Creative Writing Course – Week #10

Week 10, or the second class of the second term, of my writing course. This week we were asked what we plan to do, or have done, to Chapter 1 in light of the marking and comments it received at the end of the first term. We went around the group talking about any issues we had with what we had read about our work, and how it impacted any re-writing we might do.

For my part, I was happy with the suggested edits and tightening of the prose, but one of the suggestions was about inserting a prologue to give chapter 1 more of a set-up. I'm not sure about this, more because I don't know how to approach it rather than having a stylistic aversion to it. I also added a few more lines of dialogue to the end of the first chapter, as it was a bit too much of a cliff-hanger apparently. I'm happy with what I added, but ultimately I'm still wrestling with what to add in and what to leave out. Holding stuff back is just as important as writing it down, I've found. Maybe I'm more inclined to hold stuff back. I keep thinking, 'well, if this is under-explored or possibly confusing, no matter, it's all cleared up later on…' This is more to do with fact that the current project is a crime noir thriller, so I'm apt to keep stuff mysterious, but it's hard to maintain.

This week's class also included a little written exercise to work on clarity of description. We were given about 7 minutes to write about a market stall in as much detail as we felt necessary. No other details or guidelines were given. Here's mine, transcribed from my hurried scribbling from the night;

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The rain pattered on the red and white stripey awning overhead, protecting Mary from an incessant downpour that besieged the town. The weather kept trade away. Business was slow for her fruit and veg stall, it had been all year, and the rain made it feel ten times worse. She huddled behind the stand of tomatoes and lettuces, apples and oranges; great blocks of primary colours providing the only splashes of brightness in a market square sodden and desolate.

Fingerless gloves, almost standard-issue for market traders, kept Mary's hands warm, but her feet had gone numb. When the pace of the rain picked up and gusts of wind pulled at the tarps, banter between the stall holders died, much like the trade on a wet Wednesday in a provincial market town.

Everyone then read their pieces out. Despite us all having the same setting it was really interesting to see the different takes on the same subject. Without it being specified by the tutor, each extract had an element of story woven into it, despite the original instruction being about a market stall. There was something intriguing about each one that drew a reader/listener into it beyond the market stall itself.

The next part of the class moved onto talking about novel synopsis. Or should that be synopsi? Synopses doesn't sound right… Anyway, we looked at an example of a synopsis submitted to a small publisher to see how a 100,000+ word novel has to be condensed into a few hundred words.This particular one had an interesting structure in that the publisher specified how the synopsis should be presented to them for submission. They wanted a synopsis breakdown in no more than 650 words, then the same thing in 50 words, and then finally, in one single sentence. The last part amounted to the marketing by-line you see on the front of novels in a bookshop.

I've done a synopsis for my completed novel, but as it has never been submitted so I've never devoted much time to this aspect. This will be the task to work on before next week's class; compose a one and a half page synopsis of our current projects. This might be tricky, as I don't really have a fully-formed concept of  'the ending' – but maybe this process will force it out. If not, I'll just write '…and it was all a dream'.