Start Writing Fiction MOOC - Week 3 done

The long and winding road ...?

This week in our Open University MOOC has been the most valuable of the course so far, largely because of an exercise in original writing with structured feedback from fellow students. I received three responses to the exercise I submitted yesterday (there's a brief mention of that in my previous post below). After sleeping on the comments of my reviewers I posted these thoughts to the MOOC discussion board.

I received three responses within an hour of lodging my first draft. That was both surprising and super-helpful. The guidance I received from my peers was made particularly effective because each one gave similar comments in more or less the same areas - 

• too many numbers and nerdy facts in my opening section, bordering on the tedious. How right. 
• Strong evocation of place. Phew. 
• Less strong (bordering on invisible) illustration of character ... oops on a course predicated on the centrality of character. 
• readers' interest returned when the nervous kangaroo pricked up its ears then looked north. Saved by an outback animal!

 My peers have really helped me to step back, look again at the text and ask myself what I'm attempting to do and, therefore, consider how best to pull off whatever that might be. I have asked myself if I truly have the germ of a story at all. In an earlier exercise I knew where my story would go; knew the last line. With this peer-reviewed exercise I've asked myself, 'where did you think you were going next?' 'How does it end? 

Do we need to be able to answer such questions before we start writing? I thought, maybe not but I'm now not so sure. 

Thank you reviewers. 

So ... still making progress, I hope. On to week four.

Music to write by

Two weeks on from my references to the ways (surprising to me) Brian Eno's ambient music seems to help me concentrate on the task of writing, I'm becoming a bigger fan of meditative music playing in the background while I work. It's not all Brian Eno (although he does seem to have quite a lot of material to choose from. That's not a complaint.)

Laraaji - Essence/Universe

Allowing the links and transitions that exist in YouTube between themes or artists or whatever it may be the algorithm determines, I was led from one of Brian Eno's albums to another by an American musician going by the name of Laraaji. I had not heard of him before that transition. Wiki tells me he was born Edward Larry Gordon in Philadelphia in 1943. 

Today I've had Laraaji's Essence/Universe playing in the background while working on an assignment for my Open University MOOC, Start Writing Fiction. We have been asked to write the beginning of a new short story deriving from one of the earlier exercises on the course (when we were asked to make a character sketch from a video presentation). I hadn't been greatly enamoured by the character I created. I thought it was quite well-written but I disliked him. At this stage of my learning I'm not really in a position to spend time with characters I don't like, even if I am the one who gives birth to them.

Fortunately for me the helpful folk at the Open University had provided us with alternative stimuli for our story. These came as words, phrases, potential ideas on a story prompt PDF they had created as a Wordle picture. When I opened it the first phrase that caught my eye was "railway crossing". So on Thursday and Friday of this week I used my Morning Pages exercises to set down my first rush of words for what I hoped would become a story. Today I started the editing work with those first-flush, 602 words. 

We were asked to submit for peer review between 200 and 350 words of what may be the opening section of a longer and complete story. Mine begins,

Ivanhoe is a tiny town 650 kilometres west of Sydney as the crow flies. But we’re not crows. So we took the train ...

I hope you're working for me Laraaji.

Poem? Not a poem? No idea.

Restore after Fish

A nice cup of tea

Spike's first pixilation - 10 minutes in the making for 17 seconds of taking tea the pixilated way. Ten years from now, when the Oscars are being handed out, remember you saw the beginning here first.

Sicario

Sicario directed by Dennis Villeneuve

A tense, violent and rather nihilistic film. Maybe not nihilistic but certainly bleak and despairing. 

Some of the sequences and opportunities that arose to move the story forward seemed a little implausible or clunky - for plot purposes rather than any real life situation - for example, the scene at the border with the convoy heading north back into the USA. Given the 'good guys' were so well-organised, hot-wired into the world's most sophisticated intelligence and spying network, why not simply arrange to drive over the virtually empty southern carriageway rather than head straight into the four-lane traffic jam containing two cars full of bad guys with bad teeth, ugly haircuts, repulsive tattoos and heavy-duty bad ass weaponry? For the purposes of dramatic tension and lethal action, that's why.  Never mind 'no horses were harmed...' 'No innocents were harmed in the portrayal of this precision-tooled execution scene brought to you by the CIA.'

But I may be nit-picking. The movie is well put together and the three, central performances by Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Bernico Del Torro are highly persuasive. Three and a bit out of five. 

The Donald is leaving the building

That, Mr Trump, is the sound of the 'Fat Lady Singing'.
Thank you Iowa

Houston ... we have a Triffid

When we bought the house three years ago there was an old wheelbarrow strategically positioned in an empty spot of the front garden. It contained a bed of small, uninteresting succulents barely reaching the top of the barrow sides. The plants have grown quite a bit in the intervening years and are now in danger of becoming quite interesting indeed. 

About three weeks ago they all began to look bigger, broader, more ... more ... succulent. And in the last fortnight or so, through days when the temperature regularly reached 30 degrees plus and almost touched 40 degrees a few times, despite several ferocious thunder storms and in the face of two wild hail storms, one of the succulents has shot up - straight into the air, heading towards half a metre.  It reminds me of the fictional Triffids.  Who knows what it will do next?