Category Archives: in progress

Workshopping

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I’ve got more to write about my weekend at TiNA and the National Young Writers’ festival, but I feel the need to write about this now. So please excuse the interruption.

I’ve explored this before. I know many people have had horrible, scarring workshopping experiences, but I absolutely love them. My writing would either be incredibly crap or take about five times longer to produce if it weren’t for the regular opportunities I get to have other people read my work and give me feedback. Usually I know, somewhere deep down, what’s going wrong in a piece but it helps to have someone else articulate it for me. Sometimes though, like tonight, I know there’s something wrong, but I’ve no idea what it is. I spend far too many moments in my life thinking about it, rolling it around and around in my head to no avail. Those of you who’ve read some of my writing will be aware that it’s not always the most sunny and uplifting experience, so it can be quite distressing to have it kicking about in there.

Tonight I’ve workshopped something that I’ve been writing for about a month. Last month’s Monday Project helped me further some parts of it (I’ll put the result up here and there shortly). I’d finished the first draft but I was really at the point where I needed someone to be honest with me.

And therein lies the potential problem with workshopping, I think. Firstly, honesty can be difficult to hear; but, and perhaps more importantly, it can be difficult to give. Some people don’t want to hurt your feelings, so they hold back; others don’t care how you feel, or at least don’t know how to put the word ‘constructive’ into practice. I’ve found, though, that if you go into a workshop knowing that you don’t have to listen to everyone (or even anyone) it’s much easier to listen well. I’m certainly not always good at this! (Or giving feedback…)

I’m interested to know, from those of you who don’t get feedback from others about your writing or other output, what process do you use to work through the inevitable sticky points?

The Laughing Clown (a work in progress)

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It had all started with that cloud of pink fairy floss. The little girl was wearing red denim overalls with the hint of a grass stain on each knee. She had a blue and white striped t-shirt on underneath. The day was too hot for long overalls so her cheeks were rosier than sheer excitement could make them.

She was a very ordinary looking child, but it was her fairy floss he was interested in so she could’ve been anyone. His obsession with food began as soon as he saw delighted look on her face as she pulled the wispy pink cloud away from her face. Some of it had made it into her mouth but most of it had stuck to those overly-rosy cheeks. She used her stubby little fingers to peel the floss from around her mouth and push it into the black hole between her lips. Not once did she take her eyes off the rest of the pink haze she had left on the end of the stick in her hand. As far as she was concerned, nought but she and the fairy floss existed. He was fascinated.

He had never tasted fairy floss. He was a Laughing Clown, employed by the theme park as extra security. All he had ever eaten were those white balls people put in his mouth to win prizes; a guise designed to hide the immense security presence in the park. While the balls provided him, and the other Laughing Clowns, with all their nutritional requirements, they didn’t taste like anything at all. They were, after all, reusable, so any taste they might have had once had faded a long time ago. He had never experience the sensation of taste before.

The girl with the red overalls was the first of many humans he noticed who seemed to forget about the world around them while they ate. The food they ate was nearly as varied as their age, colour, gender or social class. There were a disproportionate number of children-fairy-floss combinations. He also noticed a similar pattern with children and ice cream; women and chocolate.

After hours he began to compile a list. One small sheet of paper turned into several larger pieces, and then into a fat, well-thumbed notebook. Each night, after the lights went down in the park, he would extract himself from the games stall along with the other Laughing Clowns. He would write up his daily report on the potential security risks he had noticed while scanning the park that day. He would chat politely with the others, usually about something work-related. Walking back to his small room in the dorm under the rollercoaster he would try to avoid running into any of the other park employees, particularly the Mummies from the ghost house: they weren’t allowed to speak intelligibly all day so they would talk your ear off if you gave them a chance.

When he managed to get back to his room he would pull a small wooden box out from under his bed, unlock it quietly and calmly open the tattered notebook to the next blank page. This page, and usually two or three after, he would fill with detailed reports of that day’s food. His handwriting was neat and simple. There was no fancy prose involved. Just the kind of detail a highly-trained security employee was expected to notice.

The Train

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The steam train spelled out a name that wasn’t his. Each of the little wooden carriages was a letter with a different grain and colour; all with knots, but none of them the same size or shape.

This was his favourite toy and he had cried when his mother tried to get rid of it. He was embarrassed that he had cried, but it had worked.

Before he played with the train he liked to sit and look at it. He would separate the carriages from each other and from the engine and sit them a small distance apart. He liked the way the timber in each piece of the train was like water, swirling and flowing in a different way to every other wooden stream.

The timber smelled like the small forest that sat behind his grandparents’ house. The back right wheel of the engine had a small squeak, like a baby mouse, he thought.

He sat with crossed legs and watched the stationery, separated little train, inspecting it for new scratches at the same time as imagining the boy whose name it spelt sitting on the floor and pushing it around. In his mind, the engine’s wheel squeaked like a chorus of mice; the train wheeled around corners, capsized, and was miraculously restored to the haphazard tracks it travelled. The boy whose name it spelt made all the appropriate noises with great gusto and no shame: he was lost in the world of the train.

The train would speed through the afternoon and the two little boys – the one whose name the train didn’t spell and the one whose name it did – would sit in the driver’s compartment together. Their hair would be full of knots and their faces covered in soot and grime. They would shriek in unison as they approached a very tight corner at a dangerous speed, and sigh with relief when the train finally pulled into the last station of the evening.

In the room where the boy whose name the train didn’t spell sat, the train’s engine and all its carriages were still separate. He now moved to join them all and slowly pushed the train back into its box.

Carefully he closed the box and put it back on the shelf in his cupboard where he kept his favourite stones. In the cupboard in his mother’s room was a similar wooden train that did spell out his name, but he had never played with it, despite much encouragement to do so. Only with his brother’s train could he imagine they were playing together.

How to Use Your Stovetop: A Manual

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Ron cannot remember how to use his stove. He is standing in the kitchen, barefoot and wearing a dressing gown, with a frying pan in his hand. The instruction manual, ‘How To Use Your Stovetop’, has vanished completely from the archive room in his head.

He peers at the slate of cool, grey metal shining at him from underneath its protective bars. He has always thought the cage was to help the stovetop user, but now he feels vaguely betrayed; the cage has switched sides without warning.

Ron does not want to call his son again, so he will have toast.

The toast cooks and Ron is careful not to watch it: life experience has taught him that, like a kettle, the watched toaster never pops. Instead he watches a small bird flitting around outside. After a little while he wonders if this bird might have the same memory lapses as he does, because it keeps returning to the same spot on the same tree without any apparent knowledge it has been there before.

The popping toast frightens him. Its mechanical noise is very loud in such a quiet house. It reminds him of the stovetop and how cold his bare toes are. Sighing, he thinks of all he needs to do today. On his desk there are three thick books to read and a box full of photographs to sort through.

As he butters his toast, the sound tearing through the otherwise quiet room, he is struck by the irony of it all. That he, the ultimate obsessive photographer always on the lookout for a moment to capture and remember, should be losing his memories.

Sometimes he wakes violently in the middle of the night with the distinct feeling that someone has had something small and cold in his ear or up his nose. Something very much like a hook. Every time he sneezes he thinks it is a memory, not his soul, that escapes. When no one else is around he will say ‘Bless You’ to himself; he has never before been superstitious but he is getting desperate and will do anything he can think of to keep the archive intact.

So this is why he must work so hard each day. He has re-read all the books in his numerous bookshelves once already since the diagnosis; he goes through photo albums every day, writing down people’s names, birthdays, favourite colours, their relationship to him; he writes letters to his wife, who will never read them in her grave, recounting in as much detail as possible the story of their long lives together; he listens to music every day, trying to name all of the composers’ other works; he walks slowly through his garden, naming all the plants.

He does all this so the next time his granddaughter asks, “Da, what’s the best day in your life so far?” he can answer with genuine certainty. And so he might remember how to work his bloody stove.

Apartment blocks all have the same lines

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Melle lives in a block of apartments that tesselates nicely with the small, neat gardens that separate it from the other blocks in the complex. All the buildings have the same lines, and these are mirrored in the lines of the garden beds. Her apartment is on the top floor so she can see that the lines form an intricate grid. She can almost see the blueprint that must have existed once – it probably still exists in the vaults of the developer, The Master Blueprint. This is why these complexes all look the same.

When she is at a loss for something to do, Melle will sit and watch the lines, creating in her mind’s eye the builders’ maps for the inside of the apartments. Knowing her small apartment as well as she does, there is very little difficulty involved in doing this: all the apartments are the same on the inside as well. Sometimes this is an activity Melle chooses, not out of boredom or lack of other options, but as first preference.

She likes to imagine how others have arranged things in their otherwise identical apartments. Things are very important to people and Melle likes to imagine what they are and which of them has priority over the others behind the curtains of the other apartments. In her apartment it is paper and pens.

Her work colleagues do not know that Melle draws. Neither do her family; she liked to draw as a child but doubts they would remember.

Melle draws the lives of others, lives she would like to have.

In her wardrobe there are suits, pleated skirts crisp shirts and drawers full of stockings that all smell vaguely dehydrated and burnt, like a dry cleaner’s. Her many pairs of high heels are battered so badly that each day spent with her feet in them is like learning to walk. She is attached to her shoes, enough to keep them even though they threaten to cripple her, but is not precious about them: they live in a pile under her neatly pressed hung clothes.

Her mother always used to pick at Melle’s lack of attention to her school shoes. Melle hasn’t really changed that much.