In a previous blog (113), 'Don't think about building a wall. Think about laying one brick perfectly', I wrote about the eight week workshop on creative writing that I completed in 2004. In the final session on Wednesday April 28th the tutor, Judith White, circulated a number of pictures and articles among the class members with the following instruction: "Choose a picture you can relate to - something that triggers a memory or a situation - and write about it from the second person ‘You’ point of view."
Among the material circulated was a programme for Hamlet. I briefly thought about that as a starting point but decided not to pursue it. Then I came across a coloured magazine photo for a court jester which put me in mind of Yorick and of Hamlet addressing Yorick's skull. This was the initial impetus for my writing The Hanging Clown: A Story for 9/11 (blog 64, 11th September 2013).
During the writing of The Hanging Clown on the Thursday and Friday of that week, I tried to keep a record of the mental mechanics of its construction. I recognise how impossible it is to thoroughly track
the thought processes in the conception and writing of a story, to accurately
record the eddies and flows in a stream of consciousness, let alone deal with
what may or may not be going on at a subconscious level. (For a sophisticated demonstration of the difficulties of recording conscious thought, see David Lodge’s 2001 novel Thinks.) Nevertheless I kept as
full details as I could of the development of my story by adding footnotes every step of the way. Each item that sprang to mind was footnoted in italics, then follow up explanations added in normal type to elucidate the note, trace any searches it prompted, and indicate whether or not the idea was subsequently abandoned.
The result was that the footnotes were longer than the story itself. They are set out below in Arial font. Where the present font (Times) is inserted the comment is a current 2014 one. At various points reference is made to 'Finger pieces' and to a book I was planning on creative writing.*
Thursday morning, April 29th 2004
“Ha, ha, said the Clown” [Manfred Mann].
This was my initial title for the story, the memory of the title of a Manfred Mann song. I played in a college cricket team with Michael D’Abo, who succeeded Paul Jones as lead singer in the 1960s pop group Manfred Mann and thought I might be able to work a story out of that contact and the song title. Later I searched on Google and found the lyric to the song and realised it was hopelessly inappropriate to the story that I had started out on in the workshop session – the song is about a guy who fancies a lady in the circus and then discovers she is married to the clown. So I dropped the title and the idea completely.
The Universal Clown.
The Sage Fool.
The Clown at the Court of the Emperor Dubya – none (parody the new crusaders).
2014 comment: 'Dubya' = George W. Bush. 'The new crusaders' = Dick Cheney, Ronald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz - the core of 'NeoCons' in the Bush administration who promoted and planned the invasion of Iraq and developed the doctrine of preemptive war to promote a US version of democracy.
A drahm of merriment for these times.
A recollection that I had a quote from Balzac in a piece of writing I did in 1982.
We need you now, clown, more than ever we need you. Your wisdom, your drollery.
Yorick, Lear’s clown, the medieval Fool’s Day (see article on cartoons) --> also Balzac, Rabelais.
I looked up the Hamlet speech (Act V, scene I) in which he addresses the skull of Yorick:
The Balzac, Rabelais note was a reminder that along with the Balzac quote I had a pastiche of Rabelais’ prologue to ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ in which he addresses the reader in the second person, ‘Most noble boozers, and you my very esteemed and poxy friends.’ Nothing came of the Rabelais prompt.
Use material from Dali.
'The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali', which I see from the flyleaf I bought in June 1978, is the origin of the potty training segment in paragraph two. It was obviously a memorable story for me to recall it after so many years.
Clowns on the Internet.
An Internet search revealed some bizarre stuff but nothing I subsequently used.
Sacha’s giggles.
A reference to my daughter who, as a child, loved to giggle and have ‘giggly friends’. In paragraph two my baby clown originally sat giggling to himself but I later changed giggling to chuckling.
Now wise fools are dead and only the idiot clowns are left to hold sway in the world.
Scaramouche, Everyman clown.
I saw Peter Postlethwaite’s one-man show ‘Scaramouche Jones’ in Auckland last year and thought it might trigger something useful, but it didn’t, other than reinforcing the idea of the clown as some everyman figure. At that time I didn’t pursue the original Scaramouche story so have just done so (it’s May 7th 2004) and to my surprise found that the opening line of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche – A Romance of the French Revolution (1921) is ‘He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.’
Overall tone of sadness and despair.
Mary’s letter to her son on his twenty-first birthday.
This was a sad letter, written but never sent, expressing a mother’s concern about the character of her son at the time of his coming-of-age and pessimism about his likely future. It was the antithesis of the optimism of the narrator in my story, yet it was my narrator’s clown son who came to a sad end.
The Hanged Man / The Fool.
A reference to two of the cards of the major arcana in the tarot pack. This prompted me to dig out the book that is now sitting on my desktop, The Hanged Man: Psychotherapy and the Forces of Darkness by Sheldon Kopp, published in 1974. Here is the opening paragraph of chapter one, ‘The Myth is Everyone’s Story’:
Lucy’s hatred of clowns
A reference to a friend who told me she found clowns very disturbing, a friend who I identified with the childlike innocence of my son clown character.
Marcel Marceau (now only mime). The sad pierrots have taken over the show, dolorous.
Later included in the text as ‘dolorous pierrot miming a wordless despair.’
Festival of Comedy.
Currently on inAuckland
Clowns: from patronage to the market --> wisdom to entertainment.
The notion that the modern day clown has to make his or her way freelance as an entertainer whose primary function is to amuse the audience. Disappearance of the gentle sage fool dispensing wisdom? Thus the idea of my child clown as something of an anachronism in this day and age.
Billy Connolly, The Big Yin.
Ability to see the general humour in the particular idiosyncrasies of behaviour. Not followed up.
SHOW, DON’T TELL: yet most creative writing workshops as Tell – see all the handouts.
A note that cuts across the thinking about the clown story to the idea of the present book. A recognition of the irony of one of the mantras of creative writing courses, the need for fiction writers to reveal character through behaviour rather than through authorial description, letting readers discover character for themselves rather than being told what they are like. Yet most creative writing books are ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’.
Opening up seams rather than just finding/picking out nuggets.
I have no idea now what this note referred to or what line of thought it was supposed to prompt.
'Soup for One' [title for supermarket piece].
Clearly my mind has wandered from the task at hand for it is at this point that I decide to title the story in Finger Piece 11, ‘Soup for One.’
'The Hanging Clown' to replace 'Hot Water Blues'.
My mind now on story titles I decide at this point on a title for the clown story and then that it should replace Hot Water Blues in the title of the present book, which was originally Hot Water Blues and other Fun Experiments in a Creative Writing Apprenticeship.
Sept 11/2001.
This is the first glimmering of the notion that 9/11 might have some role in the clown story. There are no follow up notes at this point as I am clearly more focused on the creative writing work than the short story.
Idea for book - coming out from the underneath, from footnotes to text. Keeping the creative flow separate from the analysis.
Here I am wondering how to construct a book that is as much footnote as main text and at what point, if any, the material in the footnotes should become the main text.
The ‘lost idea’.
I had a good idea but forgot to write it down. Well, I clearly thought it was a good idea at the time because this note was supposed to prompt me to work to recover it. I tried to at the time of writing the note and again later and again now, but have no idea what it was that I so carelessly let escape. I am sure it was a very big fish. I keep some notepaper by my bedside and scribble things down in the middle of the night in the dark. Usually I can just about read them in the morning. Unfortunately sometimes I have such a ‘big’ idea in the middle of the night that I imagine I will remember it in the morning without the prompt of a scribbled note. But of course I don’t.
Incorporate Wicked Goblins, No 6 bus and MikeD’Abo and Miriam.
Still thinking about this present book I speculate about adding other pieces of writing of mine that were not generated by the workshop, a story called ‘Wicked Goblins’ and a piece about riding on the top deck of a number six bus during which I spot Mike D’Abo striding flamboyantly up Lower Regent Street. Miriam is a reference to Mike D’Abo’s actress daughter, a one-time James Bond film girl.
2014: Her name was Maryam and she was his cousin.
Plunder Bruce Barton.
Still thinking about other possible stories for incorporation, including possibility of developing a story on ad copy-writing from my journal entry of April 18th which was triggered by the words “God is Alive. Are you?” (not included in ‘Finger Pieces’). The reference is to Bruce Barton’s 1926 non-fiction bestseller The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus which includes a chapter titled ‘His Advertisements’ in which Barton extols Jesus’ use of the media to promote his message.
The Masterpiece.
Reminder to myself that the end goal and end point of an apprenticeship is the creation of a masterpiece, that is, in the traditional medieval craft guilds, the piece to satisfy the master of the craft that one is sufficiently qualified to be released from one’s apprenticeship and let loose on the world as a journeyman craftsman.
Close with ‘The Archaeology of a Box’?
Another earlier short story that might be included in the book.
Piece on Tarots and Dad.
Yet another piece of my writing sitting around that might be plundered, this one on giving up religious belief without necessarily giving up a religious sensibility, on finding substitutes for God in one’s life and yet not being caught up in the tarot and other forms of New Age psychobabble.
Writers and ‘Locked-In’ syndrome.
I had been reading Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (1997) in which he describes being marooned in the cocoon of his appalling paralysis, only able to communicate by moving his left eyelid. Rather tritely and tastelessly perhaps, I saw some parallels between his ‘locked-in’ syndrome and the view of the world through the eye of a writer or of my child clown bat hanging in the corner of the cave.
The result was that the footnotes were longer than the story itself. They are set out below in Arial font. Where the present font (Times) is inserted the comment is a current 2014 one. At various points reference is made to 'Finger pieces' and to a book I was planning on creative writing.*
Thursday morning, April 29th 2004
“Ha, ha, said the Clown” [Manfred Mann].
This was my initial title for the story, the memory of the title of a Manfred Mann song. I played in a college cricket team with Michael D’Abo, who succeeded Paul Jones as lead singer in the 1960s pop group Manfred Mann and thought I might be able to work a story out of that contact and the song title. Later I searched on Google and found the lyric to the song and realised it was hopelessly inappropriate to the story that I had started out on in the workshop session – the song is about a guy who fancies a lady in the circus and then discovers she is married to the clown. So I dropped the title and the idea completely.
The Universal Clown.
The Sage Fool.
The Clown at the Court of the Emperor Dubya – none (parody the new crusaders).
2014 comment: 'Dubya' = George W. Bush. 'The new crusaders' = Dick Cheney, Ronald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz - the core of 'NeoCons' in the Bush administration who promoted and planned the invasion of Iraq and developed the doctrine of preemptive war to promote a US version of democracy.
A drahm of merriment for these times.
A recollection that I had a quote from Balzac in a piece of writing I did in 1982.
We need you now, clown, more than ever we need you. Your wisdom, your drollery.
Yorick, Lear’s clown, the medieval Fool’s Day (see article on cartoons) --> also Balzac, Rabelais.
I looked up the Hamlet speech (Act V, scene I) in which he addresses the skull of Yorick:
Alas, poor Yorick! – I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorr’d in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fall’n?I didn’t look up the fool in ‘King Lear’. The reference to cartoons is to a three-page segment, ‘The cartoonist as fool, sage and psychoanalyst’, in chapter six of my (non-fiction) book Business and the Culture of the Enterprise Society published in 1993. I have drawn on this material for paragraph five of the story.
The Balzac, Rabelais note was a reminder that along with the Balzac quote I had a pastiche of Rabelais’ prologue to ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ in which he addresses the reader in the second person, ‘Most noble boozers, and you my very esteemed and poxy friends.’ Nothing came of the Rabelais prompt.
Use material from Dali.
'The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali', which I see from the flyleaf I bought in June 1978, is the origin of the potty training segment in paragraph two. It was obviously a memorable story for me to recall it after so many years.
Clowns on the Internet.
An Internet search revealed some bizarre stuff but nothing I subsequently used.
Sacha’s giggles.
A reference to my daughter who, as a child, loved to giggle and have ‘giggly friends’. In paragraph two my baby clown originally sat giggling to himself but I later changed giggling to chuckling.
Now wise fools are dead and only the idiot clowns are left to hold sway in the world.
Scaramouche, Everyman clown.
I saw Peter Postlethwaite’s one-man show ‘Scaramouche Jones’ in Auckland last year and thought it might trigger something useful, but it didn’t, other than reinforcing the idea of the clown as some everyman figure. At that time I didn’t pursue the original Scaramouche story so have just done so (it’s May 7th 2004) and to my surprise found that the opening line of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche – A Romance of the French Revolution (1921) is ‘He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.’
Overall tone of sadness and despair.
Mary’s letter to her son on his twenty-first birthday.
This was a sad letter, written but never sent, expressing a mother’s concern about the character of her son at the time of his coming-of-age and pessimism about his likely future. It was the antithesis of the optimism of the narrator in my story, yet it was my narrator’s clown son who came to a sad end.
The Hanged Man / The Fool.
A reference to two of the cards of the major arcana in the tarot pack. This prompted me to dig out the book that is now sitting on my desktop, The Hanged Man: Psychotherapy and the Forces of Darkness by Sheldon Kopp, published in 1974. Here is the opening paragraph of chapter one, ‘The Myth is Everyone’s Story’:
Sometimes I feel as though I am four hundred years old, heavy with wisdom, knowing too much and burdened with the pain of it. I miss the wonder and the hopefulness that I experienced when I was young, though now I can hardly recall how I once felt. I’ve seen too much that made no sense, witnessed too much pain about which I could do nothing.It was in part this tone of resigned acceptance that I wanted to convey in the voice of my narrator contemplating the life and death of his clown son.
Lucy’s hatred of clowns
A reference to a friend who told me she found clowns very disturbing, a friend who I identified with the childlike innocence of my son clown character.
Marcel Marceau (now only mime). The sad pierrots have taken over the show, dolorous.
Later included in the text as ‘dolorous pierrot miming a wordless despair.’
Festival of Comedy.
Currently on in
Clowns: from patronage to the market --> wisdom to entertainment.
The notion that the modern day clown has to make his or her way freelance as an entertainer whose primary function is to amuse the audience. Disappearance of the gentle sage fool dispensing wisdom? Thus the idea of my child clown as something of an anachronism in this day and age.
Billy Connolly, The Big Yin.
Ability to see the general humour in the particular idiosyncrasies of behaviour. Not followed up.
SHOW, DON’T TELL: yet most creative writing workshops as Tell – see all the handouts.
A note that cuts across the thinking about the clown story to the idea of the present book. A recognition of the irony of one of the mantras of creative writing courses, the need for fiction writers to reveal character through behaviour rather than through authorial description, letting readers discover character for themselves rather than being told what they are like. Yet most creative writing books are ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’.
Opening up seams rather than just finding/picking out nuggets.
I have no idea now what this note referred to or what line of thought it was supposed to prompt.
'Soup for One' [title for supermarket piece].
Clearly my mind has wandered from the task at hand for it is at this point that I decide to title the story in Finger Piece 11, ‘Soup for One.’
'The Hanging Clown' to replace 'Hot Water Blues'.
My mind now on story titles I decide at this point on a title for the clown story and then that it should replace Hot Water Blues in the title of the present book, which was originally Hot Water Blues and other Fun Experiments in a Creative Writing Apprenticeship.
Sept 11/2001.
This is the first glimmering of the notion that 9/11 might have some role in the clown story. There are no follow up notes at this point as I am clearly more focused on the creative writing work than the short story.
Idea for book - coming out from the underneath, from footnotes to text. Keeping the creative flow separate from the analysis.
Here I am wondering how to construct a book that is as much footnote as main text and at what point, if any, the material in the footnotes should become the main text.
The ‘lost idea’.
I had a good idea but forgot to write it down. Well, I clearly thought it was a good idea at the time because this note was supposed to prompt me to work to recover it. I tried to at the time of writing the note and again later and again now, but have no idea what it was that I so carelessly let escape. I am sure it was a very big fish. I keep some notepaper by my bedside and scribble things down in the middle of the night in the dark. Usually I can just about read them in the morning. Unfortunately sometimes I have such a ‘big’ idea in the middle of the night that I imagine I will remember it in the morning without the prompt of a scribbled note. But of course I don’t.
Incorporate Wicked Goblins, No 6 bus and MikeD’Abo and Miriam.
Still thinking about this present book I speculate about adding other pieces of writing of mine that were not generated by the workshop, a story called ‘Wicked Goblins’ and a piece about riding on the top deck of a number six bus during which I spot Mike D’Abo striding flamboyantly up Lower Regent Street. Miriam is a reference to Mike D’Abo’s actress daughter, a one-time James Bond film girl.
2014: Her name was Maryam and she was his cousin.
Plunder Bruce Barton.
Still thinking about other possible stories for incorporation, including possibility of developing a story on ad copy-writing from my journal entry of April 18th which was triggered by the words “God is Alive. Are you?” (not included in ‘Finger Pieces’). The reference is to Bruce Barton’s 1926 non-fiction bestseller The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus which includes a chapter titled ‘His Advertisements’ in which Barton extols Jesus’ use of the media to promote his message.
The Masterpiece.
Reminder to myself that the end goal and end point of an apprenticeship is the creation of a masterpiece, that is, in the traditional medieval craft guilds, the piece to satisfy the master of the craft that one is sufficiently qualified to be released from one’s apprenticeship and let loose on the world as a journeyman craftsman.
Close with ‘The Archaeology of a Box’?
Another earlier short story that might be included in the book.
Piece on Tarots and Dad.
Yet another piece of my writing sitting around that might be plundered, this one on giving up religious belief without necessarily giving up a religious sensibility, on finding substitutes for God in one’s life and yet not being caught up in the tarot and other forms of New Age psychobabble.
Writers and ‘Locked-In’ syndrome.
I had been reading Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (1997) in which he describes being marooned in the cocoon of his appalling paralysis, only able to communicate by moving his left eyelid. Rather tritely and tastelessly perhaps, I saw some parallels between his ‘locked-in’ syndrome and the view of the world through the eye of a writer or of my child clown bat hanging in the corner of the cave.
Thursday afternoon, 29th April 2004 3pm
To the dentist for an extraction (29th April 2.30pm). On the way home (driving) I began to think of the possibility of the clown as an alter ego – that it was the clown in me that had died that day – e.g. 9/11 in NY and 3/11 in Madrid (when are the Ides of March?). How would there be room in the world for innocence any more? Surely all clowning must now be of a satirical Cassandraic form, but then how often has that been the case before – WWI, Nazi death camps --> see Steiner The Language of Silence [sic]. Antidote to the mushiness of Mr Oliphant’s Tears and back to Cameron Gunn’s nightmare – I discovered this morning that the original developer/ entrepreneur of Lagonda was Wilbur Gunn. And Gunn (I have just remembered) is my clan tartan on my mother’s side (Henderson).
The Ides of March are March 15th so that was of no relevance. The suggestion that I should look at George Steiner’s collection of 1958-1966 essays and articles, Language and Silence, was ignored at the time of writing the story. Today, May 12th 2004, I have taken my copy down from my bookshelf and see it was a present to me from my younger brother, inscribed, with our family’s characteristic lack of sentimental endearments, ‘Christmas 1970 To John from Stuart’. I have been scanning through and (re)discovered some telling comments for current times, both in respect of literature and events in
2014: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. As I write this ten years on (October 2014) ISIS is publishing videos of the beheading of hostages (journalists and aid workers among others) in its rampage to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
 |
| Image from www.authorstream.com |
Tales of Innocence. Tales of Experience.
Thinking of William Blake. Not followed up.
Friday 30th April 2004
Lying in bed (Miriam [sic] Keyes writing method).
Marian Keyes was inNew Zealand
Idea that The Hanging Clown in my bedroom should be my shrine to you, my dead clown son --> purchased at Mount Maunganui, hanging and fell (on New Year’s Day 2002) lay for a long while on the table below, broken leg, reglued --> now holds a little triangular ball game in his right hand, a child’s game above a triptych of pictures of you --> 3 scenes from your life 1 --> 2 --> 3 so sequence of story goes:
1. childhood reminiscences
2. the Everyman Sage/Fool
3. deaths of clowning --> each generation WWI/Gallipoli (ANZACS)
--> 9/11
4. now we need clowns more than ever (Balzac)
5. My Hanging Clown
Lying in bed (Miriam [sic] Keyes writing method).
Marian Keyes was in
Idea that The Hanging Clown in my bedroom should be my shrine to you, my dead clown son --> purchased at Mount Maunganui, hanging and fell (on New Year’s Day 2002) lay for a long while on the table below, broken leg, reglued --> now holds a little triangular ball game in his right hand, a child’s game above a triptych of pictures of you --> 3 scenes from your life 1 --> 2 --> 3 so sequence of story goes:
1. childhood reminiscences
2. the Everyman Sage/Fool
3. deaths of clowning --> each generation WWI/Gallipoli (ANZACS)
--> 9/11
4. now we need clowns more than ever (Balzac)
5. My Hanging Clown
This clown hangs upside down in my bedroom much in the manner described in the last paragraph of the story, though the photos in the triptych are of the clown himself sitting upright in various poses. It has this typed caption alongside: ‘THE HANGING CLOWN. Extravagantly accepting life’s chances and hazards, the suspended mind, anarchic, irrational and venturesome, sets out on a psychic voyage of self-discovery.’
When I lost you I lost the last remnants of the clown in me.
Ironically, also at my bedside this week, Evan’s gift to his mum for her birthday on April 4th - The Queens’ Fool by Philippa Gregory.
A novel about Mary Tudor told through the eyes of Hannah, the Queen’s fool, who has the gift of foresight.
.jpg) |
| The Upside-down Clown Hanging on My Bedroom Wall (2004) |
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*
The title of Judith White's workshop was ‘Seize the Clay! Moulding Reality into Fiction’. In each session members were given instructions for a piece of writing to be drafted and read out in class that day. We were then free to take this away and polish it up if we so wished. In addition Judith provided ‘triggers’ for the daily journals we were invited to complete for the duration of the programme. She also gave us a number of ‘how to’ handouts and guidelines on such matters as narrative voice, creating character, using symbolism and imagery, and a checklist for polishing and editing our work.
In the months following completion of the eight week course I put together a 40,000 word book.
The book is in three parts.
Part one, Finger Pieces, is raw material created during the period of the workshop in response to the stimulus of Judith’s exercises and handouts. It contains a record of my eight session ‘writings’ together with a number of extracts from my journal entries. Some of the session outputs are as written in the classroom during that particular afternoon. I disliked reading my work out in class, especially when I had not had an opportunity to give it a spit and a polish, so in most cases these pieces were spruced up, usually on the same day or early the next morning. The chatty style is the consequence of their being written to speak rather than to read. In some of these pieces I included jottings made at the time; these give an indication of how one idea led to another. I added footnotes throughout part one to show where I looked for inspiration, or to comment on an aspect of the writing process.
The title ‘Finger Pieces’ for Part One was inspired by Judith’s idea of seizing the clay. It is taken from the first exercises in clay modelling classes (I've tried that too) and expresses my sense of being an apprentice fiction writer/piano player trying to master some preliminary exercises/piano scales.
Part two is made up of four short stories. Three of them, And there the Antic Sits, Hot Water Blues, and Mr Oliphant’s Tears, were started and ‘finished’ during the workshop. The fourth, The Hanging Clown, was completed in the week after the workshop ended. They have scarcely been tinkered with subsequently. There is a brief footnote at the start of each story to recap its workshop origins and a more detailed footnote at the end to elaborate on the sources of ideas influencing the story’s development. As we have seen, the endnote to the last of the four stories, The Hanging Clown, attempts to comprehensively record the thought processes around its creation.
Part three is largely analytical. The first segment, 'Boring through the castle wall', documents a public critique of the short story And there the Antic Sits by three New Zealand writers, and my reaction to their comments. The second and final segment, ‘Falling down in the playground’, contains reflections on the creative writing experiences of the workshop and explores my growing understanding of the psychology of being ‘a writer’.
Most of the Finger Pieces part of the book is the direct product of the prompts provided by Judith in the workshop and is, therefore, built on the back of Judith's copyright material. I had thought of approaching Judith to see if some kind of joint book might be a workable proposition but never got round to it. Nevertheless since I started blogging in October 2011 I have frequently pillaged my creative writing book for blog pieces.
____________________________________________________
*
The title of Judith White's workshop was ‘Seize the Clay! Moulding Reality into Fiction’. In each session members were given instructions for a piece of writing to be drafted and read out in class that day. We were then free to take this away and polish it up if we so wished. In addition Judith provided ‘triggers’ for the daily journals we were invited to complete for the duration of the programme. She also gave us a number of ‘how to’ handouts and guidelines on such matters as narrative voice, creating character, using symbolism and imagery, and a checklist for polishing and editing our work.
In the months following completion of the eight week course I put together a 40,000 word book.
The book is in three parts.
Part one, Finger Pieces, is raw material created during the period of the workshop in response to the stimulus of Judith’s exercises and handouts. It contains a record of my eight session ‘writings’ together with a number of extracts from my journal entries. Some of the session outputs are as written in the classroom during that particular afternoon. I disliked reading my work out in class, especially when I had not had an opportunity to give it a spit and a polish, so in most cases these pieces were spruced up, usually on the same day or early the next morning. The chatty style is the consequence of their being written to speak rather than to read. In some of these pieces I included jottings made at the time; these give an indication of how one idea led to another. I added footnotes throughout part one to show where I looked for inspiration, or to comment on an aspect of the writing process.
The title ‘Finger Pieces’ for Part One was inspired by Judith’s idea of seizing the clay. It is taken from the first exercises in clay modelling classes (I've tried that too) and expresses my sense of being an apprentice fiction writer/piano player trying to master some preliminary exercises/piano scales.
Part two is made up of four short stories. Three of them, And there the Antic Sits, Hot Water Blues, and Mr Oliphant’s Tears, were started and ‘finished’ during the workshop. The fourth, The Hanging Clown, was completed in the week after the workshop ended. They have scarcely been tinkered with subsequently. There is a brief footnote at the start of each story to recap its workshop origins and a more detailed footnote at the end to elaborate on the sources of ideas influencing the story’s development. As we have seen, the endnote to the last of the four stories, The Hanging Clown, attempts to comprehensively record the thought processes around its creation.
Part three is largely analytical. The first segment, 'Boring through the castle wall', documents a public critique of the short story And there the Antic Sits by three New Zealand writers, and my reaction to their comments. The second and final segment, ‘Falling down in the playground’, contains reflections on the creative writing experiences of the workshop and explores my growing understanding of the psychology of being ‘a writer’.
Most of the Finger Pieces part of the book is the direct product of the prompts provided by Judith in the workshop and is, therefore, built on the back of Judith's copyright material. I had thought of approaching Judith to see if some kind of joint book might be a workable proposition but never got round to it. Nevertheless since I started blogging in October 2011 I have frequently pillaged my creative writing book for blog pieces.
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 | ||
| Image from www.charliehamiltonjames.co.uk _____________________________________________________________ The Hanging Clown: A Story for 9/11 (Blog 64)
|
With Original Story (Blog 64) attached.
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