Independent Creative Writing

Today I received two pieces of work back from university. The first was a law essay, for which I got 80. This was so shocking to me that I checked to make sure that they’d given me my own work back and not somebody else’s. This makes me feel more comfortable about messing up the exam a few weeks ago, because I should still come out with an alright mark overall.

The other thing was for Independent Creative Writing, which was a module which is exactly how it sounds. We could do whatever we wanted, and yet somehow I ended up doing something I didn’t really want to do, but that turned out fairly interesting nonetheless. We were sitting in a circle in the very first seminar and the attention turned to me. “What’s your idea?” asked the lecturer. I didn’t have an idea, so blurted out the first thing that came to mind – I’d just read War and Peace and I wanted to write something fictional in a non-fictional setting. It sounded plausible, but I’d rather have written something silly. It’s one of the longer pieces of creative writing I’ve ever done and my heart wasn’t really in it.

I got 63 for it in the end. Ah, what does he know. He’s just a published author and a lecturer in creative writing, after all. Oh. It’s strange, I’m quite disappointed with these two marks and yet if they were the other way around, I’d be ecstatic.

Here’s my piece, anyway.

.

It was September 2004 when I first met Yukio Toriyama.
…..I’d travelled to see her when, in a brief phone call, she revealed that she had a number of letters that had been sent from her husband during the short time he spent in Nanking. While that would have been enough to guarantee my presence, she then mentioned a diary that she’d been given when his possessions were returned to her, and which had, it seems, remained as in tact as the moment he’d written it.
…..“The letters didn’t have the same fate, I’m afraid,” she said as she was showing me into a small living room in the house outside downtown Tokyo that she’d lived in since she was married. She told me that it was his house, originally. It was a cream coloured building on a thin street that wasn’t much wider than the cars that were parked in bays off it. The house was hidden behind a high wall that lined the street, and was on the bottom floor of a stack of two homes.
…..She left me in the living room as she went to fetch tea. A sofa and a small kotatsu with a blue blanket on it were almost the only features in the room, but filled it to a degree that made moving around difficult. The other thing in the room was what caught my eye. A quite low shelf that lined the wall opposite the window and was full of fading black and white photographs in wooden frames. Despite having aged nearly 70 years since some of them were taken, the woman I’d met just minutes ago was still recognisable in the photos in which she appeared. In the centre was a picture of her smiling on her wedding day, next to her new husband. To the left of that, he stood looking serious in his army uniform.
…..“Wasn’t he handsome?” she said from behind me, and I turned to find her standing with two cups of green tea. She handed one to me and we sat on the sofa. “I was just eighteen when we married, but we’d known each other for a long time.”
She told me how he’d been a friend of her father’s and so he was often at their home to see him. As she got older, they became closer and soon he was coming to see her instead. While they’d known each other for a long time, the romance was something of a whirlwind. “I think we both felt that we’d end up being together,” she told me. “We just didn’t realise how soon it would be.
…..“He was told that he’d be going to China in July 1937. . . that was, I think that was early in June that year. He proposed to me right away and I accepted, and we were married a few weeks after that.
…..“Then he was gone.”
…..She fell into a silence for a few minutes after this, and I drank my tea, unwilling to break it. Eventually she sat up straight and simply said “the letters,” before she pulled a small cardboard box from under the kotatsu. There was no lid, and I could see bundles of papers and, on the top, a small book with a black cover.
…..“This is everything he ever sent me, and there’s his diary too,” she said as she pointed to the book. I picked up the diary, and it felt like leather, expensive. I opened the first few pages and the first thing I noticed was the immaculate handwriting. As if she was reading my mind, she said “he was always very careful about his handwriting, even when he was writing something he never thought anybody would see.”
…..I suddenly felt uncomfortable about reading the thoughts that he had intended to keep to himself when he was writing them, and picked up the letter from the top of the box. It was sent in August 1937 while he was still in Shanghai, and there were thick black lines ruled down the page in two places. One towards the middle of the letter, and two at the end where the final two lines had been deleted. In his letter, he spoke of the Imperial Army’s march towards, and their victory over the Chinese in Shanghai, but he sounded almost downbeat about the victory.
…..“I’ve never found out what he was trying to tell me,” she said to me as I was putting the letter carefully back in the box. “I felt that he was unhappy about something, though. Maybe it won’t be much longer before I can ask him.”
…..She got up and left me with the box as she left the room without another word, and after a few minutes I began to read.

Keisuke Toriyama left Shanghai in September 1937 and began marching to Nanking, where he arrived in early December. At the time, the Japanese were still expecting some resistance. He reached a position to the east of the city, and wrote to his wife.

“How are you, Yukio? I am well, there’s nothing to worry about here. We’ve reached Nanking and are just waiting for the order to attack. I can see the walls from where I am, and the tips of the houses. It’s a truly beautiful sight. Remember I told you how much I enjoyed the architecture in Berlin? Nanking is far beyond anything I saw there, and I can’t wait to get inside to see more.
…..“People are saying that the Chinese are trying to negotiate a surrender, which would be the best thing they can do, I think. They couldn’t defend themselves at Shanghai and I don’t believe they’ll be able to do so at Nanking. The fight will be over soon, and I’ll see you in no time at all.”

The passages from his diary of around the same time made no mention of the state of the Chinese forces, but he devoted three pages to describing the Nanking that he could see over the top of the city walls. “I’m currently situated on higher ground around a mile from Nanking,” he wrote. “Above the impressive city wall I can only see rooftops, but what rooftops they are!” He went on to describe one in particular that truly captured his heart.

“What I take from here to be ordinary homes have plain and simple rooftops of black, and occasionally red, though plain is perhaps the wrong word. Elsewhere though, what beauty. A green roof, the colour of leaves just before autumn, towers over the rest in one part of Nanking, and adorns a building almost twice as tall as anything nearby. It slopes upwards to a point and at its corners points out and slightly upwards. The rest of the building is constructed with a plain cream coloured brick, and the roof sits there as if it was placed on top by the hand of a God.
…..“I can only believe that it’s a home of the Premier of all of China.”

It’s impossible to know to which building Toriyama was referring, but it is likely that he had seen a home that had been built as a retreat for Chiang Kai-Shek and his family.
…..While Toriyama was marvelling over the rooftops, Chiang Kai-Shek was escaping on the other side of Nanking. The Chinese were weak and, without a leader, couldn’t negotiate the surrender that Toriyama had expected. Just over a week later, he led his division into Nanking, and met little resistance. In one letter home he was so confused by the lack of resistance that he wrote “why haven’t they just surrendered? What people are left have no will to fight us.”
…..When it was clear that large parts of Nanking were almost empty, Toriyama took up residence in one of those “ordinary homes” with their black and red roofs. He stayed there with his adjutant, Hiro Fujita, who he had considered a friend for many years. They were so close that Hiro had given a speech at Toriyama’s wedding. When I asked Yukio Toriyama later about the adjutant, she told me that that was the only time she ever met him. “I’d never met him before, though Keisuke spoke fondly of him. He gave a wonderful speech at our wedding, and I could see why Keisuke liked him. I supposed that after the war we’d share that bond and become friends, but he moved to the country and never came back. His sister brought me Keisuke’s things and an apology from Hiro that he wasn’t bringing them himself. I think he found it difficult to cope. We all did.”
…..Hiro Fujita died in 1952, aged just 44, but it’s thanks to him that Toriyama’s diary was preserved and that we can learn so much about the time he spent in Nanking.
…..In that house in Nanking, Toriyama’s mood began to change, though you wouldn’t know it from the letters that he sent to his wife. In them, he continues to talk about the beauty that he saw all around Nanking, and shows constant concern for how she is back in Japan. “I’m sorry I had to leave you so soon,” he wrote in one letter. “I hardly had time to show you around my home. I hope you’re settling in okay and that I can make it up to you soon.” In his diary, however, his thoughts about Nanking took on a different tone. In one entry dated four days after his arrival, he commented again on the roofs that he’d looked at from outside town.

“From outside Nanking all I saw was beauty. From inside, all I see is death. The roofs of red and black that had appeared almost pretty from a distance look terrible from within the walls. It is as if the colour has seeped from half the roofs in the city and now it colours the streets and the rivers instead.
…..“Is this what the Emperor wants?
…..“Is this for the good of Japan?”

These sentiments, this worry about what the Emperor would want and whether his actions were for the good of Japan, are themes that reappear constantly throughout his diary, though never quite as plainly and succinctly as they did on that day.
…..We can never be sure whether Toriyama was deliberately lying to his wife, or whether he was simply hiding the real truth from her to protect her. What we can be sure of is that when he wasn’t worrying about Japan, his thoughts were full of worry for his new wife. When I read his letters in conjunction with his diary, though, my feelings are that it was only when he was thinking about his wife’s welfare that he could forget about the horrors he was witnessing around Nanking.
…..There was no getting away from them entirely, though, as he wrote in his diary.

“I was woken this morning by the sound of screaming, but by the time I opened my eyes it was gone. I can’t be sure now if I heard it or if the sound had come from within a dream to wake me. Regardless, I was up.”

There was simply no escape. What did he say to his wife in a letter that was dated on the same day? “I write to you in the morning, the sun is bright in the sky but it’s very cold here. How is it there? Are you well?” he wrote. The substance of his letter concerned his uniform which he had been sleeping in, since he had no sheets to cover himself with at night. “It is becoming quite damaged,” he wrote. “I have already lost a button and it is beginning to fray in several places. I have called for a tailor but I am not sure when I might hear from him.”
…..For Yukio, this was what war must have been like. It’s not unreasonable for her to have thought this. Her husband’s letters combined with the Japanese propaganda she must surely have encountered daily, mean that there was no reason to believe that the Japanese war effort was not running smoothly. For most in the Imperial Japanese Army, it was.
…..As a captain of a division, it should have been smooth for Toriyama, who must have been looking at plaudits and promotions for his role in the successful invasion of China’s capital – something that Japan had long desired. Instead, being a captain added its own pressures and seemed to darken his mood.

“Today I received orders signed off by Prince Asaka. According to them, we are to treat the Chinese ‘like dogs,’ and this is the attitude I am to instil in my men. By this, he means that we should have no respect for the Chinese who were so important to the formation of life in Japan. I am unsure what he wants us to do to these ‘dogs’ but I know that I wouldn’t treat a dog in this manner.
…..“And yet this is what I’m expected to force my men to do, men who I thought I had known yet have surprised me since their arrival here in how cruel they can be, and how much they seem to enjoy it. I sometimes wonder if I am wrong. If maybe I should be looking to my men for guidance instead of worrying about guiding them.
…..“I cannot make them stop. It has gone too far and I am not in control of them anymore. What use to the Imperial Army is a captain with no men?”

Keisuke Toriyama left his home on December 26th 1937 on what he believed would be a routine patrol. His feelings towards what he would see around the city had become dull by now and the reports in his diary of what he was seeing became more matter of fact as the days went on. He notes that he “saw a body with two bullet holes in its back, lying face down in the road opposite [his] house.” The way in which he refers to the body as “it” is a great departure from how he had expressed a similar finding just a week previously.

“There was a body in the road on the way to the bridge. He had been shot in the back as he had tried to run away from whoever it was that shot him, and yet still he was shot. There was nothing he could have done to prevent his death and yet there was surely nothing he did to provoke it, other than the obvious. He was a ‘dog.’”

That earlier passage sees the victim as a human, where later the body he had seen had ceased to be such. It had become a thing. He had continued his patrol that day when he approached a pit, opposite which he could see the Chinese being lined up with their backs to the hole.

“Four of our soldiers were standing with a Chinese boy of around twelve years. A man and a woman who I took to be his mother and father were struggling to get to him. They were knocked to the floor with the butt of a gun and then made to stand one in front of the other in front of the pit. A sword was placed in the boy’s hands and held there, and he could offer little resistance as two soldiers forced him forwards until he had speared both of his parents, who fell backwards in to the pit. Killing his parents was the boy’s last act on this earth, as he was then thrown (alive) in to the pit after them before a soldier jumped in after him and returned with a bloodied bayonet.
…..“I was sick by a tree, and left before my presence was seen.”

This was Toriyama’s final entry about the things he had witnessed in Nanking. From the buildings he had written about from afar, to the people he had written about within and the turmoil he’d faced in his internal struggle between the Imperial Army and his own thoughts. The final entry sounds like it was intended to be a final entry.

“I am giving my diary to Fujita with the desire that he may deliver it to you, Yukio, if anything were to happen to me. I have no doubt that if I was to send it to you, it would not reach you in the same condition it is in now as I am sure many of my letters do not. Please know that I am sorry and that you shall be okay without me. I truly hope that you never experience anything such as I have experienced here, the destruction of a beautiful city and all within it for the good of nobody and nothing.”

Keisuke Toriyama’s diary ends with a poem.

In glory I did this
In glory I watched this

For Him I have done this
And for Her I would do it again
Coming back
So that She never suffers this fate

I will die with honour
and with all that that means

There then follows simply a number of blank pages. He never wrote in the diary again and it is believed that the day of that entry was the day on which he died.
…..I returned the letters and the diary to their box and returned them to Yukio. We didn’t discuss their contents as, knowing them, I felt that the conversation would be too painful on both of our parts. I simply thanked her for letting me in to her life, and in to the life of her husband.

I went away feeling that I had some understanding of Keisuke Toriyama and the reason for his death, twelve years after first finding out about his existence.
…..It happened in tiny room in a hospital in Shanghai. We were with my grandfather on his deathbed, and he told us that he was worried at what the court underground would make of his life when it came to be time for him to be judged. None of us knew what he was talking about. We had known that he was born in Nanking and that he had lived a large part of his life there, but we did not know much more than that of his past. When, if ever, the subject was raised in his presence, he would leave the room and sit in the garden alone in meditation.
…..Quite out of the blue, he said “I have killed a man.” Of course, we were all shocked but at the same time we all connected the dots and realised that whatever happened must have happened back in Nanking. He began to cry and everyone but me left the room to give him some space, and to give him some dignity in his final hours. I stayed because, through his tears, he asked me to stay. I didn’t say anything to him, just sat with him until he was ready to speak, and to tell me whatever it was that was troubling him.
…..We sat there with just the sounds of the machines that were keeping him alive between us. In the silence I imagined him trying to regulate his heartbeat to make the machine transmit Morse code so that he didn’t have to explain it to me himself. Eventually he did speak.
“It was in Nanking,” he said. Just the name of the place was enough, the time it happened was implied. “I lived there with your grandmother and your aunt who was four years old at the time. Your father didn’t come for a few more years, yet.” I had known this already, of course, but he seemed to want to start at the very beginning. I think that at the time he was almost preparing a defence, in a way. When he was being judged he would be ready to explain his actions.
…..“We hadn’t managed to escape with the rest of Nanking as we had a young child and no money,” he went on. “We heard about what was happening in our city. We could see it with our own eyes, sometimes, but we didn’t leave the house and nobody ever came looking for us so we were safe. Well,” he laughed weakly, “not safe, of course, but we thought that we might be able to get through it. Your grandmother and I both hoped that the Japanese would get bored, or that the violence would calm down when the city was secure and they went on their way somewhere else.” He stopped as if expecting some response from me, but all I could manage was to ask what happened next.
“It was a few weeks in to the battle,” he said. I’d never heard him talking about Nanking before and I’d never found out what his thoughts on it were. When he called it a battle, it encapsulated all of that in a second. For me, someone who didn’t experience it, Nanking was an occupation, an invasion. All I’d ever been taught about it was how the Japanese entered the city after the Chinese escaped, and then about the atrocities that happened after that. To my grandfather, Nanking was a battle. I wanted to ask him more but he was already continuing. “Your grandmother and I were in the kitchen washing your aunt in the sink when a brick smashed through the window. She grabbed your aunt and dived to the side and I ducked down to avoid it but was covered in shattered glass. We just stayed there for a moment, neither of us could believe how close that was, and we didn’t know what to expect next.
…..“Then there was another crash, and three Japanese soldiers burst in to the kitchen from outside.” He started to cry again here, and I was very shortly to learn the real reason why he was worried about his judgement. I don’t think he was concerned that he had killed a man, because he must have known that it was him or that man, and that he had no choice. Something else was bothering him. “Where I had ducked down, there was a table between me and these men and I knew they had not noticed me. Your grandmother, remember, had jumped the other way, and they saw her right away. I should have gone to her but I couldn’t protect her from three Japanese soldiers. They had guns, and knives. They would have killed me. What use would I be to my family if they killed me? But what use would my life be if they killed them? I didn’t know what to do and so I did nothing. I just prayed in silence. I didn’t have a choice. That was what I was trying to tell myself even though at the time all I could think was ‘you coward, your family needs you, help them.’”
…..Suddenly I felt like I was watching a film, and that we had just come to the most tense part. It was strange, though, because I already knew the ending. I knew that both my grandfather and my grandmother survived the battle, as he called it, and I knew that my aunt survived too. She died before I was born, but I knew that it hadn’t happened here, unless it was something that had been kept from me. Maybe it really was just like a film, you always know the hero is going to win, somehow, however hopeless it looks. I just wasn’t sure if I was ready to hear about what made the Japanese soldiers go away because at that moment, all sorts of possibilities were running through my mind. I don’t wish to recount any of them.
…..My grandfather was silent, and his eyes still watered. “Are you okay?” I asked him. “Do you need a nurse?”
…..“I’m fine,” he said, though of course he wasn’t. Aside from the distress of his story, he was dying before my eyes. Regardless, he continued his story as if it was the only thing he had left to do. “I could see her face from where I was, I could see the fear. She was staring at them and she was holding your aunt’s head straight so that she was looking at them too. She was holding it so she couldn’t look at me. While I should have been protecting them, they were keeping me hidden. They were protecting me.” There were tears in my eyes right at that moment. “I could see the soldier’s legs from where I was, and they started to move towards my family and I knew I couldn’t sit here any longer, but as soon as I resolved to get up there was shouting in Japanese from outside the room, and the men turned to look at it.”
…..This is when he encountered Keisuke Toriyama, although he didn’t know his name and he never made an effort to find out what it was. Not because he didn’t regret what he did to Toriyama, but because it wouldn’t change anything. Perhaps it sounds terrible, but I don’t think my grandfather wanted to humanise Toriyama. It’s impossible to know for certain.
…..My grandfather was struggling for words, now, and was stuttering not through tears but through weakness. “After the shouting, the three soldiers left and I thought that maybe we were okay now, but then the fourth soldier came in. He staggered in, like he was drunk. I thought he must have been a commander because of how he had made the other three go away, but he did not act like one. And he was a mess. His jacket wasn’t buttoned, it was falling apart, and his hair was messy. He had not shaved for some time.
…..“The first thing he did when he came in was to notice me there, and smile at me. I couldn’t translate the smile at all. Then he turned to my family and began to approach them and there was no point in hiding any more. I picked up a large shard of glass from the broken window next to me and jumped up and drove it in to his gut. He fell backwards on to the wall and slid down until he was sitting. He looked at me again and smiled again and said ‘thank you’ in the most perfect Cantonese I’ve ever heard from a foreigner.”
…..“Thank you?” I asked.
…..“Yes. I didn’t want to know why. I just left him there and took your grandmother and your aunt and we ran. I can’t remember how we escaped the city but we never went back there. Not once.”
…..“He thanked you?” I asked again. I wasn’t able to get my head around it at all, why would he have said thank you?
…..“He thanked me, and he was smiling. I never got to find out why because that was the last thing he ever said.”
And that was the last thing my grandfather ever said, as he died shortly afterwards, hopefully ready for his judgement. I couldn’t let it go, though. Who was this man? Why had he thanked my grandfather with his final words? I began my quest to find him.

Narrative, Character and Voice

Ah, some university work has been returned to me and thus, to you. Again, it’s a case of doing a decent job of some creative writing and then being let down by some essays, though not that let down. The overall mark appears to be somewhere between 70 and 71.

The essays gave us questions, novels, and said “answer this,” in that way that questions do. I had a good opportunity to lay into One Day by David Nicholls (possibly the worst book I’ve ever read) as part of my university coursework. That amused me. Also written about were Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Two of the best books I’ve ever read, which more than made up for it.

The creative exercise was fun. We were to take an already existing character from a book, or a film, or basically anything. We were then to give them a voice and a new story. So, here goes. Can you tell who it is?

.

“I think I’m being followed.” That’s what I said to her the second I got in. “I think I’m being followed.”

“You what?” she says. “You think you’re being followed?” Catches on quick, that one.

“Yes, I think I’m being followed.” And so I tell her what happened. I’d been walking along, minding my own business and a little kid, about seven or eight I think, looked up at his mum, whispered something to her, and then pointed at me for ages with a smile on his face. Then his mum looked at me and they both just stared at me before looking around for God knows what. Then she pats him on the head and congratulates him as if he’s just drawn the Mona Lisa or something.

“Didn’t you go and ask what was wrong?” she asks. Of course I didn’t go and ask what was wrong! I mean, you wouldn’t, would you? Someone starts pointing at you in the street you immediately think ‘what have I done?’ or ‘what’s on my face?’ or something. And you turn the other way. You don’t approach them.

“Of course I didn’t go and ask,” I say. And she tries to reassure me, tells me that it doesn’t mean I’m being followed. She says they could have been pointing past me, or something. It’s more than that, though. I feel it all the time, like I’m being watched. I haven’t done anything, I don’t think I’ve done anything, but all the time I feel like someone’s looking for me. The police, or spies, or private detectives maybe. Or a stalker, I could be stalked, there’s no reason why not. But anyway, now that child had given them all away, and I was on to them. Whatever they wanted from me, they weren’t going to get it.

 

“What the hell’s the matter?” she says to me. I’d just given her the fright of her life, she tells me. Apparently I’d woken up screaming, and kicked her. She thought she was being murdered by someone with a really girly scream.

“It was just a nightmare, I can’t really remember, spiders or something,” I say in explanation, and I apologise and turn over and pretend to drop off.

I’m not dropping off. It wasn’t spiders at all, I remember everything, and if I fall asleep I might go back there. I’m not going back there. Even if I never sleep again.

I was in the middle of some kind of feast, or something, but it was total chaos. There were people everywhere, literally everywhere. I was just standing in the middle, in the open, and I felt like I was being watched like the feeling I’d been getting all the time in real life, but even worse. Whenever I tried to hide, though, the people would move around so I was constantly visible. It would have been impossible to hide anyway, considering what I was wearing, I looked ridiculous. I had a cane for goodness’ sake. Where did that come from? You can’t go incognito with a cane, unless you’re trying to go incognito in London in 1908.

I might have actually been back in time, thinking about it. I’m almost certain I saw a medieval wizard dressed in red and blue, with a long white beard and a staff. And everywhere else there were just no manners, not like nowadays. I’m not sure if I was in the middle of a feast or a food fight. People were fighting over food, dropping it on the floor, throwing it around; it was just a total mess. I swear I saw one person tied up with spaghetti. Everywhere you looked something absurd was going on, but what was really getting to me was that despite that, I felt like everyone was just looking at me.

And not just the people around me, either. Other people that I couldn’t see, but that I could somehow feel were just there. Then there was a bright light, and suddenly I heard voices coming from everywhere, and I saw the child from before in the sky as if he was God, and then there were two children. And then there were twenty, and everyone was just looking at me.

“There he is.” There he is there he is there he is there he is there he is, and there were giant hands coming out of the sky and they were pointing at me and pushing me and poking me and prodding me and that’s when I’d woken up screaming.

No, I’m certainly not going back there.

 

I fight it and I fight it but you can’t fight it and I fall asleep. I’m somewhere else, this time. I’m in a room, and there’s me, and four other people who look like me. They’re all holding canes. I look down. I’m holding a cane again! I throw it on the floor but it must be made of magic or something because it just appears in my hand again without me even noticing that it happened. The five of us line up opposite a mirror and I get that feeling again.

There he is there he is there he is.

I pinch myself, hit myself with my cane and try screaming but there’s no waking from this, and two men come through a door on our left, walk over to me and lead me away.

 

Then I do wake up, but I’m not at home any more. Where am I now? I’m in what looks like a prison cell. That cane is finally gone, but so are my own clothes. I’m wearing a black and yellow striped jumper. I look like a bee. “I don’t want to ‘bee’ here,” I think to myself. I’ll have to remember that one for when I get home.

 

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I think I’ve grown a moustache.

Screenwriting

So Poetry and Editor’s Craft went well, but that’s but two of the four modules I did last semester! What of the others? Well, one was Writing the News. This is, well, writing the news. I’m horrible, absolutely horrible at writing the news. Somehow, I conned a 68 out of it. With it being news writing, there’s really nothing at all interesting that I can post onto the blog.

Screenwriting has something interesting that I could post to the blog, but I won’t because I have the strange compulsion of entering it into a screenwriting competition. This is unusual for me as, despite what the presence of this blog implies, I can feel uncomfortable about having my work read sometimes. How very odd. The compulsion is aided in no small part by the feedback I got from uni for the screenplay.

“This is a very good dark comedy. It’s very clearly structured, has a neat set-up, a original inciting incident, a good act of end one, a clever mid-point reversal, a very astute climax with an unexpected twist and a satisfactory resolution. The characters are well drawn; the protagonist has a clear journey and the antagonist-cum-love interest is unusually and surprisingly sympathetic. The script displays very astute use of visual storytelling combined with sharp, incisive dialogue. This is an excellent screenplay.”

I mean, any way you read it, that’s pretty good. The problem with it, though, is that I don’t really know how much he genuinely liked the screenplay. I knew exactly what they wanted to see with regards to structure and which elements they were looking for, and so I was pretty confident that it was going to get a good mark anyway (70 overall, though 77 for the screenplay itself.) But if the story wasn’t so well structured, would it have been as compelling? Would they still have enjoyed it?

I sent it to someone else to have a read over, someone I consider to be something of an expert. I’ve had excellent feedback from him. Not feedback that it was excellent, just feedback that I can really make a lot of use of, a lot of things that make a lot of sense, and so if I get a chance to do a re-write I’m still pretty confident about entering it into a contest.

There’s still the “if I get a chance,” element, though.

April is Script Frenzy month. I’m not really sure why I signed up for this. It was late at night, it seemed fun, and then suddenly I was taking part. It’s a challenge to write a 100-page screenplay in the space of one month, specifically, April. I’ve worked it out and that’ll work out at roughly, wait for it, five hundred words a day. It’s funny how life works.

I’ve no idea where that leaves this blog. I imagine many days over the next month will be excerpts of scripts, but I’m going to try to keep them to a minimum, really. I’ve no idea what time I’m going to have, though. The second semester of university is wrapping up and I suddenly find myself with a number of essays to write, and I really need to keep looking, harder, for a job, because in not much more time I’m going to have to stop eating food.

Poetry

Most days, when I find that I’ve got nothing to say, I type “random word” into Google, click on the first link, and I’m taken to a website that gives me, handily, a random word. Whatever word I get given, I then use as the inspiration for five hundred words of something or other. It works surprisingly well, depending on how you view the quality of my fiction.

Well, however you view it, it works well at producing some kind of spark. I haven’t yet failed to write something and the one day that the website went down I couldn’t even inspire myself enough to think of a single word that could inspire me. I somehow managed to do something, though.

Anyway, today the word it gave me was something that was so obviously meant to refer to a poem that I wrote last semester at university that I can’t really not just post the poem in this update, with a little background as to where it came from, so, enjoy!

The poem came from an exercise we did called “recipe for a poem.” The idea was based around the following ten steps:

1) Begin the poem with a metaphor
2) Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard
3) Say something specific but utterly preposterous
4) Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered throughout the poem
5) Write in the future tense, such that that part of the poem seems to be a prediction
6) Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective
7) Use a phrase from a language other than English
8) Contradict something you said earlier in the poem
9) Make a non-human object say or do something human
10) Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem

You start the poem with the first instruction and end it with the last. Apart from that, you can use the instructions in whatever order you like. In the first draft, use at least one line for every single instruction, but feel free to use more than one, or to use instructions more than once, or to edit them down (or even, if they’re not working, out entirely) in later versions.

And that’s it! Here’s the poem I wrote from it:

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Put both arms forward and run

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Meaningless conflict: Nelson vs. Villeneuve

They never tasted good.
It was a caveman instinct,
a soon-forgotten prospect of warmth.
When they see what they think
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbthey see
the inmates throw their pies in the air.
They’re caught by fictional hands
to a chorus of boos.

Bloody foreigners? Jeux sans frontiéres.

A talent destined for great things,
dropped like some inadequate stone.

They always come down eventually,
watched in slow motion as they lie
on the floor and the gods
turn away, unimpressed.

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And that’s that. What was the word that so perfectly summed up that poem? Well, to say that would give the whole game away, wouldn’t it?

Editor’s Craft

Editor’s Craft was a module all about things like grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. Was it helpful? Even now I’m unsure whether I need that Oxford comma.

The assignments involved a couple of poems, some portfolio exercises, and a short story. The portfolio exercises had me proofreading, removing modifying clauses from sentences, correcting punctuation, all sorts of stuff like that. The results were variable. The short story had me write a really nice 250 word story, and then force myself to extend it to 1,250 words which was the requirement of the assignment. Here’s what I said on twitter at the time I was writing it:

Just expanded a perfectly fine 250 word short story to 1,308 words for uni. A thousand words of shitty padding. Great.

The feedback I got for the story was that it starts off really well, and then peters out towards the end. So, so predictable.

They must have liked it enough though, as I got a total of 75 for the module which is pretty cool. Do enjoy the start of this story, and forgive me the rest.

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The Car

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Marcus walked down the three steps at the front of the stage to the sound of polite applause. He bowed a slight but uncomfortable bow and walked two steps to the right before turning around and heading left, exiting through a door to the backstage area. It got the biggest laugh of the night. Ted was waiting for him in the dressing room.

“Is this what I’ve got to look forward to, Ted? Supporting shit comedians and no recognition at all? I was only out there thirty seconds ago and I bet none of them can remember my name. Come on, boy, let’s go.”

Marcus grabbed his things and walked down a thin corridor to the exit. He knelt and attached a lead to Ted’s collar before stepping out and watching his breath form in front of him. He heard a loud cheer come from inside, as if they’d shepherded in a better audience while he was putting his coat on.

He walked to where he’d parked his car, and found that his car was missing. In its place a fierce looking black Mercedes was resting. It was so fierce looking that before considering the possibility that his car had been stolen long before this behemoth was parked here, Marcus imagined the large black monster devouring his small, shrieking car whole. It was with these thoughts in his mind that he wandered, dazed, around the Mercedes, looking in the windows for any traces of oil or petrol, the blood of his car that would suggest that at least it put up a fight. What he saw was a set of keys on the passenger seat.

Without allowing any time for thought, he smashed the window with his elbow. He ignored a shout from a woman on the other side of the car park, threw Ted into the back seat and jumped into the driver’s seat. He started the engine and did 0-60 in whatever that model allowed.

(Later, the witness would tell police that she didn’t know the man, he had no distinguishing features and to be honest, she couldn’t really remember what he looked like.)

He drove straight home, obeying the speed limit as soon as he felt safe to. He turned into his driveway, and parked the car in the garage which was still just about his.

He closed the door behind himself before letting the dog out of the car. A side door took Marcus into his kitchen, and he switched on the lights. They flickered a few times before one of the bulbs gave up. A dim light shone on him from the remaining bulb which was trying its hardest to compensate, but failing. “Well this isn’t going to prepare me for the spotlight at the Royal Albert Hall,” he joked to Ted.

Marcus looked down at his feet. Ted was whimpering, nudging his bowl with his nose. Marcus laughed, and went to the cupboard. He opened it and was met with almost nothing. He found a half eaten can of beans that he was supposed to have put in the fridge, and some bread which had seen better days, possibly even better months. There were two boxes that belonged to Ted, but their lack of weight as he pulled them from the cupboard confirmed what he had feared. The first contained nothing more than dust. The second box had a few bone shaped biscuits in it, and he threw these on the floor for Ted. They were appreciated, and the dog finished them off without stopping to breathe. Ted licked his lips, and then whimpered again. As if in response, Marcus’s stomach rumbled, and he knew he’d have to go out. Beans on toast would kill him.

Marcus turned to walk to garage but checked and turned the other way to leave through the front door. “I’ll be back in a minute, Ted,” he said to his dog as he was closing the door. “You go and lie down, there’s a good boy.”

There was a shop at the end of the road but at this time of night it was closed. A ten minute drive to the 24-hour supermarket was usually no problem but when he arrived there nearly an hour later he was tired from the walk and the prospect of walking home made him want to break down and cry.

He walked around the supermarket without being able to think. He threw a can of dog food into his basket before doing the same with a small box of treats. Before he reached the checkout, he slipped the dog food into his pocket. He paid for the treats and walked past an unmanned CCTV station on his way out. He worried what the meaning of this was, whether they were hiding and waiting to put a hand on his shoulder as he left – but nothing happened.

On the way home he had a new energy, delirium through sleeplessness or hunger, or something else.  “I’m a one man crime wave,” he said to himself aloud when he was sure that nobody but him could hear. Then he laughed.

When he got home he fed the dog and ate some of the treats himself. They were as bad as he expected them to be but it was a punishment for forgetting to buy any food for himself. He’d remember this taste any time he went shopping in future and he’d buy himself something – or maybe a more expensive brand of dog biscuits.

He went through to the living room and turned on the television, surfing through channels until he came to a news broadcast. In a way, he wanted to see his face plastered all over the screen, to know that he was the centre of attention in someone’s world. He was sure he was already, in the world of the driver of the Mercedes that was parked in his garage, but that person didn’t know him.

He felt a small amount of regret at not having driven to the supermarket, not having put himself out there to be found. There was always tomorrow. At the end of the news, and after the weather, the local news played. Again there was nothing. He played with the dog for a few minutes and then went to bed.

The next morning, he woke up feeling refreshed, like a weight had been lifted from his mind. He gave the dog some treats to eat and sat down on his sofa until the early afternoon, then he said goodbye to Ted and walked to the shop at the end of the road. He browsed for a few minutes, pocketing a packet of instant noodles and some canned tuna. He walked up to the counter where the day’s papers were laid out, and picked up the local paper. He leafed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. There was a story about a stolen car last night. It had been parked near to the theatre and as the occupants were inside watching the performance that followed his, their car had gone missing. Police had no leads on the theft, and were appealing for witnesses. He was smiling to himself when the shopkeeper mentioned that this wasn’t a library. He considered buying the paper, making a clipping perhaps, but instead replaced it on the counter, smiled in apology to the shopkeeper, and walked out without buying anything.

He was due another performance at the theatre tonight, and he was in at least three minds. Going, was one option, but he had no idea how he’d get there without his car. If he reported it stolen he might be able to claim transport on his insurance, but he wasn’t ready to report it stolen. The second option was to stay at home tonight. He smiled when he considered the possibility that he could go ‘shopping.’

The third option was to go, and to take the car. He could shop on the way home.

Poetry

Today, I received the first feedback from my Creative Writing for last semester. It happened to be my poetry, and the mark I got was much better than expected. I won’t be getting a first, or anything, but I’m happy.

Poetry is something I’ve written about before on this blog and not in the most endearing of terms. I don’t enjoy reading a lot of it, and I don’t much enjoy writing it. The stuff we were forced to read for uni was particularly angering. Genuinely angering, and I said as much in the self-reflection essay I wrote, in which I described the kind of poetry I like, and why my poems were written how they were written. In the feedback, this essay was referred to as “a curious document,” which makes me laugh every time I think about it.

Elsewhere the feedback was written in pencil in a handwriting that would make a doctor blush, so a lot of it I’m unsure about. I think I’ve worked out the comments for the couple of poems I’m going to post today, though after much translation. The first comment appeared to say “you asshat, this is a literary exercise.” Which was odd, as feedback goes. Eventually, a crack team of, well, people on a forum, managed to decipher it and the current best translation is “highly abstract, this is an interesting exercise.” But, hey, he might be calling me an asshat, judge for yourselves.

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The Hole

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It was hot as hell

and we couldn’t breathe
and we ran into the centre
and nothing could hear us
but it fell around us as we ran

and we came to a hole
and we stopped.
There was something strange.
About the heat.
About the hole.
The hole grew.

And it grew.

We turned and ran back
and tried to get away
but it was too late
and we couldn’t outrun it
and it claimed us
and everyone

and it was hot as Hell.

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This is probably my favourite of all the poems I wrote last semester. The idea behind it is also something I wrote 500 words on ages ago, though I won’t go into that now. I’ll leave it up to anyone that happens to read it to take what they want to take from it. The reason I like it so much is that it sounds really nice if you read it out loud, and it’s the only poem that I wrote with that in mind. Everything else was written very much with language and words in mind, but that one has sound.

The next poem was described as “curiously impressive, due to the form.” Maybe.

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Two

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A portmanteau
by mistake

A separation
by necessity

A death
by probability.

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A mother
by half

A father
bye bye

A split
by probability.

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I’m not sure why I like this so much, probably because it’s so short and requires little in the way of attention to get anything from it. My kind of poem. It came about from nowhere, really. I was just walking home one day thinking about words and their meanings, and the idea for this came into my head.

Maybe I’ll upload some more sometime, maybe I won’t. Poetry, what a special little treat.