April-May

It’s been a bit quiet over here but I haven’t forgotten I was due to update this blog... I’m just a bit late. 
April and May were months where I was highly focused on reading as much of the reading list as I could, and turning up to class to participate in discussions with authors. I started thinking about what I wanted to write my paper on for this term quite early so I could start building up my ideas through the classes as we went. 

It’s been 25 years since I last wrote any kind of academic paper, so I was a bit unsure if I could still do it. The brief was really broad too: we could write reflections on what we’d read that term, create a scientific study about the work we’d read, or break it down into a topic, referencing two or three writers we’d engaged with. The idea was that it was an academic reflection both on our works in progress and on what we’d read. This is all radically different from an English degree, where you reflect only on what you’ve read, and on how it works – your own interpretation or interest in it is not encouraged. 

I ended up writing about intertextuality and the idea of using echoes of other people’s works in your own to offer depth and substance. Since I was struggling a bit with making the story I was writing have enough resonance, I thought it might be a technique I could use. And the essay almost wrote itself - it was only 3,000 words long and I kind of wished it had been longer. I could easily have filled 5k. Something I really appreciated at Manchester Met was the chance to send my final draft essay to an academic unit who specialised in reading essays for style before they are submitted. That meant they would check I was using referencing properly - the mark scheme showed that you lose marks for doing it wrong - and that the essay made sense. So their notes helped me too. 

I was happy with where I landed, but in the end, as I thought about it over the summer, I was even more happy that I’d dug up some interesting ideas through doing the essay. I realised that there could be a kind of ghost story running through my story, which is about lost love, and that I could borrow tropes and language from gothic fiction to conjure that. I enjoyed playing with that idea as it emerged, and, honestly, got much more out of the course in this first term than I thought I would. Overall, it’s been an exploration of taste – reading a lot and thinking about what I like, what I don’t like, and what I want my fiction to be. I’ve narrowed it down to something a lot more specific than when I started and know that I want to write in a contemporary literary vein, where structure plays a part in the storytelling and the story is about more than entertainment. 

I also visited Manchester Met for the weeklong Summer School, which was great, finally getting to meet some of my course mates and having the chance to write about the city in different ways. It was absolutely worth it. 

Next term starts late September with feedback classes workshopping each others projects. I’m at a stage with my novel where I need to get some other eyes on it and some fresh takes, so I’m looking forward to that. I want to know: is this character likeable? Is the start interesting enough to keep you reading? And if not, how do I change that?