Sunday 31 March 2013

Easter Structures



Happy Easter to everyone, and since the clocks went forward last night, I guess its a Happy Spring too...not that it feels like it at the moment.
In the past week I have been reading Scarlett Thomas’ book ‘Monkeys with Typewriters’, subtitled ‘How to write fiction and unlock the secret power of stories’. So far its very interesting, and also very useful too. Having been on a couple of writing courses in the past I’ve never had too much enjoyment out of them, probably because they dwelt too much on ideas and writing itself. These are things I’ve never had too much trouble with. Ideas zoom in and out of my head all day and writing a sentence is fairly straightfoward.
But the biggest problem I have always had is with structure and how to fit all the various ideas and sentences together. Scarlett Thomas’ book dwells much more on these theories, at least in the early passages that I’ve read so far. For me this is exactly what I needed, the bare bones and skeletons from which to hang the flesh of inspiration. I seriously hope this will help my writing in future and not be another one of those false dawns of excitement that lead to nothing but crumpled papers and a deletable word file.
For now it makes me wonder what type of plot the Easter story is: Is it rags to riches; carpenter’s son becomes son of God and the leader’s right hand man? Is it a voyage; man journey’s from life into death and returns three days later? Or is possibly modern realisim; man is charged with incitement of terrorism and is sentenced to death? Either way, its intriguing.
It’s now been three months since I began my new blog, and I’m very satisfied with how I’ve been keeping it up on a regular basis (unlike my last one). I feel I have more things to say, partly because I gave it a little bit of structure before I started (it’s obviously something I need).
But other demands are coming upon me more and more, and I want to begin to work on some things a little more privately too for a little while. So I will be taking the month of April off from this blog. I still plan to be tweeting, so you can follow me there and see what might be going on. I promise that I will be back though before the Walpurgis embers stop glowing!

No comments:

Post a Comment