Hunting the Generated Subject - by Rowena House

It’s the last lap, the final six weeks of a six-and-a-half year creative writing PhD, which, terrifyingly, has taken up (or, at least, often took over) one-tenth of my lifetime.

I’m line-editing and proof-reading at the moment, ten pages a day of an 80K manuscript, cut down from 87K at its longest. It’s mad to try to do both at the same time, but that’s how it’s turned out and by this stage I’m not questioning my process, just getting on with it.

Hopefully, I’ll have time to read it through again on the iPad in a different format as reformatting always seems to throw up those glaringly obvious typos that have slipped past me, oh, probably hundreds of times.

I’m getting all sorts of deja-vu with the comparable stage of editing The Goose Road, my debut for young readers. Like asking, where did I put that sentence I liked so much, and really worked? And, for goodness sake, what on earth were you on about there?

There’s also been a nice moment of circularity or closure this month. 

Right at the start of this project, when Arvon began online masterclasses during Covid lockdowns, I listened to author Hisham Matar recommending that we stay open creatively during our first drafts (which I’ve taken to mean over multiple drafts) so that we don’t get trapped by our original idea and fail to access our deeper level of intuitive invention.

That became a kind of mantra for this novel: stay open to whatever comes along. 

 

 

Then, on August 7th, an email came in from Writers.com, an American organisation which I often find useful and thank very much for all their inspiration. This email offered up a notion from poetry which struck a chord. The article is by Sean Glatch, whom I’ve quoted here before, and is titled, Writing Titles of Poetry: How to Title a Poem, which has a lovely internal rhythm, which I guess is the point.

Mr. Glatch quoted Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, which he called ‘a great grounding in the craft and mindset of poetry writing’. To quote him quoting Mr. Hugo:

To Hugo, all poems have two subjects:

· The Initiating Subject: the topic, idea, or thing that led you into writing a poem.

· The Generated Subject: the subject that the poem discovers or was actually, secretly, about the whole time.

I really like this idea. It makes a whole lot of sense. For the work-in-progress, a seventeenth-century witch trial was the initiating subject, and the importance of writing to critical thinking is the generated subject.

Looking back, I realise I spent a lot of time in the early years trying to think up a generated subject, to plan it, to plot it, to do exactly what Hisham Matar said you shouldn’t do. It’s the theme thing, innit. We’re supposed to know it, but if it’s the storytelling that generates it, how can one plan it?

They say that writing a novel is new each time around. If there is another one in me, I’ll try very hard to remember this lesson and stop hunting for a theme and let it wade out of the story sea in its own good time.

All the best, everyone. Nearly there. 

 

A small step for me, potentially a giant leap for humanity - by Lu Hersey

Do you remember a time before Google and smart phones?  When people had typewriters or word processors to write with, and if you wanted to speak to someone at a distance, you had to call them on a landline? Research was done in libraries, which held so many books, there wasn't even room for a student cafe. People still respected creativity and the arts and no one used AI to write, produce art or music, or had GoogleMaps telling them where to go.

It honestly wasn't that long ago. The last twenty-five years has seen such a massive expansion of AI, we've all become accustomed to it. No one reading this would use it to write their books for them (hopefully!), but we live in a world where if you wanted to produce a readable manuscript from your idea in under ten minutes, you probably could. All thanks to AI's pirating of everything ever written by us. 

There's a rumour going around that AI centres burn books to stop us going back to print copies. Scary shades of Fahrenheit 451, and though it might sound like an urban myth, there's actually some truth to this rumour. Anthropic, a mega AI company with an 'AI assistant' they've named Claude (presumably to make him sound more user-friendly), is known to have sourced thousands of books, removed the spines to enable easy scanning, then pulped (I believe they call it 'recycled') all the pages. 

This has been public knowledge for over a year, but people only started getting seriously worried when another massive company called ISBNdb began ordering books in bulk, including rare books, from booksellers - and apparently destroying the originals. ISBNdb's website is really something - they manage to make it sound like they're doing you a huge favour by allowing you to access any book you want to read (at a price, obviously) instantly, online, from your desktop. 

Not long ago you could order a hard copy of any book you needed from a library (and up to a point you still can). Although it might take longer to source, the point of libraries is to conserve the original books, rather than destroying them. 

Yes, AI has made fantastic advances in medicine possible, and solves difficult science problems in a fraction of a second that could otherwise take years. It's brought some huge benefits to us all, and obscene amounts of money to the billionaires behind it. 

But there's a costly, sinister pay-off. Look at the rising numbers of data centre buildings being constructed to support it - no need for proper planning permission because the people financing them promise the earth, while systematically destroying it. 

The wonderful Erin Brockovich (remember the film? She's a real person) is currently fighting the rise of data centres, which are springing up everywhere (including the UK) with no proper public consultation or planning consent, despite the fact they seriously contaminate land, make a constant, deafening noise and use vast quantities of water at the expense of the environment. If you're interested, you can read about Erin's campaign in an article published recently in the Guardian.

I'm now ranting about the potential destruction of the planet by AI, while intermittently using it to research this piece. The irony isn't lost on me. So could direct action be the only possible alternative route to save the planet from the rise of data centres? This week saw Wynd Kaufman, aged 69, jailed for chaining and locking the front doors of Open AI's HQ last year. She's a member of a protest movement called StopAI , whose website describes them as a 'grassroots movement of everyday people using democratic and non-violent methods to disrupt the reckless development of destructive artificial intelligence technology'. As the first person jailed for taking direct action against destructive AI, she's been hailed by some as akin to Rosa Parks. Of course others might view her as a modern day Luddite. (Though if you follow that thought through, the Luddites had a point. Technology isn't always a good thing...)

Maybe we need to use Gandhi's example, using his charkha (portable spinning wheel) to spin cotton into yarn, a form of passive resistance against British colonial textile imports. OK, I'm not giving up my laptop to write for the time being - and I freely admit I used Google to help research while writing this piece. 

So what's my first step towards independence from AI? 

I'm trying to get places without using GoogleMaps. It involves using actual paper maps and road atlases like everyone had to, only a few decades ago. Amazingly, it works just like it always did.

A small step for me, right? But if we all remember how to do basic things without using AI, it could be a giant leap for humanity. 

Lu Hersey

lu-hersey.com

Oh you silly things By Steve Way

 I’m sure, like me, several children – and a few adults – have asked you, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I know some authors have said it’s the question they most expect and least know how to answer. I’d be interested to know if, as I do, you feel that one of several ways we snatch onto possible ideas is by watching out in our daily lives for interesting incidents, events and situations in our daily lives. One possible consequence of that might be that we notice much around us that doesn’t necessarily spark off an idea – at least straightaway – but which we maybe consider in more depth than others might do. In this case, I want to describe a few things I’ve observed which struck me as particularly silly.

It hadn’t occurred to me before until I began writing this, that all of what I’m going to describe were observed on, or by roadways. I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I currently live in a small rural town in France (though we’re seriously thinking of moving back to the north of England after this year’s unending sequence of heatwaves – we realise that moving to the south would be a living example of the adage about moving from the frying pan into the fire).

A windy road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, stretches about five miles to the next town. Halfway along that road, just before two right-angled bends, is a sign indicating that lorries larger than a certain size should not use this road. There are no other signs like this anywhere along this road, i.e. at the beginning of the road at either end, offering said lorries the chance to re-route. Also, the sign only faces one way, so drivers coming the opposite way may only ever see the sign in their rear-view mirror. As I’ve intimated the road is so narrow and twisted that even if a driver considered honouring the restriction, it would be nigh on impossible for him or her to turn their vehicle around, leaving reversing their lorry nearly three miles backwards along a windy road as the only remaining option.

Ultimately this explains why we have to drive very carefully along this road, as regularly lorries patently far to large to drive on the road bear down on us and I have to drive as close to our edge as possible, while avoiding ending up in the deep drainage ditches dug alongside the road, only a foot or so away from each side. How we laugh at the ridiculousness of the sign at these stimulating moments…

But roadside stupidity isn’t confined to France. Years ago, I was driving on a hill road between Wakefield and Huddersfield and came to a small roundabout at what in the past had probably been a crossroads. The roundabout was grassed and rose gently towards the centre, like a small mound. Two signs had been placed near its peak. Both simply read, ‘Diversion’. One pointed to the right, the other to the left, creating a completely uninformative diversion lottery. There had been no signs about roadworks, or other obstructions coming up to this point – presumably there should have been two  - and as it happens none after as I continued on my way, in that sense ignoring the signs. I particularly couldn’t help wondering about the person who set up the second sign. The first was hardly helpful, or particularly informative but surely the person putting up the second one must have realised the implications of the conundrum they were setting up for me and my fellow drivers? Too much to explain to an unsympathetic supervisor perhaps…

Meanwhile, back in France, a country famous for encouraging cycling, they have been setting aside a section of several roads, on both sides, for cyclists. These areas demarcated by thick broken white lines marked along the road, with regular images of cycles painted in the lanes themselves. All very good and righteous of course – at least in theory. The only problem is that the space left between them available for cars and other vehicles on some of the roads where this has been done, is far too narrow for them to pass without colliding virtually head-on.  Another windy road near us is an example. Drivers have to decide between avoiding the cycle lane areas and facing the danger of colliding with a vehicle doing the same thing coming the other way, as we both drive around a curve in the road, or drive in the cycle lane in which cyclists assume themselves free of danger from vehicles and where, by doing so, we might be penalised by the authorities. I also feel that the massive cost, time and effort it took to set out these impractical zones would have been better spent on setting up regular signs reminding drivers to watch out for cyclists. (Though arguably there should be also be signs reminding cyclists to wear bright clothing and helmets – I don’t know if it’s the same in the UK these days but it seems half the cyclists in France don’t consider a journey without wearing the dullest colour clothing on the dullest coloured bikes, usually without a helmet.)

I find the French word for pavement quite sweet – it’s ‘trottoir’ – making is sound as though you should trot along them! However, certainly in our neck of the woods, they only have a cursory relationship with pavements. In many cases they are too narrow to walk along except by experienced tightrope walkers. The ‘trottoir’ in our street, close to the centre of the town, is far too narrow in both directions for a wheelchair. Speaking of wheelchairs, our post office – ‘La Poste’ – is near the end of our street, the last in a series of buildings and with the entrance in the corner nearest the road. It faces along the street, rather than into the road. The entrance is above the level of the pavement and so for the benefit of customers it can be accessed from one direction by two steps and from the other by an adjoining ramp. Given that the two steps face the centre of the town, able-bodied customers predominantly use them. However as the ‘trottoir’ to the side of the ramp is so narrow, wheelchair users – for whom presumably the ramp was mainly constructed? – would either have to lean precariously, half on the pavement, half on the road, to get around it or dismount the pavement, move along the road (in the potential face of oncoming traffic) and then remount having done so, presumably at the same time swinging their chair around to face the beginning of the ramp.

Having finally made it to this point by the way, they would then find that the ramp is so steep they would either need to have the strength of a paralympian to haul themselves up it, or a fit and healthy companion to push them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

A series of stories, sketches and poems to support the NC requirements for learning spelling in a creative way. Also editions for KS1 and LKS2.

Two is a Crowd, by Cath Howe, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 

Cath Howe writes absolutely wonderful middle-grade stories set in our real world and populated by ordinary children and families faced with extraordinary, relatable, challenges. Her sixth book of this kind published by Nosy Crow is Two is a Crowd, served-up in short chapters, with stylish bold illustrations by Miguel Bustos that really show the story's emotions being played out. 

    Hattie tells her own story, covering the end of her primary school time, summer holiday, and her start at secondary school. We first meet a Hattie who is loud, funny, confident, and sure of her long-term best friend, Amber. But then something very big happens. Hattie's family one ordinary evening suddenly face having to take in Mum's dead friend's daughter Seren for the foreseeable future. The room which was to become Hattie's is now Seren's, and family life focuses on the newcomer. Hattie had always thought she wanted a sister, but Seren is unrewarding to try and chat with. She's 'blank'. And she's allowed to have and do things that Hattie isn't. Everything is unfair, and that feeling of the world being against her escalates for Hattie when she and Seren begin secondary school. Shockingly, Amber no longer wants to be Hattie's friend. Hattie's behaviour is getting her labelled as 'a bad influence'. We feel her pain and her determination, even as we smile at her bhaviour, and oh, we long for her to regain her place in her family and in school! 

    All comes good in an exciting finale up on a roof when Seren finally shows herself (and her bedroom wall under a hanging) to be very far from blank.

    Brilliantly written, this is a fast-moving easy read that delivers at a profound level. Highly recommended. 

Unleash Your Creative Monster (AGAIN) by Andy Jones, illustrations by Olaf Falafel, review by Lynda Waterhouse

 

This post includes a review of a book that I first posted three years ago. I’m partly reposting it because I’m short of time but, mainly, I’m reposting it because of a recent encounter with some young writers, aged 9 and 8 years. They are daughters of our friends, very keen readers, and they love writing. They had both brought a story to read to us as part of their trip. I was put on the spot and asked to give them some writing tips.

PHEW! This book sprang to mind and I raced to my bookshelf and brought it out.

The book is packed full of advice, tips and writing prompts FOR EVERYONE. As the blurb states ‘this book contains essential skills for storytellers, the secret weapons of successful authors, and over 50 prompts and exercises to inspire not only young writers but old and gnarled ones like me too’.

There are four sections: Training your creative monster, Monster mistakes, When your monster gets stuck, and Feeding your creative monster. You don’t have to follow it from section to section, it’s designed for dipping into.

The first exercise invites you to create your own creative monster and give it a name. It suggests keeping your name secret because the mystery – that secret bond between writer and monster - is part of its power. Some monsters do reveal their names as Olaf’s illustrations point out and that is OK too.

On every page, Olaf Falafel’s illustrations make you smile, illuminate the concepts, and at times reassure you. For instance, the scary wind–up monkey says, ‘I wouldn’t say I’m evil but I do eat beans straight from the tin’.

It is not patronising or dull. The muses are mentioned, rich vocabulary is used, and grammar and literary concepts are explained with clarity and warmth. You will find an explanation of Chekhov’s gun and quotes from Stephen King. It shows you how to create FSPs (Fantastic Story Possibilities) and to play with metaphors but to mix them at your peril! It encourages you to make mistakes, because at least you are making something, and to write fearlessly. There is advice on how to start and run your own writers’ group and support on drafting and editing your work. The editing checklist is brilliant. The pages of advice on adding rhythm and variety to your sentences are the best!

The book emphasises the importance of developing your own style and reminds us that, ‘There are a lot of so-called “rules” for writing, but rules are like eggs. Not everyone likes them, some are bad, and all of them were made to be broken’.

A creative monster should visit every school in the land and deliver a copy to each classroom, but only after making the head teacher say ‘bum glue’ three times in morning assembly.

ISBN 978-1-4063-9662-1

www.walker.co.uk

WHY SCARY STORIES ARE GOOD FOR KIDS by Sharon Tregenza

As I kid I loved to read them as an adult I love to write them - scary stories. Give me ghosts and witches, throw in the odd zombie or vampire and a haunted house - the thrill is always there.

I think they build resilience in children. Young readers watch as people their age overcome fear and survive danger in the best possible way. Most kid's horror will also add a strong dose of humour to release tension. The laugh after the scare shows kids that "that was frightening - but I'm all right" giving them a sense of achievement.  

Three good scary books that I think accomplish all this and more are...

"Coraline" by Neil Gaimen.

A girl confronts a sinister family and learns to trust her own resourcefulness.

Roald Dahl's "The Witches".

This book turns a frightening threat into an adventure filled with dark comedy and courage.

And, Goosebumps "Welcome to Dead House" by R.L.Stine

Ordinary children conquer their fears in a series of eerie events.

The best scary books respect their young readers. They give the fear shape and bounderies and usually, a victorious ending. Perhaps, by facing monsters and ghouls on the page children will be better prepared to face real concerns and worries. 

www.sharontregenza.com

sharontregenza.co.uk

Members' News August

 August is a month for holidays and heatwaves and new books. 

First off, two new books from Jonathan Emmett

Thursday 6 August: GREAT DINOSAUR MISTAKES, a factual picture book co-written by palaeontologist Adam Smith, illustrated by Stieven Van der Poorten and published by Fox & Ink Books, explores some of the most extraordinary errors early palaeontologists made, and brings past and present versions of each prehistoric creature face to face in a fantastical time-travelling adventure full of fascinating facts.

More information and to buy

Also from Jonathan, coming Thursday 13 August: ONE DOG, TWO DOGS is a count to 20 book full of flaps to lift and pop-up surprises, illustrated by Rob Hodgson and published by Nosy Crow.

 

More information and to buy

Pippa Goodhart's You Choose series of pictures books has sold over two and a half million copies over almost two and a half decades. The sixth in the series, YOU CHOOSE, PARTY TIME, illustrated by Nick Sharratt, published by Puffin, will be released on August 20th. It has lots of choosing to do. Which party theme and invitation? Which games, music, entertainments? Which face paint pattern? Who will be your guests? Which delicious cake to choose? It’s all up to you. There is much to talk about, spot, ponder, and laugh about.

More information and to buy

Next, a non-fiction book for older children. REVOLUTION, by Joan Lennon, illustrated by Teo Georgiev, is published by Templar Books, due out on 27th August.

What does it take to change the world? Sometimes it’s toppling unfair systems and finding new ways to govern that give people a better chance. Sometimes it’s challenging long-held beliefs and finding the courage to think differently.

Sometimes it’s coming up with masterful inventions that transform our everyday lives.

The world we know today has been shaped by exceptional events, ideas and inventions. These are the stories of ordinary people who made the extraordinary happen.

‘Perfect for 8-12-year-olds, this outstanding hardback encourages interested KS2 readers to look beyond dates and leaders and consider why revolutions begin, how they spread, and what they leave behind. Highly recommended.’ (School Reading List)

REVOLUTION is a School reading list title for August. Check out the link.

Finally, not a book, but a fun writing project which was organised with advice from the Scattered Authors. If you find yourself in Cardiff in the last two weeks of August, pop into St David's Centre for the story trail written by myself, Claire Fayers. Details haven't yet been released but the story is based on a Welsh legend of the quest for the oldest creature, and I'll be running some free workshops to go with it, situated in the shopping centre, which will be an interesting experience!

Congratulations to everyone with a book out this month. As always, please give these a shout-out on your social media channels and please send me your news items for the September round-up.