Course sample

Writing 2: Storylines

written by

Graham Mort

With contributions by: • Kathy Page • Toby Forward • Dorothy Nimmo • Ailsa Cox • Christopher Sykes • Helen Dunmore • Gillian Brightmore • Mary Scott • Elizabeth North

About the author

Graham Mort has published five books of poetry and has won a number of awards and prizes for his work. He also writes short fiction which has been published and broadcast on BBC radio; he is a regular reviewer for a number of literary magazines. Trained as a teacher, he has worked in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, schools, colleges and special schools. Since becoming a freelance writer, editor and tutor in 1985 he has worked on many creative writing and combined arts projects throughout the UK. Locations for these projects have been as diverse as the South Bank Centre and the Outer Hebrides. He is a regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation and also for the Taliesin Trust at Ty Newydd. In 1982 Graham founded the poetry magazine and press 'Giant Steps' which he edited for a number of years. He has worked as a fiction editor on the Yorkshire Art Circus 'Springboard' series and as a consultant on Hodder & Stoughton's 'Teach Yourself' books on creative writing. The creative writing courses and manuals which Graham has written for OCA are drawn from many years experience as a writer and teacher of creative writing.

Contents Introduction Aims and objectives of the course Tutorial procedures Day workshop / residential courses On completing the course Going further 1: The evolution of short fiction Beginnings of the story The first literature Northern Europe and Britain European and classical influences Beginnings of the modern story The twentieth century Publishing and contemporary short fiction 2: Narrative techniques Comment Report Description Speech The modes in concert 3: Ten short stories

Mud Bastard Graham Mort Lambing Kathy Page Assignment 1

The Ice Bear Helen Dunmore Juice Elizabeth North Assignment 2 Avoiding Gatwick Mary Scott The Wedding Cake Christopher Sykes Assignment 3 The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers Gillian Brightmore Lost Grandad Dorothy Nimmo Assignment 4 Hubble Bubble Toby Forward Just Like Robert de Niro Ailsa Cox Assignment 5

4: Writing and drafting assignments Some notes on drafting Assignment length Marking and assessment 5: Getting started 6: Reading list Recommended reading Selected background reading Anthologies Useful critical works Literary magazines Appendix A: contemporary writers featured in this course Appendix B: if you plan to submit your work for formal assessment

No Idea but in things. William Carlos Williams

Some techniques are appropriate at some times and some at other times. Every moment is different. Different things work. One isn’t wrong and the other right ... there is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months ago we will do it again. Actually every time we begin we wonder how we ever did it before. Each time is a new journey with no maps.

Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg

I’m only interested in everything. Les Murray

A wasp is crawling on the floor tumbling over, its motor fanatic. He has smoked 5 cigarettes. He has written slowly and carefully with great love and great coldness. When he finishes he will go back hunting for the lies that are obvious.

Burning Hills, Michael Ondaatje As a matter of fact in all my writing I tell the story of my life again and again. Only the dilettantes try to be universal. A real writer knows that he is connected with a certain people, a certain time, a certain environment and there he stays. There he stays, I would say, and he doesn’t mind it because there is enough to investigate and learn even from a small world.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Introduction Creative Writing 2: Storylines has been devised as a specialist second-level creative writing course for those students who have already successfully completed the OCA Creative Writing 1: Starting To Write course. Our title is derived from the belief that all literature, whether it be poetry, novels, travel-writing or scripts is basically involved in telling a story. The method of narration may be very complex, as in a novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, but at root it is still a form of story. This course has been developed to take you on from the foundation writing course in order to develop your narrative skills. It may be that your ultimate aim is to write novels, but the short story is a good, economical medium through which to hone those skills. A second-level OCA course involves students in having a much greater degree of autonomy than a first-level one. We have not repeated any of the information contained in the Starting To Write course and you will need to review that text before reading this one. It contains a lot of important information about language, structure, characterisation and methods of controlling your work which will be crucial to your progress through this course. You should think of Starting To Write and Storylines as being complementary volumes in the same series and not as entirely separate ones. Students who have come to this course after taking the second-level course Creative Writing 2: The Experience of Poetry might expect the course materials to contain the same sort of very detailed ‘technical’ information, but in fact that kind of analysis of prose fiction is not possible in the same way. Instead, we have chosen a broad approach which looks at the main aspects of narrative technique, rather than an intense analysis which could all too easily become academic rather than practical. Nor are the historical roots of modern short fiction as easy to trace as those of poetry, which is our most ancient literary form. Yet the notion of story-telling pervades all forms of oral and written

literature and still forms a powerful aspect of our everyday communication with each other. The theme of Storylines, that of the modern short story, places it in a very recent tradition of literature; we have included a short essay on the background to the evolution of modern short fiction and a section on narrative technique. These essays have been written to stimulate the widest possible interest in the evolution of narrative forms and to help the reader to confront important questions about story-telling as a form of human communication. In addition we have requested ten short stories from contemporary writers and have asked them to discuss the process of writing their story in an accompanying essay. Those discussions look at background influences, the relationship between short fiction and other forms of writing and the connections between form and content, or ‘form and theme’ as we called it in The Experience of Poetry. Here we have approached that discussion in a less formal way - by putting the author directly in touch with the student - though one which we hope will be equally informative. Some of the things those writers say about their own work or about writing in general may seem contradictory, but we hope that they will begin to show the sheer variety of approaches and thinking behind this very varied literary form. We do not pretend that our examples are by any means exhaustive and we indicate in the reading list where the student might look to find other forms of short fiction. The range of such work is very wide, from ‘popular’ to ‘literary’ forms; we have concentrated here on the serious ‘literary’ side of short fiction rather than commercial genres like the romance or detective story. Some students may have come to Storylines with a particular form or ‘genre’ of short fiction as their personal aim, but we have avoided trying to do justice to such specialisms in these materials. To try to tackle those aspects of form would have massively expanded the scope of the course and would possibly have blurred its focus. Good writing in any genre should be our intention and the selection of a particular genre in the first place is likely only to hamper our imaginative scope. So although some of the stories in this course might now

be seen as belonging to a particular genre, that is not how they were conceived in the minds of their authors. The outstanding short story is more likely, through the sheer quality of its writing, to challenge the notion of genre, rather than conform to it. So for the purposes of this course, ‘genre’ is no more than a convenient way of referring to certain narrative conventions. At this second level of study it is essential that the student be reading short fiction as well as writing it - indeed that is the whole basis for these course materials. When working in any literary form it’s important to understand the range of work that has already been written, since any new work invariably stands in some kind of relationship with it. This kind of knowledge also helps the student understand how authors have played with conventional forms to gain new effects and, in turn, helps to stimulate such innovation in their own work. Unlike the poetry course, where source books are difficult to track down and often not stocked in bookshops, short fiction is much more readily available from bookshops and libraries. You will find the names of very well-known short fiction writers cropping up in the introductory essay, but you should read as widely as you possibly can and make your own judgements about the quality of what you read. The reading list we have provided mentions specific editions, but you will have little difficulty in locating the vast majority of the authors simply by looking up their names in a bookshop or library, since their work has often appeared in many editions from different publishers. As well as tracking down well known writers of short fiction you might like to investigate the new writing in contemporary magazines by taking out a subscription to one. A list of British magazines publishing short fiction appears at the end of the first section. Storylines has been devised, edited and written by Graham Mort who wrote The Experience of Poetry and co-wrote Starting To Write for OCA. He is an experienced writer and creative-writing tutor and was responsible for requesting the examples of short fiction that appear in this course. Many of the contributors are OCA tutors and it was our intention to get them to speak directly to students about their own work through the course materials. A list of such contributors, with brief biographies and details of their publications, appears in Appendix A.

As a graduate of the Starting To Write course, you will be familiar with the structure of this one and the tutorial procedures. The course consists of five assignments, which you will send to your tutor in the usual way, but this time we have extended the duration of the course to approximately nine months. This means that you will have six rather than four weeks in which to complete each piece of work. This extended schedule should give you time to read as well as to experiment with your writing. This course has been designed to be read for enjoyment as well as for information. It offers a disciplined but flexible course of study and will allow you to design your own programme from the ideas it offers. More information on this can be found in the section entitled Writing your assignments.

Aims and objectives of the course The aims and objectives of this course build upon the work begun on the foundation creative-writing course Starting To Write in order to:

• encourage an awareness of the development of modern short fiction and to help students to develop their knowledge

• establish an awareness of contemporary short-fiction writing and publishing

• explore what distinguishes short-fiction from other literary forms and how it works

• encourage the writing of short fiction and to explore the relationship between narrative technique and subject matter

• lay the foundations of a solid writing technique based on disciplined drafting and revision of work

• provide a critical vocabulary for the evaluation of their own and others’ work

• provide a flexible and supportive critical response to students’ work • create a folio of short fiction which has undergone critical appraisal

and revision • offer a graded assessment of work for those students who require it.

Tutorial procedures These follow very closely the pattern laid down in Starting To Write. Upon completing your application form you will have been allocated to a tutor who is a specialist in both writing and teaching fiction. You should send them your Student Profile and also a letter expanding on your profile by saying something about your background, your experience of the foundation course and why you were attracted to this fiction course. It may be that you have requested the same tutor who guided you through Starting To Write, but in some cases that tutor may not have been a short fiction specialist and you will have been assigned to a tutor who is. Before you write to your tutor you will have received these materials and should already have spent some time reading them. Your introductory letter might therefore also outline a scheme of work for your first assignment. Your tutor will reply by introducing themselves to you; he or she will comment on your idea for a first assignment and suggest a deadline for its submission. At this stage you should be prepared to be guided by them as to what is a realistic and suitable first submission since not all the pitfalls of this form of writing will be obvious to you at this stage! Assignments will be marked and returned to you with an accompanying report. The report will contain detailed remarks about the story you have written and will end with more general remarks about your progress and development. Except in the case of special circumstances (which your tutor should inform you of) your work should be returned to you within a fortnight of it being posted off. For further information please read the section entitled 4: Writing and drafting assignments.

This is a sample from Creative Writing 2: Storylines. The full course contains 5 tutor-assessed Assignments.