Five misfits in search of literary recognition

Annie was having a bad day, Rob was nursing a cold and Linda looked tired. At least I wasn't on-call this week (had I really suggested at the previous meeting that we dress up for our Christmas meal: Rob as a parasitic worm, Chris as Karl Marx and Linda as a budgerigar? Oh, what a strange delirium being on-call induces.)

This evening Chris was reading another extract from his magnus-opus-in-progress Karl Marx and Careful Driving. Snuggled in a nook of the Black Boy pub, we all listened intently as Chris shared a little of this dazzling fusion of political philosophy, travelogue and autobiography: "... Stem the flow of ideas and the effect upon society would be similar to the effect on the Volvo were I to lift my foot off the accelerator. Although for a while the wheels would drive the engine, the vehicle's momentum would eventually be overcome by resistance in the form of wind, gravity and the friction of the tyres on the road surface. In the absence of a supply of fuel to the combustion chambers, or of fresh ideas to the debating chambers, antithesis no longer confronts thesis to produce synthesis. Whether mechanical or political, revolutions cease and progress comes to an end..."

Karl Marx and Careful Driving draws on Chris's experience as a self-declared misfit French graduate who becomes a driver of 38 tonne trucks. Chris writes: "... Some of the animosity I encountered was almost certainly due to the perception that I was different... people with a degree in French didn't become lorry drivers; they became teachers, translators or civil servants ..." As a French graduate who became a mental health nurse, I'm saying nothing.

The Blossom and the Bee

The standard of blogs for the Severn Valley Authors becomes more witty with each post, from 'Five Writers In Search of a Home' to Chris taking out his frustrations on his computer.

We continued in this vein at our last meeting when Tony suggested that we dress up for our Christmas meal: Rob as a parasytic worm, Chris as Karl Marx and me as a budgerigar. I know I should follow Twitter but really.

Rob introduced us to the (revised) first chapter of his new book, 'The Blossom and the Bee'. The book begins with a bang - literally - with a clever description of the destruction of the twin towers. I loved the surreal parallel between the aircraft plunging into the tower with 'a stray dart embedding itself into the soft panel of a loudspeaker'.

The opening sentence was enigmatic to say the least and completely lost on me, although everyone else nodded in admiration when Rob explained its meaning. I still don't entirely understand 'I am the life form spawned when something that does not exist fails to come into being - the positive product of two negatives'. Rob wants his readers to be kept guessing which is something I enjoy in a book but I think that most people will give up if they find it too challenging.

In this first chapter, Jon, the main character, witnesses the destruction of the World Trade Center, forcing him to think about his own mortality and spirituality and the answers that his Jewish background may be able to offer. Later on in the story, Jon meets Willie Keel 'a survivor of the Holocaust death camps'. Both Jon and Willie are suffering from survivor guilt which Rob describes as 'Like a parasitic worm'.

It will be exciting to see how this story unfolds and how Rob manages to manoeuvre through the many twists and turns of a complicated plot.

Talking of twists and turns, we will be back on the road with 'Karl Marx and Careful Driving' next Tuesday at the Black Boy. I look forward to seeing you all there.

The Ninth Step

Apologies for the lateness of the blog. Having been woken up at 2 a.m. by the usual drunken morons yelling in the street, I got up at 4 a.m. on Saturday morning with one of those 'sleep-deprivation headaches'. After spending over an hour attempting (and failing) to send a press releases about the Tenbury talk to the Tenbury Wells Advertiser, I did what any reasonable human being would do. I threw the computer onto the floor.

Accordingly I was unable to write this Blog on Sunday because the computer screen was cracked. They should make the bloody contraptions stronger so we can regularly throw them across the room with out necessitating expensive repairs. I am now £100 poorer - but I have a computer with a new screen and enhanced memory that allows me to send emails with press releases attached.

The Severn Valley Authors have found a new home, 'the snug' in The Black Boy pub on Kidderminster Road. We reunited on 5 October to trade the usual insults and discuss Annie's short story entitled 'The Sign'.

News: Annie has enrolled on a ten-week novel-writing course at Evesham College and is thinking about setting her first novel on the island of St Kilda. Tony announced that his article on the therapeutic value of writing has been published in the British Journal of Wellbeing, so I'm thinking of submitting an article on the therapeutic value of throwing a computer across the room. Rob's entry for the Bridport Prize, an annual competition that attracts some of the best writers in the country, was shortlisted in the top 100 out of 6,000 (see the entry on Rob's blog entitled 'Close but no Cigar' (http://robertronsson.co.uk/). So congratulations to Annie, Tony and Rob.

Annie deserves congratulations too for her short story, an insightful, perfectly structured and thoroughly researched tale of a woman's escape from the brutality of a drunken and violent partner that was inspirational rather than bleak. Rob drew our attention to the expert build-up of tension as the narrator makes preparations for her escape while her partner snores upstairs. Linda's suggestion that the title should be changed from 'The Sign' to 'The Ninth Step' met with universal agreement. Tony's concern about the authenticity of the narrator's voice led to a general discussion point. How, for example, does one write a narrative from the point of view of a child? And if we wrote dialogue as we truly speak to each other, it would be unreadable. The art of writing lies in the author's ordering and interpretation of events and of the interaction of protagonists rather than an exact reproduction of them.


Annie has entered 'The Ninth Step' for a competition. I have little doubt that it would be accepted (and paid for) by a women's magazine.

Five Writers in Search of a Home

The wind from the north, channeled by the valley’s sides, funnels into a gale and rips the leaves from the trees. The leaf litter swirls like torn betting slips on a deserted racecourse until a shower matts it into clumps. Then the frosts come and the clumps sparkle as the moonshine breaks between the scudding clouds. Surely, autumn is the cruellest season to be put out on the streets.

But this is what has happened to Severn Valley Authors. The advent of a weekly Tuesday night quiz at the Arches means we are to be evicted from our meeting room. Commerce trumps art.

So in our final Arches meeting it was fitting that our very own master of ‘wistful’, Tony Gillam, was reading the second extract from his three-part work, The Softness of Heads. In this part the hero graduates to junior school, goes to a Hallowe’en ghost reading, has a bath and discusses with his older brother the merits of watching the Lunar landing on their Gran’s colour television.

Not the most gripping material, you may think, but in Tony’s confident hands the accuracy of the reminiscence and the way he prompts sparks of recognition to flash in the reader’s mind made this an enthralling follow-up to part one. How about this for a heart-tug: ‘At playtime I stood in the playground and ate the Lincoln biscuits which Mum had wrapped in a piece of wax paper torn from the loaf of Mother’s Pride.  She worried that, on these cold days, I might get hungry before lunchtime.  I felt the crumbs in my pocket, crumbs of mother’s love, wrapped in mother’s pride …’

We all congratulated the Garrison Keillor of Kidderminster on this one.

Chris was absent with man-flu (Get Well Soon, mate) so Tony was spared a forensic examination of his comma-splices and on this occasion the discussion focused on the subject of ‘voice’. On the one extreme Linda feels that it is impossible not to inject hindsight and experience into the supposed voice of a seven-year-old and that a reader would be foolish to expect the voice to be 'authentic'. On the other, Rob thinks that the writer needs to be consistent and if the piece starts in the naïve voice this should apply all the way through unless the writer signifies he is breaking out of it. Tony remained tight-lipped on whose advice he will take when he looks at The Softness of Heads again.

In other news: Linda and Tony reported on a writers’ networking event in Worcester they had attended with Chris on the previous Saturday. Annie is awaiting news of a recent submission to Mslexia and Tony circulated a copy of his article, Time to Write the Next Book which appeared in the British Journal of Wellbeing.

Severn Valley Author's is thriving now but, after an Autumn on the streets, who knows what may become of us.

The one after the summer recess

The Severn Valley Authors were reunited once more at The Arches with new pencil cases and satchels at the ready to start the autumn term. Well, sort of. Some of us had worked most of the summer keeping the wheels of industry, health and social care oiled (if health and social care can be said to have oiled wheels). Annie (the only schoolteacher among us and thus the only one entitled to a proper Swallows and Amazons-style summer holiday) couldn't get enough of classroom pursuits and had been off to Writers Summer School (see her previous blog post).

And so it was that we gathered to discuss Linda's untitled piece. This had been entered for the Birmingham Book Festival's Short Story competition and we spent a short time licking our wounds since neither Linda, Rob or myself had been successful. It was also noted that none of the group had been successful in The Guardian Short Story Competition a few weeks earlier. This general lack of success was positively re-framed as (a) indicative of immense perseverance on the part of group members who risk repeated failure by entering competitions and (b) proof of the truism that short story judges' decisions are purely a matter of personal taste and therefore shouldn't be taken to heart.

Linda's untitled piece had been shaped into a short story for the purposes of competition entry but had originally been conceived as part of the novel-in-progress A Headful of Budgerigars. I found the piece lyrical, affectionate, humane, full of perfectly-chosen words, with musical, rhythmic sentences and poignant psychological observations. Rob described it, aptly, as elegiac. For me, it captured the atmosphere of a funeral and the unanticipated family dynamics and even unexpected humour that these situations can provoke. From a writer's point of view, it made me reflect on the differences between a short story and a short extract of fiction - not necessarily the same thing, though there are examples of short stories that went on to become the first chapters of novels.

We may not have won any competitions this month but Linda's beautifully- crafted poetic prose is, a far as I'm concerned, a successful piece of writing. As long as we continue to write and hone our craft we can't really go wrong for, to quote Richard Bach, a professional writer is really no more than "an amateur who didn't quit."

The one before the summer recess

Tuesday 27th July 2010

The Severn Valley Authors met at the Arches to discuss another chapter from Chris's book 'Karl Marx and Careful Driving'.

Chris was picked up on his choice of sentence construction in the first paragraph.
Outnumbering the tractors in rural areas, where manual rather than mechanical labour still predominates, the horse and cart is a form of obstruction frequently encountered and roundly cursed on Poland’s main roads. A number of members agreed that the subject of the sentence (the horse and cart) coming so late in the sentence effected its flow.

Chris's Orwellian quote that 'some animals were after all more equal than others,' did cause me some confusion because I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of it. The other members agreed that there should be no dumbing down. Oh if only I could be as equal as the others.

There was also much discussion on how much 'heavy material' should be included. Rob asked for more showing rather than telling. He was particularily keen for an encounter with a 'suicidal pedestrian' and felt that anecdotes like these would contrast well with the complex sections. Members were still keen to hear more of Chris's experiences of life on the road. Chris assured the group that he had many of these still to add and was trying to get the structure of the academic material organised first.

I am and so I suspect are the rest of the group in awe at Chris's dedication to this task and look forward to future installments.

With holidays and other commitments looming the group decided to take a summer recess. Tony told of his recent success: a short story accepted by Aquila, a children's magazine on the condition that it was reduced by several hundred words. It was agreed that Tony would send his story on email and the group would make suggestions in order to reduce the word count. It would also allow the group to tick over during the summer.

Congratulations also to Rob for his entry 'My Dedication to Joe Crane' which secured him a plaque from Centro Mallorca.

I went away to Swanick Writers' School over the summer and would thoroughly recommend it to anyone. One guest speaker Roger Ellory gave some very useful advice on getting published and I have included the link for you here: http://swanwickwritersschool.co.uk/news.asp?id=27

Looking forward to seeing you all on Tuesday.

After Dad Rattled the Skeletons in our Cupboard

This evening I went for a run with my friend who is in her sixties. She runs half-marathons and rings around me. I have always adhered to the theory that if one works hard enough then anything can be achieved. This rule does apply to running where the time and distance can be improved on (if only fractionally) week by week. If only this theory applied to writing, then Rob's book 'The Spaniard's Wife' would be an enormous success and quite rightly so. It seems, however, that unless you are Jordan or Peter Mandelson - a combination that makes me grimace - that a magic ingredient must be found to achieve this success; maybe a twist in the tale, an unusual story, a controversial topic, catching the right wave, or a liberal sprinkling of fairy dust. Rob has several of these assets, certainly the twist in the tale, an unusual story and the controversial topic of corrupt politicians. I just hope that he has a good supply of fairy dust with which to enchant a publisher because such a polished book deserves to be published.

As an enticement to the reader to buy and read his book, Rob has submitted a short piece for The Guardian Family called 'After Dad Rattled the Skeletons in our Cupboard'. He shared this latest offering with his fellow Severn Valley Authors last week at The Arches. With Parliament as a backdrop, Annie wittily suggested changing the title to 'Skeletons in the Cabinet' which we all applauded. Chris and Tony suggested using this piece as an introduction to 'The Spaniard's Wife', which I thought was a good idea because I found the current introduction rather confusing. We had a discussion about the use of 'may' and 'might' and decided that 'may have become Prime Minister' should have read 'might have become Prime Minister' because he didn't, eg. 'you may have a biscuit' as opposed to 'you might have a biscuit' - if I decide to offer you one!

My grandfather had local celebrity status for growing the largest marrow and producing the best rhubarb champagne for the village show - he even had his photograph in the local newspaper. This all seems rather small fry in comparison to Rob's possible pedigree. My grandmother, like the Spaniard's wife was dark and tiny (4'10") and as neat as a button. She was a softly spoken woman who lived for her family. Mary Ireland was a firebrand, a strong politically minded woman who sacrificed her family for the love of John Wheatley and his politics. This happened before women had the vote and when such adulterous behaviour was seriously frowned upon, especially among the working classes. John and Mary had both fought their way out of poverty and improved their lot, and certainly couldn't be described as the average couple.

What if Rob's grandfather had been John Wheatley, the cabinet minister who could have become Prime Minister but for his scandalous life, rather than the Spaniard described as 'a drunkard and a waster'? Had this been the case, we probably wouldn't have been sitting in the pub with him discussing the hard road to recognition. The magic ingredient would have been his birthright; with wealth and notoriety, who needs fairy dust?