My free newsletter is out today and includes some competition info and tips on beginnings – if you’d like a copy please use the form on the right.
In last weeks newsletter, in a piece about France, I mentioned a three-legged dog. Well the dog stuck with me as I wrote it into a short story I’d been thinking about – only in this story the dog has four legs. It’s one of a set of linked stories about a small group of characters who won’t seem to let me go. I wrote it fast, straight into my notebook- quite a lot of scribble – but it’s what works best and most creatively for me. I find the story comes out hot – there’s plenty of time later to hone and polish. It’s about a man who keeps a dog chained and ill-fed, it begins….
Bridger stood in the meat aisle in Tescoe’s surrounded by the Taliban...
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Now for something completelty different – Yesterday I spent the day on a wonderful textile memory book, course. I went with ideas of what I wanted to achieve and came away with something entirely different – I like that! I liked being able to use words in a new minimalist way..
Memory books don’t have to be made with pictures…………………….
A textile memory book, a new and fascinating idea for me. Never made it past the cross stitch patten in reader’s digest. Strange how many of us can read about blood lust murder and psychopathic characters; but I can’t even look at a page of animal cruelty without wincing.
Interesting how some ideas just don’t let go. Sometimes I think these are the ideas to go with. At other times, I’ve found they come up at the point in the novel you’re writing when you hit pay dirt, a form of resistance to the task in hand.
A writer I talk to online, a psychologist by profession, says that in his experience, writers don’t finish things not because of a lack of discipline, but it the closing off of other ideas to see one idea through to it’s conclusion that people find insufferable.
That’s interesting – I think it applies in a way to this series of stories I’m writing – I don’t want to close off the ideas, or more to the point characters, that have sprung up, so I’m delibrately exploring them. I think as well as making a collection of linked short stories it could make an interesting novel with a looser form than usual… we’ll see! It’s definitely an ‘idea to go with’ for me.