Llanito: en mi language

 

I have taken a hiatus from this blog for nigh on three years, maybe slightly longer. Life sometimes gets in the way - work, the dullness of routine that serves to numb creativity, the grind of getting each day done that stifles so many of those who might want, wish, would and should write their stories and tell their tales. Myself included, clearly.

But I've not been away entirely.

Since my last blog post, I have published a non-fiction book, co-written with my eldest daughter, Ciara Wild. Myth Monster Murder explored the story of Jack the Ripper, how the gruesome Whitechapel murders were, and are, mythologised by the media, how at least five women became the victims of his blood-happy knife, and of the gore-addicted press, victims themselves, perhaps, of rampant commercialism. Why did the murders take place and could they happen again, we ask ourselves in the book. I won't tell you the answer. The book is readily available on Kindle or on paperback through Amazon, Blackwells, Waterstones, Foyles....so treat yourselves!

Myth Monster Murderer by Jackie Anderson and Ciara Wild

That feat wore me out a little, so my writing became more of a dabbling, an early morning pre-breakfast gathering of thoughts and toying with the keys of my laptop, or the occasional scribbling in a notebook of disparate ideas, sentences and phrases that appear irrationally and unannounced into my mind and that occasionally drift together into a coherent whole.

But during that rather barren period, something has emerged in Gibraltar that is worthy of dusting down this blog and reawakening it. And that thing - or phenomenon is more approrpriate a word - is Patuka Press and its literary journal, the third issue being entitled: Llanito.

My copy of Llanito from Patuka Press

Here's where you can get your copy of LLanito

I spoke on GBC Breakfast about this back in July. It was a brief interview too early in the morning for me to be fully coherent so apologies to listeners, but in it I spoke not just about my writing and my book and the story I wrote that was published in 'Llanito', but also about the journal. 

I remember having conversations with fellow Gibraltarian Writers some years ago, shortly after a group of us worked on publishing an Anthology of Gibraltarian Poets (the first anthology of its kind), that centred around the vital importance of having a local outlet that would publish local writing - that is, writing that is not just produced locally, but by writers that have a strong connection with Gibraltar, who may be Gibraltarians living abroad, or people who had spent time in Gibraltar and had stories to tell. 

Writers might well love their craft, they might well be brilliantly skilled storytellers, wordsmiths, playwrights, poets, but if they cannot reach out to readers through some form of publishing, then their words are lost to the rest of us. And that is a literary tragedy, especially in Gibraltar, where there are so many tales to be told and its writers are bursting to tell them.

More than that; we want to tell them in our language, in Llanito, in the words that shape who and what we are as a people, and as an individual person.

In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of initiatives that have started to provide recognition for Gibraltar's writers, and outlets for their work. Among many other features, Gibraltar now has a Literature Week which this year is going to form part of the Gibraltar Literary Festival; there is a local book shop at last, which stocks works by local writers and about Gibraltar; there is increasing recognition, academically and among Gibraltarians, that our language is a clear and valid language that is part of our cultural identity. Social media and interest from GBC through various programmes such as Between the Lines, has helped tremendously. Young writers are daring to write and publish and not worry about whether what they have written is 'literature' or not; they do not care about meeting some vague and undefined standard of what is literature and don't question whether they can stand up to comparison with Dickens, Byron, Orwell or Rowling. Who wants to be like all the others anyway? We are who we are and say what we say and from what I'm reading of Gibraltarian writers, some can proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with other writers from other countries, or spine to spine on the shelves of any bookshop or library anywhere.

The joy of seeing this growth in local writing is immeasurable, more so when seeing that so much is now written in Llanito. Despite the decriers and nay-sayers, and I am not going to waste any energy wading into that argument, we are finally openly exploring what it means to be 'us', to speak in our own language, to write our own stories. What Patuka Press has achieved with Llanito is to put a stamp of approval, a public accreditation if you like, on writing in llanito. And that goes a long way to saving our dwindling language. As Charles Durante put it in his essay 'Llanito: Grammar, Etymology and Identity' in LLanito:

    "It would be a very sad day if Llanito were to disappear, as some have gleefully            predicted. It would be like losing a limb, a form of spiritual emasculation."

I can't help but agree. It would be a tragedy with far-reaching effects; the loss would be far more visceral than the loss of a gathering of words.

So the impact of Patuka Press and its collections of stories, poems and essays should not be understated. To local readers it provides an affirmation of who and what we are culturally; we laugh and nod our heads in recognition of ourselves and our community, we marvel at the novel and the new that is being created day to day by talented Gibraltarians, we gasp at the variety of imaginative skill on show between the pages. That this third issue explores and celebrates Llanito, hablando de mi people en mi language, is testament to the surfacing of our love for Gibraltarian culture, our willingness to explore talk about what makes us us, the sunshine and the rain, the beautiful and the ugly, the whole gamut of Gibraltarianness, warts and all. The journal is both an achievement in itself, and I hope, it is also the soil in which our literary growth as a people will take root and find succour.

The next steps for Gibraltarian literature? It is, despite the decriers and nay-sayers among us, a growing, living thing but it is still young, it still needs a helping hand from those that can and from the whole community. Here are some ideas:

• Another publishing house. Patuka Press and Calpe Press and self-publishing may be wonderful things but we need the competitiveness of alteranative publishers to hone our skills and thrust our writing output into the realms of quality and not just quantity.
• Setting a high bar. Again, quality. It isn't just about work being published because it's been written or even because it's good. It's got to be good enough.
• A writing residency, where the writer in residence (perhaps selected from numerous applications to the National Book Council) works for 1 - 2 years as a writer, running workshops, producing work, organising readings, running writing groups, attending seminars, book and literary events in other countries, mentoring writers and so on.

Our literature is being read and analysed across the world. It's got to reach globally high standards and all those editors and publishers working with Gibraltarian writing, whether a news channel or a freebie magazine, a publisher of books or a literary journal, or a competition judge have to start to apply a bar. It is not enough for a writer to submit work and be published, it has to be quality work.

And while all that is going on, get yourself a copy of Llanito. I picked one up from Amazon because I happened to be in UK when it came out, but Bookgem sells it. And then get the other two issues: Shit Jobs and Borders and Boundaries. You'll find one of my stories published in each of the three editions, and I'm not just proud that my submissions were selected for publication; I am privileged.

Shit Jobs by Patuka Press

Borders and Boundaries by Patuka Press

Place and time and stories

Writers and Place

In the past couple of  years, I have become increasingly interested in how stories link us to a particular time or a particular place. Or the reverse, time and place can influence and inspire the stories that we tell. 

This happens the world over, in all of our stories. Dickens wrote about the London of his lived experience, and left us with a legacy of an intimate understanding of the slums and rookeries of the capital and with what amounts to a familiarity to the characters that peopled it. Chaucer had the same effect when he told his 'Canterbury Tales.' 

Writing Gibraltar

Closer to home, Mark Sanchez achieves a similar effect with his stories set in modern Gibraltar, bringing to life this tiny city in southern Europe that is not  British except politically, nor European nor Spanish nor yet its own identifiable self. In 'Jonathan Gallardo' we meet the Gibraltarians of the seventies and eighties in a narrative infused with the dark humour that is redolent of the people who live on the Rock. In 'The Escape Artist', we see the world through the eyes of a Gibraltarian student attending university in UK, and we encounter the differences and similarities between the working class Gibraltarian student and the 'upper class' Gibraltarian student, as Gibraltar works its way through the legacy of the British colonial class system.

Almost every piece of writing will contain the echoes of the writer's lived experience. Camus' life in North Africa shines through his novels "L'Etranger" and "La Peste"; Tahar ben Jelloun's Morocco and the urge to seek a new life in Europe speaks at us through the lines of his novel "Partir." Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is as much a novel of its place and time as is Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and Cervantes' "Don Quixote". Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie creates a detailed picture of Nigeria and the Biafran war in her novel "Half of a Yellow Sun". I could go on...

As writers, we are the sum of all our lived experiences, of the experiences of the places where we live and the people who inhabit our lives. This emerges in our stories.

The reason writing is such a critically important part of Gibraltar's cultural growth, part of the evolution of the Gibraltarian identity, is because it is through writing our individual stories that those lived experiences are recorded and transmitted to others, to those outside Gibraltar, and to the future generations of Gibraltarians. 

We are growing our body of literature, slowly but steadily, and when a Gibraltarian book is published and talked about in the universities and book shops and cafe's of the rest of the world, I am proud and delighted in equal measure. When our local writers' work is published and read around the world, like playwright Julian Felice's plays are performed in London and in USA, we should be excited that our stories are reaching out from our home and touch the lives of others. When our story tellers like Amy Montegriffo and Elena Sciatiel win writing competitions hosted in other countries, as they have done recently, or like Jonathan Pizarro and Giordano Durante, are published in international magazines and journals, it's wonderful, both for them as budding writers and for Gibraltar. 

Echoes and Ripples by Amy Montegriffo


Poems by Giordano Durante published in Blue Gum


I found Pizarro's story, "La Frontera," remarkably touching, because I was one of those whose family left to live in England because the frontier was closed and those feelings and experiences were caught and expressed in the story of another. My experiences were no longer unique - there were others who shared them. There came a sense of belonging as I read this story, and that is precisely what good literature, influenced by place and time achieves. You can read it here:

Untitled Writing: La Frontera by Jonathan Pizarro


And when poets like Jonathan Teuma and Gabriel Moreno perform their poetry to international audiences in London and Madrid, Gibraltar's stories, in our words, our accents, truly are heard. Each one of those writers are deserving of all of our support, especially now, in the wake of a pandemic that may be focusing our attention on economic growth rather than on the wealth that artistic growth can bring to our society.

Gabriel Moreno

Jonathan Teuma performing 'Friendship' online for GBC Open Day

As for those writers who are perhaps not publishing regularly, or have not yet sold their work on, or have not submitted their work for publication, their stories are also our stories. Take Omkeltoum Serroukh's story, "Growing Old." 

This is a recollection of the writer's experience of rural Morocco. Omkeltoum was born in Morocco who lives and works and raises her family in Gibraltar. The link between Morocco and Gibraltar is ancient and endures. Her story reminded me of my Grandfather's stories of his years in Morocco when he spent his teens in Tangiers and Melilla before the war. The story touches old memories in me. It is raw, written in a way where the Moroccan voice echoes in the ears; the English is perhaps not smooth but the language sounds authentic. The story reveals a simple rustic life through the eyes of a young person raised in the city and it touches on the enduring world-wide theme of youth and age, of the awakening of the young to the loneliness of old age. My thanks to Omkeltoum for permitting me to publish it on this blog. I hope you all enjoy reading it. You can find it here, in the Simply Stories pages of Write Gibraltar.

Simply Stories - Growing Old by Omkeltoum Serroukh

Locked down and blocked up

Writer's Block during lockdown

While social media is bubbling with samples of creativity and productivity during lockdown, many other creatives are wondering why they feel 'blocked'. Periods of solitude are often essential for focus, for losing yourself in your creative zone and coming up with your own personal masterpiece, in whatever medium you happen to prefer. Theoretically, having to stay off work and stay home for a prolonged period should give many of us the time and space we have been craving for. Writer's block is a well-documented phenomenon - whether you agree it exists or is just a temporary frame of mind - but perhaps it feels a bit bizarre that it should happen now, when we all seem to have more time and space to be the writers we want to be.

Puzzled as to why I personally was struggling with my own lack of wit or energy to apply to my own writing, I called a couple of friends to see how they were getting on. Here's what they told me:

June

June is in her late middle age and a semi-retired business consultant with a small portfolio of loyal clients that keep her linked to her profession while giving her the time to also write professionally. She is an author of school text books, and her enthusiasm for quality writing being key to communicating information effectively knows no bounds despite the dryness of some of the subject matter (maths, stats and economics).

Me: June, how's it going? How are you finding lockdown is affecting your writing?

June: Hello, dear, nice to hear from you. All well at my end, and busy, busy busy.

Me: So much for people have loads of time to be creative! Are you managing to write?

June: Of course I am. In fact, I'm making great progress with my latest project, and I'm planning out another. And I'm thinking of co-writing a book on the economic impact of the pandemic and the future of small businesses.

Me: I'm impressed, but how do you manage to keep motivated.

June: Good planning and good organisation. You know I like my routine, so  haven't changed it at all except allow more time to go to the supermarket and queue, and then take the shopping round to my neighbour who is in her seventies and can't go herself. I get up at the same time, go to the garden and do my Tai Chi (Note - June used to go to the local park with friends to do this but lockdown rules means she follows the routine at home instead). Then I do any client work that needs to be done - I've just started using Zoom, it's marvellous! - by which time its usually a stop for lunch. Then a call around the kids to make sure they're ok, a bit of housework and by three pm I'm back on the computer and writing. In fact, I'd say the routine works really well, because I'm writing better and faster than before. Perhaps it's a sense of being determined to get the project finished before the bloody virus gets me!

Me: Doesn't Neville (June's other half) interrupt you?

June: He's too busy painting the back room. We're hoping that when all this is over that Julian (youngest son) will come and live here. He's not at all happy alone so far away since he and Imogen split up.

Me: I guess the peace and quiet is helping you stay inspired and creative. No writer's block then.

June (laughs): Oh well, you know I think writer's block is a myth. You might think you've got no inspiration, but inspiration itself is a myth. The best inspiration is an unmovable deadline and the vision of the invoice you're going to send your client or the cheque your publisher has promised you. All you have to do is knuckle down and put words on paper. Once you start forcing the pen, the brain follows, grudging or otherwise. And I don't listen to the news until suppertime when I'm done writing for the day. By the next morning, the bleakness of what is happening has thinned somewhat!

Shefali

Shefali is in her thirties, single and a vet working in a small animal clinic. She has continued working during the pandemic, because pets continue to get sick and need treatment, coronavirus or not, although the clinic is providing emergency treatment only and she is working from home several days a week. Shefali is always inspired by the animals she encounters daily and by their owners, and enjoys writing stories for children.

Me: Hiya Shefali, how are things with you?

Shefali: All good, thank you,  pretty busy as usual. I'm working from home quite a bit, doing call outs as and when I have to but generally managing to give advice to owners over the phone and offer prescriptions etc. I've been going into the clinic either mornings or evenings and keeping the admin under control. It is a lot quieter than usual though. It's a bit weird, to be honest.

Me: Are you still managing to write?

Shefali: Well, funny you should ask but I'm really struggling. I started a new story at the beginning of the year; remember I said that I was going to try my hand at YA fiction? But I just can't settle down to write. 

Me: Why do you think that is?

Shefali: I don't know at all. I do have a bit more time on my hands, and you see on Facebook and on TV all these people learning new skills and performing music, and all I can do is lounge about in my PJs eating chocolate! Seriously, when this is over I'm going to have to get back to horse riding and work it all off! But as for the writing, I don't know. When I'm at work, I am focused, caring, I know exactly what I'm doing, but I find that in my spare time I feel tired, I don't want to think much and when I try to think about the story, or characters, or plot, I feel confused, a bit lost really.

Me: Writer's block then?

Shefali: I guess it is. Or maybe just a way for my anxiety to manifest. I feel perfectly fine most of the time, but I am finding it hard to be away from family. I speak to them every day on Skype and WhatsApp - in fact, I've spoken more to my aunties in India in these past few weeks than I had in months - but when I try to work out what I want to do in my free time, I'm at a loss. So, other than jotting down some research notes for the story, I have not got very far. But I am reading.

Me: Does reading help?

Shefali: Reading is so relaxing. I'm hoping it will eventually unlock my creativity again, and get me writing. I've just started Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall". I got the whole trilogy now that "The Mirror and the Light" is out so I'm giving it a go during lockdown. And I've set myself a target to have all the character summaries for my story completed by next weekend. Perhaps if I get all that going, I will get my mojo back! (And I hope she does because her stories are great!).

Colin

Colin writes poetry. He's a teacher in a comprehensive school and has been working incredibly long hours helping his students through this difficult time of uncertainty.

Me: Colin, how are you and the family?

Colin: Hey, good to hear from you. We're all well, and the kids have taken to lockdown surprisingly well, which Maggie is delighted about because I am working mainly from home and we were worried that I would not be able to concentrate with all of us in the house together. But so far so good.

Me: I guess with delivering lessons online and assessments and grading the A-levels, you haven't had time to write?

Colin: You've got it in one. Well, I have drafted a couple of poems, but these are literally in pencil on the back of a scrap of paper I was doodling  on during a Zoom meeting with the heads of department (I probably shouldn't admit to that!).

Me: Interesting, so where did the inspiration come from for those poems? The pandemic?

Colin: Not really. Not about people getting sick or the heroism of medical and care workers. I was thinking about the disengaged kids, and that the risk of them falling away from engagement with society is so much higher  now. The kids whose home lives are not supportive of education, who have so many disadvantages to overcome anyway, and now this. Or the kids who are vulnerable and at risk, and of course, we're not really seeing them now so we can't help them if help is needed. That's what's keeping me awake at night far more than A level results, and that's what came out in the poems. But don't misunderstand me - they need a lot of polishing up before I can really call that gathering of words actual poems!

Me: But at least you have been creative...

Colin: At the end of the day,  it doesn't matter whether as a writer you can be productive during lockdown. What matters is that we get through it. And perhaps one day, we can refer back to this experience for inspiration in our poetry or whatever it is we write. No-one has to do anything during this time. We are all different and we are all trying to survive. 

Quite an interesting mix of thoughts. Perhaps writer's block is a figment of the imagination, an excuse for not knuckling down. Perhaps it is that we cannot always be creative when we are anxious, or overworked, or tired. Or perhaps we just need to relax and let our minds mull. Shakespeare might have written "King Lear" during his version of lockdown, but none of us is called upon to be Shakespeare and right now, being ourselves is perhaps the best we can be. So my lesson? If I can't concentrate on writing, go and do something else. Like Shefali, I'll get my mojo back eventually! And like Colin, a scrap of paper with a selection of words is a start. I'd love to be half as organised as June though!

Just Write It

What's your story during this difficult time? Image courtesy of Pixaby

Just Write it!

That's all you need to do. You're a writer with a story to tell, or words bursting to emerge and characters that are chattering in your mind clamouring to be let out. Or you might not have thought of yourself as a writer before but with a bit of time on your hands in this coronavirus pandemic lockdown situation we're in, you might want to give writing stories - or poems - a go. And if you do, I'm more than happy to share them on this blog!

So, if we have a bit more time on our hands for writing, let's just do it. Don't worry about whether you have a writing degree or an English GCSE. You don't need these - if you can speak, you can tell a story. It doesn't matter what you've every learned at school - there are online tools and perhaps friends who will help you with correcting your script. And if you get stuck with the writing down of it, then voice record it and see if a  helpful friend will type it up for you. Just get the story out there.

But where to start?

Here are some of the ways that I use to get a story going:

1. Who? The characters are really important. Who is the story about? What are they like? Where do they come from? What makes them individuals? What do they look like / sound like / smell like? What problems are they facing that your story is going to try to resolve? What adventures are they going to have? What are their strengths and what are their flaws? Understand your character and you've already gone a long way into getting your story going.
2. What? What is going to happen? Where does the story start? How are the different events sequenced so that they take you to the end? And what will happen in the end? It's quite useful to set out a list of events and then number them in the order they will take place. Or write each one out on a post-it note and stick to the wall and move them around until you are happy with the order of events. Whatever works for you.
3. Where? The locations for the events that take place in your story are really important. Places have a way of affecting people and influencing their actions. One of the joys of writing is that your stories can take you anywhere you like. Perhaps you want to write a story set in Gibraltar in the present, or about the Australian outback in the nineteenth century, or on the moon. But visualise the settings, and find ways to describe them so that the reader gets the sense that they are real - even if they're not.
4. When? Is your story set in the past or present or future? Is it going to happen over the course of a year, a lifetime or an hour? It's up to you - another joy of writing is the freedom you have to unleash your imagination. When your story takes place might affect how your character acts, or speaks or dresses.
5. Why? This is linked to your theme. What is your story really about? Is it about love, or joy, or grief, or death, or war or anger, or jealousy, or fear? Is it about bullying, or racism, or addiction, or depression, or disability, or courage, or hope, or struggle, or success....there are so  many themes. What is at the heart of your story?

And by the time you've spent a half hour or so jotting down your thoughts on the Who, What, Where, When and Why of your story, you're eager to get writing.

This is where we often brake to a screeching halt and find ourselves with no words that we feel are adequate for starting a story. So, what do we do about that?

The dreaded blank page of writer's block! Image courtesy of Pixabay

Just write. It doesn't matter that it doesn't sound great at first, once you get those first couple of sentences out of the way, the rest of the story will come. And once it's written, it can be revised and rewritten and you can write better starting sentences. You will work away at that story, changing this and improving that, until it's ready to read.

And when you think it is ready to read, read it out loud. To yourself, or the dog or your plants. If the words you have written sit comfortably in your  mouth, then they will be happily listened to or read by your audience. 

Read him your story to test it out! Image courtesy of Pixabay

And then you've got your story.

Simply Stories

At which point, I'd love to read it! I am going to post a story each day for a week in a series called "Simply Stories" which I hope my readers will enjoy and that I hope will trigger them into writing their own. And I will publish stories sent in to me by you as guest writers on this blog.

Please send in your stories - I'm looking forward to reading them.

Pandemics, plagues and the human need to write it

Scene from The Last Judgement by Bosch courtesy of Pixabay

These are strange times we are living. I expected to write this blog post at the start of spring and write about the sorts of inspiration that spring has for writers, how to go out and observe and write about nature, or changing seasons - something on those lines. Or I would have tackled a review of the workshops on short story writing that I was involved with during Gibraltar's Youth Arts Jamboree just a week or two ago. 

Coronovirus - image courtesy of Pixabay

Now the workshops seem like forever ago, Gibraltar along with much of Europe is on the verge of a coronavirus pandemic lockdown and the world seems a far more terrifying place than it did last month. So how do writers reflect this? How do we work with this experience?

In some ways, a pandemic, like the plagues of old, give rise to countless stories.  A twentieth century example would be La Peste, by Albert Camus. We are pretty well served by apocalyptic fiction, post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction, fictional epidemics which wipe out almost all human life and others that give rise to different forms of life or even the living dead (I'm not sure we can refer to zombies as any kind of life form!). 

If reading fiction stories using these as a theme is an entertaining form of escapism, writing them is even better. Writing about disease and devastation has fascinated the world for centuries. Stories have been the means for spreading information since time immemorial. Telling stories about experiences, tales from the experiences of other nations, was how information spread from one community to the other in the days  before mass printing and, of course, the internet. Whether about real or fictional plagues, famines, diseases, war or natural disasters, people learn and explore their thoughts, emotions and ideas through stories.

We are flooded at the moment by news reports, much of it sensationalist, some of it false and misleading. What is particularly interesting now, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic the like of which has not been seen by anyone living, is that people have taken to writing about it. Writing down thoughts and experiences - whether electronically or on paper - seems such a natural response. We are recording and interpreting and communicating on a number of levels, especially when we write fictional accounts of the experience.

And, of course, I don't need to go into the therapeutic effects of writing. Even writing a diary entry of your observations on the pandemic will help to rationalise and allay those fears and anxieties, which even the most logical and calm of us will experience. Disease, plague, epidemics, pandemics - these are all emotive words. These are all situations which are extreme and which bring out some extreme reactions in people. 

Think about the scenes replayed on social media of panic buying and empty shelves in the supermarket, and of otherwise mild-mannered people fighting over a bag of macaroni. Panic spreads faster than the virus because human beings are emotional creatures; our instinct for self-preservation often over-rides our sense that self-preservation is best served through social support and communal action. What can I say? As a writer, these are all great themes to use in your next novel! But, on a therapeutic level, those fears and that anxieties and that sense of panic are better worked out on the page than in the streets.

This New York Post piece is an excellent example of what good journal writing can achieve. When you read this, it gives you an instant snapshot of what life was like in Crema in Italy during the lockdown. Perhaps writers in Gibraltar will do similar:

My Lockdown Diary

It will be interesting to see what books and films and poems and artworks emerge from the Covid19 pandemic. I would urge all writers to turn to their notebooks now. If we are having to stay at home for a period, then writing a journal of events, personal and national, would be a starting point. If the writing never goes beyond a journal entry, it will be a concrete, written record of the pandemic in Gibraltar, a part of our history. 

But perhaps, that journal entry will one day inspire a poem, a short story, a plethora of novels, a film, a painting. It will be your unique take on the Covid19 pandemic in Gibraltar, and one day it will be part of Gibraltar's literary history.

What will you be writing about the 2020 pandemic?

In a Flash

Last week I entered a story into a competition. As I've said in a previous post, writing to competition rules is good discipline and a great (and you never know, possibly profitable) way of practicing the craft of writing.

With a 1000 word limit, this particular competition qualified as flash fiction and, my word, that was tough! I am naturally verbose and this spills over into my writing, but the risk I take with rambling on is that I bore my readers and they put down my writing, never bothering to finish reading the story. So writing to a tight word count is my way of training myself to cut the crap out of my writing. And as a proofreader for several publications, I know just how much of what people write and think is essential, can be cut out, the effect of which is often to tighten a piece of writing until it right to convey the message with maximum impact. Less is more, so they say and in this respect, "they" are right. 

So  here are some of my thoughts on how to write a concise story. This can be applied to other types of writing: features, letters, reports, monologues, scripts, blog posts...

• Write your first draft freely, then work on it - this lets you freely explore your ideas and lets the creativity flow
• Then rework the piece taking all unnecessary words out - these are words that don't add anything to the meaning of the sentence. Like "very" or "really".
• Use strong nouns and verbs and you can get rid of adjectives that don't add to the sense of what you are writing. Try it out, it works.

• Do you need to elaborate on how someone was talking when using dialogue? Readers can become distracted when faced with a variety of ways of speaking. Have them focus on what is being said rather than on whether they whispered softly (how else would you whisper?), or shouted loudly (ouch, too much!). "Said" is often all you need.
• Pick a key emotion on which to hang your story.
• Limit your images: one or two strong images make a more lasting impact than many crammed into a tight word limit.
• Pick a key theme and stick to that one - there is no room in 1000 or fewer words to elaborate or complicate.
• Limit the number of scenes since world building and context setting can take up much of your word count.
• Limit to just one or two characters - make it personal and make it focused and the reader will be swiftly hooked, engaged and rewarded.
• Use a small idea for a small story and reserve big ideas for longer pieces of writing.
• Limit the viewpoints - one character, one viewpoint tends to work best.

Final tip? Just write and enjoy the process. Work hard enough and you may be rewarded for it in a competition win or publication.

Stories all around

Photo by Surachai courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We understand our world in stories.  We tell stories to inform each other of events, to explain circumstances, to reflect on history, to investigate our thinking and explore concepts.  Some stories are make-believe and some are real, but what we do know, is that as human beings, our understanding and knowledge is based on the stories that we create and tell.

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, 

stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

 
― Philip Pullman

March in Gibraltar was very much the month of the story.  It all started right at the beginning of the month with World Book Day.  I joined a number of local authors at the John Mackintosh Hall where we set out our publications in the gallery overlooked by the exhibited works of young local artists. The focus of my day was the mini-workshops that I ran, aimed at encouraging local writers, or anyone who wants to write but won't go as far as calling himself a writer, to join a writers' group.

Christiana Fagan talking to a group of school children about her beautiful Nature Diary which she wrote and illustrated with water colours.

It was very much a day where we all focused on stories, local authors told the stories of their books and the school kids listened to the story telling session laid on by the Gibraltar Cultural Services department in the theatre upstairs.  At the workshops we looked at where we can find inspiration for stories, and how we can create a beginning to make reader's mouths water with anticipation, a middle filled with unexpected delights and an ending to savour. We are now looking forward to getting together later in April to see if we really can get a writers' group off the ground and create a home for all those stories in the making.


My review of World Book Day for Mum on The Rock

The month continued with the Drama Festival, and an absolute feast of dramatised stories it was.  I was lucky to attend almost every performance, missing only some of the junior ones because these were staged earlier in the day and clashed with work. I was hugely impressed with the Drama Festival, mainly because some of the theatre groups took on the challenge of some very difficult plays and pulled these off brilliantly well.  Notable to me were the polished performances of Jean-Paul Lugaro and Samantha Barrass in "Constellations" by Nick Payne, which won Samantha the Best Actress award, and the ensemble of young players from the Bayside and Westside Drama Group in Berkoff's "The Trial".  This latter play was mesmerizing from beginning to end and won the brilliant young Billy Snell as Joseph K the Best Actor award.  Super stories well told, it was a hugely enjoyable week of theatre for me.

My review of the Gibraltar Drama Festival 2016 for Mum on The Rock

We also had the deadline for the Gibraltar Spring Short Story competition in March.  Now, much as I love stories, I find these hard to write, especially with a 1000 word limit.  I did submit one, dubiously, and I shall wait and see how it fares, which is one of the things I like about submitting work: the anticipation.  Of course, the deep gloom that then descends on me after rejection or failure is something else.  I hope lots of other writers submitted too.  The short story competition is one of the very few local outlets for writers to showcase their work.

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For me, the story moved on and at the end of the month during the Easter weekend, I volunteered my writing skills to keeping the media and the world of pool updated during the International Pool Association's Gibraltar leg of the World Series tournament.  I have never been a writer of anything sporty before, so it was a first for me, but I think I've found a new skill.  I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge and getting to grips with something very out of my comfort zone, and I kept Facebook sites and Twitter feeds busy with reports on the matches.  A new way for me to look at and tell a story.

IPA Professional World Series Gibraltar 2016 page

From the month of stories to a month in which I am working on a new piece of fiction...because I just love stories. 

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