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Short Fiction
I suppose I see poetry as a more intimate relationship with the world around me. It is the noises on the inside.
Whereas, whenever I am in a more extrovert rage at the world - the one sensible, default position of any contemporary sentient being - when I am engaged with it, having accidents within it, finding its faults, discovering my own - the whole morass of interaction with the social condition, driven by all its economic and political forces, mainly unseen, insidiously eating away at the sense of the human, diluting the inner animal, I don't always want to write intimately at all but shout above the traffic. The noises on the outside.
When this happens I am happier to look for a longer explanation as to why somebody or I or both of us combined, have really fucked it up this time. So I write longer forms than poems and try the short story.
I find that because the material arrives from the above angles, the writing process is not so much about refining an initial burst of inspiration but about keeping scrap books of incidents and items which may impact upon a theme or view until such time an experimental look then solidifies into a plot which carries a story.
What always strikes me as important is to drop all assumptions. I am working within a mini-genre at present: sci-casm or cyber-satire. This came about not through a desire to write sci-fi but a failure to control longer tracts of autobiograpy. I had something to say but as soon as I wrote it from a point of view so close to my own face, I saw nothing. I eventually realised that near future sci-fi - so close to the present it's almost tangible, was much more possible. I could write better when the ideas weren't so close to my own face. Sci-fi in particular uses extrapolation - the juxtaposition of another world onto a present reality in order to examine that present - far more than other genres. Therefore by coincidence, it is extremely suited to assist a move away from autobiography to fiction.
Also at odds with what might be expected to inform sci-fi; it's not my recorded episodes of Red Dwarf or the telescope in my front room. Recently it has been the paintings of Heironymous Bosch in a story called The Song Fishers. Because what is most important to any genre whether its sci-fi or anything else, is not the conjouring of a thousand detailed space ships, but the human motives and in this case Bosch won the tender because I needed images of decadence and greed.
In the same way the story carried a 'love interest' of sorts - a relationshiop of necessity forged from the violent politics of projected neo-colonialism and I got a handle on that from the trials and tribulations of the characters from Spenser's Fairie Queen, one of the oldest works of English Literature around the period of the Renaissance.
What this leads to is the conclusion that I can't rely, for creativity, on the staid mechanics of logic and reason. Otherwise I would still be watching Red Dwarf and not writing. Yet again I find, despite their usefulness, that all the lit. criticism and all the writing workshops in all the world, will not provide as startling an insight as one, off-centre piece of advice. This has become more truthful to the journey I take, than any other learned note: basically that I have to perfect a way of not looking...at least not too hard.
The Song Fishers
I once read that Francis Ford Coppola sometimes began a film script with one strong visual image in mind and nothing else and then expanded by experiment. When I tried this I ended up with 18 000 words. But I kept going with the editing and what was challenging in writing without a pre-emptive structure, was the job of constraining the story and characters to a world (and about 8 000 words)! In other words if you leave one single possibility that they 'can just walk out the room' because you've left a loophole then the whole thing crashes. I think I've just about managed to close all the doors. Its easier if you plan in advance but then again sometimes you can't suppress a vision. Just because its difficult doesn't mean its not interesting.
I took a much more planned approach in another story - a comment on the world of advertising, information and how we as human beings might progress if we become secondary to these forces.
Product Placement
What was typical of both these stories is that somewhere after the middle and before the conclusion, I sometimes suddenly drop, in an attempt to secure the ending, into paragraphs of explanation which lose the more natural momentum so far achieved. I have to constantly address that weakness in structure. I think I did it quite well in Product Placement in the end but some re-jigging in The Song Fishers may well do me a further favour if I look back at this one more time. Inevitable really, as it was the first lengthy story I have written and the first time my ears pricked up at the possibility of maintaining longer fiction to create a novel. I've tried before, don't get me wrong but this time I may actually have convinced myself...
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Other, recent Short Fiction:
Condensation
Time Consuming
I have just reminded myself of the value of reading in the genre in which you wish to write. This sci-fi short begins as I have recently absorbed more short science fiction. Its only first draft but you get the picture. The advice to read more is often ignored and should not be. It works. It's that simple:
Two little boys had two Little Toys
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