Hooray Hooray Hooray!

TMA02 came back in the nineties, and I am singing and dancing! The short story really perplexed me and I still didn't know what was expected of me for the commentary, but fiction is my natural genre and I'm thrilled that she liked it. And thank you to no.1 son who pointed out a few last minute irregularities, he needs to get on with his final TMA for A174 now. I don't care if I don't do well on the poetry, it doesn't matter as much as I'm not trying to be a poet (I want to be a novelist). It counts for 30% of the marks, which was very nerve-racking at the time because it adds a layer of extra stress. Why can't the last one be the heaviest weighted. Anyway, riding high so got to get on with the OCA one now!

Finished! Hooray!

Well, that's a relief! 500 words of carefully crafted commentary (OK,you can have too much alliteration!) and 2,200 words of short story - with, get this - an actual ending. I did a freewrite on the experience of standing in the mortuary and all this poetry pours out. Including an ending. Fantastic, I love this course. When I'm not beating myself in the forehead with the big book, or frozen at the computer saying, 'why? Why?' Did I start it, of course.

But I did, and I'm glad I did. Of course, I'm on the sunny side of an assignment with all the coursework down for the poetry and just the assignment to do. That's the problem, I think it will take most of those weeks to do! On the plus side, I have the perfect life writing story, I think. My family tree turned up an anomaly in my father's family, and my daughter and I suspect we have enough evidence to patch the story together. And I have the perfect piece for TMA05, I wanted to submit to Myslexia anyway. And then I can work on the book, and a chapter would be perfect for the ECA. So I feel like TMA03 is the last big obstacle.

Now to the OCA assignment, which I still haven't done. Ow.

Fourth Draft

Finally, the short story is a) 2,200 words long after being in excess of 3000, and b) feeling OK, reasonable. No. 1 son - easily my biggest but most creative critic- likes it, although it's not the sort of thing I normally write.

It's ended up in four scenes, and the biggest weakness is that each section needs to start and end on a strong statement. Apart from that,I just need to listen to the music of it. It has some nice phrases in it, but they feel diluted down by the story a bit. It's drifted a long way from my sister and her own death now.

Now the commentary! I wrote 700 words but frankly, it's still very analytical. Then I checked the assignment brief and found out it had to be 500. Somehow I have to prune it down while expanding the emotional interpretation! This is confusing - but that's where I lost quite a lot of marks in TMA01. I'm going to have another go. The one thing that has really grabbed me from the course and section 2 is Flannery O'Connor, and I want to get some of her stuff in. Not to mention the difficulty of working out how to reference CD tracks and the BRB. Still ignoring the OCA assignment.... Ooops.

Second Draft of TMA02

I realise I had intended to send this off at the end of November, but I'm on the case now. The story takes place in four scenes, at the beach, with the police, at the deceased's home and at the funeral. Four scenes is a lot for 2200 words so I tried to work on the main three and leave out the house scene, but it didn't really work. The story is about finding out about someone now they are dead that you didn't know well during life. I remember being involved in my parents clearing out my grandmother's house, when I was a young adult. There were aspects of her life that were on show that I had no idea about as a child, although she was a regular visitor and lived close by. I ended up with a box of cheap china that I loved, so retro, but I realised it was a set you collected over time, piece by piece with either cigarette coupons or a magazine. It brought home to me how short of money she was. In my character's story, she was unaware how much this person that she judged and disapproved of was so loved, so popular. How much do we really know even our own family? My brother had a fortieth birthday this year, I would only have known a couple of people there. His closest friends and I hardly even know their names, yet we are reasonably close. Yet when we are together, he says things that surprise or baffle me, that make me realise how little I know about what goes on in his life, and how little he understands about mine. At one of our deaths - probably mine, I'm nine years older - will he find out things he never knew and I never thought to tell him?

Meanwhile, I forgot about the OCA assignment even though it's 90% done. So I did the TMA commentary in first draft, it's very technical and needs to be less cold, so I thought I would have some fun with the OCA commentary today. I wrote a radio play, my first, and hope she likes it. Now I have to go back and edit it into something warmer and more emotionally satisfying. Not to mention I still have Chaucer plays to write, which would all have been easier if I hadn't slipped into a four week depression during December.

The other thing that has been slowing me down is the realisation that I do understand poetry, a bit anyway, and can actually write it. It takes forever to write, that's the difference between knocking off a few adjectives and a bit of fluffy language and actually writing good stuff - which I am beginning to recognise. Slow process but I am gaining in confidence about TMA03 and starting to collect freewrites for it. This could be fun.

Writing what you feel as well as what you know

I've now got 4 perfectly good short stories, none of which is suitable for my TMA though maybe they would be better for competitions. So, going back to basics, the short stories that I know are the best are all from emotional experiences of mine or of close friends. Since I have an incredibly rare day all alone from 10 in the morning until midnight, I have run off a painful first draft of the experience of attending my sister's funeral, as a starting point. The contrast between the funeral of a loved one who had a death through illness, with all the expectation and professional support, funeral services etc. and the service in a mortuary with an unexpected death was my base camp, along with a chance encounter. We were clearing out my sister's house when one of her friends came to the house, freaking us out because I had only heard his name and never met most of my sister's friends. It made the day more mysterious and confusing, a bit like her death.

So I wrote 2.3k words in an hour, and it flowed really easily but painfully. Now I have to make some decisions. It wrote itself in first person - not my favourite to be honest. But I know from experience that going to third person omniscient can be difficult, I tend to water down the feelings involved, distancing myself from it rather than keeping the emotions in there. My voice character is rather prissy and easily shocked, not very lovable. I managed to create settings thinly but have to improve that. First person makes it hard to conjure an image of the speaker, too. The biggest problem for me is the showing not telling that my first drafts are weak on. I need to go through and highlight areas I can work on, but it's a couple f days work before it's ready to read out loud (my personal method of working!). Oh, and I need to work more suspense in there, that's for me, to ramp up the plot element. Did I mention that it has a very conventional beginning, middle and an end? It clearly needs to start at a high emotional point, but I'm not sure how to. At least, after weeks of limping along, I'm energised by my writing again. And I have lots for my commentary!

Not to mention I have material for a poem as well! TMA03, here I come.

Short story

OK, now I'm really getting into Xmas/solstice and still really need to do both assignments - I believe I was here a month ago! Maybe I need a deadline after all...I've written a short story (my fourth for this OU TMA02) and I think I'm onto the right kind of thing. The problem is, it's a good story, based on a true story, and that's where the problem is coming in. In telling the narrative, I'm struggling to put forward the quality of writing that my tutor seems to be looking for - there isn't quite room for in depth character analysis, descriptions, settings etc. I've got it down to three scenes really, the petrol bomb through the window (it doesn't go off though), the emotional distress of the person it was lobbed at, but the twist is, he doesn't care about the petrol bomb, he just wants to talk to someone he loves who hasn't spoken to him for many years. Sounds pants when I put it like that, but I'm trying to link up the emotions in the case. I'm trying to make you see the emotions and needs of a person who has put himself beyond normal sympathy through his deeds. It's a bit of a struggle! I'm back on draft 3 now - I get stuck at this point, usually. Back to the keyboard, in between cooking for the freezer. I promised Rosie could make the pudding - she's 10 so still loves all the drama of the steaming and cooking! On the downside, it's a giant pudding for 12 people so it's going to be 8 hours on the top of the stove... at least. I could write a short story in that time, and then I'd have 5 unfinished drafts!

Using the course

I'm amazed at how much I'm using the course even with kids. 'Show not tell' is becoming the mantra for me when writing with them. I'm using the poetry all the time: not only did I write about 50 lines of full rhyming iambic pentameter for one of the plays but I'm working on lyrics for a song in dactyls. (That's Tum ta ta, Tum ta ta for anyone who hasn't done the Fry book!) Meanwhile, I've written about six or seven short stories but none of them are suitable for TMA02. So I analysed them and found - because I've been writing to 1200-1500 words for so long, I'm stuck with what to do with the extra words. They start to look like padding when I take my plot and stretch it to 2,200 words. Basically, 1200 or 1500 words isn't enough to go beyond one story arc (although I squeezed one into 750 words for TMA01) and 2,200 seems a bit short for subplots. So I need bigger plots in the first place - big juicy three handers, perhaps, rather than two handers, or two or three scenes. So, I'm looking at drawing on a draft of a plot I sketched out as an exercise for plotting novels (I really don't plot; I find characters and they lead me into a story). Basically, the first chapter of a novel, but taking out the big story arc and leave the subplot that starts in chapter one. Then somehow finding a resolution for it.

Two years ago I wrote a novel about a woman coming back from a life threatening assault, trying to find herself in the story of the attack, which had become bigger than she was, just when she had felt diminished by being ill and weak for a time. I could have some fun with this perhaps, reconnecting her with her own autonomy, which tends to drift away in hospital. Perhaps her defiance can be her resolution, as she works on her own agenda, not the therapist's. I like to see clients starting to disagree with you, as a therapist, finding their feet again.

The OCA assignment is due in the end of November, so I need to get on with that. The idea from my TMA01 would make a great radio play, and that's where my tutor and I were going. Today, we discussed filming (and me writing a screenplay) in the Chaucer, so working on dramatic media is very timely. I have the A363 book to work from as well, and my colleague and I will have to storyboard the thing. Fortunately, she is very visual and kinetic with her imagination, I'm wordy and practical, so hopefully, we will work it out! All this hard work feels like the NaNoWriMo that I didn't think I had time for - and which would have been less words! I wrote 8000 words in the last three days... Oh, and I did I mention, if you are considering doing A215, that Stephen Fry's book is a brilliant start to debunk all the scary structures, rhyming and metred poetry? An Ode Less Followed. Seriously builds confidence in non-poets. Section 3 on the course is great for creativity, but leaves you a bit unsure about where to go next... Fry makes you listen to the music of poems. If you still resist the book (and yes, there's not a lot of contemporary poets in it), take one piece of advice from it: read out loud, really slowly. If you can't hear any kind of rhythm or sense - read it again, out loud, even slower. It works. For those people who are addicted to new poetry, look again - lots of poets write in metres of some sort, even if not completely. And as for archaic forms: villanelles are everywhere.

Lost my motivation

Well, I'm struggling with my motivation at the moment. I have three drafts for short stories for TMA02, all well developed but not finished, but I can't help thinking they are stronger stories than elegant writing. I feel as if this uneasy balance between 'genre' and 'literary' is the elephant in the OU room. I was happy with the short story I wrote for TMA01 and it got good marks. Nothing I've written since is as reflective or unusual. The time lines are linear, the characters expressed in the third person form a single POV, the tension builds predictably, there are twists at the end. Nothing like the 'literary' short stories that I am reading. Given all the stresses and business of a crowded week, I suppose I'm doing all right, but I want my enthusiasm back. The TMA squashed that a bit (even though I did well). I just don't want to hand my baby over to be dissected, though the comments were extremely helpful. Perhaps I just need to get on and make the changes my tutor suggested and have a look at where that lands me. Meanwhile, I'm blue, playing with chapter 5 and working with my drafts. I just want to wallop out 1500 or 2000 words in a rush of first draft enthusiasm, not get stalled with 'Oh, what's the point, it's not good enough' fears. I might work on my poetry again just to get going.