Emma Darwin's Blog, page 36

Only a proof of the splendour

The signs to have your formal graduation portrait taken were at least as large as those for the graduands' check-in and for collecting robes, and more colourful. I had an hour to go till the ceremony and you don't have to pay unless you order one. The people in front of me were being slotted one after another into six units of the franchised formula, first alone, then with family, then "next please". Standard lighting setup, friendly and efficient ladies, camera with leads to lights and...

How even punctuation can be about music

Okay, so in a loose, anecdotal, bloggy sort of way we've tackled how unpicking what you're doing in terms of grammar and syntax might help you to say what you're trying to say better, and also the different effects of past and present tense, and the value of learning to handle long sentences. Today's thinking aloud is about how a minute query about punctuation opens up an exploration of what you're trying to say. Here's a sentence from my work in progress:

And yet even the most self-hating...

As it falls

I'm not sure why the post here, about how to make your Moleskine into a more efficient planner, gave me the giggles, but it's also set me thinking again about notebooks again. My basic notebooks small (bag/pocket) and big (desk/holidays) are not organised in any way, except that I start at the beginning, and fill it from left to right, till it's full. I did once decide to collect my PhD thoughts at the back, but kept forgetting to put them there: now everything gets bunged in together.

In...

Is it the same hammer?

Over on this thread on WriteWords, children's author Leila Rasheed asked us all

do people go back to their draft and change the plot of specific scenes while keeping the function of the scene. I think the difference between the function and the plot of a scene is an important one.... it reminds me of the story about the hammer: a man has a hammer; it's the same hammer that belonged to his great-great-great grandfather. In those years, the head of the hammer has been changed many times, and...

A very Itchy birthday

Today's the third birthday of This Itch of Writing, and a good moment to thank everyone who's joined in over the years. I really didn't know, when I started this blog, whether I would find I had anything to say, or anything I wanted to say, let alone whether anyone would want to listen or respond. So it's been a delight to find that I have, and people do. Indeed, it hasn't just been fun: I've thrashed out ideas on here which ended up in my PhD, and your comments have enlarged not just my...

Writing for radio 8: a streak of evening sun

So now the dust has settled, and my story 'Calling', broadcast on Radio 4, has vanished into the ether (except for me, since I've got a lovely CD of all three Lost in the Lanes stories), and my writing brain's moved on to other projects. But there's no denying that even if I'm commissioned again, it's definitely one of the landmarks that will be visible for a long time, when I look back over my shoulder. So what does the landmark consist of? Some of these are my perceptions, some I gathered...

A streak of evening sun

"So now the dust has settled, and my story 'Calling', broadcast on Radio 4, has vanished into the ether (except for me, since I've got a lovely CD of all three Lost in the Lanes stories), and my writing brain's moved on to other projects. But there's no denying that even if I'm commissioned again, it's definitely one of the landmarks that will be visible for a long time, when I look back over my shoulder. So what does the landmark consist of? Some of these are my perceptions, some I gathered...

Two or three ways of thinking about a sieve

I've always read poetry, but it was workshopping other students' poetry at Glamorgan, under the aegis of the likes of Sheenagh Pugh, Gillian Clarke and Tony Curtis, that taught me a bit about how poetry works: most particularly contemporary poetry, where it's so much less obvious what the poet is doing and how they're doing it. The rest of what I know about how poetry works I chiefly learnt from Ruth Padel's 52 Ways of Looking At A Poem. Now I go to readings, and work on poems and poetic...

How a subordinate adverbial clause of purpose might just help you to sing

A while ago, I was thinking about how the order in which you arrange the phrases of a sentence makes a difference to its effect. And then on the WriteWords forum someone queried whether a sentence like this was good writing:

My hand reached out, seeking Adam's rough warmth but finding only the cool sleek linen of the sheets.

The grounds for the query were that "finding" implies that the
sentence is going to go on with something like "My hand...finding only
the cool sleek linen of the...

Writing for radio 7: how I wrote 'Calling'

Now that 'Calling' has been broadcast, and the flurry of flattering Facebook comments and tweets and emails had died down, I meant to do one last post in this Writing for Radio series: how it feels to have your story read on the radio. But then a friend who writes magazine fiction for a living started a discussion of where stories come from, and I realised that actually I haven't been able to talk properly about where 'Calling' came from, because it would have given away the story. So this...