Course, Week 5 - nearly there

Some more excellent advice in the week's course notes, all taken to heart. Two very pleasing critiques received from fellow students, with one describing my half-finished work as 'monumentally creepy' - just what I was aiming for, fortunately! Submission this week was the finished story - not necessarily in its final form but showing how it all works out, and I did that, surprising myself with incorporating a death - and I've never used 'creepy' or death in a story before. So something is changing.
         Another task was to produce a shorter story from scratch in one go, which I have done. No idea where the story came from, apart from a memorable (for all the wrong reasons) moment in my mid-teens involving a spider. The story just, as they say, told itself. 
         Now both of these stories need some going over. I have emailed them to our gas fitter! He is a keen reader, especially creepy, and asked if he could see them.
         The final week will involve critiquing by and for each student - I expect everyone, like me, is bracing themselves. This is a good course, stirring up the waters and producing surprising results.

Short Story Writing Course - week four

All exercises duly completed, including providing feedback on two anonymous part-stories. One was difficult to visualise because the characters' physical positions in relation to one another were not clear. I could visualise the characters themselves, though, and there was a great twist at the end of the plot summary which I didn't see coming. The other posed a mystery from the start which hadn't been revealed in the text so far but which set me trying to guess; well written and the secondary character easy to visualise but the main character still mysterious. Don't yet know if we get to see the finished works.

A short story to be listened to online - very strange and dramatic, marked changes of pace - slow, then building to fast, and then dream-like slow pace allowing something frightful to be followed with dispassionate interest. Looking at characterisation, and how dialogue illustrates it, in this module, getting to know my characters more deeply and realising I haven't done this sufficiently in the past.

Definitely feel that I'm stepping back and looking at the short story in a completely different light, as well as realising the need for something a lot more intense than before. But beginning to think I could do this.

Back To School!

As I've been venturing into fiction more lately, especially of the flash type but also short stories, the lure of Tom Vowler's six-week online short story course was hard to resist. After looking at his website, achievements and general cred, I paid up and planned - very roughly - my 3-5 hours per week to devote to the course. There are only a few 'students' so feedback from Tom and from the others is manageable for us all.


The first week's work is now done, and I am really glad that this is more a literary course than one for women's popular magazines, as that's what I feel I lack. Tom wrote a useful intro about the short story, and set some exercises - including submitting the beginning of a story - and reader, I did them all. He intends to make silk purses out of sows' ears, and I shall give it my very best shot. Oink, oink.


I shall blog in a week's time about the second lot of exercises now in my inbox, together with (if publishable) any interesting feedback on my first attempt.