Joe Blogs

Welcome. This is my fourth blog. I've just left Squidoo to set up camp here (if anyone's interested, my blog there is called http://www.squidoo.com/write-away ). I liked Squidoo, and I might carry on using that blog for something else. But for the type of blog I'm trying to write, I think Blogger will be best. I wish, though, that cuddly little cartoon monsters would pop up here, as they do at Squidoo, and give me encouraging messages.
This will be a journal (I shall try for at least once a week) about my writing, what I'm trying to write, and how it's going. I hope you find it interesting, perhaps even useful. At the moment, I'm infatuated with horror fiction, especially the ghost stories of M.R. James. Subtle, creepy, well characterized horror fiction. Not overtly violent, not misogynist, but something to make the reader feel pleasantly scared. And that is what, at the moment, I'm trying to write.


I've begun Writing Practice again, as outlined in Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones. You take a certain subject and write about it for a set ammount of time. It was one of the practices (along with daily walks and artist's dates, from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way) which helped me get through a two-decade writers' block.
I don't know why I ever stopped, really. I think what happened was, I began using Writing Practice time to write actual short stories. I thought, initially, that my stories were a jokes, a bit of a laugh I could have whilst travelling to work in the mornings (always assuming I could get a seat). By having fun, not taking them seriously, I found myself writing story after story.
Another thing which happened, I think, is that I began associating Writing Practice with pain. It does bring up painful memories and feelings, because you don't make anything up. It's automatic writing, you don't stop to think. Natalie Goldberg advises you, when you find yourself resisting a subject, to go for the jugular. But I don't always want to remember the past, or feel pain. I don't know if that's good or bad, but there it is. Writing fiction, even of the serious kind, blunts the pain for me. Nothing is quite that horrible when it's happening to your own fictional character, rather than a real person. Maybe I'm like Mel Gibson in The Beaver, talking through a glove puppet.
Lately, though, I've begun thinking that maybe I ought to write something a little more serious than a horror story. Even a comic story (of the Nick Hornby variety) or an episode of a sitcom would ease my conscience a little. Something where the protagonist is facing the problems most of us face in everyday life : unemployment, redundancy, loneliness, divorce, etc. I know my wife would prefer it. I've begun rereading David Nobbs's Reginald Perrin novels, on Kindle this time. The original novel, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, is one of my all-time favourites. Written as an original novel, rather than with an eventual tv series in mind, it's a lot more hard-hitting, and strangely mournful, than you might expect. None of its tv counterparts and sequels quite live up to it.
At the moment, strictly speaking, I'm not writing anything. I'm editing a short story, trying to get it from 4,000 words to 3,000 (I've got 500 words still to go, but I'm stumped). I'm typing up a load of stories which I've written in ink in various notebooks. And I'm searching for ideas for this M.R. James-ish ghost-story-on-stage which I keep daydreaming about. But as for actual writing, this is supposed to be my fallow time. Letting the soil gain some nutrients. And Writing Practice is one of the ways of doing that.
But I know, though, that I'll want to write- actually write- fiction soon; and that writing practice will seem too painful, as well as pointless. I'm a storyteller, I'll say to myself, why am I wasting time remembering falling off my tricycle? I should be over that by now.
I'm never completely happy unless, at some time in the day, I'm writing fiction of one sort or another. No matter how well the rest of my life might be going, even if I won the lottery, I would get the urge to write a story (if I won the lottery, I'd tell myself that I could self-publish). And conversely, nothing in my life ever seems quite so bad if I've got a project to retreat to. This is the big one, I tell myself, the novel that's going to make me a million, and solve all my problems.
I've got an itch, and I'm trying not to scratch it.

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