Om...Om...Om...

A much better week. I think that reading Natalie Goldberg’s new book, The True Secret Of Writing, is paying off. I’m not sure that a reader new to her work would get much from it, but for the converted, as I am, it is wonderful. I’ve begun writing practice again- that is, writing on a particular subject but not with any particular aim except to, well, practice. She also means the word practice in the spiritual sense, as a sort of meditation- writing to clear your head, to see what you’re thinking and feeling.
I won’t, probably, use those pieces straight away. As Goldberg says in Writing Down The Bones, you need to let them compost. Get some distance from them. Didn’t someone define poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity (Wordsworth?)? Describing how you thought and felt at the time.
Because I’m limbering up to writing something which is not in a genre. Something contemporary, mainstream. I don’t like to use the term Literary Fiction, because that makes it sound like the reader needs a PHD to read it. I’ve begun re-reading Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse, my favourite novel, despite having a teenage protagonist who dreams of becoming a writer.
Perhaps a better way of putting it is this: I want to write a story where the protagonist makes a mistake and learns a lesson- and that’s the only requirement I want from the plot. I will not insist on supernatural elements in the story, scientific trappings, the protagonist being under threat of violent death, etc. The protagonist might be trying to win the affections of the person he/she loves, but he/she will not be a perfect person. In fact, I want to depict an imperfect person.
I’d like the protagonist to be likeable, sympathetic; but I won’t even insist on that. One of the problems I’ve got, at the moment, is finding someone in real life on whom to model my protagonist on. Leaving aside the risk of offending my loved ones (I’ve done that before, and it’s no fun), I simply don’t know that many people; and of the people I do know well, I don’t like many of them.
There are some advantages, I suppose, to basing your hero on someone you don’t like. You can put that character through the wringer. It can serve as a satire. You can have a sort of revenge.But I was hoping to have a character whom the reader might like, and root for. Which would mean that, in the first place, I would have to like and root for the character.
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I came up with something for the Chalk The Sun competition:
http://chalkthesun.co.uk/?page_id=897I found a story I’d already written at the back of one of my notebooks. I discovered it, so to speak. It was fraught, trying to get it down to 200 words. I hope I’ve managed to keep most of the original version’s good points. Oh well, nothing ventured.