Creative Writing Course - 2nd week's homework.

The second week's class started with each of us reading out our homework assignment from the previous week.  I was a bit concerned that my offering might be deemed a little risque, particularly as I hadn't had much opportunity in the two hours the previous week to assess my classmates.  I needn't have worried.  Doug the Tutor had also undertaken the same exercise as he'd set us, and finished his with the dialogue 'Come on, let's fuck off.  The bus is waiting!'  It made my story about Dr Oral Love tame in comparison.  Thanks Doug. 


For our next assignment he sent us away with a line from a Brothers Grimm fairy story called 'The King of the Golden Mountain' and told us to continue from that line with another 200 - 500 words.  I've had an idea in my mind for some time that I will send my main character, Reece Winner, to other countries where his philanthropy might be desperately welcomed.  There are several places in the world that I have already visited, where I've hopefully gained sufficient knowledge with which to write some of these stories.  However, I have never been to the African continent further south than Egypt, and would love to embark on a trip to gather research for a Reece Winner story I already have in mind for there.  I was thus inspired to write this piece for this week's assignment.

The son took leave of his father, placed himself in a small boat and the father had to push it off with his own foot.  The water, turned silver by the moonlight, lapped at the bows like mercury, as the boat slid silently away.  Neither dared speak for fear of discovery, nor look in the other’s eyes in case a visible tear changed their decision.  Reece knew that his leaving the island was his father’s only chance of survival.  He needed to make it to the mainland before the bank opened for business on Monday and cancel the transfer to Okeke’s bank account.  They had both agreed that once he had the ransom, Okeke would have no reason to let them go free, or to cease his executions of the surviving hostages.

He paddled as quietly as he could with his hands, afraid to lower the oars into the water until he was sure the guards would not hear their splashes.  He watched his father slip away into the shadows and wondered if he would ever see him alive again.  The moon passed behind a cloud, cloaking the sea in blackness, offering Reece an opportunity to put distance between him and the island.  He installed the oars and silently lowered the blades into the near-motionless sea.  As he drew the oars powerfully into his chest, he felt the gratifying surge of the boat pulling away from the shore, taking him towards the safety of the mainland and away from his nightmare.  At the end of the stroke, he cautiously raised the blades high above the surface of the water, to avoid catching a crab.  He pushed the oars forward once more, holding his breath to eliminate even that sound, as the rowlocks creaked and rattled.  As he dipped the oars once more, he saw a tiny flame in the bushes as a guard lit a cigarette.  His heartbeat resonated as adrenalin and terror conspired to make him row for all he was worth and hope to get far enough away to evade recapture.  Then he remembered how Okeke’s men had chased poor Bandele, when he had tried to paddle his canoe for the mainland a few days earlier.  He could still hear the men’s laughter as they circled him in motor launches causing him to capsize and almost drown in their wakes, before Okeke himself, had put a bullet in his head and left him out in the Strait to the sharks.

The image of Bandele floating face down, his young life ebbing into the sea, stirred his hatred for Okeke and his desire to see him dead.  Staying calm, meant staying alive and clinging to the chance of personally seeing that happen.

Creative Writing Course - 1st week's homework.

Our tutor Doug, showed us a picture of a character from Venetian folklaw called The Medico della Peste (The Plague Doctor) and told us to write 200 to 500 words about whatever the image brought to mind.  Later that week, as I sat down with the intention of tackling the exercise, I got involved in Facebook chat with the daughter of an old colleague, about a doctor I stumbled across in the Medical Register when I worked in NHS administration.  His name really was as I've written and having been reminded about him I couldn't resist incorporating him into the piece.

He sat at the hotel dining table, nervously anticipating the entrance of his future mother-in-law.  His fiancée seemed to be watching the lift doors with all the trepidation that someone with a noose around their neck would watch the trapdoor.  His mother sighed and repeatedly glanced at her watch, in between tutting and rolling her eyes, as if the tardiness of their hostess was less forgivable than The Crucifixion itself.  His father, on the other hand, was calmly polishing his cutlery with all the smug, self-assuredness of someone about to be proven right, provoking Oral to fantasise about how he might use his skills as a doctor to commit the perfect patricide.

It annoyed him that at the age of twenty-nine, he was still intimidated by his father, despite having lost all respect for him on his first day at secondary school. That was when he had discovered that his name was to be a millstone around his neck for the rest of his life.  He remembered going home and asking his father why the older kids had called him names and his father had simply laughed and told him he would find out soon enough.  When eventually, one of the kinder, older girls had explained a few things to him, he had stormed home and asked how any sane parent, with the surname ‘Love’, could have decided it was a good idea to call their offspring, ‘Oral’.

Oral Love’s name had remained a curse until he left school to study medicine at Nottingham University.  The students there had been equally quick to seize the opportunities for humour that his name presented, but he soon became blasé of his new nickname Horatio.  Nonetheless, he would still feel hairs bristle whenever someone used the unexpurgated version of Horatio Fellatio.

                                                                       

He had only met his future mother-in-law on one previous occasion, and even his love for her daughter had not blinded him sufficiently to ignore that she had hit every branch as she fell from the ugly tree.  Now he was about to introduce her to his parents, and he knew that his father especially, would be eager to find something to criticise. 

When the lift’s bell rang, even Mrs Love deigned to look towards the silently opening doors.  Oral could almost hear his mother’s sharp intake of breath and his father’s stifled snigger as Mrs Cruickshank swept into the restaurant.  She was wearing a long, dark brown gown, which looked as though a hundred moles had died for its creation.  Her make-up gave her the pallor of a cadaver after his former anatomy class had finished with it, and served to exaggerate her misshapen features so she appeared even more unlovely than he remembered.  Her nose supported thick, frameless lenses, which aspired to magnify the hooked, beak-like monstrosity out of all proportion to the rest of her face.  She brandished the stick she carried more menacingly than the Medico della Peste himself, upon whom, he speculated, she had modelled her appearance.

A time to write.

When I decided to satisfy my desire to be a writer, I was just a few months into running a pub, which had been closed and boarded up for several years. 

It sat decaying and looking forlorn in a Lincolnshire market town when I stumbled upon it.  It was still an attractive building and seduced me into wanting to put my twenty years experience into saving its life.  I spent several Monday to Fridays away from my other pub in Nottingham, project managing the building work whilst doing much of the labouring and redecorating with a friend.  My wife, son and I eventually left our previous pub, and home of seven years, and moved in.  However, we could not have foreseen, when we reopened in July 2008, that fatcats within the banking system were greedily lining their pockets and creating unstable markets, which would eventually plunge the UK into a global recession.  Or so I was led to believe by the press - I was too busy swimming against the tide to worry about the mechanics of the problem.  The pressure was already well and truly on when we discovered my wife was pregnant some 4 months later.

It was about that time, during one of the bedtime story sessions with my eleven year-old son, I decided that I was running out of time to do something I always knew I would one day do.  Pub hours were long and seven days a week.  We worked until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays, chasing the late night drinkers and dealing with the antisocial crap they brought with them.  We had bills to pay and staff who relied on us for employment.   Takings were precariously low and overheads high.  I felt under a ton of pressure.  Yet I knew I would eventually have to find the time to realise my ambition and it might as well be now.  If the adage 'When you want something done, ask a busy man to do it' were true, then the timing was ideal!

I had read many Enid Blyton books as a child; The Famous Five, The Find Outers, The Ship,Valley, Mountain, River of Adventure etc and had revisited many of them through reading to my son in recent years.  I had noted how dated they seemed, and how the freedom enjoyed by kids in the fifties seemed unrealistic in today's 'nanny society'.  Even growing up in the sixties and seventies I used to envy these youngsters who went off on great adventures without parents to supervise them, and we had much more freedom then, than kids seem to enjoy today.  I decided I wanted to write stories that took a central character on adventures similar to the ones Enid Blyton wrote about, but in a modern, and therefore, harder hitting way.  I wanted to create something that would resonate with modern teens/young adults, but I didn't want to write fantasy.  I wanted the reader to truly empathise with the characters and recognise potential events in their own lives within the stories.  I adore travel and therefore wanted to take the main character, and the reader, all over the world - and that meant giving him the means to do it.  I also wanted to encourage readers to appreciate the English language, and whilst I acknowledge that there must be a degree of realism in the writing, I vowed to avoid the 'yoof-speak' and text language that afflicts this generation. Finally I decided that my main character had to be like a son I could be proud of, with sound morals, a sense of fairness and an innate concern for the plight of others.  As an atheist, I wanted to do this without any whiff of preaching. 

Reece Winner, is twelve years old and the story starts on the day his parents split up.  He lives in a pub overlooking the North Cornish coast.  His parents have bought it a few months earlier, after his father had spotted it for sale during a family holiday the previous year.  He's a slightly eccentric boy, with dyspraxia, which makes him awkward and hence prone to isolation and bullying.  Nonetheless, he is likeable and quite introvertly smart.  One of his coping mechanisms is to find humorous anagrams of the names of teachers or other antagonists.  Hence, his bullying enemy Robert Fathaby, becomes 'Fart-Breath Boy',  Rupert Poutril the PE teacher becomes 'Pupil Torturer' etc.  However, he is often afraid of telling anyone, for fear of being thought a 'geek'.

He suffers a series of unhappy events which turn his once-stable life upside-down, including falling into cliff blowhole in a quickly rising tide, whilst out researching a homework assignment.  His father, racing to help him, has an accident and suffers serious injuries which land him in intensive care.  He is helped through all this by his new friend Kara, an equally out-of-place girl, whose father committed suicide a few years earlier.  His parents' split, the pub being hit by recession, debt collectors calling at all times of the day and night, and his father's tragic accident, all threaten to throw Reece and his dad out on the street and force them to leave his beloved Cornwall - but I've haven't called him Reece Winner for nothing.

We recently sold our Lincolnshire pub and so had to find somewhere else to live.  I was so desperate to finish the first Reece Winner story, I persuaded my wife to move to Cornwall.  We now live in Polperro (which is on the opposite coast to where I set the book), but I have a stunning view from my lounge window over Polperro Harbour.  The weird thing is, I have written much less since moving here than I did before, when I had the pub to run.  When I set out creating Reece, I would drive my son to school at 8.30am and continue driving to a picnic area in Willingham Woods where I would sit outside in the freshness of the morning and get a couple of hundred or so words into my laptop.  There was a snack hut which opened at 9am and the owner gave me a discount on tea because I was there so often.  I would stay there until 10am when I would return to the pub to get ready for opening at noon.  Ironically, the writing seemed easier then than it does now.

Okay, so we do have a baby, now aged 15 months, and a teenager whose self-sufficiency is limited to not having to be reminded to breathe.  Our apartment has only one lounge/diner where I can sit and work and I often have to give that up because my daughter wants to sing along to The Teletubbies whilst discovering what happens when she presses the buttons on the TV, the stereo, my laptop or the telephones.  When I've removed all of these, or barricaded the side of the room where the TV sits,  she will steer her Scuttlebug (a wonderful sit-on device designed to allow children who cannot yet walk, access to every socket, hot coffee and drawer full of life threatening implements on the ground floor) towards the parrots cage and poke her fingers through the bars.  Cassie the Cockatoo, has so far been very good about this and only pecked her once, but I am afraid that as her obvious warning nip has failed to deter young Jasmine, Cassie might think the next one ought to remove the digit at the knuckle.

During the summer I have tried taking my laptop across the cliffs to sit in the sun and write.  Unfortunately, it's impossible to see a laptop screen in the intense sun that has blessed Cornwall this year.  During the tourist season, sitting in a cafe for a couple of hours sipping overpriced tea, is not going to put you on the owner's Christmas card list.  The shelters in town are full of people noisily enjoying their holiday and so writing outside the house has not been all that successful and I can't really afford to be driving to isolated locations.  I chide myself all the time that these are pathetic excuses for surmountable problems, and to a degree that is correct.  However, when I do find myself with the time and environment criteria met, that can be the time when I'm simply not in the mood.  Or that is when Facebook or Twitter will appear like the angels of Beelzebub and promise me writing fortune and fame if I just read this post or that blog, or make a cuttingly sarcastic witticism about an ex-customer's spelling of 'gawjus' and other such inanities.  

Then I have my writing class, which, because we live in Cornwall, is a 50 mile round trip every Wednesday night, returning home in the fog, which swirls off Bodmin Moor.  With homework!  Yes, bloody homework!  I have enough of that to do for my son.  My homework assignment this week is to write 200-500 words starting with 'The son took leave of his father, placed himself in a small boat and the father had to push it off with his own foot.'  If he's not careful, my son will be the one in the boat.  For real. 

I guess I'm hoping that chronicling my progress in this blog will be a cathartic excercise to download the mental detritus and leave my brain uncluttered for the creative task at hand.

I remember reading, many years ago, an interview in which an author, (whose name is lost to Alzheimer's) was asked if she enjoyed writing books.  She replied, 'I enjoy having written a book', and this sums it up for me.  What started out as an enjoyable distraction, has now become an obsession - and that's serious shit.  Reece Winner makes new daily demands for more effort, harder work, more research, more learning and more polishing to perfection.  And whilst I know that sounds like a complaint, it isn't.  It's the very least I should be prepared to do - but I'll be damned glad when I've finished!  It's presently at 54,000 words and I think it will probably finish at 70-80,000.  Any advice from fellow writers/readers is welcome.  Just don't interrupt me when I'm writing!