A very good day yesterday with two concentrated chunks of work.
The first of these was a full read-through of Crash, trying to employ a greater range of pause and variation in my delivery. And being able to record it, meant I could listen back afterwards.
The result? Well, the reading took 45 minutes, which surprised me – but when I replayed it I could see why: in adding in more pauses I had slowed down delivery of the whole thing, there was insufficient variation in pace. This was a really useful discovery, and something I can take into my next session with Andy on Wednesday. 35 minutes feels like a good target.
The other thing I worked on was to develop the off-the-cuff narrative I had started under the banner of “C”. And I developed it all the way to 2.5k words! I now have 6 characters searching for histories…
…which is the major task for today i.e. to see if I can start to craft timelines that a) make sense in terms of the overall ambition behind “C”, and b) give me enough encouragement and generate sufficient enthusiasm for me to push on with what’s already there.
If I were to confess to a concern about “C” as it stands it would be around its ‘originality’ – though it does speak to the themes of human existence I’m really interested in, and it is coming out in my ‘voice’. Which is what you’d expect, I guess. Is that enough though? A question for when I’ve a little more to base a judgement on.
Having also fiddled with “B” very briefly yesterday (the follow-up to Crash) I feel I am coming to a moment of crisis as far as poetry is concerned i.e. essentially when it comes to answering the questions “What is Poetry for?” and “What is Poetry?” – at least as I relate to them. If I get to a conclusion it will be the subject of a dedicated post – or a doctoral thesis!
#Writing #AmWriting #fiction #poetry #WritingCommunity #books #novels #CrashPerformance
Ian Gouge - Writer & Publisher 