Changes in your Writing Technique

I like writing novel length stories where I can slowly reveal and develop conflicts.  I get a chance to delve right inside my characters and embellish what drives them.  I tend to over-write as I get into my tale.  It then requires tough edits to sharpen disagreements and heighten emotional turmoil, then slow it down so the character has an opportunity to take in the situation.

The writing group I attend have a word of the week and each person is invited to include it in in a piece of flash fiction.  There is no reason to write anything extensive and most people settle for around 100 words. To begin with, my offerings were simply a slice of life and, although anyone in the group recognised it as my work, I have never had a problem with over-writing with these short pieces.


The exercise has served me well.  I am turning out flash fiction worthy of the term now, and look forward to the new challenge each week.  My breakthrough came from the word "cucumber" and I have added it as a taster.

Cucumber

It started simple enough; a bus queue and a forgotten lighter.  I chatted with Silvie all the way into town, so natural and refreshing.  The woes of family life drifted away and I continued with the bus after I got the car back.  It was easy to convince Janet that it saved on the parking.

The cheating grew worse as I took to walking the few streets to Silvie’s house, and running my hands over her soft skin and savouring her flesh.

My father knew how to deal with my lies many years ago.  He took his belt and bruised my back.  One day he chipped a piece of bone from my shoulder blade and I could feel it rubbing under my skin as I cut the lines to his cucumbers. They lay tangled together on the floor for the rest of the season.  With the coming of autumn, my father cut them back until there was nothing left.  Running my fingers over the cold sheet, I’d become accustomed to that feeling.

I suppose people who write short stories and novels have to change their writing style, but I wonder if anyone else agonises over their second draft to the same degree as I do in one specialism, and not in another.

Deep Rivers

Imagine growing up in the bosom of loving Peruvian Indians, only to find later you're shackled to a white community who enslave those very people.

In "Deep Rivers," Jose Maria Arguedas tackles the emotional fallout from this kind of upheaval in a story told through Ernesto.  Abandoned to a boarding school for well-to-do white boys, he is left in no doubt that he is not an Indian.  Yet the Quechua Indian world view is Ernesto's oracle. whereby people, mountains, animals, rain and truth all have powerful dimensions of their own.  To each, he attributes tenderness and love.


I think Ernesto must see his classmates as philanderers who ignore the graces he has come to understand.  Arguedas describes how one of the boys boasts that his father whips the Indians at his disposal to keep them cowed.  The author also relates how the white boys mistreat girls so they have control over them.


Ernesto dreams of a girl who might take for her own his memories of the rivers and mountains he'd seen, of the sheer cliffs and wide plains populated with lakes he'd crossed.  But she should be small and slender with blue eyes and braids.


In his confusion, Ernesto comes to imagine he springs from some non-human species and asks himself if the song of the lark is the stuff of which he is made.  He is drawn to obscure intuition and magic.


Arguedas argues that reality can hardly be logical for the exploited Indian peasant, scorned and humiliated all his life and defenceless against disease and poverty.  Neither can the world be rational to the outcast child, rootless among men.


So what of Arguedas; a scholar who has written one of the most authentic works we have in relation to the indigenous people of South America.  Yet he committed suicide at the end of 1969.  In his last letter he wrote, "I withdraw now because I feel I no longer have the necessary energy and inspiration to continue to work and thereby justify my existence.  Such deflation in a successful man shows how isolation can destroy the spirit.


I would like to believe the appalling treatment of Indians described by Arguedas is assigned to the mid twentieth century.  The government in Peru are promising much but I fear that little will change.


What do you think?

Thin Air in the Andies

Have you ever considered what it's like to breathe 4,000 meters above sea level?  I did when I knew I was going to La Paz.  Everyone who'd been there said they thought they would never be able to cope with the altitude.  I imagined myself gasping for isolated pockets of oxygen.

The problem is that you don't gradually climb to that height, you are instantly there.

We arrived at six a.m. from lowland Miami.  The aircrew woke us with hot drinks, and most people chose tea or coffee.  An American gentleman opted for a cup of hot water, to which he added a teabag.  "Helps me with the altitude," he explained.  "Always suffer when I first arrive."  I learned to do the same whenever I could.  The teabag contained finely chopped coca leaves - which surprisingly can be bought legally in America, but not in Britain.

Mount Illimani

Below us I could make out the Grande Cordillera range of mountains that separates La Paz from the Amazon basin.  Mount Illimani is the highest peak.

At the air terminal I walked down the steps, breathing... well, normally.  The air was thinner, but I felt confident I could deal with it. And you can - so long as you don't do anything.  Leaving the
airport, I saw La Paz laid out before me in an amazing panorama.

La Paz

Our tour guide advised us to drink three litres of water a day - just keep drip feeding the stuff.  My wife, Pat and I tasked ourselves with buying a litre of water each and returning it to the hotel.  Have you noticed this first mistake?

Then we took a stroll along the avenue Municipal Santa Cruz in the pleasant seventy degree sunshine.  My chest began to tighten as we ascended the gentle slope and I found myself searching for breath.  There were several cafes, fresh fruit baskets and bric-a-brac stalls along the busy thoroughfare.  I sat at an open air table and introduced myself to coca tea - it tasted OK.

Next morning I gasped for breath as I Drew on my socks, a bit like you do after running a 100 yard sprint.

We began our tour with a cultural walk around the city, and given an insight into the Bolivian mind with a history lesson.  In 1879, according to the guide, Chile invaded Bolivia's Atacama Desert in a bid to take ownership of the generous mineral deposits.  The Bolivians, in the middle of a two week fiesta, decided to finish their festivities before going out to defend the outlying territory.

Parliament Building

La Paz is the seat of government for Bolivia and the parliament building is lavish compared too much of La Paz.  We weren't told whether coca is drank in there, but it is so much a part of Bolivian culture, I'd expect it to be.

How Close Do You Go

Do you read a book to become immersed in how the characters cope with the situation in a whole new world, or do you want one person's dilemma as your escape route.

We know that by writing in the first person, the reader can get closest to the protagonist.  We are engaged in their ever mounting struggle, and care about the situation they are caught up in.  The individual becomes our friend and their cohorts our family.  But the author treats them as someone else's children who she can't stand.  The reader is kept hanging on, coping with a way of life that is alien, but gradually becoming familiar.



A lot of people write that way, but from the books I'm reading, it seems less popular at the moment.

This may be because it's easier to present a rounded impression of the story by delving into different points of view.  It allows you to develop each character by seeing them from conflicting angles.  We know from our own experience that everyone has good and bad characteristics; which is which, can be a matter of opinion.

A positive as seen from one person can be a negative in the eyes of someone else, especially if there has been friction between them.

The book I'm working on has four points of view.  At the time that I had it professionally critiqued, the reader followed Baz more than anyone else but other characters had their say.  One comment I had to face was that, on reading the manuscript, she didn't see it as Baz's story, because other people got in the way.

In the end, I stayed with several points of view because it is the way I want to write.  But in doing so, I have to accept that the reader will not fall in love with my main character to the same extent as they would have, if I'd written in the first person.