Styles and techniques

Usually Sometimes Have to work out an end to work towards. Which means I have the general plot idea and beginning (no middle) and work on from there. Only seem to be able to write humour :-) Even if it starts off relatively seriously, I can't keep it up (so to speak). Usually write it all in one go (over a period of a day two) then leave it for a few days. Edit/print, edit/print (can't see mistakes on the screen) about 8-10 times before I'm satisfied. I'm not fond of wordcount, even though nearly all mags and comps have a max. I like to write until it's finished. Fortunately, my shorts are so short, they rarely exceed 2000 words. You forgot to ask about titles :-) Haven't got a clue about poetry...

I bet there's loads i forgot. Yeah! what about titles, opening hook lines. do you like to write dialogue or description? Anything relevant appreciated, don't be constrained by the questions. Amazing what can written in less than a 1,000 word of prose. " Fishing for Jasmine" by John Ravenscroft a brilliant example.

erm... example from poetry? My way is very inefficient. one at a time in draft version... bur I might be revising about 6 at a time, 5 of which I'll drop. Drafts only take about 5 minutes though, so its worth doing a million on the chance that something in there'll be decent. Start at the beginning, hopefully, but it might be the middle by the time I'm done. A poem is never finished, just abandoned. who said that? I sometimes leave them for fear of over-editing. Word count normally hones, I think. With poetry, it's line count, especially when you first enter competitions... you're thinking "what line is weak enough to rip out so it'll be 20 lines??" Titles are normally strange... and ambiguos. Why are they so important in poetry? *breathes now* if anyone else is a poet, i'd like to know how the heck they do it.

Paul Valery? (is that his name?) The abandoning thing.. very true. Another interesting related question is do you expand or subtract?.. are your earliest drafts of stories cut down or does it happen the other way around? I more or less always expand. Which means some of my short-ish stories end up as kind of novellas. And I can NEVER seem to write a really arresting short, short, short story (1 page 2 page) A few people have told me I write pretty good dialogue but I don't write enough of it. I want to get back to that. I'm writing a screenplay (for a friend) at the moment and I really want to see what I can do with dialogue. It's hard. You really have to have an ear for the spoken word.. even the pauses are important. When I first started writing stories I kind of went in two directions at once. Very intense pseudo poetic relationship things (which didn't really work) and snappy fragmented dialogue-type stories mostly about people desperately trying to have fun but not quite succeeeding. The latter; people seemed to like and I got a couple published (no money tho) ..but the former I'm still really working on. I still figure if I can combine the two things without the reader losing interest then I'll be happy because I think the combination is still genuinely me. But my sentences are still very clumsy and I know I've got a long way to go. This prose thing is very difficult. It's a bloody slog, actually. I like what drew said on another thread about 'if a word doesn't add to a story then don't bother using it' I think that's a good thing to keep in mind. Unfortunately I'm still struggling with structure. Sometimes I'll have an opening sentence in my head for months and months but it won't fit into an existing story. Other times I'll have a couple of paragraphs hanging around for ages. In some ways I think my life has to settle down a bit before I can see any structure in what I've written. I'm really fed up with prose, actually. I have about five alternate beginnings to my favourite story 'Youthanasia' ..but I re-read them a few days ago and they're all pretty shite. The ending really works but if you haven't built the tension up from the beginning then no one's gonna read the ending. It's an @!#$. One thing you begin to appreciate though.. and that's just how good some of your favourite writers are/were. I figure if I could just write a paragraph as good as (and still not copy) Dazai, Genet, or Paul Bowles then it might give me a new lease of life. But these writers are very dense to read (esp. the last two).. poetic in the sense that they really pack the emotions in. So I'm setting myself up for a fall. But slowly does it, ..baby steps etc. As far as titles go.. I used to have quite a bizarre way of doing it.. I'd just use quotes from my favourite songs and put them at the top if I hadn't got a proper title. The quote would usually give me a feeling about the title and I'd stick the title in later. Sometimes it would work the other way round and the quote would set off the prose. I used a Robyn Hitchcock lyric 'Suckin on a tap that never dries' for a story I wrote about a relationship. The title was really extraneous.. and it was prose that was triggered off. Then when I started what became Youthanasia.. it was Leonard Cohen's song The Future that directly influenced the title.. 'I've seen the future brother, it is murder' It all tied in pretty neatly because the song was about two close friends, almost brothers. I want the prose, conceptually, at least, to get even closer to what I mean by the title. But that might mean a lot more prose and it could end up being a short novel. I used to think titles (esp. for poetry) were great to get my creative juices flowing but the last few years I've not really thought about them. Over three quarters of my poems don't have titles and are just numbered (I got the idea from Pollock's paintings originally) and I'm actually quite happy to continue writing them like that. Having said that I once went to a poetry reading in Bury (of all places) and I was announcing all my numbered titles and everyone was laughing so I felt a bit of a dick. 'This is no. 42, this is no.96' etc. Recently, the editor of a magazine was good enough to accept a couple of my poems.. but I didn't have a title for one of them and she wanted me to give it a title. So I've started thinking about titles again. That's plenty to be getting on with! It's been a long while since I've done writing tips. I must have stored all this up.

Oh ..and opening lines ..I have a lot of them. I really want to write a story that starts with- "Sandy had never imagined that she would give birth to a Vauxhall Viva. She had done all of her research, she had looked at all the relevant pictures. But there it was. As broad as daylight.." But anything that follows just won't live up to that, eh?

Do you write one story at a time? Nope currently have 2 short stories on the go plus a wannabe novel! Do you write start,middle then end? Depends on my mood, the thread of the story and how well my brain is functioning! Do you like to write in one Genre or do you like to mix? Used to always write in one genre but I am now trying to experiment in others Do you write then leave it? Yes but only for a short while as them my brain is telling me to go back and edit it Does word count hamper your style or does it hone your technique? For short stories I have found that it has improved my writing a great deal Then again who knows who’s way is right? I doubt that anyone else uses the same techniques as me but if it works for you then far enough!

Do you write one story at a time? Hell no! I can have dozens on the go--and I hate being like that. I wish I could discipline myself to just finish one of them! But I don't do short stories...I do novels which gets kind of daunting when you're trying to write 6 lots of 80,000 words. Do you write start,middle then end? I don't often have a start actually (so sue me lol), my stories just seem to start at a certain place. Oh wait that is a start..now I've confused myself. Do you like to write in one Genre or do you like to mix? I write really dark, or (attempt) to be really funny. I never seem to get a balance :) But thebn..I don't want to! Do you write then leave it? Well we all have to sleep sometime. Or do you continuously return to re-edit? Oh right, I understand now. I don't re-edit until I finish the whole thing unless I really do think a particular part is terrible. Does word count hamper your style or does it hone your technique? It guides me I think. Of course stories should be "as long as a piece of string" my old teacher once said, but really...no they shoudn't. Some stories just aren't suited for certain wordcounts, and it's best to know that before you start :)

andrea, I can't believe you answered all his questions!

why?

Me neither, but I do my humble best :-)