WRITING AS A WAY OF RETRIBUTION

Early 2013, I attended my first writers’ talk one Tuesday evening. The guest speaker was Hanna Jameson, author of Something You Are (the first in the London Unground series). At some point the question was raised as to whether or not there was some truth in her writing, and Jameson simply replied that she found writing as a fantastic form of revenge.

I took her advice on-board but I didn’t act on it as I didn’t feel compelled to seek vengeance, and besides; I really hadn’t felt over encumbered by an
yone. That was until winter of last year. I shan’t get into specific details but I will say the ordeal drove me to a breaking point. Even after it was over, the ordeal still plagued me, and Jameson’s revenge concept resurfaced in my head.

But revenge, to me, is a negative word and I don’t feel that I was seeking revenge; I was seeking retribution – a calming of the mind. So, using a university project, I got the ordeal out on paper and warped it into the intended genre. And do you know what? It felt fantastic to do so.

Once it was done of course.

During the ordeal it was hell. I regressed to that breaking point in order to access that thought process. I found listening to music difficult, my stress levels were through the roof, and I was obsessing over this project so much that I didn’t adequately partake in other modules. But I’m done now. It’s over and I have to say it was an incredible therapy session. But I will say I will never read the piece again. For me it’s too difficult to do so, and yet I believe it’s one of the best short pieces I’ve written.

So what I'm trying to say, I guess, is that I implore you, for your own sake, if you’re going through anything – whether they be tough times or ferocious feuds – write it out. T
hat is of course if you don’t mind obsessing about the damn thing for a few days.

Sam Garrett

GAUGING YOUR AUDIENCE

This Friday I had two work-shopping sessions at university. One was for a ‘fairy tale’ piece and the other was for this sci-fi short that I'm now hoping to take further. Now for those who know me, know that I fall flat on my face when it comes to reading work out, particularly my own. So luckily for me, my work was read out by others and I didn’t have to stare at a page overflowing with text, but was able to…

Gauge my audience.

Now, quite bluntly, I don’t understand why I have never thought to do this kind of experiment before – maybe because it’s slightly voyeuristic? I don’t know. Did it help? Probably.

So I was having my first piece – the demented ‘fairy tale’ one – read out, and I couldn’t help but look around instead of at the words that I had already browsed through too many times. Now this particular piece ended up transforming into essentially, concrete poetry, and as soon as it did; I could tell. Because my audience and my reader were surprised and even revitalised. It was different and that’s what I liked and loathed so much about it. Now in this particular case, that became a dividing moment. Some people became more interested, while others stopped reading the text and just listened in order to decipher the images.

Now for my second piece – the sci-fi one – I was entirely unsure of the reception it’d receive. It was essentially a first draft but had a frame narrative induced twist that I loved. But deep down, I knew that I wasn’t so sure on the piece, because I frankly hadn't obsessed over this one. So some guys began to read it for me (cheers again for that) and I could tell some things were hitting the okay notes, others the cringe-inducing ones and then there was the climax – and I crap you not – the guy reading it just said, “Whoa. Shit.” once he got to a certain part. Then he got to the twist of resolution and there was this all round silence, the pleasant un-awkward type where you ingest what you’ve just read and go on to talk about it.  

Just remember, facial expressions are often underrated. You can fake them – I know – but when readers get lost in a piece, they get lost, and from my studying readers often tend to react as if they were there in the flesh. 

REVISITING AN OLD WORK

Short blog post this week but I wanted to share something. I’ve been trawling through old documents to see if I could get any use out of them for competitions or things and came across this, a piece of flash fiction I wrote last year from Ekphrasis.

WRITING IN A NEW GENRE

I’m currently on this great module at university called Author Study and – as you may well have guessed from the name – it’s about the study of authors. In our seminars we’ve focused particularly on John Cheever and Emily Dickinson, and have been tasked with creating a piece of prose or poetry somewhere between 2,000-3,000 words in length, focusing not only on the themes that have arisen from those authors but also from our personal feelings on writing.

My original intention for this module was to rewrite and submit a piece I wrote while working over the summer. The short story was called 'Legacy' (viewable here) and was a completely out-there science fiction piece. But I loved the structure and had created my first official untrustworthy narrator, so I wanted to salvage it in whatever way possible.

Thankfully, I had a Eureka! moment.

Throughout my life I’ve been captivated by fiction and films that manage to fit a lifetime into a piece. I’ve always wanted to create my own, so I figured; why not? Ones that instantly sprung to mind were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Notebook (both of which are both prose and film). So instantly, I knew there was a connection: they were both – with the exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original short – love stories.

And I haven’t written a conventional love story before.

And this was and still is a problem.

The genesis of this piece was that it was to be a tragedy. Now, if anything, it’s growing into some twisted combination of literature in the vein of film masterpieces, Once and Blue Valentine.

Either way my upcoming piece is about a young man walking a young woman to a party on the other side of town. And through the seemingly average escalation of events, that symbolically represent aspects of their future relationship, the two begin to lament their future together and irrevocably change the lives of each other.

Fingers crossed I remember to post it to Wattpad once its done!