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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?
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I’m still really enjoying it but I’m starting to get the sense that this is a marathon not a sprint, and maybe I’ve gone off at a slightly too fast pace. This week in particular, I’ve been getting a stitch: quite a lot of full time work on, plus a child who has been sick all week, a gym schedule I’m supposed to be keeping to, friends to see, a house to sell, a new house to buy... it’s felt like reading and thinking about writing is taking a back seat.
What have I done this month on the course? Well, I’ve got a real kick out of exploring secondary material because I’m a geek. I just am. I found a book called ‘Swimming in a pond in the rain’ by George Saunders, and dove right in. It’s a radical teaching text about Russian short stories, breaking down their techniques, and it’s amazing. I don’t even have any knowledge of Russian writers...I’ve been note taking like a dervish and trying to keep up with the ideas I keep discovering, about how to draw characters, scenes, and how to always keep escalating. At the same time, I’m writing away for an hour or two at a time on a Wednesday afternoon, and I’ve got a little further into my book. I’m happy with a lot of it, which is really saying something. It’s been an enlightening experience. I’m learning a lot about writing from reading, about what I like, what I don’t like, what works, what feels lazy and I think that’s the point. Being able to go from identifying that into putting it into action is not easy and I think it does need more time to sink into my subconscious to do that. I’m not forcing it, just trying to be playful with it. I’d love to write more but that’s not an option at the moment. There’s one paper due this term, on any title or subject that we like, and I’m going to be putting that together next month. I plan to write something about texts in dialogue with each other and themselves because I want to look at something structural and conceptual. It’s my first paper and I’m not 100% sure about how to go about it – I haven’t written an academic essay for over 20 years – so I’ll take advantage of the teaching time available and make sure I chat to my tutor about it before I begin. But I’m also fighting a few things on all fronts – lots of deadlines for my daily work, an upswelling of projects I really want to do, and still more books to read... so life has just got a bit harder. Tonight we have a class on writing about climate which I feel both interested in and a bit cynical about. Interested to see how it pans out... I’m starting to get the hang of things, and it’s really interesting. My first module is about reading as a writer, and I’ve got a short, six-book reading list, plus secondary reading to do. We meet once a week and have a one-hour discussion about the text we’re focused on that week, and spend the second hour talking to the author about the book. It’s really a great way to do it and a real treat to talk to authors.
I have loved all the books on the list so far except for one, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about why that is. That’s the idea, of course. The point of this part of the course is that over the first module, which runs January-May for us part timers, we start to understand what our taste is and why. I’ve been puzzling more over the book that I don’t like than the ones that I did, trying to take it apart and say: why did the tutors put this on the list? What are they trying to say? Is there a way that if I was the editor of this book, I could help the author make it stronger? Ultimately, the answer came in the session with the author: he talked about how he constructed the book and what he was trying to create. I felt that it didn’t align with what I look for in a book – and that’s not a critique of the book, it’s a reflection of my taste. I like a book that has a deeper meaning than transporting the reader (me) to a new place. I want this intangible feeling of a statement running through it, an idea around how this is what it is to be a human in the world, meaning our world, this world we live in right now. It’s a revelation to put it in these terms. He was doing something entirely different. I also got the chance to talk to another student on the course - it is so good to be able to do that, because if you remember, part of my drive to do this course was around community - and she loved the book. She was really interested in world building and fantasy and found the author’s approach to it brilliant. It is. I felt this great relief to hear that she loved it, and for those reasons – it wasn’t that I had missed something, it was really down to taste and preference. And that’s 100% OK. Towards the end of the module we have to write a 3,000 word paper on craft, taking into account two of the reading list books and our own writing practise. I would say that it’s been hard to keep up a daily writing practise while also reading, thinking and carrying on with my day job. I’ve locked into something Manchester Met offers called The Scriptorium where on a Wednesday afternoon, we get together online and in person and write for a few hours following some prompts. It at least has me committed to writing once a week. I would like to do more, but my day job is threatening to swallow me alive, so I’m trying to keep a balance. I’m getting deeper into this thought that taste is everything: it’s what makes you feel satisfied at the end of a piece of writing, if you ever finish one. It’s the goal, to write something that fits with your taste. I like that approach. I also like the thought that spending time on craft, style, method etc is super important as a way to make the unconscious conscious. I think it will help me to realise what I can do to fix the issues in my own work in progress, and to think clearly about editorial decisions I’m making, rather than relying on luck and instinct. Monique Roffey said that her award-winning book, The Mermaid of Black Conch, came out in six months and was instinctive, so I would love that to happen to me; she also said that the other nine novels she wrote were hard graft and research all the time...so it’s proof that it’s not a bad thing that my own work is feeling quite hard to put together. It’s just life. Why am I doing an MFA?
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