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Writing 2: Storylines

written by

Graham Mort
With contributions by:
• Kathy Page • Toby Forward • Dorothy Nimmo
• Ailsa Cox • Christopher Sykes • Helen Dunmore
• Gillian Brightmore • Mary Scott • Elizabeth North

About the author

Graham Mort has published five books of poetry and has won a number of
awards and prizes for his work. He also writes short fiction which has been
published and broadcast on BBC radio; he is a regular reviewer for a number
of literary magazines.

Trained as a teacher, he has worked in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, schools,

colleges and special schools. Since becoming a freelance writer, editor and
tutor in 1985 he has worked on many creative writing and combined arts
projects throughout the UK. Locations for these projects have been as diverse
as the South Bank Centre and the Outer Hebrides. He is a regular tutor for the
Arvon Foundation and also for the Taliesin Trust at Ty Newydd.

In 1982 Graham founded the poetry magazine and press 'Giant Steps' which
he edited for a number of years. He has worked as a fiction editor on the
Yorkshire Art Circus 'Springboard' series and as a consultant on Hodder &
Stoughton's 'Teach Yourself' books on creative writing. The creative writing
courses and manuals which Graham has written for OCA are drawn from
many years experience as a writer and teacher of creative writing.
Contents

Introduction
Aims and objectives of the course
Tutorial procedures
Day workshop / residential courses
On completing the course
Going further

1: The evolution of short fiction

Beginnings of the story
The first literature
Northern Europe and Britain
European and classical influences
Beginnings of the modern story
The twentieth century
Publishing and contemporary short fiction

2: Narrative techniques
Comment
Report
Description
Speech
The modes in concert

3: Ten short stories

Mud Bastard Graham Mort
Lambing Kathy Page
Assignment 1
 The Ice Bear Helen Dunmore
Juice Elizabeth North
Assignment 2
Avoiding Gatwick Mary Scott
The Wedding Cake Christopher Sykes
Assignment 3
The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers Gillian Brightmore
Lost Grandad Dorothy Nimmo
Assignment 4
Hubble Bubble Toby Forward
Just Like Robert de Niro Ailsa Cox
Assignment 5

4: Writing and drafting assignments

Some notes on drafting
Assignment length
Marking and assessment

5: Getting started

6: Reading list
Recommended reading
Selected background reading
Anthologies
Useful critical works
Literary magazines

Appendix A: contemporary writers featured in this course

Appendix B: if you plan to submit your work for formal assessment

 No Idea but in things.
William Carlos Williams

Some techniques are appropriate at some times and some at other times. Every
moment is different. Different things work. One isn’t wrong and the other right ...
there is no security, no assurance that because we wrote something good two months
ago we will do it again. Actually every time we begin we wonder how we ever did it
before. Each time is a new journey with no maps.
Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg

I’m only interested in everything.

Les Murray

A wasp is crawling on the floor

tumbling over, its motor fanatic.
He has smoked 5 cigarettes.
He has written slowly and carefully
with great love and great coldness.
When he finishes he will go back
hunting for the lies that are obvious.
Burning Hills, Michael Ondaatje

As a matter of fact in all my writing I tell the story of my life again and again. Only
the dilettantes try to be universal. A real writer knows that he is connected with a
certain people, a certain time, a certain environment and there he stays. There he
stays, I would say, and he doesn’t mind it because there is enough to investigate and
learn even from a small world.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Introduction

Creative Writing 2: Storylines has been devised as a specialist second-level

creative writing course for those students who have already successfully
completed the OCA Creative Writing 1: Starting To Write course. Our title is
derived from the belief that all literature, whether it be poetry, novels, travel-
writing or scripts is basically involved in telling a story. The method of
narration may be very complex, as in a novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses or
Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, but at root it is still a form of story. This
course has been developed to take you on from the foundation writing course
in order to develop your narrative skills. It may be that your ultimate aim is to
write novels, but the short story is a good, economical medium through
which to hone those skills.

A second-level OCA course involves students in having a much greater

degree of autonomy than a first-level one. We have not repeated any of the
information contained in the Starting To Write course and you will need to
review that text before reading this one. It contains a lot of important
information about language, structure, characterisation and methods of
controlling your work which will be crucial to your progress through this
course. You should think of Starting To Write and Storylines as being
complementary volumes in the same series and not as entirely separate ones.

Students who have come to this course after taking the second-level course
Creative Writing 2: The Experience of Poetry might expect the course materials to
contain the same sort of very detailed ‘technical’ information, but in fact that
kind of analysis of prose fiction is not possible in the same way. Instead, we
have chosen a broad approach which looks at the main aspects of narrative
technique, rather than an intense analysis which could all too easily become
academic rather than practical. Nor are the historical roots of modern short
fiction as easy to trace as those of poetry, which is our most ancient literary
form. Yet the notion of story-telling pervades all forms of oral and written
literature and still forms a powerful aspect of our everyday communication
with each other.

The theme of Storylines, that of the modern short story, places it in a very
recent tradition of literature; we have included a short essay on the
background to the evolution of modern short fiction and a section on
narrative technique. These essays have been written to stimulate the widest
possible interest in the evolution of narrative forms and to help the reader to
confront important questions about story-telling as a form of human
communication. In addition we have requested ten short stories from
contemporary writers and have asked them to discuss the process of writing
their story in an accompanying essay. Those discussions look at background
influences, the relationship between short fiction and other forms of writing
and the connections between form and content, or ‘form and theme’ as we
called it in The Experience of Poetry. Here we have approached that discussion
in a less formal way - by putting the author directly in touch with the student
- though one which we hope will be equally informative.

Some of the things those writers say about their own work or about writing in
general may seem contradictory, but we hope that they will begin to show the
sheer variety of approaches and thinking behind this very varied literary
form. We do not pretend that our examples are by any means exhaustive and
we indicate in the reading list where the student might look to find other
forms of short fiction. The range of such work is very wide, from ‘popular’ to
‘literary’ forms; we have concentrated here on the serious ‘literary’ side of
short fiction rather than commercial genres like the romance or detective
story.

Some students may have come to Storylines with a particular form or ‘genre’
of short fiction as their personal aim, but we have avoided trying to do justice
to such specialisms in these materials. To try to tackle those aspects of form
would have massively expanded the scope of the course and would possibly
have blurred its focus. Good writing in any genre should be our intention and
the selection of a particular genre in the first place is likely only to hamper our
imaginative scope. So although some of the stories in this course might now
be seen as belonging to a particular genre, that is not how they were
conceived in the minds of their authors. The outstanding short story is more
likely, through the sheer quality of its writing, to challenge the notion of
genre, rather than conform to it. So for the purposes of this course, ‘genre’ is
no more than a convenient way of referring to certain narrative conventions.

At this second level of study it is essential that the student be reading short
fiction as well as writing it - indeed that is the whole basis for these course
materials. When working in any literary form it’s important to understand the
range of work that has already been written, since any new work invariably
stands in some kind of relationship with it. This kind of knowledge also helps
the student understand how authors have played with conventional forms to
gain new effects and, in turn, helps to stimulate such innovation in their own
work. Unlike the poetry course, where source books are difficult to track
down and often not stocked in bookshops, short fiction is much more readily
available from bookshops and libraries. You will find the names of very well-
known short fiction writers cropping up in the introductory essay, but you
should read as widely as you possibly can and make your own judgements
about the quality of what you read. The reading list we have provided
mentions specific editions, but you will have little difficulty in locating the
vast majority of the authors simply by looking up their names in a bookshop
or library, since their work has often appeared in many editions from
different publishers. As well as tracking down well known writers of short
fiction you might like to investigate the new writing in contemporary
magazines by taking out a subscription to one. A list of British magazines
publishing short fiction appears at the end of the first section.

Storylines has been devised, edited and written by Graham Mort who wrote
The Experience of Poetry and co-wrote Starting To Write for OCA. He is an
experienced writer and creative-writing tutor and was responsible for
requesting the examples of short fiction that appear in this course. Many of
the contributors are OCA tutors and it was our intention to get them to speak
directly to students about their own work through the course materials. A list
of such contributors, with brief biographies and details of their publications,
appears in Appendix A.
As a graduate of the Starting To Write course, you will be familiar with the
structure of this one and the tutorial procedures. The course consists of five
assignments, which you will send to your tutor in the usual way, but this time
we have extended the duration of the course to approximately nine months.
This means that you will have six rather than four weeks in which to
complete each piece of work. This extended schedule should give you time to
read as well as to experiment with your writing. This course has been
designed to be read for enjoyment as well as for information. It offers a
disciplined but flexible course of study and will allow you to design your
own programme from the ideas it offers. More information on this can be
found in the section entitled Writing your assignments.

Aims and objectives of the course

The aims and objectives of this course build upon the work begun on the
foundation creative-writing course Starting To Write in order to:

• encourage an awareness of the development of modern short fiction

and to help students to develop their knowledge
• establish an awareness of contemporary short-fiction writing and
publishing
• explore what distinguishes short-fiction from other literary forms and
how it works
• encourage the writing of short fiction and to explore the relationship
between narrative technique and subject matter
• lay the foundations of a solid writing technique based on disciplined
drafting and revision of work
• provide a critical vocabulary for the evaluation of their own and
others’ work
• provide a flexible and supportive critical response to students’ work
• create a folio of short fiction which has undergone critical appraisal
and revision
• offer a graded assessment of work for those students who require it.
Tutorial procedures
These follow very closely the pattern laid down in Starting To Write. Upon
completing your application form you will have been allocated to a tutor who
is a specialist in both writing and teaching fiction. You should send them your
Student Profile and also a letter expanding on your profile by saying
something about your background, your experience of the foundation course
and why you were attracted to this fiction course. It may be that you have
requested the same tutor who guided you through Starting To Write, but in
some cases that tutor may not have been a short fiction specialist and you will
have been assigned to a tutor who is.

Before you write to your tutor you will have received these materials and
should already have spent some time reading them. Your introductory letter
might therefore also outline a scheme of work for your first assignment. Your
tutor will reply by introducing themselves to you; he or she will comment on
your idea for a first assignment and suggest a deadline for its submission. At
this stage you should be prepared to be guided by them as to what is a
realistic and suitable first submission since not all the pitfalls of this form of
writing will be obvious to you at this stage!

Assignments will be marked and returned to you with an accompanying

report. The report will contain detailed remarks about the story you have
written and will end with more general remarks about your progress and
development. Except in the case of special circumstances (which your tutor
should inform you of) your work should be returned to you within a fortnight
of it being posted off. For further information please read the section entitled
4: Writing and drafting assignments.

This is a sample from Creative Writing 2: Storylines. The full course contains 5 tutor-
assessed Assignments.