Plundering Memory. A Writer's Odyssey

I am thoroughly relishing the work on my new short story collection called Kaleidoscope – Stories from the Frontier. I am now writing the sixteenth of what will be twenty short stories. Perhaps you read one of them on my last blog post - Patchouli?
One of the most exciting things in this new project has been to focus my mind on the whole notion of memory and how it works for a writer.

In the process I have asked myself questions. What is my memory? Is it objective? Is it all I remember? Is it, perhaps, what I have forgotten? Is it all that I’ve been told of what has happened to me? Is it what I have dreamt? Is it these buried subconscious memories that are meat-and-drink in popular articles on crime and its solutions?

Do I as a writer of fiction, plunder my own memory and the memories of others? In surveying my longish list of various kinds of publication I feel certain that I do this – not just in character, content, and narrative - but in those embedded memories of the language and syntax of storytelling – crucial inner memories of the senses, the feelings, the fugitive memories of pain of delight. 

From these I have created and recreated original characters in my fiction. And I have even borrowed others’ memories as though they are our own, and projected memories harvested from my reading. I reinvent lives as essentially original inventions and end up believing that that is what really happened.

The joy and privilege of being part of an oral as well as a written culture is that somehow we inherit memory as part of our acknowledgement of  our membership first of the human clan, and then the human race. This has been reinforced and strengthened throughout the millennia by the sharing of stories in family and social groups, allowing us to develop a shared heritage of collective memory, sensitivity and consciousness as human beings.  Modern discussions of genetic memory perhaps reflect this.  

A writer’s instinct is ultimately to express universalities which will link with our readers' own experience and world-view. Thereby hangs worldly success, after all. Perhaps this particularly might be said to be more purposely focused in novels attached to genres such as espionage, crime, romance or war.  But even in these fields the narratives and the characters should be unique and idiosyncratic to save the work from suffering from an uninspired sameness.

As novelists and storytellers  from the house of our own memory we invent characters with their own histories and conflicts and we use them as psychic dwellings for our own dense complex experiences.

 Each one of us, with our unique baggage of complex memory picks up our pen and then asks the writer’s question What if…?  This is what I have been doing as I am writing Kaleidoscope. Stories from the Frontier.  My theory is that our writing is fuelled and developed from our embedded and continuing memory, whether intended or not. So in the end – as I have found in working on Kaleidoscope -it’s quite exciting to do this with a greater degree of consciousness than ever before.

Using Great Writers in your Writing Process

I am occasionally dismayed by the weight of instructional material to teach new writers around these days. There seems a plethora out there particularly now on the internet, on blogs and even on Twitter.

It’s as though for writers to ‘succeed’ (however you define that…] the new writer just need to apply – for example -  ‘five things’ to their short story, or their paragraph, or the beginning of their novel, or  the ending their novel, or publishing their book, or designing their  cover, or marketing their book or building their brand and hey presto! They have a book that thousands of people that people will put on their reading pile. Or not.

This all begs the question that true writers those creative, instinctive, loose-cannon type individuals can be ‘instructed’ and led to success by obeying instructions.

It also begs the question about the expertise of some instructors.  Does their expertise lie in Lit Crit credentials acquired in places where their own instructors have endorsed arcane bullet-point lists simplified and extracted from the work of great writers in the chimera that is writing of distinction?

Or does it come from the journalistic facility emerging from reviewing books in the national or local press? Or to a lesser degree, even from reviewing books on the internet through their blogs or Twitter? Or does it come from owning a PhD in Creative Writing. acquired through literary study, sanctioned peer bullying, and imitative practice pieces  rather than a body of work, showing that they really are experts in this esoteric process of writing, which remains harder than gossamer to pin down?

For myself I look to great and successful writers who have earned their credentials by writing long and short  fiction themselves which opens doors in the minds of readers, making them think, hate, love,  laugh, cry, identify, salivate, relish and learn, without even noticing the time passing by.

Walter Mosely

Of course, with the exception of generous individuals like Walter Mosely*, most committed writers are too involved cooking up, concocting, dreaming, empathising, scribbling, pounding the keyboard and channelling all the realms of their experience into their stories, to give new writers  the comfort of instructive lists about the path to success.

 

Guy de Maupassant.

That’s not to say we cannot learn from them.  But the method is much more challenging than making lists. To learn how to write a short story I would advise a new writer to read six stories by substantial and accomplished writers such as William Trevor or Guy de Maupassant, or Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf or by Raymond Carver. (Or choose five successful writers in your chosen field or genre.)

It’s important to read 5 or 6 stories by any single 
writer. Each writer is different. I

Virginia Woolf 

would advise a new writer to read them and raise him or herself out of the passive role of reader into the attentive role   writer and note -  either on the book itself, or in a dedicated notebook – just what these acknowledged masters are doing – each in his or her own unique way.  

The new writer will notice then that these writers don’t dissolve into a common list of qualities or methods. What is shared between these works is the way the stories illuminate some particular qualities of mind, motivations and events that rings true to the reader, like a perfect bell, even if all these aspects are world away from this new writer’s own experience.

The same approach is entirely appropriate if the novel is the writer’s desired form. I would say read intensely the work of several great novelists - read as a writer, note what you recognise -  about the way each writer gets to his own truth, using language as a tool – sometimes fine, sometimes blunt - and developing a particular form and structure as the best vehicle for this truth.

I say to new writers, ‘If you do this you will notice and internalise many significant things.  And when you sit down buzzing with original ideas for your own story you will have furnished your subconscious with insights and instincts that will guide you through your own unique process without addressing your task  in any imitative way.’

This might look  like a long  process  but if the new writer is seriously keen on being a good writer as well as a successful writer, this intense study phase is very enjoyable and life enhancing. It takes years to become a potter, a cabinet maker or a doctor – all equally significant professions alongside that of a writer.

Becoming a writer through this process means that every day you add to your insights into the writing process. In the end you will be a better person and a better writer than you could ever have dreamed. And you will have produced a good story, or a great novel.

And not a list in sight,

This is a good article about quality in short stories :https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/oct/17/the-10-best-short-story-collections 

*Walter Mosely Click!/  A writer whose work trancends category and qualifies as serious literature.  

Aspect of my Writing Process Newsletter

I am very excited about my new Newsletter to be called 

'LOVING ASPECTS OF THE WRITING PROCESS'  Dear writerly and readerly friends and followers. Here below  for you is a sample of the first Newsletter. I need permission from you to put you on my regular circulationlist  If you would like to be included in my circulation list could you possibly  email me at wenrob73@hotmail.com so I can include you? Best Wendy It will be all about ... aspirations, ideas, methods and processes that have kept me loving my writing ... View this email in your browser Every day produces something new: a new idea, a new approach to writing, to reading, to researching and reviewing. One day we are inspired by someone who turns present day despair about publishing into the personal adventure of independent publishing. Another day we meet  a new contact who urges us to try a new thing ...

Hello  to You Welcome to my brand new Newsletter. Thank you for signing up. Here on My Writing Process  I hope to share with you the inspirations, aspirations, ideas, methods and processes that have kept me loving my writing process and enjoying some success with people out there who love it too for the last twenty years.  I want this to work for you too. Every day some new writing. So easy to sit down at the keyboards or with notebook in hand. Still, I find writing  anything but routine.  I am truly astonished at articles and blog posts that say what a dreadful toil the writing process. Every day, with writing at the core of my life, I discover things about myself I never knew before. I would argue with the rather widespread notion of writing as therapy, but I have no doubt that writing every day has a therapeutic effect. Every day produces something new: a new idea, a new approach to writing, to reading, to researching and reviewing. One day we are inspired by someone who turns present day despair about publishing into the personal adventure of independent publishing. Another day we meet  a new contact who urges us to try a new thing- this Newsletter for instance. Another day we read an article that takes away the mystique of something that has seemed difficult. For me last week it was learning how to free-hand design the cover for my new novel Writing at the Maison Bleue.. It is happening all the time. This  week I was excited when a writer friend discovered an image on the Internet that will change the whole direction of her novel. No wonder after all this time I still continue to love my writing processes and I hope that this newsletter will inspire you to love yours. It is entirely about the process – not some distant dream of publication, fame or fortune. Just love your writing and your life will be truly enhanced. Designing the cover of my new novel was a very new experience. Refreshing.

France - particularly the Languedoc - is a great inspiration for me. A strange place displaces a writer and  fires the imagination. France - particularly the Languedoc - is a great inspiration for me. A strange place displaces a writer and  fires the imagination.

Copyright © 2015 Wendy Robertson Author, All rights reserved. Your are receiving this email because you opted in from my blog or my Twitter. (Thank you) Our mailing address is: Wendy Robertson Author Springwell Villa Park Street Bishop Auckland, Durham DL14 0 United Kingdom Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences

Short Story Competitions: Fixated on Anecdote

 At a recent workshop a writer told me that she’d had a story rejected with the comment that it was merely an anecdote. In our recent podcasted discussion (see below) Avril Joy said to me that one problem was that some writers were fixated on anecdote.

This made me think. I suppose it all depends on what we mean by ‘story’.

We all live inside a web of stories. We learn our family histories going back more  than two generations through the stories that come down to us. This will weave its way into our fiction whether we do it consciously or not. I discovered this when I sat down to write my memoir The Romancer and discovered in retrospect that I could trace many of the themes and  much of the texture of  my novels in story- or anecdote -driven  elements of my own life.

Such stories from life might well be labelled anecdote. I call these fireside stories and would link them with fairy stories and spoken sagas coming down through history.  I feel it is natural that writers, when they begin and cast around for a ‘story’, will make use of such anecdotes – and quite right too.

However when we are writing a story that will stand alone as true fiction, the familiar anecdote can only stand as one element, as one strand of certainty which might give the fiction authenticity.

Our story becomes literature, it becomes fiction, when we take liberties with it, when we play about with the probabilities, when we invest it with imaginative insight and set our fantasies flying.

It becomes fiction when we strive to meet the challenge of finding the precise, right words to express the action, the setting and the atmosphere of this new story which will take wings and make for the writer and the reader a new literary reality.

It becomes fiction when we shape it with elegance, when the story arc is taut and true. Interestingly enough part of that truth can be the anecdote - the fireside story - that first inspired the writer to take the leap into fiction.

Having just launched our Room To Write Short Story Competition we are hoping the some of the entries will be taut and true and the same time great fiction.

Links for You...

To listen the Avril and me discussing to and fro on these points and many others click  my Soundcloud link 

Click here to see The Room to Write Short Story Competition  

Read Avril Joy on  ‘StartingSmall - Short Story Competitions': 

Read me on 'Setting About High Quality Editing for Short Story Competitions'  

Read me on: 'What is your Short Story About?' 

Click for 'The Romancer' here    

Click for Forms of Flight: 27 Short Stories here   

So, What is Your Short Story About?

Today is the first of four sessions in the second sequence of the  Back to Basics series that Avril Joy and I are runningat Bishop Auckland Town Hall. The theme for this  sequence is 

The Short Story.

This is very timely as I’ve been buried for a month in the task of collecting together, , anthologising, revising, editing, proofing and printing twenty seven of my own short stories. These will be published in a singe edition. Some of these stories were written fifteen years ago; some were written much more recently.

In completing this rather arduous task I have discovered a lot more about myself as a writer and about the nature of the

Revising, editing,  proofing, printing
the collection.. And revising again,
proofing again ...

short story.

The collection will be published this month under the title of Forms of Flight: Twenty Seven Short Stories. The title story is about a woman, recently widowed who escapes into a second, more vibrant life in a battered old Dormobile, painted with the emblems of an aeroplane and a butterfly.

Writers at every level are often asked the impossible question What Is Your Short Story About?

You might as well ask what the moon is about? Or what is a butterfly about? This is truly mpossible to answer in a sentence.

Yet this is what I have made myself do in putting together  these twenty seven stories.   Every collection of stories must have a contents page. And in writing my contents page I have challenged myself to create a strap-line (such as you might see in a magazine) for each story.

This is because people tend not to read a short story collection as you might read a novel: they don’t read it from page one to page 200. They tend to cherry-pick from the list of stories, going backwards and forwards at will, So I created the contents page with a strap-line for each story to help in the cherry picking. A bit like pinning down butterflies, but here goes...

See the Contents Page for Forms of Flight below. How would you cherry-pick? 

(Today in the workshop we will ask ourselves What is a Short Story?. I will report back here on the inspired answers to this question…)

But first – here is the Contents Page for 

Forms of Flight: Twenty Seven Short Stories. 

	1.Painting Matters: ‘ …his black hair shot up from his head and was cut oddly short at the side and. He was clutching big square parcel which he hoisted so she could see the label.  ‘Emma Unthank	14
	2.Chaos Theory and Frost on Grass:  Lilah gets drunk and makes a new young friend…	31
	3.My Name is Christine: - Christine tries time and again to rescue herself from self-harming oblivion.	51
	4. 1913. The Making of a Man: Rites of passage on a boy’s first day down the pit.	73
	5.1936.  Vi’s Shifts: Stoical, humorous Vi, with her husband Ralph and a son both in the pit, and a son at school, works three shifts a day	87
	6.Joe, Theo and the Silver Ghost: The unspoken love between Joe and his workmate Theo threatens Joe’s marriage.	101
	7.The Story Of An Unusual Marriage: Imogen and Freddie live their own lives almost unbeknownst to each other	113
	8.Oh Amsterdam: This would make a good start, thought Ernestine.  A short journey. A couple of nights stay. Her first,-her very own, - experiment in travel	110
	9.The Nature Of Art: Using his phenomenal memory he painted pictures of the teaming city that were somehow drenched with the light and the movement of the ocean..	133
	10. A Cloak with Pentacles: ‘takes the cloth from her and strokes it with a forefinger pocked with the prick of needles  as though teased by a nutmeg grater	139
	11.Queenie and the Waterman: Queenie is a bag lady who sees angels and giants and lives an enchanted life	143
	12. Sandy Cornell Saved My Life: A hounded adolescence saved by  the gift of friendship	159
	13.The Paperweight:  A chance meeting with dark edges on a rainy night.	169
	14. Knives: A man who likes playing war with toy soldiers learns a true life-lesson about knives.	177
	15.The Glass Egg: She looked up to see a shadow looming across the glass roof-light.	191
	16. The American. ‘Oh, really?’ The voice was American, a soft West Coast sound. ‘You people really read these things?’ He leaned across, picked up the Sylvia Plath…	213
	17. 1946. My First London Spring:  My journey to London was a kind of pilgrimage, eager as I was to fulfil a promise to Josey Atkinson, one of the friends who had died in the cold. I still had his address, on the back of one of my drawings.	219
	18.Turpentine. Embarrassment uncoiling in her senses, made her notice more intensely the smell of peppers in the gypsies food and the turpentine scent of the painter’s oil paints.	233
	19.International Relations:  She brought the tales home to Patrick and they would giggle helplessly over their evening drink: Perrier water for him, gin and tonic for her.’	249
	20.Corn Rows:  ‘… blew her long hair dry, watching it rise away from the dryer like lifted silk ‘What beautiful hair you have, dear,’ said the old woman, looking up from her puzzle book	239
	21. Still Life. ‘Sometimes, without picking up a brush or pencil, the girl would sit hunched on her stool staring out of the windows.’ 22. The Psych and the Poet: She sat down and faced  hi across the table. ‘‘If you’re going to do word association or show me inkblots like the last fucking shrink you can get lost.’                                                                              280	254
	23. Letter to Emily: ‘Miss Lottie, the children!’ she said grimly. ‘According to your father you have been a little mother to your own sisters, I have seen little evidence of such qualities in my house. ‘See to your charges!’	294
	24. Josephine’s Englishman: ‘When M’selle Josephine visited us Amalie was always on edge, uncharacteristically bad tempered. It took me some years for me to realise  that this was caused by jealousy.	311
	25. Forms of Flight: ‘Air Force trained him as a navigator. When he saw the land from the sky he said it fired his Romany blood	321
	26. Spider:  ‘He has marked a column, headed  Knife Attack on Welder.  There is a photo of a handsome man in his mid thirties	327
	27.  How I Became a Painter:  Edgar realised his friend was telling the world  This is me!  in defiance of his father who’d never been comfortable about his son’s soft habit of drawing every dratted thing he saw:	339

Long fiction, the short story and the poem. Plus Work in Progress

As friends here will know I am enjoying the new adventure of writing short stories.

So I thought I would share here my introduction to the six story collection Writing Matters where I meander about thinking of the connection between long fiction  the short story and the poem.

And then also here is work in progress - an extract from one of these stories. Hope you enjoy it.

I once said in a room full of dedicated short story and published writers that a short story was the waste of a good idea. Such blasphemy got the gasps it really does deserve. In the end I did protest that my tongue was firmly in my cheek.

In fact I admire the short story form. It sits neatly between the novel and the poem. It combines the broad narrative significance of the novel with the precision, the economy and illumination of the poem. Both the poem and the short story demand of the writer the precise and focused use of language and true involvement with the processing of unique human experience.

And the truth is that I have always written short stories. The very first publication for which I received hard cash was for a story in Annabel magazine about a little boy called Sam who stood on a rusty nail.

As the years went on, while publishing long fiction, I continued to write short stories, mopping up the ideas that teamed in my head. Some of these were published in Sunday supplements and other places. After a while I started to collect them together more systematically. So emerged the collection called Knives and Other Stories (first published by Iron Press). Then came Fear of Flight and Other Stories which is to be published soon with the re-issue of Knives by AudioGo.

It’s difficult these days for a writer to place very good short stories, despite substantial national campaigns to reinstate the value of this prose form in the public consciousness. I have been advising serious short story writers to build a collection around a theme.
In producing Painting Matters and Other Stories I have followed my own advice.

Often we don’t quite realise quite what we are influenced by or what may be threaded there in layers below our surface narrative. And recently, when re-evaluating my own long fiction, I realised how much painting, painters and teachers and inspirers thread themselves through quite diverse novels.

My first job (when barely out of my own teens) was teaching art to disaffected teenagers and when I moved on I continued to admire art history, contemporary painters and to paint a little myself. Also – very significantly as I re-read my work what also struck me was the degree to which I see painting as a liberating process.

So I decided that Painting would be the loose theme for my next short story collection which has emerged here as Painting Matters and Other Stories. I hope you enjoy these stories.

Work in Progress: from the short story actually called Painting Matters:

"… And the person knocking at the door could definitely not be Sheena’s sister Geraldine. She lived on a boat somewhere in the Midlands with her arty friend Roy and her musical so n Seth. Geraldine’s focus on Emma was a five minute telephone call every Sunday night.She often told her step-mother that she made phone calls standing up. Time, she would say, was to be spent, not wasted.

Emma was breathless when she finally reached the door. She put a hand to her throat, took a deep breath, undid the chain and opened the door. She blinked up at the boy who stood there. He was tall and rangy, his grey eyes were ringed with black; his black hair shot up from his brow was cut oddly short at the side and. He was clutching a big square parcel which he hoisted so she could see the label. ‘Emma Unthank?'

She nodded…"