Day 3 (Team July)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Here is the post to update with any extracts, thoughts, or comments you might have for today.

Keep the fires burning!

(Considering the temperatures we're currently having over here, I expect spontaneous self-combusting on my part. *sighs*)

Comments

700 words so far

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Still working on the opening scene (all new writing). I'm finding this tough going. The closer I get to the end, the more the Inner Critic is screaming at me that my narrators are too similar and there are too many words and I shouldn't do it this way and and and and I'm beginning to panic.

Awful Poems by Awful Poets We Learned at School
(Maurice narrating)

Finally, with her mouth full, she asked me, "So, what do you think of Gabriel Hunter?" A bit of potato fell to her lips and her hand went to her mouth in apology. She swallowed back the rest. "I mean the poet."

"I know who you mean." Gabriel Hunter, the surviving poet of a doomed generation, or so he liked to style himself. God knows that was a month of lessons I could not get back. All spent learning this cantankerous rant of a poem "The Dove" which bestowed on its reader every bit as much displeasure as it contained in its endless stanzas. I remember being caned because I forgot it was written in anapaestic metre; for the life of me I still cannot remember what that is.

Reading the poem later by torchlight, at a more relevant phase in my life, with German bombers dropping their payload over my head as I huddled with hundreds of other Londoners in Oxford Circus underground station, I of course realised what as a disillusioned schoolboy I could never have seen: it was a masterpiece on the horror of war and the rage of women. It had been madly controversial in its day, which was well before I was forced to read a bowdlerised version in a dog-eared schoolbook in the middle of a drowsy, sun-filled classroom with a trapped fly buzzing and banging at the window. (I knew all too well how that fly felt.) By the time it reached my eyes, the controversy had disappeared and Hunter was regularly wheeled out to speak at any Great War related shindig. Then he pinched somebody's bottom at the wrong time and they silently decommissioned him. Since then he had lived in seclusion for years. Of course he could afford to: since the schools had published his poem in their anthology, he was filthy rich.

"Have you read many of his poems?" I enquired of Lucia, before realising that of course she hadn't, since he had written only one great one and hundreds of pieces of forgettable doggerel in the intervening years. But Lucia was not listening. Her loaded fork hovered halfway between the plate and her mouth, before being set down again.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Great progress!

Maurice's sarkyness comes across very clearly in this :)

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm thinking of deleting most of it though. I don't want Maurice hogging too much of the reader's emotional space. She should be coolly interested in him, no more.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

*nods* I can see what you mean - it is hard when characters start taking over the story! Good luck getting it sorted to your satisfaction.

thanks

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Wrote past it as far as just over 1,000 words. I just want this scene to be over. Just want this draft to be over...

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Beware the inner critic.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Oh he's a f**ker! And I'd avoided him up till now. I swear to God I'd throw him out the window only most of my brain would go with him...

[muninnhuginn]

Isn't he just.

I enjoyed this excerpt.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thank you :) I am going to make a cup of tea and come back and finish this bit up to the scene break. And I am not going to delete anything until the read-over when I'm on draft 3.

[elmey.livejournal.com]

Maurice has a distinctive voice. I don't think you need to worry about him. You write so well, don't panic--the nervousness is normal I think, when you've poured so much time and love into something. The book is really good, the things you've shown us are all beautifully written. Tell that inner critic to take a good long break. Through the next draft at least ;)

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, mrs. Means a lot to hear. I wrote past the inner critic for the moment anyway and got to 1000 words and then went to bed cos it was late. He is still hovering about but I think I have him in hand.

[saki101.livejournal.com]

I like how Maurice's self-critique is mixed with his critique of the poet as poet, as man and as social tool and how the frame of the observations about Lucia eating gives the timeframe (I'm thinking all that passed through Maurice's mind between bites). His ruminations convey so much information about Maurice and his society so succinctly!

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Aw, thank you :)

[akane42me.livejournal.com]

I liked getting inside Maurice's head, and his voice. It flows, just as his own thoughts would, reflecting on the poem and poet.
Don't do anything rash with what you've written, don't kill it with self-doubt. It's good writing, as usual.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thanks mrs. "Stet" - for the moment anyway :)