So now after blogging a couple of posts I am about to disappear again back into my world of fiction.
My two year MA course is almost at an end and I have my dissertation to write for September. That will be a 90 minute script based on my belief that I am not a good fiction writer but I have proved to myself that I can, at least, write for the screen. I'm not actually sure if that's true but I'm concerned that the jury is still out on fiction writing this far into the course and I'm still no where near writing that novel that I've always wanted to do.
Perhaps it's not that I can't write fiction but that it takes me too long to get to grips with what I'm trying to do with a story. My tutor Graham Joyce is both a brilliant and successful award winning novelist. He's written the first draft of his new novel in the time it has taken me to battle with the right 4,500 words that I'm looking for. His post linked above gives an idea of how hard it is to get a story as you want it.
Graham also makes clear that's it's good to get some away from the story for a while. To give it some space. "Quarantine" he calls it. That is why I'm blogging today. I thought that if I did something completely different, then when I pick up my story again, it will somehow become miraculously clear what needs to be done.
It's a short piece called Granny's House which is about a woman who was abandoned by her parents and brought up by her grandmother. When she has to clear the house after her grandmother's death, she discovers the secret of her past.
I've been all around the houses, round the block, up the street a couple of times, and then took a blast up the M1 with this one. It started out as crime story- my favourite genre - but it soon became apparent that I had the basis for a novel and, frankly, too many twists, too many characters and not enough substance. It was with a very heavy heart, some words of encouragement from Graham, and after my break in Italy that I eventually got back to it after my very first bout of writer's block. I had to get back to the drawing board. The story also involved four generations of women so some grannies had to go.
I think I've simplified it enough now to get cracking further on with it. Gone is the murder plot, a daughter I put in there, and a great grandmother. It's not so much of a crime story now as a mystery. I've still got lot of redundant information in there I'm sure but it's still quite hard to see the wood for the trees.
Added to my misery is the fact that I only have a week to hand in this last assignment and I've just accepted a job in a local newspaper office for 40 hours a week, starting tomorrow, which means I'll be in the office all day and hoping I have the energy to be creative when I get back home in the evening after 6pm.
The one regret I think I'll have about this course when it does eventually end, is that I haven't had the time to devote to just fiction writing. Perhaps when the pressure of writing for a grade to achieve a qualification is over, then I'll relax more about my writing and stories like the one above will come to me more easily.