Show #3

Our story this evening was Untouchable by Wendy Clarke, a powerful tale set in medieval France and the winning entry in the 2009 Totnes Bookshop short story competition.
The second half of the show involved a look at lists as a writer’s tool.
Even the most mundane list can be used to present details of a life without telling the reader how to respond, allowing them to make their own judgements about a character. A list engages a reader on an active level, forcing an emotional response to the text, allowing the reader’s own prejudices and opinions to colour their interpretations of the things they see listed - creating an excellent opportunity for the writer to subvert those expectations.
In a functional sense, a list can also get things done quickly. As an example I mentioned F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterful use of a list to create the atmosphere and detail of a lavish party in The Great Gatsby.
I also touched on the use of a list as a way to introduce poetic, metrical rhythms into a prose piece without drawing attention to itself, without breaking that prose illusion of reality.

I suggested an exercise based on all this. Come up with a list for one of your characters, a shopping list, a list of new year’s resolutions, a to do list, or anything really. Try and twist it around, add something unexpected, subvert expectations, tell a story through it. After all, at heart, most stories can be thought of as an expanded list: a list of events and the insights they trigger, one after the other.
This week’s extracts came from two books that rank pretty high on my own all-time list.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Please feel free to submit anything you come up with here on blog. Or if you have any other comments on the show, again, please post.
Looking forward to the next show on March 8.

Keep the stories coming in.

Show #2

A double helping of stories from Veryan Williams-Wynn, which I am sure you all enjoyed.

The response to the call for stories has been fantastic so far. Please keep them coming in.

There was not too much time in the show for the 'talking about writing' bit, but the stories did get me thinking about research, and what this heavy word means to the writer. Both of Veryan's pieces combined a wide range of research and creative sources, from writing exercises, museum trips and bookwork, through to her own childhood recollections and family concerns.

Of course, external research can be vital for effective fiction, and I can see a future segment devoted to this. To create an authentic, albeit fictional, real world setting requires authentic detail. This type of research is often a creative source in itself, throwing up new ideas and angles and personalities we had not before considered as we delve deeper into our chosen settings and time frames. If you feel this is an area you would like to explore further but don't really know where to start I can recommend Ann Hoffman’s Research For Writers. This is an excellent practical textbook for research sources, techniques and considerations. My copy is the 2003 seventh edition and it is still useful. It may well be into its eighth edition by now.

Still, as writers our greatest resource is ourselves. To search out our memories, to clarify our responses to the world and to map out our personal journey through life is how we develop a unique voice. That is not necessarily to say that all fiction is somehow autobiographical (although there are certainly some who would claim that), but that if we do not give of ourselves to our work in some way, then what is the point of it?

Of course, childhood offers a great well of ideas and insights; this is the time when we are formed, when we make the greatest advances along the road from innocence to experience. It is a heavily mined source for short stories – the ‘coming of age’ narrative, the glimpse of the adult world that awaits us and will forever change our perception of it. Without getting into a debate about when, if ever, our childhood truly ends, it is also a time that is seen from a distance. I have heard writers claim they write most effectively about a country once they have left it. I think the same is true of childhood. Only when we have left it, can we truly understand it.

Here’s an exercise you might like to try, adapted from one in Josip Novakovitch’s excellent Fiction Writer’s Workshop.

Find a bit of peace and quiet and write down your three earliest memories. Try to weave them into a story. Make it someone else’s story and make the links between them something other than your personal history. The memories do not need to proceed in the same order as you recall. Play around, merge, separate, mix and match, cut and paste. In other words, change everything, except for the essence of the memories. Let yourself go!

Feel free to post the results here if you like, or submit to the show, it could make for an interesting section.


I’m looking forward to the next Soundart Stories on February 22. Until then, keep reading, keep writing, and, above all, keep seeing.

(I’m not sure about this closing line for the show. I thought it was concise and clever, both to the point and multi-layered, but I’m beginning to think it just makes me sound like a pompous Edward R Murrow wannabe . . .)