I have a story, The Suitors of the Glade of Willows, in which a young man pursues the middle of three willow-like girls. I wrote it as a direct reaction to some Thomas Hardy I was reading, and the plot is that the son must find a suitable suitor for the eldest sister in order to marry the middle one. In the end, the wild hunt swings into town and Herne or whatever you want to call him carries her away on the back of his stallion.
I returned to this story a few months ago and wrung my hands in embarrassment at how awful it was. I almost deleted it on the spot. But I have another story brewing that necessitates the youngest daughter (the goat-willow) so I went back and looked at it again. The first 100 or so words were awful, a faux-Victorian failure in rhythm and structure. (My father characterised my writing as containing lots of "such-and-such was quite good; not the best but adequate". This was just a list of those splattered with extraneous words.)
But when it got going it was great. Really pacy and full of ideas and subtleties. I am proper glad I didn't delete it now. So I fixed that introduction and now I've got 3,000 words which are again usable. That's great because I need this story for other parts to work and I wasn't looking forward to blank-page rewriting it.
Now to begin the goat-willow sequel.
(As an aside; writing these blog posts is a really useful warm-up or warm-down. Cures writing block fo sure.)
11 Dec 2009
29 Nov 2009
The Right Answers
I completed the edit of The Anchorite. In the end I wrote about seven hundred more words and deleted about the same amount. I'm very happy with it; 3,000 quality words. I've started work on another story tying together the Bear of the House of Cornus strand with an older story called The Old Woman and the Soldiers that's felt a bit isolated from the rest in terms of content, though structurally it's right at the heart of matters. I've got a stunning opening (stolen from a mobile phone advert!) and some quality middle but I'm not sure where it's going. A couple of night's dreaming should solve that one.
Part of me wants the old woman to stab the warrior with her kitchen knife; but that goes against everything I'm trying to say, against her character and is a terrible thing to do with an aspect of a work you're having trouble with. I think the best thing is just to say "I don't know" and put it in my folder of fragments and unfinished bits. Either it'll make sense in the future or it won't. One possible solution would be to somehow have the soldier and the old woman go to church together which would set them up for the finale. But what might the old woman do in the finale? There are answers to the questions, but to find the right ones will take time.
Part of me wants the old woman to stab the warrior with her kitchen knife; but that goes against everything I'm trying to say, against her character and is a terrible thing to do with an aspect of a work you're having trouble with. I think the best thing is just to say "I don't know" and put it in my folder of fragments and unfinished bits. Either it'll make sense in the future or it won't. One possible solution would be to somehow have the soldier and the old woman go to church together which would set them up for the finale. But what might the old woman do in the finale? There are answers to the questions, but to find the right ones will take time.
27 Nov 2009
The Man Who Was in Love With the Wood
I wrote this months ago. At the time I bodged it together out of little fragments I had lying around and I could not appreciate it for what it was. I just re-read it and thought it was brilliant; a fully formed, realised and rounded tale, an exposition on the subversion of drama.
Dangerous Ideas from the Wood: The Man Who Was in Love With the Wood
That year was perhaps the first during which I understood my place in the world. I shot a hind under the lush green canopy of the wood, and I carried the beast home on my shoulders – quite a task – and set about butchering it in my garden in the glade of maples.
My wife came out of the house. She was pleased that I had brought home meat, but was also saddened by the death of the animal.
“Look at the blood upon the ground,” she lamented, “just so we might eat.”
It was true enough that the animal had suffered. I had killed it, and it had not been a clean death. My first arrow was fatal, and it was a fair shot, but it had not killed the beast outright, and I had had to track her through the foxy elders and into a patch of briars where finally she bowed her head down to death. How many winter's life had I deprived her of?
But this sentimentality is easily invented in the hearts of the young and of women. We must eat, surely. As much as I have a duty to protect and nurture the hind, the hind has a duty to feed and nurture me. It is the destiny of such a beast to line my belly.
That night I had a dream. I dreamt that I was butchering the deer all over again, and I saw the small elder bush that grows by our back door. As I was cutting the meat from the bone, the elder grew high into the sky, where the tips of the leaves began to caress the shoots of a second tree. In my dream, I followed the stem of this second bush down through the forest, and I found it was one of the same bushes I had tracked the hind past. Just as we made our home by an elder in the forest, so too had the beast.
I saw clearly then, for a moment, how we were interconnected and relied upon each other. I saw the fates of the animals and plants of the forest, how each of us related to the others. When I woke this direct understanding was gone, but the spirit of it remained.
The next day I walked out under the greenwood. It was high summer and the air was full of insects. Here now came a bee, buzzing by my head. Perhaps she would visit the flowers of the blackberries and help provide me with food in the autumn. How could I begrudge her some honey knowing that?
In the evening, as the forest cooled down from a blazing day, my daughter came to me with a plucked flower and said she had been stung by a bee. I told her she must forgive the bee. I asked her if she thought it was her fault she had been stung, and she replied that no, she had done nothing to provoke the little creature. So I said that a bee doesn't sting without a reason, and it must have thought it was right to be angry. What should we do with an angry bee? We could do worse than to love it, the silly little thing.
It was harvest time, and the trees hung bountifully with apples this year. I had paid my respects to the trees throughout the year; I had nurtured them and I had prayed at their feet. Now I took one of their fruits from a branch and I bit deep into the firm ripe flesh. The juice was glory, glory as rays of sun cast between leaves and branches shone upon my face.
“Thank you providence,” I said out loud, “thank you, my friends the apple trees, for this gift of an apple to nourish me today.”
The year moved on and I found myself tending to the autumn fire in our hearth. I went to the wood store and returned with logs which had been drying for months.
“Well done,” said my wife as I brought in the logs.
“I've done not nearly so well as the tree which we will burn to heat our home,” I said.
“Oh, let it go, always thanking the forest, you daft thing,” said my wife.
Winter came and with it the frost. Now we collected hips and quince and boiled up the fruit into puddings and there was laughter around our table.
At church I saw a friend shivering and blowing upon their hands.
“Damn this cold,” he said, “I hate the winter, it makes me sad.”
What could I do but smile?
The snow came and the land was beautiful. The air was dry and we climbed onto the cliffs above the yew trees and looked out over the white world. Who could be unhappy in a world of such calmness and tranquillity?
Spring came in due course, and as the buds blossomed out into great blooms and the shoots shot up into the sky I cried “hallelujah” to the strengthening sun and span around in circles and danced with my wife under the greenwood bough.
I am in love with the wood, with its seasons and moods, its colours and smells. Though I have been here all my life it is giving up secrets still; an orchid previously unseen here, and a turn of inflection in the soughing of a bough there. It is wondrous to see trees come and go. Rivers change their course and new flowers grow in the clearings where I fell timber. Badgers move their setts and crows roost in different trees. Everything about the wood changes and yet the whole stays the same, timeless and unassailable. I am in love with the wood. The wood is perfect.
Dangerous Ideas from the Wood: The Man Who Was in Love With the Wood
That year was perhaps the first during which I understood my place in the world. I shot a hind under the lush green canopy of the wood, and I carried the beast home on my shoulders – quite a task – and set about butchering it in my garden in the glade of maples.
My wife came out of the house. She was pleased that I had brought home meat, but was also saddened by the death of the animal.
“Look at the blood upon the ground,” she lamented, “just so we might eat.”
It was true enough that the animal had suffered. I had killed it, and it had not been a clean death. My first arrow was fatal, and it was a fair shot, but it had not killed the beast outright, and I had had to track her through the foxy elders and into a patch of briars where finally she bowed her head down to death. How many winter's life had I deprived her of?
But this sentimentality is easily invented in the hearts of the young and of women. We must eat, surely. As much as I have a duty to protect and nurture the hind, the hind has a duty to feed and nurture me. It is the destiny of such a beast to line my belly.
That night I had a dream. I dreamt that I was butchering the deer all over again, and I saw the small elder bush that grows by our back door. As I was cutting the meat from the bone, the elder grew high into the sky, where the tips of the leaves began to caress the shoots of a second tree. In my dream, I followed the stem of this second bush down through the forest, and I found it was one of the same bushes I had tracked the hind past. Just as we made our home by an elder in the forest, so too had the beast.
I saw clearly then, for a moment, how we were interconnected and relied upon each other. I saw the fates of the animals and plants of the forest, how each of us related to the others. When I woke this direct understanding was gone, but the spirit of it remained.
The next day I walked out under the greenwood. It was high summer and the air was full of insects. Here now came a bee, buzzing by my head. Perhaps she would visit the flowers of the blackberries and help provide me with food in the autumn. How could I begrudge her some honey knowing that?
In the evening, as the forest cooled down from a blazing day, my daughter came to me with a plucked flower and said she had been stung by a bee. I told her she must forgive the bee. I asked her if she thought it was her fault she had been stung, and she replied that no, she had done nothing to provoke the little creature. So I said that a bee doesn't sting without a reason, and it must have thought it was right to be angry. What should we do with an angry bee? We could do worse than to love it, the silly little thing.
It was harvest time, and the trees hung bountifully with apples this year. I had paid my respects to the trees throughout the year; I had nurtured them and I had prayed at their feet. Now I took one of their fruits from a branch and I bit deep into the firm ripe flesh. The juice was glory, glory as rays of sun cast between leaves and branches shone upon my face.
“Thank you providence,” I said out loud, “thank you, my friends the apple trees, for this gift of an apple to nourish me today.”
The year moved on and I found myself tending to the autumn fire in our hearth. I went to the wood store and returned with logs which had been drying for months.
“Well done,” said my wife as I brought in the logs.
“I've done not nearly so well as the tree which we will burn to heat our home,” I said.
“Oh, let it go, always thanking the forest, you daft thing,” said my wife.
Winter came and with it the frost. Now we collected hips and quince and boiled up the fruit into puddings and there was laughter around our table.
At church I saw a friend shivering and blowing upon their hands.
“Damn this cold,” he said, “I hate the winter, it makes me sad.”
What could I do but smile?
The snow came and the land was beautiful. The air was dry and we climbed onto the cliffs above the yew trees and looked out over the white world. Who could be unhappy in a world of such calmness and tranquillity?
Spring came in due course, and as the buds blossomed out into great blooms and the shoots shot up into the sky I cried “hallelujah” to the strengthening sun and span around in circles and danced with my wife under the greenwood bough.
I am in love with the wood, with its seasons and moods, its colours and smells. Though I have been here all my life it is giving up secrets still; an orchid previously unseen here, and a turn of inflection in the soughing of a bough there. It is wondrous to see trees come and go. Rivers change their course and new flowers grow in the clearings where I fell timber. Badgers move their setts and crows roost in different trees. Everything about the wood changes and yet the whole stays the same, timeless and unassailable. I am in love with the wood. The wood is perfect.
Awe
Well you may have guessed from my silence that I've fallen away from this project a little. I've been doing other things; making a game which I hope may be saleable, investigating the potential of buying a wood and helping friends move house.
Today a friend sent me a story he had written. At first I was struck by the similarities between what he had written and what I had been doing, even though he had not seen my work. I was disappointed; had I merely found something anyone in my position would have found? Then I realised the immediacy of what I have been working on. These things I am creating are most relevant to us, now. I must complete my work before that relevance is diminished.
I read back through some of my past writings. I was moved and awed by what I had achieved. This is worthwhile. I am in a vein that is beyond the ordinary and I have a duty to the project of existence to mine it. My life has been unusual and I am the only one who may work these things in the way I may work them. I must do this.
In practical terms, I have strayed a little. I was conscionably striving to write outside my comfort zone; to stretch myself into characters and situations that were at the edges of my experience. I believed I had to be a explorer cataloguing the distant. But where I have been successful, it has been because I have distilled my experience and discovered those things I already knew more purely and truthfully than I had known them before. Douglas Adams said: "Mozart tells us what it's like to be human, Beethoven tells us what it's like to be Beethoven and Bach tells us what it's like to be the universe." I was jealous. I am only capable of telling you what it is like to be me, and I knew it. I strove to go beyond that, but I see now that I must use that as a strength and not allow it to hold me back. Hopefully you may see yourself reflected in the wilfully innaccurate picture I paint of my existence.
Today a friend sent me a story he had written. At first I was struck by the similarities between what he had written and what I had been doing, even though he had not seen my work. I was disappointed; had I merely found something anyone in my position would have found? Then I realised the immediacy of what I have been working on. These things I am creating are most relevant to us, now. I must complete my work before that relevance is diminished.
I read back through some of my past writings. I was moved and awed by what I had achieved. This is worthwhile. I am in a vein that is beyond the ordinary and I have a duty to the project of existence to mine it. My life has been unusual and I am the only one who may work these things in the way I may work them. I must do this.
In practical terms, I have strayed a little. I was conscionably striving to write outside my comfort zone; to stretch myself into characters and situations that were at the edges of my experience. I believed I had to be a explorer cataloguing the distant. But where I have been successful, it has been because I have distilled my experience and discovered those things I already knew more purely and truthfully than I had known them before. Douglas Adams said: "Mozart tells us what it's like to be human, Beethoven tells us what it's like to be Beethoven and Bach tells us what it's like to be the universe." I was jealous. I am only capable of telling you what it is like to be me, and I knew it. I strove to go beyond that, but I see now that I must use that as a strength and not allow it to hold me back. Hopefully you may see yourself reflected in the wilfully innaccurate picture I paint of my existence.
20 Nov 2009
The Anchorite
I woke up today with a story fully formed in my head. I went through it as I lay groggy in bed, and then I got up and typed it out, all 3,000 words without stopping or distraction. There was no need to work at it; my subconscious spat it out fully formed. I am relieved, I have not been doing so much of this as it requires. I'm going to go to the shops now to buy some breakfast (it's 17:22...)
The story's about a monk in love with a girl. He gets found out, repents, drives deep into religious fervour and ends up as an anchorite sealed in a cell at a country church. The girl visits him and turns out to visit a number of men in exchange for gifts. Eventually the anchorite reaches redemption. The hermit character from other stories turns up in part of this process. I wanted to make sure he was in this story so there could be no confusion that the two characters were the same, and there was something perfect for him to do, so my subconscious let him do it. Also in the story are some allusions to the life of St. Anthony, which I want to use more fully at a future date. I've just seeded the groundwork to make that possible. I have a clear idea what this monk/anchorite character and the girl are going to do at the finale, so that's very positive. There's a strong theme about the nature of fate developing, which I suppose is the "moral of the tale".
If I were to psychoanalyse this, it is clear that the story is about my time as a hermit on an uninhabited island. It's also about my relationship with asceticism. But that's not important; what's important is this artefact of fiction that has been produced by this process, and any relationship that might develop with any audience that might read it.
The story's about a monk in love with a girl. He gets found out, repents, drives deep into religious fervour and ends up as an anchorite sealed in a cell at a country church. The girl visits him and turns out to visit a number of men in exchange for gifts. Eventually the anchorite reaches redemption. The hermit character from other stories turns up in part of this process. I wanted to make sure he was in this story so there could be no confusion that the two characters were the same, and there was something perfect for him to do, so my subconscious let him do it. Also in the story are some allusions to the life of St. Anthony, which I want to use more fully at a future date. I've just seeded the groundwork to make that possible. I have a clear idea what this monk/anchorite character and the girl are going to do at the finale, so that's very positive. There's a strong theme about the nature of fate developing, which I suppose is the "moral of the tale".
If I were to psychoanalyse this, it is clear that the story is about my time as a hermit on an uninhabited island. It's also about my relationship with asceticism. But that's not important; what's important is this artefact of fiction that has been produced by this process, and any relationship that might develop with any audience that might read it.
16 Nov 2009
Merlin and Structure
Hello again. I'm sorry for the break in service. I could pretend that our broadband connection was still playing up, but the truth of the matter is that I have been with my Grandmother all week and I have done nothing productive in the field of writing whatsoever.
Anyway, I had a few relevant comments about the last episode of the BBC TV series Merlin. You have to forgive Merlin it's weaknesses. In brief, it plays like it was written by committee and is Saturday night tea-time family entertainment. If you approach it generously it can be a joy to try and predict what order the stock scenes will appear in each week. But it does have strengths.
One of the things it does very well is the authority figure, King Uther. King Uther is a bad guy from the point of view of the protagonists, always restricting their actions and telling them no, but they love him and are forced to accept his authority because it is in the interests of the kingdom in very tangible ways. More than that, especially in the last episode, Uther can be a true villain, persecuting magic users, killing his own wife and dispensing summary executions. I love what that is teaching kids about authority. Why do we put up with government and injustice? Because to do otherwise we would have to compromise our values and become like the things we dislike.
I like the way they have confused the traditional Arthurian characters. They make us guess if their characters will somehow develop into the ones we expect, or if they are making a point by changing them. Colorblind casting Guinevere with a mixed race actress is a stroke of genius. Camelot is a mythic ideal of what Britain should or could be. What could be a more ideal of Britain than a mixed race Queen the epitome of beauty and grace? I aim to reflect my subjective perfect England in my wood. On the other hand, it is compelling to guess how their Morgana will develop into the Morgana we expect. This kind of foreshadowing, of planting an expectation and then dangling the method to satisfy it, is something I would like to employ in what I am doing. It is something that you can only do in a full work; it is a technique of the novel or a TV series or an album of music. It is not fully possible in a short story or an episode or a single song.
I could go on. I hope to study structure in fiction (and the real world) and one day wield it with prowess. It is no good for Dangerous Ideas from the Wood for me to play like a beatnik and make disregard for structure my structure. I have been analysing this for some time and I hope it will pay off.
I realise my shortcomings. I said in my first post that I thought the public unfairly perceived short story writers as not up to writing a novel. I am not up to writing a novel. I cannot sustain my work to medium length, let alone to a full length and I am left scrabbling around piecing together bits. One day, I will have sufficient understanding, patience and practice to compose something fuller. One day I will write this thing, and I perceive my advances at every turn, but there is nothing that can be done to rush it.
Anyway, I had a few relevant comments about the last episode of the BBC TV series Merlin. You have to forgive Merlin it's weaknesses. In brief, it plays like it was written by committee and is Saturday night tea-time family entertainment. If you approach it generously it can be a joy to try and predict what order the stock scenes will appear in each week. But it does have strengths.
One of the things it does very well is the authority figure, King Uther. King Uther is a bad guy from the point of view of the protagonists, always restricting their actions and telling them no, but they love him and are forced to accept his authority because it is in the interests of the kingdom in very tangible ways. More than that, especially in the last episode, Uther can be a true villain, persecuting magic users, killing his own wife and dispensing summary executions. I love what that is teaching kids about authority. Why do we put up with government and injustice? Because to do otherwise we would have to compromise our values and become like the things we dislike.
I like the way they have confused the traditional Arthurian characters. They make us guess if their characters will somehow develop into the ones we expect, or if they are making a point by changing them. Colorblind casting Guinevere with a mixed race actress is a stroke of genius. Camelot is a mythic ideal of what Britain should or could be. What could be a more ideal of Britain than a mixed race Queen the epitome of beauty and grace? I aim to reflect my subjective perfect England in my wood. On the other hand, it is compelling to guess how their Morgana will develop into the Morgana we expect. This kind of foreshadowing, of planting an expectation and then dangling the method to satisfy it, is something I would like to employ in what I am doing. It is something that you can only do in a full work; it is a technique of the novel or a TV series or an album of music. It is not fully possible in a short story or an episode or a single song.
I could go on. I hope to study structure in fiction (and the real world) and one day wield it with prowess. It is no good for Dangerous Ideas from the Wood for me to play like a beatnik and make disregard for structure my structure. I have been analysing this for some time and I hope it will pay off.
I realise my shortcomings. I said in my first post that I thought the public unfairly perceived short story writers as not up to writing a novel. I am not up to writing a novel. I cannot sustain my work to medium length, let alone to a full length and I am left scrabbling around piecing together bits. One day, I will have sufficient understanding, patience and practice to compose something fuller. One day I will write this thing, and I perceive my advances at every turn, but there is nothing that can be done to rush it.
10 Nov 2009
After the Battle
I'll keep this short because we seem to be on a ration of an hour of broadband each evening (thanks BT, that's really great of you). I've started work on the next part; a description of the Saxon prisoner (probably, it's only suggested implicitly that it's him) wandering around the heath after the battle. He's pretty worked up about things. I've gone for first-person to really explore his feelings in that situation.
In another strand of the story there's a hermit who spends some time wandering around on a moor after a battle. So far, I'm happy that I'm not repeating myself, but it's getting a bit close for comfort. Things would improve if I had some things to contrast between the two of them. Overall, this piece needs a bit of meditation and some extra depth adding. Perhaps it would be beneficial to go and wander around on a moor. Whatever I do, it needs some careful thought.
In another strand of the story there's a hermit who spends some time wandering around on a moor after a battle. So far, I'm happy that I'm not repeating myself, but it's getting a bit close for comfort. Things would improve if I had some things to contrast between the two of them. Overall, this piece needs a bit of meditation and some extra depth adding. Perhaps it would be beneficial to go and wander around on a moor. Whatever I do, it needs some careful thought.
8 Nov 2009
Battle
I found a solution to the problem of describing the battle the Bear of the House or Cornus fights in. I don't want to take a military history perspective; I could do that well with little effort but what would be the point, what would it mean? I don't want to write some teenage gorefest under the banner of writing a gritty account of the realities of war, because that's trite and would, quite properly, turn my target audience off. And I don't want to take some compromise route that glosses over the horror and significance of these terrible deeds.
What I've done is to focus on muscles. I've written five hundred words describing muscles and other organs, and the emotions and meanings attached to them as they contract and expand and go about their muscley business. I opened up half a dozen pictures of bulls pulled off google and went for it.
Afterwards the battle is over and they're taking prisoners. I think it's quite effective.
What I've done is to focus on muscles. I've written five hundred words describing muscles and other organs, and the emotions and meanings attached to them as they contract and expand and go about their muscley business. I opened up half a dozen pictures of bulls pulled off google and went for it.
Afterwards the battle is over and they're taking prisoners. I think it's quite effective.
7 Nov 2009
The Wanderer
2,000 words written in three days. A third of those words are cribbed from a dark ages poem, too, so really I've done about 450 words per day. Not great, but that's what happens, I guess.
I've been writing about the Bear of the House of Cornus's fight. I've written two parts: the army preparing for battle, and getting drunk after a victory. I've shied away from the battle itself, although I'll have to face that at some point.
In the part before the battle, I discarded a lot of draft material because it was too close to Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King which I have just read the first part of. I think I'm justified in using a post-Roman Arthur because that was planned long ago, but it sure was difficult not to copy what I'd just read. The point of this section is to put across the idea that pulling the sword from the stone is about controlling smelting and smithying. It can be kingmaking to control the ability to draw arms from ore, or the means of production in any way ("F- the g ride, I want the machines that are making em" - Rage Against the Machine). So far I've set this idea up, but the payoff comes later, when a king is made. Also, I've gone into subtle sympathetic allegory about asylum seekers. Being forced to keep it in balance with this being soldiers on the eve of battle has certainly improved the quality of it.
After the battle, a prisoner is goaded into performing for the warriors. He gives a speech that is so bleak the soldiers forget about him and he manages to escape. Hopefully the parallels I'm trying to draw about depression and society come through, but it's very implicit and I'll leave it like that. The speech is the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer set in my own modern English. I found this in the wonderful slim Penguin The Earliest English Poems. It's been my intention from the genesis of this project to keep this story in canon with various historical fiction pieces, and these poems are one of those. I'm delighted to have been able to use it in such a multi-layered way. On the surface, this is a moving Anglo-Saxon poem about being exiled in a post-Roman world. I have given it two new layers of meaning. The first is analogous to what someone might be able to do in a introduction or a review: by setting the piece slightly differently I have expanded and deepened the resonance of it's meaning. The third meaning I have given it is to compare this remotely ancient and emotive exile with the our current modern dialogue about modern exiles or asylum seekers. All within the umbrella of King Arthur's first battle.
I am under no illusion that the casual reader will perceive any of that. My aim is to get just enough into people's heads so that they can work it out for themselves. Preaching is ineffective. Priming is more subtle and sophisticated. All art manipulates the audience; I believe that in creating art we inescapably accept a great burden to take responsibility for the effect of our work.
I've been writing about the Bear of the House of Cornus's fight. I've written two parts: the army preparing for battle, and getting drunk after a victory. I've shied away from the battle itself, although I'll have to face that at some point.
In the part before the battle, I discarded a lot of draft material because it was too close to Bernard Cornwell's The Winter King which I have just read the first part of. I think I'm justified in using a post-Roman Arthur because that was planned long ago, but it sure was difficult not to copy what I'd just read. The point of this section is to put across the idea that pulling the sword from the stone is about controlling smelting and smithying. It can be kingmaking to control the ability to draw arms from ore, or the means of production in any way ("F- the g ride, I want the machines that are making em" - Rage Against the Machine). So far I've set this idea up, but the payoff comes later, when a king is made. Also, I've gone into subtle sympathetic allegory about asylum seekers. Being forced to keep it in balance with this being soldiers on the eve of battle has certainly improved the quality of it.
After the battle, a prisoner is goaded into performing for the warriors. He gives a speech that is so bleak the soldiers forget about him and he manages to escape. Hopefully the parallels I'm trying to draw about depression and society come through, but it's very implicit and I'll leave it like that. The speech is the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer set in my own modern English. I found this in the wonderful slim Penguin The Earliest English Poems. It's been my intention from the genesis of this project to keep this story in canon with various historical fiction pieces, and these poems are one of those. I'm delighted to have been able to use it in such a multi-layered way. On the surface, this is a moving Anglo-Saxon poem about being exiled in a post-Roman world. I have given it two new layers of meaning. The first is analogous to what someone might be able to do in a introduction or a review: by setting the piece slightly differently I have expanded and deepened the resonance of it's meaning. The third meaning I have given it is to compare this remotely ancient and emotive exile with the our current modern dialogue about modern exiles or asylum seekers. All within the umbrella of King Arthur's first battle.
I am under no illusion that the casual reader will perceive any of that. My aim is to get just enough into people's heads so that they can work it out for themselves. Preaching is ineffective. Priming is more subtle and sophisticated. All art manipulates the audience; I believe that in creating art we inescapably accept a great burden to take responsibility for the effect of our work.
6 Nov 2009
Meta Blogging
About half a dozen people have come up to me around town saying they're really excited about what I'm doing here. That's pretty cool. I haven't really promoted this very much yet; I just left some rather plain messages on various social networking sites hoping to attract a curious few. I wanted to get into the swing of it and have at least a half dozen posts before I started bothering folks about it.
Anyway, it made me curious to know how many people were reading this. I imagine the vast majority of readers will view this through an aggregator (Google reader works for me). Is there any way to track how many people read something via a feed without putting a separate tracker in each post? I'm guessing there isn't.
Also, I'm unsure as to how much of the actual story I should put up here. Bears looked very long as a blog post (it's about ten pages of a novel). I don't mind sharing what I've done; even if I put the whole thing up here in sections and you read it here, the book would still be valuable because of the structural things I'm going to do to it. The question is, as a reader, how much actual story would you expect to see here?
Anyway, it made me curious to know how many people were reading this. I imagine the vast majority of readers will view this through an aggregator (Google reader works for me). Is there any way to track how many people read something via a feed without putting a separate tracker in each post? I'm guessing there isn't.
Also, I'm unsure as to how much of the actual story I should put up here. Bears looked very long as a blog post (it's about ten pages of a novel). I don't mind sharing what I've done; even if I put the whole thing up here in sections and you read it here, the book would still be valuable because of the structural things I'm going to do to it. The question is, as a reader, how much actual story would you expect to see here?
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