MacGuffin

Over the last few weeks I've been reading and listening to stories on MacGuffin; a new self-publishing platform for short stories and poetry. Produced by Comma Press, it is a kind of literary jukebox and free to use. Available at the moment in beta version, the full launch will be happening soon.

There's already a large amount of content on MacGuffin, with the opportunity for writers to add their work to the site. It is brilliant to see classic works by writers such as Chekhov and Joyce sitting alongside acclaimed contemporary writers like David Constantine and Zoe Lambert, as well as new voices and emerging writers.

All the stories are available as both text and audio. Users are encouraged to interact, rating the text and audio pieces and adding hashtags to help other users find and categorise the content. Using the keyword search is a fascinating way to bring up a whole spectrum of work and encourages users to perhaps read something by writers they may not have come across before.

Each story also has an analytical breakdown showing how many readers and listeners have rated it, where they are located and if/at what point they dropped out. This might sound a bit brutal but actually it isn't. There is no explicit judgement attached to this data and so it enables readers and writers to look at writing subjectively. If there are correlations in the reader dropout data does this mean the story needs to be strengthened at certain points, edited and made more arresting or actually does this confirm that this narrative demands a bit more from the reader?

My favourite MacGuffin discovery? A brilliant writer that I was previously unfamiliar with; 'Something for Nothing' by Larissa Boehning, translated from German by Lyn Marven, is evocative and transfixing. MacGuffin is the perfect forum for discovering writers, whether well established and just new to the reader, like Boehning was for me, or new voices on the literary scene to take note of and champion.

Have a go with the beta version here. Read the The Guardian review of MacGuffin here.

The Barrow Rapture

The Barrow Rapture is an interactive story told through text and illustration. The protagonist is a soldier returning to Barrow with a guilty burden and a pocketful of unanswered letters.

'That was when you started to feel as if there might have been something else wrong; something beyond the wrongness that was putrefying inside you, and that you had travelled to Barrow to try and excise, one way or the other. Something external, as well as internal.'

The Barrow Rapture by Beth Ward

The artists behind The Barrow Rapture are Curious Tales writers Jenn Ashworth, Brian Baker, Tom Fletcher and artist Beth Ward and it is funded by Lancaster University.

The reader decides where to go at the end of each short section, in a sense collaborating with the three writers and artist exploring text, image, story and place to construct the narrative. It's a bit like a more beautifully wrought, grown up version of the Choose Your Own Adventures books you might have read as a child. Does this comparison sound disparaging? I hope not - I loved those books - despite the naff writing and the risk of getting stuck in an endless narrative loop, the second person voice and the opportunity to choose safe or subversive directions for the protagonist made the Choose Your Own Adventure stories come alive. They felt three dimensional, a web rather than a narrow thread. The Barrow Rapture does this too - artfully, poignantly, elegantly - and so much more.

The setting, Barrow, becomes a character in its own right. There is beauty and resonance in familiar places, an aesthetic delight in the mundane or downright ugly  - multi storey carparks, working men's clubs, rundown terraces... I find these liminal, abandoned or unexplored places fascinating and this narrative takes the reader right through them, offering choices at each juncture. Where do you want to go next? The caravan park? The cinema? The town hall clock tower? It is like exploring a map in the most wonderful way.

In real life, we don't think or talk in straight lines; often we skip back and forward, one thought or idea connecting with another, creating a network. Conventional fiction (if you'll excuse that ham-fisted term), even writing that plays with timescale and linearity, often relies on a structure of cause and effect. One incident leads directly onto another. In reality, human motivations are usually influenced by several factors; some that we are aware of, some we might be able to discern if we stop and think about it, and others that are completely hidden from our understanding. The Barrow Rapture explores this multifaceted approach in both its narrative bites, eschewing plot progression for a more organic reflective tone, and its flexible structure, allowing the reader to navigate the story according to their choices. The reader is intrinsically part of the tale; not just simplistically selecting the next location but in the questioning process of why we make the decisions we make. The story is going to be subtly different for each reader both during the interaction and also how they reflect back on it afterwards.

Thematically, however, I think the experience will sing for every reader of loss, death, memory, searching and love. It will also resonate with anyone who has revisited somewhere that they once knew intimately - how memory and reality are often out of kilter; at once completely familiar and foreign. Although the context is vastly different, it made me think of George Bowling revisiting his childhood places in Orwell's Coming Up For Air. It also reminded me of forums such as this one, where urban explorers upload images of abandoned places. The Barrow landscape is saturated with emotions; living memories running through each natural curve and architectural detail.

Beth Ward captures this in her haunting, dreamlike artwork; the dark kind of dream that you only recall hours after waking. The sort of dream that takes a familiar moment, a train station underpass or a narrowing hallway, and twists it.

 My only critisicm would be that the story is over too soon. Hungry for more, I went back to the beginning and explored all the routes I could have taken. But I would happily have navigated the first time for a lot longer.

To read more about the experiment see the Curious Tales page here, and a blog post about the project from Jenn Ashworth here.

Clever Girl

At a function recently someone asked me what I do for a living. I explained to them in a few sketchy details. Someone responded with, "Yes, she's a very clever girl." A couple of other people chipped in and agreed that I was indeed a very clever girl.

I'm thirty three.

Had I been a bloke, aged anything over 18, I suspect they would not have referred to me as a very clever boy.

It was meant affectionately. It was supposed to be a compliment. I know this. I know, like and respect the people who said it. But this isn't the first time as an adult I've been referred to as a very clever girl. Is it indicative of a societal tendency to acknowledge and praise women who are academically interested and striving towards challenging goals, while simultaneously (whether consciously or subconsciously) applying caution that we don't overstep narrow, imposed gender stereotype? Is it the implication that my cleverness is limited to the fact that I'm female by gendering the sort of clever that I am? And then further reducing it to the level of a girl; a child. I can't just be called clever, or a clever woman (or even, at a stretch, a clever lady *shudders*). The girl aspect limits me somehow to something quantifiable. Non threatening, with all the ghastly baggage of gender stereotyping that that carries. Ugh.

Am I reading too much into a very misguided compliment?

Whatever. It may well happen again sometime and I will have to decide whether to make a scene over a thoughtless attempt at a compliment or just smile and let it go.

Either way, I will hold dear to this image from Jurrassic Park; the ranger who mutters the phrase ironically in the moments before his raptor death. Whatever gets you through.

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.