September Reflections

September was sunny, rainy and everything in between. This is a time of year that makes me feel so creative…I hope it’s the same for you! Here’s some September reflections…

Quotation

‘Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.’ – George Elliot

Let’s celebrate the arrival of autumn – the official season for everyone bookish. I loved reading this post about the influence of autumn on our culture and on ourselves. I’m very excited to light the candles, run a bath and test out the gorgeous Autumn Leaf bath treat from Lush.

Reading

I’m making the conscious decision to read more poetry. You all know I love D. H. Lawrence so it was rather serendipitous that I stumbled across a collection of his poetry in a second hand book shop this month. I particularly love ‘Piano’, a gentle but powerful reflection on memory:

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; 
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see 
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings 
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Writing

I love talking and finding out about the creative process. I thought that when I wrote my second novel it would happen in the same way I wrote the first but I’ve found that each new project requires a new process. It’s a great idea to keep a writing journal so you can track the ways in which you write. Here’s an old post about how to do it.

Focus on…Nesting

Ah Autumn! As well as being cosy, it’s a great time to clear out and have a little revamp. This could mean chucking out clothes you never wear, treating yourself to a bunch of flowers or forging a new, good habit.

Three things to look forward to in October:

1. Snapping the colours of Autumn on long walks.

2. Baking bread and making soup.

3. Twinkling candles and carving pumpkins.

Posts to catch up on:

• The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 7

• The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 6

• The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 5

• The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 4

• The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 3

• The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 2

• The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 1

• A Selection of Short Stories

• Stationary Haul

• Book Group Notes: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

• Why Creativity Takes Courage

·       How was your September? Feel free to leave a comment below… 

The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 7

This seven-day writing challenge is designed to simply get you writing. There is no word limit on each exercise but you’ll probably aim to write 300 – 500 words for each. Make the exercises work for you as you wish. You can work chronologically through each day, or you can spend more time on one day if it needs more attention and then catch up with the other exercises at a later date. Most importantly, just keep writing! Save revisions for after the end of the challenge. I’d love to know how you get on so leave a comment!

Write on

Congratulations for making it to day seven! By now you will have written about 3,500 words. Today, look back on what you’ve produced over the last six days. Was there one particular session that you enjoyed especially, or one that was weaker than the others? Choose one of your pieces that you would like to expand and explore further. For this exercise set a timer for about thirty minutes and free write. You may want to continue from where you left off or you could use your free write on why the piece intrigues you, how you will expand on it, what research you’ll need to do, etc. Allow yourself to be unedited, don’t think too much, just write.

If you’ve enjoyed the challenge, feel free to explore previous writing exercises and keep visiting for new ones to be added! Follow on Bloglovin'. 

Previous exercises:    Day One – You are Here

                                   Day Two – Fashioning your Character

                                   Day Three –Transformations

                                   Day Four – Giving Directions

                                   Day Five – Adopt a Character

                                   Day Six – Respond to a Classic

                                    

The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 6

This seven-day writing challenge is designed to simply get you writing. There is no word limit on each exercise but you’ll probably aim to write 300 – 500 words for each. Make the exercises work for you as you wish. You can work chronologically through each day, or you can spend more time on one day if it needs more attention and then catch up with the other exercises at a later date. Most importantly, just keep writing! Save revisions for after the end of the challenge. I’d love to know how you get on so leave a comment!

Respond to a Classic

I like to think of writing as a never ending conversation in which we correspond with the great writers that have come before us. The classic novels, plays and poems that continue to inspire across generations have a golden thread spun through them. Any writer, at whatever stage of their creative odyssey, has much to gain from immersing themselves in this mastery. For this exercise choose a classic work – the older the better – and find a passage, stanza or speech. Things that work well for this might be a Shakespeare play or one of the Greek epics. Think of it as a call and response. Read the passage through and then write a reply, engaging with the themes that are being explored. Your response can be as messy as you like just allow yourself to react to what you read.

Come back tomorrow for another exercise. Happy Writing!

Previous exercises:    Day One – You are Here

                                   Day Two – Fashioning your Character

                                   Day Three –Transformations

                                   Day Four – Giving Directions 

                                   Day Five – Adopt a Character 

The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 5

This seven-day writing challenge is designed to simply get you writing. There is no word limit on each exercise but you’ll probably aim to write 300 – 500 words for each. Make the exercises work for you as you wish. You can work chronologically through each day, or you can spend more time on one day if it needs more attention and then catch up with the other exercises at a later date. Most importantly, just keep writing! Save revisions for after the end of the challenge. I’d love to know how you get on so leave a comment!

Adopt a Character

Some characters stay with us. Have you ever imagined what happens after a novel ends? Or what happened before the story even began? Many writers use existing characters in order to explore a life beyond the book they’ve read. Think of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea or Howard Jacobson’s Shylock is my Name. In this exercise you will offer a new life to a character that already exists. Give Heathcliff a 21^st century makeover or surmise how Mrs. Dalloway’s life unfolds after her party is over. Although this is a fun exercise, it’s also a great way to practice plotting as the character you’re exploring is already fully formed (although you’re adding your own spin). You can either write what your story would be about or just straight launch into it.

Come back tomorrow for another exercise. Happy Writing!

Previous exercises:  Day One – You are Here

                                Day Two – Fashioning your Character

                                Day Three – Transformation 

                                    Day Four –Giving Directions 

The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 4

This seven-day writing challenge is designed to simply get you writing. There is no word limit on each exercise but you’ll probably aim to write 300 – 500 words for each. Make the exercises work for you as you wish. You can work chronologically through each day, or you can spend more time on one day if it needs more attention and then catch up with the other exercises at a later date. Most importantly, just keep writing! Save revisions for after the end of the challenge. I’d love to know how you get on so leave a comment!

Giving Directions

On an earlier post about dialogue (read it here) I said that speech ‘is the way in which a character’s inner world escapes fleetingly for other people to see. Dialogue is different from thought because it is controlled and censored. Therefore, when you write speech you need to apply this same filter process. Having said that speech can’t be too rigid. In short, you need to achieve something more controlled than thought, yet something natural and realistic.’

Try your hand at dialogue with this exercise: depict a scene in which one character asks another for directions to somewhere. This is a good scenario to practice with because we generally know how the conversation will go, so you can modify depending on character and story. Furthermore, it is a catalyst for drama in that it is a situation in which one character needs something from the other, giving you some scope for action. To start with, just write the dialogue and add prose later. 

Come back tomorrow for another exercise. Happy Writing! 

Previous exercises: Day One – You are Here 

                                Day Two – Fashioning your Character 

                                Day Three – Transformations 

The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 3

This seven-day writing challenge is designed to simply get you writing. There is no word limit on each exercise but you’ll probably aim to write 300 – 500 words for each. Make the exercises work for you as you wish. You can work chronologically through each day, or you can spend more time on one day if it needs more attention and then catch up with the other exercises at a later date. Most importantly, just keep writing! Save revisions for after the end of the challenge. I’d love to know how you get on so leave a comment!

Transformations

When I think of what makes a good storyteller, it’s very often the delivery rather than the content that sticks in my mind. This is a simple exercise where you will play with how something is told. Write 100 words about anything that could be from a story – a quick and simple scene is fine. Don’t stress too much about the actual content. Once you’ve done that, change something about the narrative voice. That could be transferring from first person to third, or maybe from the past tense to the present. Or, change the perspective of the story. For example, let’s say your scene depicts two people arguing as told by an omniscient narrator. Try switching the narrator to a stranger whose passing by and witnessing the fight or, from the perspective of a small child watching. Try out a couple of these transformations and see how it changes the dynamics of the writing. Does it improve it? Or, does the change not quite fit?

Come back tomorrow for another exercise. Happy Writing!

Previous exercises: Day One – You are Here

                                Day Two – Fashioning your Character 

The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 2

This seven-day writing challenge is designed to simply get you writing. There is no word limit on each exercise but you’ll probably aim to write 300 – 500 words for each. Make the exercises work for you as you wish. You can work chronologically through each day, or you can spend more time on one day if it needs more attention and then catch up with the other exercises at a later date. Most importantly, just keep writing! Save revisions for after the end of the challenge. I’d love to know how you get on so leave a comment!

Fashioning your character

At the beginning of her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark has the difficult task of introducing a cluster of characters at once – a group of schoolgirls all wearing the same school uniform. Spark deals with this by allowing the panama hats each student must wear to tells us about each girl. So Rose Stanley, a student famous for her promiscuity, wears her hat ‘unobtrusively on her blonde short hair, but she dented in the crown on either side.’ Monica Douglas wears hers ‘perched as if it were too small’.  Eunice Gardiner, ‘famous for her spritely gymnastics’ wears hers ‘turned up at the front and down at the back’. Sandy Stranger, on the other hand, chews at the strip of elastic attached to her hat. Spark uses the very thing that makes the girls identical, their hats, as a way of helping the reader tell them apart. Sometimes genius is as simple as that!

For today’s exercise try describing a character using a single garment. How do you this is up to you: you may want to include the character in the description, as Spark does, or just describe the object without showing the character. If you’re working on something already you might choose one of your current characters. If not, you could use the item of clothing as a way of finding a character. Think about how the garment is worn, how the character interacts with it, its colour, style etc. If you’re struggling, here are some examples to start you off: a little black dress with a frayed hem, a tie with an ink splodge on it, a supermarket uniform, driving gloves, a cowboy hat.

Come back tomorrow for another exercise. Happy Writing!

Previous exercises: Day 1 - You are Here

The Seven Day Writing Challenge - Day 1

This seven-day writing challenge is designed to simply get you writing. There is no word limit on each exercise but you’ll probably aim to write 300 – 500 words for each. Make the exercises work for you as you wish. You can work chronologically through each day, or you can spend more time on one day if it needs more attention and then catch up with the other exercises at a later date. Most importantly, just keep writing! Save revisions for after the end of the challenge. I’d love to know how you get on so leave a comment!

You are Here

Before we can go forward, we need to understand where we are. This first exercise seeks to ground you and your writing. It’s a simple one – describe your immediate physical surroundings. It could be the most banal room you’ve ever been in – that doesn’t matter just make sure you get that banality on the page. Everything you describe will have a story behind it – just like the careful placing of a prop by a set designer, everything has a reason for being there. Tease out some of the truths that lurk behind the place your describing. For example, ‘there is a clock on the wall but its hands have stopped. We needed the batteries for the remote control.’ Instantly, that description uncovers something. So, start where you are. Where are you?

Come back tomorrow for another exercise. Happy writing! 

A Selection of Short Stories

As the days grow shorter, we leave behind the long, languishing sessions of summer reading in favour of cosy bookish nights. Short stories make for a perfect autumn comforter, like a mug of hot chocolate for the mind. Here is a little selection of small, but perfectly formed tales for you to devour.

The Insect World – Jean Rhys

‘Almost any book was better than life, Audrey thought. Or rather, life as she was living it.’

In this haunting story, Rhys combines the two worlds she knew so well – war torn London in the Blitz and memories of her childhood in Dominica. Mentally fragile Audrey, a representation of Rhys herself, begins to see parallels between the humans that buzz around the London underground with a type of tropical insect that gave her nightmares as a child.

The Fox – D. H. Lawrence

‘She stretched out her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.’

This short story is a miniature masterpiece. Two female farmers living in solitude have their lives uprooted when a young man arrives. Like the fox that steals the women’s chickens, the man comes into their little world leaving a trail of destruction. Lawrence explores the battle of the sexes, control and hate in this story that drives to a dramatic climax that will stay with you long after reading. Read it here.

The Withered Arm – Thomas Hardy

‘Gasping for breath, Rhoda, in a last desperate effort, swung out her right hand, seized the confronting spectre by its obtrusive left arm, and whirled it backward to the floor, starting up herself as she did so with a low cry.’

This is like a little piece of distilled Hardy. All the hallmarks are here – haunting pasts, human effort versus fate, magic and superstition. This story follows the legacy of one jealous woman’s curse upon her love rival. You can read it for free here.

Kew Gardens – Virginia Woolf

‘The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed.’

For those dreading the impending dark evening and mornings, Woolf brings some floral cheer with Kew Gardens. This description, however, is to over simplify big, important themes of life that Woolf ponders in this stroll past flowerbeds. Memory and thought are the threads Woolf uses to weave this tale with a zooming in and out of people and things. Read it for free here.

Which of these short stories will you add to your reading list? Which short story would you recommend? Feel free to leave a comment below… 

Stationary Haul

It first started when I noticed that I enjoyed being dragged to Office World, whilst my Dad bought his monthly supply of yellow ruled notepads. I suddenly found that I needed notebooks for unforeseen projects. September meant pencil cases to be filled and a new ink pen to be sought out. Over the years, I have refined the process of stationary collection. Today, I’d like to share with you some of the things I’ve treated myself to over the last couple of months…

Index cards are always helpful for writing projects – you can write plot lines and character profiles on them for easy reference. I like these Paperchase Spectrascope A6 Postcards (£2.50) which will bring a colourful cheer to writing sessions. With them is this uber-cute set of Macaroon Erasers from W.H.Smith (£1.99) which feel almost too sweet to use. 

Stickers are sneaky. They seem so innocent with their £1 price tag, but when one thing leads to another, they can lead you to bankruptcy. These Accessorize stickers, however, are nothing but nice – one a woodland owl design and the other a panda one – and will make great embellishments in my journal and on letters (Both £1).

These two exercise books can cheer up any rainy day. The cloud design is from Marks and Spencer’s and the rainbow raindrop design is from Sainsbury’s. Both will make great incubators for autumnal ideas on wet days. 

This little Sass & Belle notebook (£2) has the loveliest, floral pattern and the paper inside is high quality. It feels too nice to get scuffed in my bag so I might put it to a more dignified use and collect some inspiring quotes in it. 

Where are your favourite places to get stationary? Let me know in the comments below!

Book Group Notes: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Literary Lady’s Book Group Guides are designed to generate discussion at your book group or as a way of enhancing your own reading experience. The discussion points offer a ‘route’ through the book but don’t feel you need to stick too rigidly to it if an interesting topic comes up that needs further discussion!

About the Book:

Charles Ryder, an impressionable young Oxford student, meets the enigmatic Sebastian Flyte and falls in love with his family and a world of privilege that is slowly decaying. This novel spans the years leading up to the First World War in a poignant exploration of faith, love and family. Your book group will love the decadent and desperate world Waugh will take them to.

Discussion Points:

•  If Brideshead Revisited is a love story, who are the lovers? Sebastian/Charles? Julia/Charles? Waugh/Church?
• What did you think of Charles Ryder as a narrator?
• Though often melancholy in tone, Waugh also employs comedy throughout. Did you find the book funny in any way
• “Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.” What is the relationship between time, memory and self in the novel?
• The book is divided into distinctive acts, often punctuated by location – Oxford, Italy, Tunisia etc. Which part of the book did you find most compelling?
• What is unique about the Mortmain family? What is their particular dynamic?
• Discuss the religious conversions that take place in the story.
• How far does the Waugh interrogate the idea of a nostalgic England?
• Brideshead Revisited has been adapted twice - once for a major television series and again for a film – what do you think makes the novel so appealing to audiences?
• The book is often ranked highly in greatest books ever written lists. Do you think it deserves such praise? Why does it have this enduring appeal?

Have you read Brideshead Revisited? What were your thoughts on it? 

Why Creativity Takes Courage

Creativity is a courageous act. It requires strength and bravery to turn blankness into something transcendent and beautiful. Here’s a few reasons why creativity can be scary…

• Rejection looms, casting a shadow over you as you work. What if we get discouraged? What if someone laughs at our best attempt?

• Creating means working intimately with yourself – the parts you like and don’t like.

• Creativity can mean facing difficult emotions and memories.

• Its unpredictable - forcing you to solve problems that no one else can give you the answers for.

• It means comparing ourselves to our heroes and fearing we can never live up to their masterpieces.

Reading that, it seems the creative life doesn’t have much going for it. And yet, miraculously, the need to create wins out. In spite of all the risks we go ahead and do it anyway. The need to express ourselves, to make sense of the world around us, to entertain and to bring joy always trumps the negativity and fear.

Think back over your creative landscape and seek out the abandoned projects, the ones you felt you weren’t courageous enough to do. Find the times that being creative actually made you courageous. Most importantly, unearth those moments when being creative made you fearless, when you were so immersed and in love with the process that all the fear and self-doubt went away. With this in mind, I’d like to amend that Matisse quote slightly to ‘Creativity takes courage, but creativity makes courage too.’

When we think of the term courage we might think of the brave knight slaying the evil dragon. But in Ancient thinking, the dragon is a symbol for powerful creativity. We don’t need to slay the dragon we just need to be brave enough to climb on its back and let it take us for an adventure. 

What do you think the relationship between creativity and courage is?