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Longer Fiction
The first time I discovered one single, momentous moment on a Creative Writing and English Literature course at London Metropolitan University, the message was: 'always write what I am most afraid of'. Each to their own but it worked for me.
This began to give me theme and voice. What it didn't do was assist structuring longer pieces. Recently another piece of instruction from a creative writing tutor on that course fell into place for the first time. I was told at the time, not to be too prescriptive; not to confine plot elements to too tight a structure. This was said during a dissertation tutorial, when nobody else was around. It was almost said in a whisper because rules were being broken:
'..stop thinking Stuart: write..'
I have been unable over the last three years since graduating to contemplate the longer structure of a novel. I stopped trying. I had instead been collating random passages which felt important to me when my life was falling apart (or even when it was falling together) but had no idea where these snippets were going. I had always rejected this spontaneous approach as I thought it left only the laziness in the writing process and thought I was diligently waiting for the master plan. Then I remembered reading an interview with DBC Pierre who won the booker some years ago with Vernon God Little. He said that he had collections of paragraphed rage and rants with nothing approaching a plot. (I'm not quoting direct). But he felt it right to collect them all and wait for them to fall into place.
Recently I started pulling similarly sourced strands together and I think it is beginning to work: for one reason and one reason only - each time I tried to logically condemn each character's voice to a plot - a pre-planned future coordinate - they ran away into darkness and refused to move or speak. So I stopped asking:
'what has to happen next'?
And instead started asking:
'what wouldn’t happen next?
This is a much better way to work because if you eliminate that as best you can, the rest is then free reign. I don't really have an explanation for this, it simply feels right.
This is how the beginning is shaping up:
Bar Code
And I think this time I can just keep going and take that good advice…
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