Notes on Blogs and Notes.

One of the less hysterical of the myriad celebrations taking place in my house at the moment, following the end of A363, is me coming back to the blog or blogging - perhaps where this writing fixation began. And this will be a very ordinary blog as opposed to something lifted from the spotty inspirations generated from A215 and latterly A363. An old fashioned blog entry where one sits at the key board without a copy of Developing Dramatic Technique individual Style and Technique sitting on my lap - or within spit-rattling distance of its precursor Creative Writing, A Workbook with Readings. No. Just a blog to say it's over. Though what 'over' actually means in this context should perhaps be interrogated a little.

I would say that to answer my own question about what it's 'over' means it would be no longer writing to order, being incredibly fussy about word length, trying to fit in as many techniques as taught as possible lest one is marked down for not applying what has been learned. But not writing.  Writing's not over. Don't be silly.

If writing is not over the problem I have now is where to take this newly polished skill. I feel in a way - all dressed up with nowhere to go. Feasted and gorged with nowhere to throw. I started, once I'd unraveled the arcane business of dialogue construction and getting to grips with show over tell, writing short stories.  I enjoyed this, but always knew that I was too heavily dependent on my own life experiences. No surprise when life-writing as a genre came up I luxuriated in it, though my cupboard of stories was quickly depleted leaving very little of interest for any fiction to come. I enjoyed both and I suppose that's where my future might lie - a kind of blended genre of life writing and fiction - though I certainly would have to apply many of the principles taught on the courses for this to succeed.

Chief among these advice principles according to A215 is in always carrying a writers notebook. I can't argue with this. So simple an idea, but so wide ranging a concept. It doesn't have to be a physical notebook - though this is a good start - it cold just as easily be a note taking application or vocal recording device on a smart phone. Either way it would fit several functions. It would motivate you to see, hear, smell and remember things that you encounter, it would provide inspired nuggets later when you feel the cupboard is, if not bare, not prompting any thoughts, and it would allow a reference list of ideas for later - given the twists and turns of the vicissitudes of daily life. I'm not writing about sunflowers at the moment - but I might need to describe them sometime in the future. Who'd have thought I would be writing about lilies, heather, and nightingales prior to May 2012? Or differing brands of cider presses or wildlife found in the Andean Cloud Forests of Peru during 2013?

All good stuff. But it's a shame beyond utterances that the writer's notebook remains something of a rare species about my body despite my knowing its inestimable qualities.  I can talk it up with the best of them - but I need to literally put words into action. Trouble is I'm so badly organised. And my efforts largely have led to broken pens, ink spilled all over my underwear, shirt, hands. Notebooks that look so broken and battered they might have been retrieved as artifacts from a war trench. Illegible writing - missing pages, pages falling out. Smudges, scratchings  doodlings, and mind-numbing examples of mundane life that could never be mistaken for artistic observation,  like shopping lists, car prices and currency converters.  Left behind at home in this or that other pair of trousers. the litany of failure goes on and on.

I'm sure I can bring some of this learning and experience to some kind of fruition, but I know I'll not get very far unless I sort out this business with the writer's notebook.

So much for that. Over the next few weeks I'm sure I'll be free writing about other things post writing courses.  The' free write' of course is another technique - one I'm using now - that requires a blog entry all of its own.