Synaesthesia

I am delighted to have a story in the latest edition of Synaesthesia Magazine.

Synaesthesia publish prose and poetry with some element of synaesthesia about it; the fusion of two or more senses, i.e. taste has colour or sound might be textural. Each edition has a theme, this time the theme is EAT.

My story, Honey Fungus, is about a woman who forages for a masterchef.

There are some beautiful responses to the submissions theme in this edition. My favourite is Dinner Invitation by Kendra Kopelke.

Read the magazine here.

For news and future edition themes click here.

Hearing Voices

How do writers create believable characters?

This week I've been planning a creative writing session to help students explore this.

And then, in perfect serendipity, I listened to BBC Radio 4's Open Book discussing character voice this week. You can find it here. Jennifer Hodgson has interviewed over 100 writers to research how they hear and write their characters. She found that many "couldn't even begin to write the character until they'd heard their voice." And that very often the narrative process "began with a voice." It's intriguing and worth listening to. Jennifer Hodgson has written an article for the latest Mslexia issue which explores her fascinating research a little more.

Today I've been working on a new short story. Do I hear the voices of my characters? Yes, I think so. I know the tone of voice my protagonist uses when he feeds the cat and how he answers his phone and what he says to JW's on the doorstep. I know the things he mutters in his sleep and how he would react if he was caught up in an armed robbery. I can imagine all of these things although none of them actually occur in the narrative. As I'm writing a story, I mentally place my characters in positions outside of the text and see how they react. If they can 'live' like this off the page then I hope that they come across believably within the story that I'm telling.

One character in this story, however, isn't even 'real'; my protagonist has an imaginary friend. Am I filtering him through the main protagonist? I ought to be, because the imaginary friend doesn't 'exist' except through the protagonist's imagination. Effectively, he is just another layer of him. The imaginary friend should be sought through him, in every way, as he creates him. But the imaginary friend character didn't come into being after my protagonist became fully rounded. If anything he came first and the protagonist was the one who followed.

Are you still with me...?

Another thing... The imaginary friend is mute, so I don't hear his voice at all. But I have a complete sense of him through expressions, body language and physicality. I know how he would make a cup of tea. I can picture how he would hang out washing, lift a car bonnet, respond if he saw a child choking on the bus. Again, he does none of these things in my story. But the fact I can picture it perfectly reassures me that I know him well enough to hopefully be believable. I wonder if he should solely be an extension, a projection, out of my main protagonist. He does the things that my protagonist longs to do - mischievous, deviant acts. But I think I also see him as a person in his own right. I can imagine him existing even if the protagonist did not. Should I be so aware of him, as an entity outside of the protagonist? I don't know. They are, after all, just different sides to the same character, existentially compartmentalised. A bit like a ventriloquist and their dummy. Except I'm operating both.

Book Lover

I really know I shouldn't... but I can't help being a bit into the whole Valentine's thing.

What I'm loving this year.

1. I will be spending Valentine's Day with four of my favourites - Mr S, my brother, sister-in-law and their gorgeous dog, Stella.

2. We will most likely be in a pub drinking beer and spotting the annual-one-night-out couples gulping soup self-consciously in the dining area. Then we will go home to play Cards Against Humanity.

3. I will be critiquing manuscripts from the students on a short story course I'm leading, which is a genuine delight and pleasure. I feel really lucky to be working with such a fantastic bunch of writers.

Ebb and Flo Bookshop, Chorley

4. Finally, this Valentine's Day, I'll be wishing I lived just a bit closer to Ebb and Flo in Chorley. This fantastic independent bookshop is offering blind dates with books. This taps right into my happy place.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone x

The long and short of it

I have been reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch for over a month now and I am still only half way through. I am a stupidly slow reader. Although, to be fair, it is 864 pages long.

Generally speaking, I'm enjoying it. But I wonder whether it goes on, just a bit, in places?

The writing is beautiful and evocative. The scene near the beginning in the art gallery is particularly powerful. But could the whole book have done with a hearty edit?

There is one particular tic that's been getting up my nose. Phrases like 'We always...', 'We sometimes...', and 'Often we'd...' seem to crop up fairly regularly. I don't like these generalised flashbacks. It feels a bit sloppy. I want to see a scene in which the regularity or repetitious nature of whatever it is they are doing is shown rather than told. I think it is partly because in everyday life, when someone says "we always do this/that..." it often means they've done it twice, or even only once but like to be perceived as the type of person/couple/family to often do that thing, whatever it may be. I don't trust it.

A single set scene, crystal clear with everything the reader needs to glean the surrounding story from, is so much more powerful. And Donna Tartt writes this kind of scene so brilliantly throughout the novel that these broad stroke flashbacks feels unnecessary. Like I'm being stuffed with story.

Perhaps my reaction stems from the amount of time I spend with short fiction - reading it, writing it, editing it - where every sentence, every word, has to work and where the best stories don't rely on generalised flashback (or, more and more I'm finding, don't rely on flashback at all.) I've just reworked a story that I wrote a long time ago and found myself hacking away at the ugly flashback scenes, to tighten the prose.

This week I'm also reading an Everyman collection of Russian short stories. In contrast to Tartt's weighty Russian equivalents, such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace, these bite sized stories demonstrate that size isn't everything. With short fiction, it is so much about what you leave out, the unspoken moments, that gives a story its punch. Tolstoy's 'Korney Vasiliev' gives the life story of a man's undoing in just over 20 pages. Gogol's 'The Cloak' explores class, status and society through a man's need of a coat. These narratives leave something for the reader. It is the sealine viewed longingly through coin operated binoculars, rather than an overwhelming tidal surge.

This week I read Poor Souls' Light, a collection of seven winter ghost stories by independent publishing collective Curious Tales.

I'm hugely late to the party on this one (nothing new there!) The collection came out well before Christmas when I bought it as a gift to myself. I've been saving it until I could consume the whole book in one sitting, which probably isn't the recommended way to do it unless (like me) you enjoy steeping in that unsettling feeling genuinely frightening stories can give you.

All seven stories draw inspiration from Robert Aickman. My favourites are probably Alison Moore's 'The Spite House' and Jenn Ashworth's 'Dinner For One'. But there really isn't a weak story here.

The artwork on the cover and accompanying the text is by Beth Ward. The dark, shadowy images are the perfect companion to the written narratives.

Read more about the fantastic team behind Curious Tales here. You can buy a copy of the book or the art prints here.

The Agenda

Today I received an unsolicited phone call from a company offering me PPI compensation. I get a lot of calls like this, despite being on the TPS list. If you work from home you probably will, too. You will also understand how annoying they are. Mr S suggests I just don't answer the phone. But as a freelancer, if a number comes up that looks halfway legit, I kinda have to answer in case it's work related.

I've had various strategies for getting rid of these people. I went through a phase of just being Very Angry at them. I'd demand to speak to their line manager. I'd demand to be taken off their records. I'd tell them how Very Angry I was to have had my working day interrupted. I would finish the call feeling rattled and Very Angry for quite a while. And then, because I'm generally not good at being Very Angry, I'd feel guilty about my behaviour; embarrassed at how I'd spoken to a fellow human who was just trying to do their job.

My next tack was simply to hang up. But that felt incredibly rude, too. The passive aggressive sort of rude.

So I decided (and this seemed like a perfectly obvious next step at the time) to make gentle animal noises down the line until they went away. Generic bird sounds or what I describe as the Lonely Cat.

Then I realised that it was weird. (I gave it to a character in a story to do and understood via third person quite how sinister it was.)

In my fiction writing I've been thinking a lot about dialogue and how to make it feel authentic. Every character in a story needs an agenda all of their own, ensuring that no character is simply a foil to get some point across for the other. The things they say will lean into their own agenda. The dialogue that I admire most from other writers is the dialogue that tightly pits characters' agendas at each other. Both have something they want, both will only shift so far before they start tugging in their own direction. This works most effectively I think when the desired thing is in some way not altogether known to them - when it's subtle or cerebral. For example, the stilting dialogue between the man and woman in Hemingway's Cat In the Rain.


So today when Kevin rang me from Pearl Refunds, with a very clear agenda for helping me reclaim PPI, I decided I had quite a different agenda. He had interrupted me mid sentence on some new writing set in woodland. So I asked him about his favourite animal. I asked him if he liked squirrels. He wasn't sure about squirrels so I explained a bit about them. Bushy tail, acorns etc.

He said "snails?"

So we had a bit of a chat about snails. Snails were more his thing, after PPI, of course, which he mentioned again.

But I was persistent about the squirrel agenda. "They were in decline," I told him. "But they seem to be making a comeback."

"Snails?"

"No, squirrels."

After a bit he sighed and said, "Mrs Schofield, do you want PPI?"

"No," I said.

We politely said goodbye. It all felt very civilised.

BBC Radio 4 Open Book

Following the release of the Beta Life anthology a couple of weeks ago, Martyn Amos and I were invited to BBC Radio 4 to be interviewed by Mariella Frostrup for Open Book. It was an interesting experience... luckily prerecorded... which meant my faltering answers were cut down to something that sounded sensible.

The interview played out on Radio 4 on Sunday, and then repeated on Thursday. It was an immense privilege, albeit a terrifying one, doing the interview. And a special kind of nervous when part of my story, The Bactogarden, was read out on the programme. To have a story (well... an extract from one) read on Radio 4 realised one of my writing dreams. I feel proud and very lucky to have been involved in this Comma Press project with so many fantastic writers and scientist consultants.

The interview can be heard here.

PS. For more Radio 4 loveliness, here is a link to a short story series I enjoyed recently, Short Rides in Fast Machines; brilliant short stories commissioned by Sweet Talk Productions from three of the best - Toby Litt, Adam Marek and Tania Hershman.