The Word Cloud - Writing Community - Help and advice for writers

Once again I find myself furiously battering at my keyboard, trying to vent my toxic emotions, which some of you (including myself) may consider ridiculous.

It may seem absurd that losing something as 'meaningless' as an mp3 player, could evoke such powerful, furious feelings - but believe me it does.
I went out with friends last night, going to Rochelle's house beforehand to hang out and eat homemade cheesecake *irrelevant*

Anyway, I seem to have managed to lose my Creative Zen player, within the short space of time, between leaving school, meeting up for the meal and then onto McDonalds afterwards *no lectures on healthy eating tarr*.

I use my mp3 everyday, and am never without it. It helps to drown out all the people who infuriate me, it comforts me and distracts me and I love it. Now I have no clue where it could be. All the places that it could be, have been triple checked and checked again, so now I have the prospect of school and my A-level results looming over me without my music.

Yes there are worse things in the world, blah blah blah, yes some people don't have mp3 players - but for now I really couldn't care less.


I just want it back.

:(

I just wanted to share this.

Some years ago I had to take an examination so that I could say I was qualified in a particular project management process. In the exam I had to specify the process, believe it or not, of getting a book published. A combination of my lack of respect for these pretentious box ticking processes and the subject matter being close to my heart led me to try to make my answer entertaining. Therefore I named the printer "Inky Hands" and the accountants "Takemore - Cash". Not entirely sober and serious, but neither am I. It seems to have worked as colours flew while I passed the exam and can now say I am a PM2 Practitioner. Whoopeedoooo.

Anyway, the way I make my living is by resolving technical and management questions for law firms when their IT clients sue each other and they don’t have a clue what they are suing each other about. It happens a lot.

I recently have come up against a firm of solicitors that I had never heard of before. Now when you are against a firm they always appear difficult, unpleasant and objectionable. That is as certain as Christmas. But this lot are called "Wright - Hassell". Really.

A crisp, browning leaf caught her eye as it was lifted slowly out of the gutter and softly replaced. As she looked away, it was caught up with a multitude of others and hurled into the air, in a whirlingly, dancingly colourful leaf tornado. The muttering air caught the ends of her long hair and brushed it over her face, catching on her eyelashes, sticking to her lip.

She turned onto a busy, unknown street, with unknown crowds waltzing past one another. The rising breeze creaked a shop sign back and forward, then snatched at her skirt before a half-embarrassed smile and a cautionary hand held it in place. An abrupt gust struck her in the chest, and she was suddenly blinded by ruffling hair as she leant forward into it. A garish crisp packet bowled past her, and a scrap of paper moulded itself purposefully to her shoe before scuffing away.

The wind blew an elemental excitement under her skin.

She walked an experimental strut, and colour was brisked into her cheeks. She noticed a bright red coat, and the rouge-on-blue of the dusking clouds repeatedly lifted her eyes to linger on the sky. Snatches of melody occurred to her, her own soundtrack romancing her down the street as she swung her arms, and noticed the stereotypes in the people who passed her.

She should go anywhere, or do anything. The wind-recklessness stirred her, and she felt alone in the swarms of the ordinary, as if she knew them all but didn’t care for any of them. The trees lining the street tossed around above her and mischievously flung their leaves away, and a mop of a dog strained and yapped urgently on its throttling string.

No-one else seemed to feel the wildness rolling up in her. The same puckered lips and suspicious eyes stamped beside her, the same carefully averted stares; the same frowsy grumpiness walked the street, and gave no indication of secret rashness, or a hidden daring. She skirted past them all, and there were skitters in her chest as she rushed on nowhere.

Nipped from her chaotic self-dreams, an unaverted gaze caught hers. A beautiful man was whipped past her by the winds, and she looked at him fully, with the courageous light of a laugh in her eye.

 

EVER CHANGING SEAS

 

A love of the ocean, but allergic to salt

 

Sea air replaces pollutants of the city

 

Views of rolling waves replace high rises

 

 

A thirst deprived while surrounded by water

 

Unlimited supply offers plenty, but cannot drink

 

A love for and the wanting of, overwhelms purpose

 

 

Deep currents affect all pulled in or pushed out

 

Comparing love as a give and take that pulls

 

Love at high seas is great, knowing they will recede

 

 

A moon of fullness guides oceans according

 

Hearts gained and lost to its brightness of

 

Colors of skies, water, and moons offer unknowns

 

 

Vast bodies of beauty and wonder intrigue us all

 

Swells that display a power as does love

 

Rogue waves can destroy in an instant as love

 

 

Seas of deceit will lead us to believe

 

The most powerful in the world share

 

Moves earth with time, conquers souls easily

 

 

Ships depend on her, as a child needs their mother

 

Some need her crop of life to cultivate to feed

 

Few have ever felt her wrath, but always respect

 

 

 

 

Her breath will take all secrets that lie dorm it

 

In awe of, without fully understanding the dynamics

 

Those who know her well, share concern as excitement

 

 

 

Seas of beauty and flesh, will deceive eyes looking

 

Hearts embrace false images of, and overlook dangers

 

A sun will rise and fall to her blanket that covers so much

 

 

Rays penetrate her surface as love spears our heart

 

 

 

 

 

And...CUT!

The story of how a fake movie executive helped kick-start my very real show-biz career

One of the things I enjoy most about going back to England is the choice of fresh bread available. Over here, there is only one sort of loaf. Its crust is thick and tough, and the bread is hard and often full of holes. Sometimes it is sliced, but often if the power is off, it is sold whole. It never lasts more than a day, before becoming stale. Either that or the ants move in. I will never forget the first time I met my future father-in-law, back in the early ‘90s.

I was staying with my husband-to-be and his parents in my husband’s lakeshore house. That sounds rather grander than it actually was. A modest teacher’s bungalow, with a cold shower and a wood-burning stove, it was run-down and infested with cockroaches.  The cat had died after eating insects, which had been doused in ‘Doom’ (it does what it says on the can), and his pet monkey, Monica, had recently hung herself in a tragic accident with a mosquito net. At that time, my husband was renowned for his poor hygiene; a friend of ours had spent New Year in hospital with severe food poisoning, after sharing Christmas lunch with us.

Anyway, this particular morning, trying to impress the future in-laws, I decided to make toast for breakfast. The wood burner was glowing, and I had pounded some of the slower cockroaches in the cutlery drawer, with the rolling pin, as was the daily custom. I carefully sliced into the new loaf of bread, purchased the day before, and let out a shriek. My father-in-law (to be) was first on the scene. A stocky Welsh retired engineer, he had no time for Southern girly wusses, like me.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he said, as I stared open mouthed at the loaf, with the knife raised in the air.

‘A…a…ants,’ I cried, waving the knife.

‘You’re not afraid of a few ants are you, girl?’ he scoffed, pushing me aside. But then he saw the full horror. The entire interior of the loaf had been eaten away by what seemed to be a seething mass of ants. There must have been thousands of the things, and not a crumb in sight.

‘Toast’s off,’ my father-in-law stated, very matter of factly. ‘Got any bacon?’

That was about twenty years ago now, but the memory has stayed with me. Since then, I have encountered ants of all shapes and sizes. Like Eskimos, who have a hundred odd different words to describe snow, my kids have a large vocabulary to describe the many varieties of ants here. Their favourite are the stink ants, which when squished, release a powerful, foul odour. Once, when staying in a rest house by the lake, there were so many ants in our room, that my youngest daughter, then aged about seven, got out of bed in the morning, with her back heaving with them. On the white bed sheet, there was the perfect shape of her body outlined by red ants.

But, to bring me back to the start, yesterday I bought a loaf of bread that amazingly closely resembled any white sliced loaf you might find in supermarkets back in the UK. It could have been a Kingsmill or Mother’s Pride (does that still exist?), and yet I purchased it here in Malawi. It even came packaged in a plastic bag, printed with ingredients and other nutritional information and a best before date. These things are all taken for granted back home, but here nothing is ever sold with any sort of information like use by, or best before. It doesn’t really matter with bread. You know it will only last a day, and can tell, with a squeeze, whether it is fresh or not. But for meat and dairy products, it is so valuable. Around a third of the milk, cream and yoghurts that I buy, I end up having to throw away, as they are off before I get them home. Such basic necessities that we all take for granted, like fridges and freezers, are alien here to most of the population. So, when shop assistants receive a delivery of milk, they do not realise the urgency to refrigerate it. Milk can be left sitting in the midday sun for hours before it is put in the cooler. Since they are unlikely to drink it themselves, with it being priced way out of their reach, they don’t realise how the taste is affected.

So, at last, a sliced loaf that compares with home. In the last few months Malawi seems to have been crawling into the 21^st century. We are now proud to have a proper cinema which shows real films (not just the badly dubbed ninja rubbish), albeit a few months late. We just saw Disney’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. Our first fast food burger restaurant, owned by a South African chain, opened last week. Not quite MacDonalds, (are we the only country in the world not to have a MacDonalds?) and not very fast, but that’s a whole other story. For now, I am enjoying my loaf of bread, which really is the best thing since sliced bread.   

An unspoken rule has been followed by all members of my household for such a long time, yet never has it been discussed between us. When the news first hit it was as lightning, I was shocked into silence and self-reflection.

Me: 'Why are the police here? Where is Alice?'
Dad: 'They found her wandering in the traffic, something happened.'
Me: 'What?! Did a car hit her, is she alright?!'
Dad: 'No, nothing like that...she got into a vehicle with three men, they took her to their house against her will.'
Me: 'What. No. What did they do to her?'
Dad: 'Everything.'

But now, less lightning-like it festers as a poison below the very foundations of this once-amiable family, slowly eating away at all of us. But each and every action has a reaction, this surreally cruel situation was to get harder to deal with. I awoke on the 1st of August, 2008 to find my sister unconscious outside my bedroom door, an empty bottle of sleeping pills lay beside her head. The weeks that followed saw us going through a phase of removing all knives, and hiding all our medication. This stopped when we realised that if she wanted to, she could end her life at any time on her way to school. So why bother?

Since that day, she has been rushed to the hospital for multiple attempts at taking her own life every couple months.

As her older brother, this destroys me. I should be helping, but aside from holding her hand while she's unconscious and calling for yet another ambulance, I don't know what to do. We're hoping that maybe if we just don't talk about what happened, the abhorrent deed along with its after-effects may slither away, far out of reach of any of our memories, leaving us in peace. But, deep down we know and accept that this will never be the case. What was done cannot be "un-done". We're stuck with the dice that were rolled for us. Forced to keep it here in our house and mind, as if the memory of it has become a permanent member of our family. Until the very last of our hearts stops beating, this repulsive monster will not leave our world. 

Time has shown me that discussing such an act only makes my melancholy worse, unloading my burdens onto others simply isn't fair. There seems to be no clear way out of this. So perhaps, if we continue to avoid discussion and deny it any place on our lips for long enough, we may one day be set free from the tyranny of the situation we are trapped to live under...That's the silent-hope we share here, anyway. 

Yet still, I cannot help but catch myself wondering; how long will it be until sirens can be heard outside my house again? And why will we not solve this now, before they are even given reason to start - why do we do nothing but wait?

Lying on my bed reading City of Thieves by David Benioff, my laptop remains open and awaiting its bi-chapterly 'f5' in hopes of you getting in touch. Yeah, I know you have credit on your phone, but I can't f5 mine. Besides, you can fit more in a Facebook message than in a single text. 

Maybe you'll do that. Any minute now. I'm ready for it. Please?

Dawn's pale first light,
A glowing farewell to night.
Petals tumble free,
Like perfumed rain, from a cherry tree.
Salty ocean spray,
Misting my face on a stormy day.
Dappled light green,
Through a forest canopy.
Warm scented grass
Slope, beneath a sun of brass.
Orchestra tunes,
Dischorded notes like summer's bloom.
Orange-streaked sun set,
Burning into darkness's dept.

Each breath of these,
Our loves like a zephyr breeze,
Is just as pure
And miraculous a cure,
For any tear,
Or sigh or gloom fallen here,
As the beauties,
That shine so brightly in minds,
So still feel blessed,
Despite pain and times distressed.
Seek and you'll find,
Seven sights to heal the mind.

Until recently I'd never heard of a writer editing, unless their day job happened to be with a publisher. As I've always used the words, editing is done by editors, and what I do, after I've got the first draft down on paper, is revising. But now I keep hearing aspiring writers say, "I'm editing at the moment." (Just to clarify, I tend to think of re-writing as what I'm doing when I leave behind a story which hasn't worked, and start again with some of the same ideas and characters, and approximately the same purpose, and polishing as the last pass to pick up minor slips and idiocies.)

But surely the important point is that anyone trying to write recognises that getting the first set of words down on paper is just the beginning. Does it matter what we call the next stage? I didn't think so, until I started hearing a scary number of aspiring writers saying "I've written the novel, now I've only got the editing to do and I'll be sending it out." From the talk on such threads it's clear that they see editing as a close-up process: excising unneeded words, bringing out a character more clearly, tightening up sentences. Of course, that's terribly important, and can make a huge difference to how well your story comes over; I often liken it to cleaning the windows on the Orient Express: if they're grubby enough you'll be able to tell mountains from deserts and night from day, but not much more, and who'd buy a ticket if that was all they were going to see? But it seems as if many beginner writers think this close-up attention is all that's needed once the story is basically told.

"Okay, but when did the revising happen?" I want to ask. When did you stand back and look at the whole novel? When did you really examing the structure of the bridge, counting the piers, measuring the spans, testing their structural integrity? When did you prod each character to see if they're really alive, and throw them at each other to check they really would behave as the plot requires? Now that you know what the story's really about, did you ask yourself if you've told it through the right pairs of eyes? In the right tense? Started and finished it in the right place? When did you open your ears and ask yourself if the voices are voices that a reader is willing to listen to, and for a whole novel? "Revising" is derived from Latin, to re-examine, but to me it also has a sense of "re-visit" or "re-vision". When did you revisit all those decisions you made before you began to write or on the fly so you could keep going, and make sure, with all the new knowledge you have now you've got to the end of the story, that they're still the right decisions? When, in other words, did you make sure that the train will actually start, run, stay together and arrive safely at its destination, passengers and all? What about the heavy engineering?

This kind of stuff, which I think of as revising, is what publishers call the structural edit. Since professionals have good reason to work out the most creatively and financially effective way of doing things, it's worth thinking twice before doing things differently. What beginner writers have taken to calling 'editing' is what publishers call the line edit and, if it's a separate stage, will always be the later one. And then the last stage, polishing, is not unlike the copy-edit: picking up dodgy commas, typos, wayward formatting, final checks for the minor idiocies which inevitably creep in whenever you start doing stuff. Checking the toilets, as it were, and straightening the magazines in the rack.

Clearly, macro and micro - engineering and window-cleaning, wood and trees, revising and editing in my terminology - are different conceptually, even if they coil tightly together in the final novel, and some writers would say they do them together.  One writer even suggests that it's only in the close-up work that he uncovers any major structural problems. It's certainly true that if you're struggling to write how a character does something something the plot needs it may be that the character shouldn't do it, and is doing his best to tell you that: you're going to have to change either plot, or character. But the talented and/or experienced writer works with a feedback loop, whether it loops once an hour or once ever six months: big thematic changes, for example, need to be carried through at the level of sentences, while a change of tone which evolves in a particular scene may make you realise that there's something awry in the novel as a whole.

What worries me is to hear so many would-be writers using a word which suggests to me that they simply don't know that the chances of the wood being the right shape from the beginning are small, that it almost certainly will need chainsaw work, and that no amount of trimming twigs is going to make it the right shape if it isn't. I think it's because so much writing-teaching focuses on the small scale. That's partly because prose is easier stuff to read and write and teach on in class-sized chunks, than structure is. And it's partly because of the focus, in teaching beginners, is on how to find material inside and outside yourself, and then learning some tools to shape a single little piece.  So writers embarking on their first novel are often quite aware of the micro-work it takes, but much less aware of the macro: in the Writers Workshop one-day courses I teach, our exercise making people write a two-sentence summary of each of the first five chapters is an absolute revelation to many students.

But if the smaller stuff is easier for teachers to handle, I'd suggest that it's also easier for the writer to face dealing with, and that's where you need to take your Anti-Writing Demon by the throat and kick him out of the room. It's frightening for a beginner writer to stand back and try to recognise if some of those fundamental decisions have turned out not to be right. Taking a long, hard look at the heavy engineering may mean you realise that a) you've got the wrong train for the route, or the wrong route for the train and b) you may need a consulting engineer to work out what to do next. It's much easier to concentrate on excising passive constructions, and whether they really did use 'wonder' to mean 'speculate' in 1710. Unfortunately, there's no point in polishing the windows for the best view of the approach to Venice, if the train won't pull your passengers up the first incline out of Victoria, let alone get them safely and happily to Istanbul.