2 Comments on Writing

Checking through my blog subscriptions I came across two unread posts by Damien G Walter (sometime contributor to the Guardian).

Oh please GOD no STOP writing! (so much)

I’ve been wrestling with a bit of guilt recently.  I’ve been busy you see, far far too busy to sit down and write.  When I’ve not been busy I’ve felt that sort of ennui that just sucks the life out of anything creative that I attempt to do.  Wherever I look there are writers who talk about work in the same way I think about the day job – and I don’t mean the good day job either.  I mean the world of Dilbert or the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.  It’s all work, no play and little reward.   It’s the hand cranked world of the industrial revolution’s mills.  It’s a crazy crazy world that smells of excel spreadsheets and looking at the receipts.

And if this sounds like me raging at my own laziness you might be right.

But isn’t it dispiriting to think about a creative pursuit in terms of factory output?

And here’s a link to his second post:  Flash fiction is not the future.

What is Flash Fiction?  Flash fiction is really short fiction of about 50-1000 words.  Ish.  Something you can bang out in a couple of days and read over a cup of coffee on the way to work.

In summary Damien hopes that flash fiction is not the way of the future – that there’s a reason that people read novels.

I get where Damien is going with this one.  At lest year’s Edinburgh Book Festival I had to sit through a reading by one of the world’s foremost “short fiction” writers.  When they said short they meant flash fiction and they meant stuff that was more akin to [prose] poetry than anything that I recognised as a short story.  There were lots of people in comfortable jumpers sitting around nodding their heads and all the time I was thinking “What is it that I am missing?”

And the problem was the story experience.  It’s a bit like meeting a beautiful girl.  You start off thinking “lovely lovely” and then she ignores you for the smelly guy at the end of the bar and you think “is it me?”

And maybe it is, was and always will be me – but I put it to the world that sometimes it just can’t.

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