of the murder. Once that had arrived, the other details kind of fitted themselves into my imagination until I was ready to write.

I’ll have to quickly interrupt myself here – I normally don’t know how my stories will end. I generally come up with a character who, having formed him or herself, then begins to say stuff and do things: all of which colour their personality and lead to the action and conflict that make the story. Often – nearly all the time – the ending of the story comes as a surprise to me, and I have even discovered, as I write, that the guy I’ve been rooting for as hero has turned out to be the villain on one or two occasions!

So the thought of writing a crime story to which I already knew the answer felt exceedingly strange. But it is the only way, I think, to write an honest crime story. You must know the ending and the perpetrator in order to fulfil the requirements of a detective story. Clues must be left for the reader, odd and random instances of happenstance or coincidence must be explicable (even if only becoming so once the grand denouement has taken place) and the crime must not have been committed by a random stranger who never otherwise comes into the narrative. There are more rules, laid out much more eloquently than I can say here, but these are the very basics.

 

So I thought, as it was my first ever crime story, that I would just write it, letting it be as long as it needed to be. A couple of days later I had 4,560 words and the first draft was done. A bit of tidying up and redrafting made it easier to read, but didn’t vastly reduce the number of words – something of a problem as I only need 1,500 and will lose marks if it’s over 1,650! While I mulled over the problem, I handed the story round to a couple of friends. One of them, handing it back to me, said, ‘I don’t know about making it shorter, but this could be the outline for a novel.’

I took the story home and focused on getting it to the required length, eventually achieving this by making it a story told to someone by my detective. This enabled me to cut through all the detail of post mortem and witness statements, just giving the results, rather than the process. Once the story was down to a manageable 1,700-and something words, I put it aside to mature.

In the meantime, I was on holiday from uni, and had a lot more free time than usual. The suggestion about making the story into a novel drifted back and, this time, took hold.

So I began. I started by expanding each paragraph out into chapters, then found places where more chapters needed to be inserted in order for events to make sense, or to bring characters more authentically to life, or just to pass chronological time in the novel. I rattled through splendidly, getting up to 30,000 words in a mere four weeks, with the whole novel plotted out in rough notes from start to finish. Since uni has been back in, my output has dramatically slowed down, but I am slogging through one to four thousand words a week, and am now up to 50,000, with a target of another 20,000 to get the novel up to an acceptable length. I know what I have to say, and I’ve actually already written the ending, which – so far – I’m very pleased with.

As you’ve probably gathered from this long, rather rambling post,  I haven’t been writing here, because I’ve been writing up a storm elsewhere! I have had time to write a new drabble, which I’ve included below, please do let me know if you enjoy it?

Hopefully, the next time I post, I will have a complete first draft of a novel, and will be thinking about trying to get myself an agent or a publisher, depending on which seems to be the easier/ most logical option.

Until then, take care, look after those who need it and stand up to those who need that.

 

x Liz

Medusa

They say I turn men to stone as if that’s a bad thing. They’ve made me into a monster, with snakes for hair and eyes that petrify. But that’s wrong.

It’s a different hardness they experience – you know what I mean. Yes, that.

I was hot. Sexy, daring and willing to do anything at all. That’s the truth of what they saw in my face and it worked on them. every. single. time.

So next time you hear someone talk about the Gorgon’s head, or my supposed ugliness, you just tell them.

You say, ‘No. I know the truth.’

 

What’s in a Flash?

Any regular readers will know that I’m something of a fan of the phenomenon known as flash fiction, the short-short story. To those unfamiliar with the art – and it is an art – of the tiny tale, it can seem like something of an easy option.

Paying markets for short stories are few and far between and those that do pay tend to pay in magazine copies or cash amounts so tiny that the kindest name for them is ‘token’ (‘joke’ would be an example of an unkind one…). Most publications don’t pay at all, and rely on the delight at ‘being published’ felt by authors to keep themselves in business.

This is because, I suspect, there is a tendency to believe that flash is easy to write, that anything so short must be whipped off in a matter of minutes and ready for publication within half an hour or so. As such, short stories are given little literary weight and are treated as amusing bits of fluff, lacking worth, importance or merit.

This dismissive attitude is unfair to writers of good flash fiction. Good flash is small, but perfect, as carefully crafted as a sculpture and takes up a great deal of time and effort. Because the word count is so small, each and every word must count and be chosen with precision. A true flash has a complete story arc, complete with characters, action and conflict. It can include dialogue, location and more.

But what really distinguishes a good flash from a poor one (or, in the spirit of fairness, from a prose poem  or story snippet) is compression. You should be able to read a flash and know that there is more to the story than the superficial narrative. By analysing words and sentences, you should be able to deduce and infer information: information that is not spelled out but merely hinted at or alluded to.

And yes, flashes can be written fairly quickly, and the low word count does make it easier to proofread, draft and polish. However, there is more leeway in longer pieces of writing for, not errors exactly, but for words that aren’t precisely right. The longer the piece of writing, the more you can get away with, simply because the higher word count hides any flaws. In flash, they’re always visible.

But a good flash  is like an inflatable life-raft: you should be able to read it and have a whole huge world explode into being in front of you, complete with everything you need to get you safely back home.

That’s enough from me for now: here’s another little story that I’ve had a go at – if you like it, you can read more from me here and here. Let me know what you think in the comments below?

Frankenstein in Brief

‘Ooh… I’ve got an idea!’

Several blood-drenched months later, after visiting morgues, hospitals and even the odd unguarded grave, Victor stood back, eyes wide with anticipation. He made the final adjustments and stood back, waiting…

‘Oh God, what have I done?!’ Victor fled through the doors, running away into the night, back to his mum’s house.

Some time later, Victor’s baby brother died in mysterious circumstances. Victor knew it was his creature. He decided to fix things…

‘We meet at last!’
‘My creator. Why did you make me?’
‘I wanted to make a man…’
‘But – that’s women’s work, fool.’

x Liz

Make it New…But Make it Your Own

I’m currently studying Modernism at university and some of the concepts make my brain hurt. However, I am slowly warming to the themes and underlying ideas behind Modernist principles.

Before university, I didn’t like it when people took the ideas of other writers and twisted them. I’m not talking about fan-fiction, although fan-fiction does swim in the same pool, albeit in the shallowest of shallow ends. I felt that these writers were merely unimaginative – being unable to think of their ‘own’ stories – and disrespectful, mauling and manhandling the original narratives, which I saw as being perfect, complete, unchanging and unchangeable.

Of course, you never read the same story twice anyway. I am sure everyone who reads a lot has noticed that they get something new from any book each time they reread it. I am a big Terry Pratchett fan, and the one thing that I’ve thought after rereading each book is: How incredibly clever and wise Pratchett was. There is a different look to the Discworld depending on how much you’ve learned since the previous reading, depending on your mood at the time of reading, depending, in fact, on your physical and emotional state at the time of each reading.

Now I am a bit wiser (I hope!) and I can see the value behind Ezra Pound’s ‘make it new’ and one of my favourite books is Angela Carter’s Burning Your Boats – a comprehensive collection of her short-story anthologies. In many of the stories she takes a ‘perfectly innocent’ children’s story and makes it her own, adding hearty, sensual femininity and often turning the narrative inside out or merging two,very different, narratives.

These are, in a way, perfect examples of what Modernists had realised and what they were trying to encapsulate – different points of view,different perspectives despite seeing or reading the same thing. Pratchett, of course, was a master at story appropriation, making it new – and yet making it entirely his own by placing it on a pizza-shaped planet balanced atop four elephants who are in turn precariously supported by the shell of a massive space turtle! Wyrd Sisters, for example, is basically the story of Macbeth, with a bit of Rapunzel thrown in there (probably along with a bunch of other references that I haven’t got yet!). But it is also an entirely unique story – and therein lies its greatness.

I can appreciate, now, the difference between making it new – á la Carter and Pratchett – and copying – stealing ideas and dressing them slightly differently – which is a huge difference.

I would like to write more, but I fear that my understanding of Modernism is still in its infancy and may wander off-track, so I’ll sign off for now, leaving you with my latest drabble, which can be read on the site here: https://drablr.com/lizmilne/drabble/g6m-another-little-pig. Let me know your thoughts, both on the story and on Modernist principles, in the comments section below!

x Liz

Another Little Pig

‘Let me in!’
‘Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.’
‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff: I’ll blow your house in.’
‘Bring it, Wolfie, do your worst!’

The wolf stopped, uncertain. Prey certainly wasn’t meant to challenge him.

‘What?’
‘I said, bring it, Wolfie!’ the pig sounded quite insane.
The wolf backed up and sat down, puzzled. He could see that the house was poorly constructed, easy pickings for him.

No.

He shook his head and trotted off. He’d heard there was an old lady nearby whose house was made of good things to eat.

He’d try there instead.

 

My Two Cents, For What It’s Worth

Okay, so this post is going to be a bit political, but sorry-not-sorry in this case. I think someone – many someones – need to say something, so that when, in the future, survivors, grimly picking through the desolate wastelands after the radiation levels have reduced slightly, ask ‘Why didn’t someone stop it? Why didn’t someone say something?’, there will be indications that we weren’t all so ignorant and blind that we rushed headlong into world-wide annihilation without some reservations.

I’ve watched, along with the rest of the world, the events unfolding in the US presidential race with mingled amusement and distaste – and over the last few months the amusement has shrivelled and the distaste has grown, with a healthy dose of fear creeping in there too.

There are many memes and cartoons about the matter, but for once – I usually embrace the gentle, humorous approach – I feel that this is too important, too real, too dangerous to joke about.

Mr Trump’s campaign slogan is ‘Make America Great Again’ – an admirable sentiment. However, what made America ‘great’ in the first place was its standing as a symbol of hope for the persecuted people everywhere else in the world. Rags to riches stories are the epitome of the American Dream – ragged immigrants (before it became a dirty  word) arriving on US shores with a few pennies, ambition and a dream… That is the ‘greatness’ that America offered: that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you have, if you work hard you can achieve almost anything.

What Donald Trump  is actually doing is making America hate again. We already have a near militant black civil rights movement akin to the Black Panthers back in the day; we have a resurrection of medieval ideas about women and their place in the world, exacerbated by Trump’s opponent being female, but hugely endorsed by his ‘pussy-grabbing’, daughter-leering, ‘just kiss, don’t wait’ rhetoric. And that’s just two sections of the population – we could also talk about, amongst others, the ‘entirely-to-be-abhorred’ Muslims and the ‘rapist’ Mexicans who are also apparently so stupid that they would pay to build a wall to block themselves from easy access to the apparent cornucopia that is the USA without any objections should Trump prevail and tell ’em to get on with it. (Who knows, maybe that wall will be needed to stop hordes of panicked Americans fleeing the Trump dictatorship in a year or two?)

I think my turning point from mildly amused to horrified came when I heard a snippet on the news in which a woman said, ‘We must bear in mind that we are entering the era of post-truth politics.’ She was speaking in regard to the UK’s disastrous Brexit (∗ see footnote) vote, another example of fear, hate and ignorance triumphing over the quiet voices of reason, common sense and truth, but it seems to be relevant all over the world.

Think about that phrase for a second: post-truth politics. Win your election, no matter what. Say what you want to say – say what they want to hear – and you will win. Once you’ve won, shrug and deny that you ever said it. (Nigel Farage, mentioning no Trump-supporting names…) Donald Trump seems to have embraced this policy with open arms and mouth – saying whatever he wants to, whatever he thinks will carry the crowd and completely ignoring the fact that this policy means he must contradict himself on a regular basis! Look at the whole ‘birther’ issue in which Trump went from ten years of demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate and claiming that he was ‘an African’ (as though that were an insult in itself) to flatly saying ‘Hillary started it, not me.’

A few weeks ago, I began to worry that if Trump won the election there would be a world war within months. I still think that – especially given his blithe assumption that if one has nukes of course one wants to use them- but now I am beginning to think that war of some kind is inevitable no matter what. Trump supporters are known for being both vocal and all too ready to use their fists to punctuate their opinions – how will they take a Trump defeat? Badly, I think… Which leaves us with no good outcomes to this election at all. If Donald wins, it win be a toss up between civil war decimating the States and world war breaking out over insulting 3am tweets from POTUS to other world leaders. If Donald loses, his supporters, I fear, will riot – whether he incites them to or not.

I have no solutions. I’m not an economist, a historian or a politician, not an expert of the kind we need right now. But I implore those who are to weigh in, to raise their voices and to do it NOW.

Before its too late for all of us.

x Liz

 

∗Footnote: Why do I think Brexit is a disaster? Because I lived in Zimbabwe when it experienced catastrophic devaluation – 2l bottles of milk literally more than doubled in price overnight (Z$16 to Z$34) – because the government decided that to get more money in the coffers all one needed to do was print more banknotes (along with various other poor decisions). This uncoupled the currency from the global economy, causing it (the Zim dollar) to plummet, making us all poor millionaires within a matter of months.

We, my family, managed to sell all our worldly possessions for the price of our plane tickets and get out before the trillion-dollar notes were put into production, which puts us amongst the lucky ones.

I do not want to go through that again.

Ever.

How Far is Too Far?

This post isn’t so much about the practicalities of writing, but rather responses to writings and the cut off between lively intellectual debate and trolling.

The blogosphere and social media mean that anyone can write pretty much anything they want to and put it out on the internet for everyone and anyone to read. While most people tend to ignore posts that they disagree with, there are a few who take a perverse pleasure in arguing with just about any writer about any topic.

The accepted way of dealing with these debaters is usually to ignore them, in the hope that they will go away and find someone more responsive to pick on. Sometimes this works, at other times the bully will take heart from the lack of response and escalate their language into profanity and insult.

What I’m wondering is: why are we told to ignore the opening overtures? Sure, the questions asked may sound insulting and rather bald, but it is widely accepted that nuance is difficult to get across in text – what may be curiosity can come across as derogatory – but it may be honestly intended.

For example, I’ve seen comments on feminist sites (or even feminist comments on news articles) in which the glass ceiling, the gender pay gap and other similar issues are mentioned. On one such article a man (going by his name and profile picture) commented, ‘Rubbish! What pay gap?’ As you might expect, he was bombarded with a series of really quite awful comments, with all the responders assuming that he was an awful, ignorant person who not only enjoyed male privilege, he was quite happy to permit the issue to continue as it wasn’t his specific problem.

Towards the end of the nearly two hundred comments, only one person thought to ask him, ‘Why do you think mention of a gender pay gap is rubbish?’ His answer, addressed to that person, was thoughtfully worded and packed with stats about the industry he was in, which offered a non-gendered sliding pay scale, starting all employees off at rate 1 and rising with every qualification achieved. Further back and forth on that conversation led to him admitting that he tended to work very long hours and only socialise with people (of all genders) from his place of work – hence his quite genuine ignorance of the issues faced by people working for other, less fair, establishments. The questioner then provided him with a series of links discussing the gender pay gap and the whole conversation ended cordially, with the man thanking the questioner for enlightening him.

Only when we know all the facts in this instance can we see that lack of free time and a restricted environment had led this man to making faulty, but now understandable, assumptions. The tens of people who ‘shouted’ at him did not teach him anything, and without the one person stopping and asking him his reasoning, he would have continued to believe in his lived experience and would further think that ‘other people’ were mean-spirited moaners making a fuss about nothing.

Of course, there are also people who respond with aggressive and insulting words right from the beginning of an exchange, and that is hard to justify (after all, good manners are free and don’t hurt anyone!). However, I believe that responding to all commenters rationally and reasonable is the duty of a writer of the blogger or social media sort, no matter the subject. However unreasonable a troll may start out, constant polite requests to clarify their standpoint or justify their beliefs and a reasoned (and still polite) rebuttal to ideas that are not the nicest (racist, sexist or ageist to name a few) will soon force them to a) leave the conversation in search of a more satisfying fight or b) reassess their ideas.

Of course, the main point to take in any internet conversation is that you do not know who you are talking with: it may be a teenage boy delighting in using language that would get him sent to the naughty step for a week, a frustrated office worker fed up with their job and looking for an outlet, or someone having a truly awful week and simply lashing out anonymously rather than taking it out on his or her loved ones. Or perhaps they are just a big mean bully who should know better! Bear this in mind at all times, keep your tone moderate (I often have to draft and re-draft responses until I’m sure they hit the right tone of voice!) and don’t resort to name calling, generalisations or insults. Read responses thoughtfully and actively try to understand why they are speaking the way they are, asking questions if something doesn’t make sense. Only when you have exhausted all these avenues should one resort to ignoring/ deleting or blocking the offender. Hopefully, it will never reach that point.

How do you all deal with comments and interactions which are not entirely positive? Are you a responder, a delete-and-blocker or an ignorer? And what, for you, is the point of no return, a point at which you know further discussion is futile? Let me know in the comments below?

 

Back to Flash (vs Short Story)

This is a subject that has fascinated me ever since I discovered – and ventured into – the world of flash. I’ve previously pondered the difference between prose poetry and flash (you can read it here, if you’re interested) but I’ve recently been looking for publications (online and print) that pay for short stories and I’ve found that flash and short story have a huge and blurry overlap.

Stories can be as short as Hemingway’s famous six-worder (‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’) and they can range all the way up to twenty thousand words or so. From what I’ve discovered between twenty and forty thousand would be a novella and anything over forty thousand is a novel. The latter statistic surprised me as I’d always thought that a novel needed to be at least eighty thousand words (adult novels, that is, children’s books are generally shorter).

Of late (over the last twenty years, let’s say) the short story has developed ‘specialisms’, the most discernible of which is flash fiction. Different editors and publications all have their own definitions of the difference between a flash and a short story, with upper word limits ranging from 50, 60, 100 or 250 words all the way up to 1500 or 2000 for flashes. Short story limits can look similar, although the very short stories (under 500 words) are generally acknowledged as flash, sudden- or micro-fictions. Just looking at these numbers, it is really easy to see a huge overlap between flash and short story – so how do you decide if you have written a flash or a short story?

Musing over the above question has led me to a minor epiphany – perhaps the difference is not at all the number of words that comprise the story, rather it is the content of the story? The way I’m now considering small fictions is in this light, and, so far, I seem to be justified in it. So here goes:

A short story is complete. It is not difficult to get into, and can be read superficially as well as being interrogated for a deeper meaning. There will be characters, a story (conflict, battle, resolution etc) and an ending. Dialogue is always a good addition, as is a detailed location. Short stories, once read, should engender a feeling of satisfaction and closure, a feeling of being done with this narrative.

Flash fiction, on the other hand, is packed with more meaning than the word count would seem to allow. Flashes can contain everything that a story does, and must flow narratively – anything too ephemeral is probably straying into the realm of prose poetry. While some flashes can be read just once and seem to be superficial complete stories, good flashes often leave the reader slightly bemused, or even lightly frustrated – like getting to the last page of a gripping thriller and finding that the last couple of pages have been ripped out by some sadist. Good flashes can, and should, be read over and over again, with more meaning and different interpretations presenting themselves with each fresh reading thanks to the meaningful gaps in the narrative. NB Not plot-holes but deliberate gaps left by the author so the reader can arrive at their own inferences. It is important to trust your reader to read flashes ‘properly’ and to avoid the temptation to over-explain what’s going on. A successful flash is difficult to write and should be challenging (but satisfying) to read – but when you get it right, you will know it!

To summarise, here’s a metaphor for you: we can say that a short story uses a wide-angle lens to show everything in the picture in crystal sharp detail, while a flash uses a macro lens, close and tight on the focal point, with the background out of focus and open to interpretation and extrapolation.

I’ll finish off with my latest drabble (100-words exactly) which can be found here on Drablr if you would like to see more of the short form.

See you all soon

x Liz

Goldilocks Revisited

When the bears returned from their walk a small girl had broken and entered their home – just entered, really, as the door was unlocked.

They found that not only had she trespassed, she had stolen their food too, sampling a bit of each bear’s porridge, before bouncing on each of their beds.

Then they discovered that the intruder was still there, sleeping in the smallest bed. They stood around uncertainly, wondering what to do.

Eventually, the small girl stirred and stretched, yawning prettily. Then she saw the bears and screamed.

So they ate her, just to stop the noise.