First presentation to the writing group...
On Thursday nights I attend a very small writing group in Central London. Earlier in the week I had circulated the snippet of text for comments, and Thursday night was the verdict - Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant...
The selection was well received. Very well received. This is encouraging. I was told I had a very noir-ish writing style, with short, punchy sentences, and some nice turns of phrase. All was not perfect, nor did I expect it to be. Sometimes they felt less was more, and that something I had spent a whole paragraph on was in fact better captured by the first sentence, and all the rest could be discarded. In other places, the sense was that I should in fact expand further on what I was saying, and rather than telling the reader about something I should help them experience it. My writing voice is something I'm trying to nail down in this piece, and it veers between the journalistic (first person relating past events) and a very immediate, experiential style. But all the comments were very constructive, and one idea I might explore further is structuring the novel by place, rather than time. It means getting rid of some ideas I had, but then sometimes you have to "kill your babies" to make things work.
Over on my personal blog I mentioned that I have more affinity with the melancholy, the gothic, the bittersweet than I do with tales of joy and happiness, and that this comes through in my writing. Perhaps I should have been born a couple of hundred years ago when the Shelley's and Byron's of the world were writing. The story I'm working on at the moment is a tale of lost love, yearning, depression, self-recrimination and regret. So, not a happy book for the beach... In my defence, it does have a happy ending. Of a sort. But that depends on how you interpret the ending. It could either be wonderful, or very depressing depending on which aspects you focus on, but it is very, very final. I shall say no more, because I like the twist, and although it is a bit of a trick, it avoids the cop-out ending that had been there previously, which was both obvious, and wishful thinking and didn't sit with the events that led up to it. And I've been told that sometimes there's nothing wrong with a trick in writing.
Why I like the melancholy stories is sometimes a mystery to me, but for as long as I can remember my favourite books have been tales of loss, regret, heartache and, although not misery, deep sadness. Just before I hit my teens I was given a copy of The Little Prince, in which the lead character, an innocent lost in a world he does not understand, dies in order to return to where he belongs. It is a sweet and heartbreaking tale, and in the bravura of my teens I dismissed the book, gave away my copy of it, and pretended it was childish. But I later revisited it. My word, it is as wonderful to read now as it was as a child, perhaps more so.
Recently I finished reading a book I promised myself for a long time that I would read someday, The Phantom of the Opera. First of all, it is far, far superior to the musical. If you've seen that, or the film of the musical, then put them out of your mind and go to the book. It is short, but breathtaking. There are passages in there that are pure heartache, as Leroux recounts two love stories, each bittersweet in their own way: the ultimately successful love between Christine and Raoul, and the doomed love that Erik, the Opera Ghost, has for Christine.
My sympathies kept switching between Raoul and Erik, but ultimately I think I identified most with Erik. Someone capable of so much, who loves Christine so much that he literally dies of his love, and yet who is capable of such destructiveness in his life, managing to turn the affections of Christine to hatred for him. We have all been in situations when our own wrong-headedness leads us down the wrong path, causes us to say things we regret, and hurt people that we care about. Erik is a monster, but he is also the most human character in the novel. Flawed, yet perfect. Demonic, yet angelic. Erik is a cypher for the dreams and aspirations that we all have, ambitions thwarted by circumstance, fate, bad luck, self-destructive behaviour, whatever we wish to blame.
So, I heartily recommend that you read the original novel of Phantom. I am now off to read the unrelenting misery that is Dostoevsky...
The selection was well received. Very well received. This is encouraging. I was told I had a very noir-ish writing style, with short, punchy sentences, and some nice turns of phrase. All was not perfect, nor did I expect it to be. Sometimes they felt less was more, and that something I had spent a whole paragraph on was in fact better captured by the first sentence, and all the rest could be discarded. In other places, the sense was that I should in fact expand further on what I was saying, and rather than telling the reader about something I should help them experience it. My writing voice is something I'm trying to nail down in this piece, and it veers between the journalistic (first person relating past events) and a very immediate, experiential style. But all the comments were very constructive, and one idea I might explore further is structuring the novel by place, rather than time. It means getting rid of some ideas I had, but then sometimes you have to "kill your babies" to make things work.
Over on my personal blog I mentioned that I have more affinity with the melancholy, the gothic, the bittersweet than I do with tales of joy and happiness, and that this comes through in my writing. Perhaps I should have been born a couple of hundred years ago when the Shelley's and Byron's of the world were writing. The story I'm working on at the moment is a tale of lost love, yearning, depression, self-recrimination and regret. So, not a happy book for the beach... In my defence, it does have a happy ending. Of a sort. But that depends on how you interpret the ending. It could either be wonderful, or very depressing depending on which aspects you focus on, but it is very, very final. I shall say no more, because I like the twist, and although it is a bit of a trick, it avoids the cop-out ending that had been there previously, which was both obvious, and wishful thinking and didn't sit with the events that led up to it. And I've been told that sometimes there's nothing wrong with a trick in writing.
Why I like the melancholy stories is sometimes a mystery to me, but for as long as I can remember my favourite books have been tales of loss, regret, heartache and, although not misery, deep sadness. Just before I hit my teens I was given a copy of The Little Prince, in which the lead character, an innocent lost in a world he does not understand, dies in order to return to where he belongs. It is a sweet and heartbreaking tale, and in the bravura of my teens I dismissed the book, gave away my copy of it, and pretended it was childish. But I later revisited it. My word, it is as wonderful to read now as it was as a child, perhaps more so.
Recently I finished reading a book I promised myself for a long time that I would read someday, The Phantom of the Opera. First of all, it is far, far superior to the musical. If you've seen that, or the film of the musical, then put them out of your mind and go to the book. It is short, but breathtaking. There are passages in there that are pure heartache, as Leroux recounts two love stories, each bittersweet in their own way: the ultimately successful love between Christine and Raoul, and the doomed love that Erik, the Opera Ghost, has for Christine.
My sympathies kept switching between Raoul and Erik, but ultimately I think I identified most with Erik. Someone capable of so much, who loves Christine so much that he literally dies of his love, and yet who is capable of such destructiveness in his life, managing to turn the affections of Christine to hatred for him. We have all been in situations when our own wrong-headedness leads us down the wrong path, causes us to say things we regret, and hurt people that we care about. Erik is a monster, but he is also the most human character in the novel. Flawed, yet perfect. Demonic, yet angelic. Erik is a cypher for the dreams and aspirations that we all have, ambitions thwarted by circumstance, fate, bad luck, self-destructive behaviour, whatever we wish to blame.
So, I heartily recommend that you read the original novel of Phantom. I am now off to read the unrelenting misery that is Dostoevsky...
posted by Paul @ 10:51
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