Joanna Trollope and Me!

Well, got an email yesterday from Dominic King, the radio presenter who’s been kind enough to put me in The Writers' Room on his show – if you don’t know about this, read this blog, or this one.

ANYway. The email said ‘Joanna Trollope was my guest on todays programme, we played her the writers room stuff and she reacted…’ And the subject heading was ‘I think you might like this Alis’. Oh yes, I liked it!

Anyway, with the wonders of modern technology, I’m going to try and put an MP3 link in here so that you can see what Joanna Trollope had to say about the beginning of the short story I wrote for The Writers’ Room. Here it is.

OK, actually, here it isn't. Failed on the link front. If anybody out there has any tutorials in how to put MP3 files into blogs, do let me know!

So, anyway, basically what she said was 'Congratulations to Alis' (I liked that bit) and then talked about how the story-starter presented a scene which could have been happening at any time and how the lads could be representative of any group. That might not sound like much but it was exactly what I was trying to do so it was nice to have her pick up on it. I suppose the proof of the pudding's in the eating and, since I've had suggestions which range from settings in the eleventh century to ones in the future, people don't seem to have felt too constrained by any particular time period!

I am hugely chuffed by Joanna Trollope's kind words as I’ve always been an big fan of hers. Somebody I know once said of a mutual acquaintance that ‘she’s the sort of person who’d rather read Joanna Trollope than Anthony Trollope’ intending for us both to have a cackle at this other person’s expense. But I spoiled her fun by saying ‘Actually, so would I.’ I own every book Jshe has written since The Choir and have loved them all - some more than others, obviously but you know what I mean.

I don’t know why people are so sniffy about her books – you know, the whole ‘aga saga’ thing. Is it just the usual British tendency to try to throw stones at success? Dunno, but I find a huge amount to admire in Joanna Trollope’s books. Apart from the pages virtually turning themselves, I mean. For instance, I think she writes men very well and very believably. OK, I know I’m not a man, but they just ring true, I know men like the characters in her books. And, of course, her women just walk off the page.

She also does meticulous research. This was most evident to me in Next Of Kin, a quite dark novel for her, about a dairy farming community. Since I come from just such a community, it was spooky to see how very much she had managed to see under the phlegmatic, just-get-on-with-it mentality of farmers to the anguish and desperation which often lies beneath.

Similarly, a friend of mine who’s married to a vicar said she could barely read The Rector’s Wife because it was so reminiscent of her own youthful experience – the having no money, parishioners watching critically and commenting on every single thing the poor wife did. Claustrophobic doesn’t begin to cover it.

Anyway, I feel even more chuffed than before that I have been invited to do this stuff on the Dominic King show as he has such illustrious guests. JT today and, the last time I was on I followed Conn Iggulden of The Dangerous Book for Boys fame.

BBC Radio Kent. It’s the place to be!

Short Stories 'R' Not Us!

Oh my goodness. Blog already written in draft, I log on to Blogger to realise that I'm about to post my 100th blog. Should have done something special. Oh well, I suspect this is all quite self-referential enough without starting to congratulate myself for having so much to say for the last three and a half months!

So I'll just say - SOOO many thanks to all of you who visit and especially to those who comment - it's great to talk to you!

Anyway, on with the blog...

I wrote here last week about my sudden rise to fame (ahem…) on BBC Radio Kent and wondered how the whole Writers’ Room experiment would come to fruition. Well, now I know. I got an email this week from Dominic King, the host of the show on which The Writers’ Room is a tiny feature, asking if it would be OK if I wrote up what seemed like the most promising listener idea into a proper short story.
Of course, I said.
No problem, I said.
Delighted, I said…
…and sent the email

Except… I don’t write short stories.
At all.
Ever.
Not for the last sixteen years, at least.
I did once upon a time. Like most beginning writers I was under the mistaken impression that short stories, being short, were easier than novels or other more extended forms. Which is not a particularly logical thing to think when taking anything but word-count into consideration. It’s like saying that it must be easier to win an Olympic 100 metres than a marathon.
Of course a marathon requires more stamina but no less training or basic athletic ability.

I was, as people are prone to do when looking at any creative endeavour, confusing effort with talent.
I have no basic talent for brevity. Testament is not a short book. Shorter than it was before I put my editing hat on and deleted 75% of the lovingly-bestowed but annoying-to-read adverbs, pruned sentences which basically reiterated what I’d said in the previous line only with different words and cut whole chapters which, though beautiful, did not add much to the story, but still not short. (Arguably, one of the beautiful but value-added-less chapters remains, but I left it there so that readers would have a few pages of lovely meaninglessness to recover from what had just happened. And, in my defence, there are a few lines which move the plot forward. )

But I digress.
Brevity. It is not me. For a few years a decade or so ago, I had a column in the local diocesan newspaper (ie one that’s given out free to all churchgoers in an attempt to make everybody feel that they’re part of the diocese instead of being all parochial. And, obviously, I use the word parochial there literally…) I had 500 words to say something ‘relevant, to the point and witty to the person in the pew’ as my original brief said.
For the first couple of years I invariably wrote 1500 words and had to exercise my frequently-called-upon skills in precis to get it down to 500. After a while it gradually shifted down to around 750 but I never produced a piece which I didn’t have to hack mercilessly until it said the one thing which I was supposed to be saying instead of digressing, musing and just, frankly, embellishing.

Anyway, short stories. As you will have gathered from the foregoing, they are not my natural habitat as a writer. Nor, as a matter of fact, as a reader, though I always feel that is something of a deficiency in me.

So what am I to make of the fact that I must produce a short story which, when read aloud (as they are going to tape me doing, before adding music and fx) is no longer than 5 minutes? Mr King reckons that this is ‘about 882 words’. I make it closer to 550/600 as I’m sure that, in my short story writing days all those years ago, when I was trying to write to the BBC’s short story slot (15 mins) I never got above 1650 words. I don’t read aloud particularly slowly, probably the opposite in fact.

I’m due back on the show on the 18th of Feb to talk about the suggestions people have made about where the story should go and, then, they’re giving me a week or two to write the story before going back and recording it.

Just as the synopsis for Testament seemed to take longer to write than the whole blasted book had, I suspect I shall be writing and re-writing this short story for days and days. I’d start writing it now but it would be just my luck for a brilliant suggestion to come in on the day before I have to do the round-up of submissions, so I’m possessing my soul in patience. But there is already one particularly good suggestion which I’m letting quietly stew away in the back of my brain…

The Writers Room

Hmmm. I seem to have allowed myself to be flattered into doing voluntary work for BBC Radio Kent. After my appearance last week whilst still high on adrenalin and therefore probably talking rubbish fairly convincingly, a listener wrote in to Dominic King, the nice presenter I had spoken to, to say wouldn’t it be fun if we all wrote a story together with listeners contributing chapters. Yes, said Dominic, let’s ring Alis and see if she’ll kick it off. And read the chapters. And decide how to make a story out of them.

Well, to cut a long story short, initially, chapters morphed into chunks, for which read ‘a few lines’ and I was going to wade through the one/s which arrived each day and decide which was the best, stick it on the website and wait for more the following day. But that was deemed to be a competition which Radio Kent can’t do.

So I think what we’ve arrived at is that I start the story with a little opener – which I did yesterday on air – then listeners send in suggestions to what Mr King is calling ‘The Writers’ Room’ as to how the story should pan out. I get to read said suggestions and then we go back on air in a month’s time to discuss what fell on to the Writers’ Room cutting floor. And, clearly, what didn’t. Assuming I don’t have to read hundreds of submissions a day (I’m slightly hoping that the people of Kent haven’t been riveted, as a body, by my opener. A few dozen rivets would do me nicely) it could be a lot of fun.

I don’t know if we’re going to end up writing the story as per the top suggestion – that might be too competition-flavoured, I don’t know – but if not, how else could we generate a good finale for the Writers’ Room experiment?

What do you think, commenters and lurkers? If I don’t end up writing a story, will it be a bit of a damp squib, or will it be exciting enough for people to hear their ideas discussed?

I was asked for general pointers, to which I said:

a) decide whether this really is the begining of the story or whether it’s actually describing something near the end, so the whole story is explaining the beginning. Believe it or not, I actually put it better than that but I’m rushing this because I want to get it finished in draft before Messiah part 2.

b) choose a couple of characters and tell the story with your eye on them, don’t try to follow too many people

c) you can only have one plot in a short story. (Is this right, actually? I haven’t really written or read short stories for years, to my shame, except for a selection in one of the Sunday supplements a couple of months ago by tons of famous people which all turned out to be deeply depressing. Mostly about death, as I recall. But anyway, one plot for short stories, yes? Otherwise novella, surely?)

Anything else which I should have told the people of Kent lest they start producing sub-standard ideas?

And, in case anybody’s interested, this was the Kent-themed opener:

A field, grass worn to bare earth in patches, ragged trees in the middle distance, motionless under a heavy grey sky. A group of young men, all dressed alike, sprawl on the ground, joking, laughing, their muscles defined, their edge keen. A pale, slight youth rises to his feet as if to an unseen signal and his companions follow suit. Gathering in a tight knot, their jokiness left behind on the ground, they thrust their right arms into the closed centre of the circle, rigid, like spokes on a wheel. Fists pump, voices chant; there is an abrupt beat of silence and one voice is raised ‘Garden of England!’