Present Vs Past

I am trying to decide on wether or not to use the present tense for my NaNoWriMo novel. It is not the most common tense to write in. I have never written anything longer than a short story in the present tense. But, somehow it feels a little better. A lot of my writer friends despise the present tense and refuse to read anything that is written in it. I too have often turned my nose up at novels written this way. But, I do not think that is just because of the tense. It is because they use the present tense in a strange way.

The challenge when writing in present tense is making it sound 'right'. I use that word with some caution as I am not sure what the correct term for well written work is, as everyone has a different idea of it. What I mean is some sentences sound strange when written in the present tense, they make complete sense and feel comfortable in the past but transferring them straight over to present is just... strange. This is where the challenge comes from. I have been writing a short piece in present tense. When I read over it I find myself tweaking small parts that would sound fine if I just changed the bloody tenses.

However, when I started this piece I was writing it in the past tense and it felt wrong. And if it feels wrong then there is nothing I can do but bow to the whim of my idea. It is set in the close future, and that, for me, seems to be enough to push it over the edge when I am writing in the past tense. It doesn't even feel like sci-fi to me, it is that close to the present, so it wouldn't make sense to write in past tense. Does that make sense? It seems to, but then I think about it and I know it should not matter.

No matter the tense, as long as it is written well it should get good feedback. I just want to avoid those who would rather chop their hands off than read present tense. I guess my aim with this novel is to appeal to those people especially. To have them pick it up, read it, and find themselves thinking, 'well I don't usually like present tense, but I love this.'

Originality is dead.

A few of my more recent lectures have made it very clear that no idea is new or original. This has lead me to want to throw myself from a very tall building, seeing as, you know, none of the work I have ever slaved over is original anyway so who cares. Originality is dead and I would argue that technology killed it.

Every idea I have ever pitched has at some point met with this response 'Ah that's kind of like this book/film/article where...' Every idea we come up with is like something else. This is because our lives are solely intertextual. We cannot help but see similarities between works of fiction, in tweets or status updates. Why is this? How have we become an intertextual society?

Technology is the answer that I would give. We can share work at the click of a button, we can link articles, surf world news, read newspapers from other countries and time periods. We can watch shows we have missed, shows from years ago, films, all online. We have surrounded ourselves with material and it all interweaves with and comments on everything else. Any person who is sitting at home on their computer, sitting on the bus on their phone, sitting in class on their tablet, can be a critic, an artist, a social presence and an amateur blogger. We can be and see so many different things at once, we can interact with them. No wonder we have brought that notion into our films and literature. 

Contemporary writing, films and articles are filled with references to other writing, films and articles. Sometimes this is deliberate, other times it is subconscious. We are constantly becoming involved in several things at once online, it is not possible for us to keep this out of our creative work. Right this minute, as I am typing, I may be reminding you of someone else, or something else. I may sound like an article you read the other day, I may use the same phrases as a character you were just thinking about. We contrast and compare naturally, it is only human to do so. Originality is dead, then, and perhaps humans killed it. It would not be the first time we had throttled a state of being out of existence.

So what hope do our creative minds have? Little, I am afraid. Creative people will never be able to escape the scrutiny of human nature. We are attuned to references, we like to criticise. We like to look at a great piece of work and shoot it down because it has been done or seen before. It gives us pleasure to think that one great artist or another is actually not so great because someone before had worked in the same way. I find that the one criticism I cannot bare is 'it has been done.' We have been brought up in a society that lauds originality and criticises repetition. 

But, that does not mean that we should just give up. I am still writing, I am still writing. I am still writing. I am learning and reading and finding different ways in which to express myself. Good writers, I think, are aware that intertextuality is unavoidable. Great writers use this knowledge, and create work that cannot be criticised for being unoriginal because that was how it was supposed to be. This does not mean that great pieces of art are complete regurgitations. This means that great pieces of art are taking those regurgitations and twisting them into new forms. I have not yet found the right way of doing this, I do not hold the secret to great writing. But, I am willing to try and find it. 

 

Mammoths, fantasy and defining modern writers.

I am an unpublished writer. I am an unpublished... writer? I am unpublished, therefore I cannot be a writer. 

That last statement is untrue. I am a writer. I have sometimes wondered if other people see me that way. Are there people out there who think that they cannot be writers because they are unpublished? Probably. It was how I used to think. But, I have and am studying writing, I think I should get some kind of title for that. Princess, would be my desired one. World dominator, empress! But, what if I applied that thinking to other subjects? I have studied history so... I am a historian! No. And the reason that I am not a historian is because I do not feel it. I love history, but in my heart I am a writer. I always will be. And also a little bit of an empress too.

I started thinking about this because I started thinking about submitting to a magazine. Or online journal, or anywhere. I am not at this point going to be picky. The thing is, I have gone through this process before. I have thought about submitting, researched for hours the best magazine to submit too, gotten a piece ready for submission, aaaaand backed out. I just cannot hit that button. I have done, and I have a slew of rejection emails to prove it. But, why can't I now? I think it is because that as a writer I do not know who I am. 

Writer is too broad a term. I am a writer of fiction, we could narrow it down that far at least. But then within that, what am I? Once, I would have said 'I am a writer of fantasy fiction.' Yet, I no longer class my writing as fantasy. Sure, there are fantastical elements to all of my pieces but they feel too real to be fantasy. Fantasy can be a comment on reality and real society but I think that my work goes deeper than that. At least I like to think so. I think it strikes real elements with a sledge hammer rather than encompassing them as fantasy fiction does, sometimes. I am well aware that fantasy is a very broad term and it could be applied to my work. 

Yet, fantasy is not the right world. Surreal sounds better. So going back to the top. I am an unpublished, surreal fiction writer. Does that sound right? Not quite. I do not think it is quite there. I want something harsher, something that screams look at me I'm being fucking amazing over here! Empress Jodie, sauntering through. Marching through. No, charging through! I want something that charges through with a lance, riding an elephant! No, a mammoth! Let's bring mammoths back! Let's all ride mammoths and charge into the world of fiction. Or better yet, let's all stop labelling ourselves as writers. The term is too broad, too encompassing, too much like fantasy and fiction. 

I propose that we all choose our own terms to describe our work and who we are and who we want to be. I have been stringing something together throughout this post. And after much more thought than there seems to be here I think I know who and what I am.

I am an empress and my work is a charging mammoth.

This Summer

Come and find me in the summer,

I'll be standing by the window.

In a white dress.

I will paint my lips red,

darken my eyelids for you.

Stain my white dress.

Let us spin a bedroom,
I will draw the curtains,
you can paint the sheets.

Let us stand together,
by the window and,
watch them as they dry.

You will leave me in the winter,
when I have to close the window.
I'll fold my white dress.

So just give me this summer.
Your sweet lips,
paint my dress.

A single hug.

My Dad hugged me last night. He put one arm around my shoulders and pressed his hand to the back of my head. He stroked my hair. I do not remember him ever hugging me like that. 

I've never had a bad relationship with him. We have just never seen the need to be emotional with each other. More recently he admitted to not believing in depression. He is not an ignorant man, he has just never come into contact with someone with mental health problems. And to have his own daughter diagnosed must have been a shock for him. His reaction when I first told him should be in a comedy. He one arm hugged me, said he needed to go to football, whilst looking at the floor, and left as soon as he could.

Perhaps he is ignorant. Perhaps he is hurting. It might be that I just cannot see it. Either way, as much as I like to laugh at it, it effected me. The man who I had always expected to be there suddenly wasn't. He didn't even believe that there was something wrong. 

It has been around two months since then. I hit a wall at uni yesterday and my step-mum brought me home. I had dinner and said I was going to bed. That was when my Dad hugged me. It doesn't sound like much, but to me it is a big step forward. 

Women and men and changing things. (The worst title for a poem, ever)

If there were a mirror, bigger than the moon,

maybe then I could see your source.

But, the moon reflects only light.

Those are your words not mine.

Glass is worthless, you say.

Yet, you are young, 

and your hair was cut short.

And mine has grown. I let it.

There are things that have always been.

And I realise that I know them,

now. Better than anyone else, I know.

I want to tell you to roll with them.

But, they will chew and keep on chewing.

There is no spittle for people like us.

The moon can see our fated progress,

it has a light and is enough.

For when you are nothing, the faintest light

can bring you to a page.

I will be blunt, we are not all artists.

I will be worse, money is king.

And a king is a man who can

make a woman a queen.

Teaching Creative Writing

I am in the third week of my third year. My very last year at the University of Winchester, studying creative writing. I can not even begin to tell you how excited I am, how scared I am. But, I don't actually want to focus on those parts of it. What I want to focus on is my degree itself, and how amazing it has been. 

There has been a lot of discussion in Britain as to if creative writing can be taught. In America they seem to already have it sorted out, they offer MAs in it as well as MFAs which people over here seem to have only just gotten to grips with. Britain has often been of the opinion that creative writing comes from the person almost entirely and so no one can teach it. But, walking comes from us, and we can teach that. 

Personally, I think that creation cannot be taught. The drive, the light, the spirit of a creator cannot be transplanted. Their mode of creation, art, science, writing, is also up to them. But once they have found their mode of expression I think it best to help them along it. We would not trust a scientist if he had not had a single lesson. 

There are some lucky, natural writers, but even then they have been taught at least the basics of english. And I believe that they could benefit from taking a class, because education forces us to challenge ourselves and modern writers need that. I offer myself as living proof of this.

At the beginning of my degree I refused to write anything that was not fantasy, and I believed that short stories were worthless to me. I remember being in a class that we had to read a selection of short stories for, I remember turning my nose up at it. I think that a part of me did not truly believe that I needed educating. I thought that I had all I needed in my fantasy books and my fantasy writing. 

Now, two years on, a huge amount of time in the life of a young writer, I am interested in writing something that is not fantasy. In fact, I have already written a few short stories that focus a little more on real life. I want my writing to mean something, I am interested in postmodernism's affect on history, I want to write metafictional pieces, and I want to read anything but fantasy. My writing is intelligent, it has themes and it has a purpose. I still have most of the year to go.

Yet I know it will not be enough. I do not think that a lifetime of studying writing and working in workshops would be enough. I am lucky in that I am going to go on to do a creative writing MA, and after that I am hoping to teach in colleges. It is the only way I can think of that will keep me learning. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that if you are passionate about your art, and you are wondering if it is worth doing a university degree, or an MA, it is. It really is.

My first, brief, attempt at metafiction.

I will start with you standing at a station. It isn’t a particularly new one. The benches are wooden and stained. The guard looks as old as his surroundings, and not because of his age, he has a worn kind of boredom about his eyes. It is the kind of boredom that makes me want to ink out a dinosaur beside him. I would like to see what he would do. He was athletic in his youth, his legs might still remember what it was like to run. I could remind them of that. Instead, I will focus on you.

I will tell you that you are waiting for a train, simply because I have no way of drawing your attention to the timetable. 

NEXT TRAIN TO NEVERLAND: PAGE THREE

You have been waiting your entire life for this train, so I assume that you can wait a little longer. Unless, of course, you are in desperate need of that train. Perhaps you can see your teacher walking towards the classroom, why are you reading before class? Some people would call you a geek, or maybe you are at a bus stop or a real train station and your actual mode of transport is scheduled to arrive in one minute. If you can read so much in so little time I will be impressed. You might even catch my train in one sitting. 

So what shall we do whilst we are waiting for the train? My train I mean, the one I am writing about. If it were my choice, which it is, then I would do what I always do when there is something that I have to wait for. You take a book out of your bag and you start to read.

‘I will start with you standing at a station. It...’