Controlling idea, premise, subject and theme, a love-sick finch and tractors in macs. Wednesday 6 May 2009.

Before workshopping our writing we thought again about what we were writing about; controlling idea, premise, subject and theme or world view. Nancy Kress and Robert McKee are the bods for this stuff and I’m seeing it in context now that I’ve tried to write a short story.
It seems so obvious, of course, but identifying your theme makes writing easier because you can choose scenes, events and imagery that reflect that word view. Oh yes.

I know it is obvious when Kress and McKee say it but most obvious things are a revelation to me. For a long time I couldn't understand why skirting-boards in other peoples' houses weren't like mine; defined by a ridged detail of sooty dust. One day I caught a friend at work with a bowl of soapy water and a scrubby cloth.

'Does everyone do that?'

'Think so'

'Do they? How often? Christ it’s all slotting into place now. Oh my goodness! Is that why other people have tidy bathroom windowsills too?'

Why is there this conspiracy of silence over helpful information just because it’s obvious?

With the Writer with the Writerly Name we workshopped our stories. No one was harshly criticised but we were palpably subdued by the end. I think we’ve realised that having the story is only the start; now we have to make that story believable and alive, and all before the end of May.

My office has recently acquired solar reflecting glass which is a bit mirrory from the outside. There were a pair of chaffinches out on the cement ledge a few days ago; a plain brown-job hen and a rosy cock (yes, yes, very funny). The male was peck, peck pecking at the window, level with our ankles, all day.

At first I though he was pecking at tiny insects. I couldn’t see any but I imagined they were only visible to the naked finch-eye, or maybe he was locating them by ultrasound or smell or radar or some other finchian special-power. Sometimes though, he really launched himself at the glass. A man visited the office for referencing advice and said the little cock wasn’t eating; he was defending his territory against his own reflection. Sure enough the little brown hen hadn’t pecked at the glass all day – I suppose I imagined she wasn’t hungry or she’d eaten a cracker-bread the day before.

The little brown hen hopped around on the ledge patiently all day whilst the battle raged. Around 4 o’clock she disappeared. The cock was still having it out with himself when I left work; his poor little face surely must have been sore and he can only have been exhausted. Eventually he’s going to have to concede his territory to his own reflection but it won’t matter by then because he was so busy scrapping that he didn’t notice his missus gone. The event felt like a parable but I’m not sure what the moral of the story is.

I know the photo is of a Blue Tit. I didn’t have my camera at work. I hang the bird nuts on my primeval looking monkey puzzle tree to deter squirrels who steal all of them (and demolish the bird feeder) in one go. But I feel a bit ambivalent about doing that because squirrels are only being squirrels, they didn’t be born and then think, ‘I’m going to be a pest and wreck bird feeders.’ They are just helping themselves to a yummy snack. But then blue bottles are just being blue bottles and I generally don’t feel undecided about whacking them with a rolled up copy of the Daily Mirror.

The other two photographs are of tractors wearing macs on the shore at Lytham. Very nice, very nice.

That'll be different. Wednesday 12 November 2008

Submitted our first drafts with commentary and thought about theme. Called my bit funeral and I spoke to a friend about what I was preparing; I described the different components, Jimmy Woods digging graves, the death and funeral of my friends' mother, the tune September Song and wearing a remembrance poppy. He asked if I was calling it September Song, he plays gypsy guitar and he has four versions of it on his ipod; that in itself seems extraordinary because I think I imagined I was one of the last two people alive who knew the song. I've never considered calling it that but I didn't know why because it does encompass ideas of the past, my father and time running out. Thinking about themes make me realise that I'd stuck with funeral because it is literally (is it literally?) at the funeral where all the components converge. I'm feeling a bit giddy and excited about changing person and seeing what happens to hand in next week. I was pleased that the lecturer made us work with someone different this week because it’s useful to have a change of perspective. And it’s diverting to speak to someone else.

Someone called Jo Marchant was on Start the Week on Radio 4 on Monday. She spoke about the Antikythera, a calculating mechanism dating from 70 BC that was recovered from an Aegean shipwreck in 1901 by pearl divers. The device links the technical calendars used by astronomers to the everyday calendars that regulated Greek society. Its intermeshed toothed wheels represent calendar cycles; by turning the wheels users could distinguish the relationships between astronomical cycles to figure out the relative positions of the sun and moon and forecast eclipses. It’s a complicated but it’s unlikely to have been a one-off. It made me think about the althiometer in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials. When Jo had spoken others on the panel expressed astonishment that whoever had made the device hadn't made something Really Useful, 'they could have made a alarm clock'. Jo replied that within the context of the times the maker had made something Exceedingly Useful and that first century BC Greeks would have no use for a clock, alarm or otherwise. This made me think about two things, an anthropologist called Evans-Prichard who studied the Nuer, who are/were Sudanese pastoralists. He reported that they did not have any expression equivalent to time which meant that they couldn’t speak of time as though it was something actual, it didn’t pass, couldn’t be wasted, couldn’t be saved and couldn’t be made up. I’m compelled by the notion that we invented something as stressful as time and I wonder what we do or don’t do now that will appear incomprehensible to future generations. I suspect that building substantial great structures to the glory of a god that we’ve made up might be one thing, but of course it’s just as likely to be something that seems wise and reasonable to me at the moment. I very uneasy about the common assumption that putting children from the age of four or five away in schools from 9.00 till 3.00 every day is a kind or sensible thing to do.

I went to Crail this weekend to visit my mother in law. Crail is a very strange seaside town in Fife. On my last visit the man in the museum directed me to a petrified Carboniferous tree trunk on the beach. I was completely overwhelmed by the sight of it, it’s huge and unbelievable. A few weeks later my daughter Ali went to visit her Granny and then went in search of the fossil tree trunk. She couldn’t find it so asked a likely looking local. He said he thought it must be in the opposite direction because, ‘there are only rocks that way’.