First fictionfire course imminent!

I've been adding more material to the fictionfire website, so this poor old blog isn't getting much of a look in just now! There's less than two weeks now to my first fictionfire course, on the 21st - it's called Get that Novel Up and Running: a pretty self-explanatory title. The week after that I'll be running a day course on plot. So, if you're interested, get over to http://www.fictionfire.co.uk/ and book! If you're not going to attend yourself but you know anybody who might be interested, do please spread the word!

Shortlisted!

This week I've been continuing to work hard on my fictionfire site and am really pleased with how it's going. I've added Paypal to the courses section - I'd intended to do this anyway but the situation with the postal strikes has really pushed me into action. I'm also having fun doing the 'Quote of the Week' page - I love ferreting out a literary quote and then writing a mini-essay about it. So I hope if you haven't been over to the site yet, you'll take a look at http://www.fictionfire.co.uk/

I entered the Bridport Prize some months back and just this week thought 'I wonder what's happening with that?' so checked out the site only yesterday - it said that winners had already been notified by telephone. Sigh. So it was an absolute delight to receive an email today telling me that my story, 'Mind This', had actually been shortlisted. Of course it would have been nice to have been in the top thirteen prizewinners, but to reach the shortlist when there are thousands of entries is pretty damn good too and has given me a boost! Apparently my name will be posted on the site with the other shortlisted entrants in late November. I'll definitely be having another go next year, although to be honest I don't write short stories all that often these days. They tend to be like the poems I also write - something that just comes to me and is expressed quickly (even though later worked on relentlessly, sometimes over a number of years), whereas novels are a more conscious act of development and construction, slow to brew, rich, complicated, frustrating, rewarding. I do think it's good to pursue different forms of writing - I even wrote a play in August, in my own Scots dialect, and found that a new and somehow liberating experience, even though the constraints of dramatic form might have seemed restrictive. When you find yourself 'stuck' with one particular story or genre, try your hand at something else and maybe it will help to bring back your writing mojo.

fictionfire launches!

Well, I'm still working on my website but I just can't wait any longer to let you all know about it! I've been talking for years about setting up my own creative writing courses: I've built up a decade of experience in this field and have worked - and still will - for the University's Summer School programme and at Winchester at the Writers' Conference. But I've been feeling increasingly restive, wanting to run my own show my own way. So, fictionfire has been born!

I'm starting with a couple of day courses at Trinity College here in Oxford. The first, on the 21st November, is called Get that Novel Up and Running (self-explanatory, don't you think?) and the second, on the 28th, is Blindfold into the Maze: Plotting your Novel. I chose these as my starting subjects because so many writers struggle to find the nerve to make the transition from short fiction to tackling a novel - and then, when they do, they find managing plot a daunting prospect. I've presented these courses before so some of you out there reading may well have attended.

Full details of the courses, price and venue are on my website, http://www.fictionfire.co.uk/ so I do hope you'll take a look. It feels pretty damn good to use the words 'on my website' because for a technophobe like myself to have designed my own site is quite a triumph, believe me. The past few weeks have been a vertiginously steep learning curve - and tears of sheer bleedin' frustration have been shed along the way. I've also had a lot of fun too, selecting the photos and the overall look of fictionfire. I hope to learn more and make it look even better.

I'm still adding material to the site. I'll be offering editing/critique services imminently, and I'm also posting other material which I hope you'll find interesting. I'm a complete magpie when it comes to collecting snippets and quotes and anything we can share to inspire us as writers and keep us hanging on in there when the world of publishing is a cold and hostile place.

So, I hope to welcome you to fictionfire soon. Thaw out your imagination, fire up your faith, ignite your creativity (and other such conflagratory images)!

One Just Asks the Servants to Do It

I'm sorry I've not posted for a couple of weeks but my new enterprise has been taking up all my time and energy. I'm very excited about it and I hope to post about it in the next few days.

In the meantime, this caught my eye in The Author yesterday - somebody had written in to say that in an interview with The Metro , Katie Price, a literary artist of wide renown and huge sales, when asked about how she goes about writing (and we're always fascinated, aren't we, by how other writers do it) answered that her ghostwriter 'sits down and writes it all. I don't have time, I'm far too busy and wouldn't be able to do it. But I come up with the storyline and then she puts the rest of it together.'

Shock revelation!

I'm reminded of Edith Wharton - now, she really was a literary artist and her books are brilliant - but her way of composing was to sit up in bed and cast the pages as she filled them to the ground, whereupon a minion would gather them up for transcription.

Where are the decent servants (aka ghosts/amanuenses/gofers/dogsbodies/spouses-with-no-rival-ambitions) to be had when one wants them? No wonder I struggle with my Art!

Jaundiced Teacher Struggles to Hold Onto Ideals

Term has started. The last opportunity for candidates to be examined for the old-style A levels will be in January - otherwise it's the new form of A level all the way. Now, it may be that I'm just a crabbit old bag these days, but, God, I just can't find any joy in 'teaching to the test' and particularly this test. Time was, a couple of geological epochs ago, that I taught books. I taught students about pertinent themes, explored structure and language, and hopefully conveyed the joy I feel when analysing a beautiful piece of literature. It was not unknown for my students to discover they actually liked their books and that they'd been guided to an enriched appreciation of said books. I was always keen on explaining the historical and literary context for the books because this was part of the enriching process. But the bottom line always was the text itself, and exam questions often took the form of a passage for close analysis: 'Here is a scene from 'Antony and Cleopatra': how does the language used convey the relationship between the two main characters? How would the audience react to them at this point in the play? Support your answer with close reference to the text.' I've seen all sorts of changes over the years: texts allowed in exams, texts allowed to be annotated, coursework options allowed, modular repeated sittings of exams. We teachers take a deep breath, adjust, soldier on.

The latest changes, though, drive me to despair. This is not English as I perceive it, nor is it English as I would like to teach it. We're losing sight of the texts: they're swamped in a morass of politically correct contextual analysis, where the key word 'synoptic' rears its head over and over, where texts have to be related to one another to such a degree that we can no longer see them as individual pieces of art, where the notion of 'different interpretations' is so dominant, that students are bewildered. I have always known, for goodness sake, that there is no 'right' way to read a text, that we all bring our cultural and gender-based selves to a reading and this will affect how a text strikes us - but now the joy of analysing a line or enjoying a plot is submerged in jargon-heavy, abstract generalisations which are fundamentally as empty as city councils with their talk of 'beaconicity' and 'outreach programmes.'

I have become Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, I suppose.

Here is a sample question from an old-form A level paper, on Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale': 'How important do you think the relationship between Perdita and Florizel is to the play as a whole?' You may argue this is simplistic, but you know where you are with a question like this and even though the wording is simple it does not preclude the bright student from bringing the deeper issues and themes of the play into their argument. How about this on 'Measure for Measure': ''In spite of the fact that men govern Vienna, it is the women who have the real power.' To what extent do you agree with this view of 'Measure for Measure'?' This is a straightforward, argument-based question, with the key phrase 'To what extent' signalling to the candidate where they should go with their structure.

The new A level has cut the six module structure to four. Two of these modules are coursework units, the choice of texts for which is left to the teacher. The boards are offloading responsibility onto teachers in a big way. Teachers feel obligated to choose texts which will provide the easiest route to getting a good grade. This means that texts and areas of literature which may be more challenging are by-passed. The proportion of coursework to exam is too large. Shakespeare, on OCR, doesn't feature till the A2 year.

Here's a sample A2 essay question, focussing on three texts for one question, shackled together by the rule of 'one text post-1990, one text poetry': 'Writers present us with a clear sense of values. These values are drawn into particularly sharp focus when a chief concern of their writing is emotion.' Comment on and analyse the connections and comparisons between at least two texts you have studied in the light of this assertion. In your response you must ensure that at least one text is a post-1990 text, as indicated by * in the list above. In your response you should demonstrate what it means to be considering texts as a modern reader, in a modern context and that other readers at other times may well have had other responses.'

Say what?

Look at the length of the question! Look at the pomposity of it!

At AS, one sample coursework task, suggested the candidate write an pitch demonstrating how to re-tell King Henry IV for a 21st century audience. How about the 21st century audience making the effort to understand Henry IV within its own literary and cultural context? There are brilliant modern takes on Shakespeare and on Chaucer, we've endured modern twists on Jane Austen and Dr Jekyll: film and TV feast on the copyright-free past. Fine and good. But when it comes to exams, why should W. Shakespeare or G. Chaucer need to be subjected to an analysis which is more sociological than literary?

I really want to stress I'm not against contextual studies: it is important to know what the role of the church was in the fourteenth century, what the position of women was in Shakespeare's day, how Darwinism shook the foundations of Victorian complacency - this is all of interest and enhances reader understanding. But, for God's sake, exam boards, I'm begging you - cut the politically-correct obfuscating jargon, get the balance of text and context right, set questions which are clearly interpretable by an A level candidate, get back to basics, bring back the joy.

Rant over. For the moment

Publisher wants it all quiet on the western front

This is just a quick post because I'm pretty busy trying to construct a website for my new enterprise. Steep learning curve, I assure you. Plus the boys are imminently returning to school (cue weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth) and my teaching will get underway next week. Summer, suddenly, is over and as so often as September arrives, there's a sense of having been cheated. Certainly, we were cheated weather-wise, and all meteorologists should be spit-roasted over the barbecues they predicted we would have. But also, you remember late June, early July, the academic year coming to an end, the season stretching ahead, the plans for all the things you'd do, the trips you'd take ...

I always plan cultural/educational Places to Visit and Things to Do with my sons - and then fail to carry through. Plus the big change this year is that said sons wouldn't be seen dead with me downtown, in case they run into their mates. It is Not Cool to have Mum around. So Mum ends up feeling distinctly redundant.

Sebastian Faulks was on Breakfast this morning, promoting his new book from the comfortable position of established, well-regarded, media-friendly author. He told an anecdote, which as literary anecdotes are prone to be, was part-funny, part-horrifying. When he wrote Birdsong his American publisher was reluctant to take it on. She asked him whether he could cut the war sections (!) or, indeed, relocate it to a more recent conflict! She wasn't entirely getting the point of it, was she? This follows on the heels of a friend telling me yesterday that someone she knows, of high academic standing, cannot sell her father's memoirs (and this was a man who had lived a perilous and exciting life) because, as one publishing minion put it, 'Your father's dead and therefore we couldn't arrange a promotional tour.'

Permission to open and close your mouth like a goldfish.

The Wanderer Returns

You may have noticed I've been gone a while (well, I hope you noticed!) I was off on holiday and then had a couple of important things to write to a deadline.

We went to St Ives, for the fourth - and not the last - time. I just love the place. The picture I'm going to attempt to add to this post (wish me luck as I'm dreadful with this sort of thing) says it all.

Unfortunately the weather wasn't our friend for the most part, which was frustrating. But nothing can spoil a location of such beauty and power as West Cornwall. While I was there I visited Marion Whybrow, who attended my summer school here in Oxford. She has lived in St Ives for many years and is very involved in the artistic community there: she's married to Terry, a painter of beautiful still-lives which exude a Zen-like calm, and she's written various books about local artists, although she's now branching into fiction. With a friend, Marion Dell, she wrote 'Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: Remembering St Ives', which is a beautifully illustrated survey of their time in the town and its influence on their work.

Marion also introduced me to the writer Ann Kelley, who won the Costa prize for best children's novel, 'The Bower Bird', in 2007. I haven't read that yet but have read 'The Burying Beetle', which comes before it. It tells the tale of Gussie, a brave, eccentric, spirited, thoughtful, loving child, who's waiting for a desperately-needed heart and lung transplant. The novel captures her unique take on the world and celebrates the 'nowness' of life: Gussie can't afford to look too far ahead and fully expects a premature death, so she throws her energies into looking, experiencing, analysing, making connections. The descriptions of the Cornish natural environment are exquisite - it's no accident that Ann is also a poet and a photographer: her eye and ear are acutely tuned to what Gerald Manley Hopkins called the 'inscape' of things. She was a very welcoming host at her amazing clifftop house - the sort of place where you can very soon forget the outside world exists. I'm going to re-read 'The Burying Beetle' to further appreciate the descriptions now that I've been there, and then move on to 'The Bower Bird' and the latest, 'Inchworm'.

Oxford felt incredibly oppressive after all that sea air, but I've just about adjusted. I've been busy, but have also finished Christopher Rush's 'To Travel Hopefully' which I mentioned in my last blog-post. And yes, it's still my book of the year so far and another to which I shall return, to mull over certain passages and trains of thought properly. Christopher Rush manages to stare the worst of life in the eye and force it, in the end, to lower its gaze. There's no easy sentiment, no schmaltz - he describes his own agony, an agony of grief that rendered him temporarily selfish and bitter, and yet, during and after his journey, even though the pain does not go, acceptance dawns, an ability to perceive beauty and purpose returns. His travels are a quest for redemption and a kind of redemption comes to him, hard won, in no way facile. He is a poet, a mordantly funny satirist, a critic of modern education systems (me too, Chris!), a true academic for whom the words of Tennyson, Larkin, Shakespeare blend into his thoughts and prose almost involuntarily, so much are they part of his being. Read him.

I'll save what else I've been reading for my next post.

I was terribly sad, halfway through the holiday, to receive a text from my sister who lives in Wiltshire, telling me Harry Patch, 'the last Tommy', had died. I've blogged about him before and will post on my other blog, 'Poem Relish', about him.

So what now, having at last caught up on the mountain of post-holiday laundry? Well, the academic year is looming up and very soon I'll be sucked into that and, no doubt, have all my creativity sucked out of me by it. At this point I find myself wanting to launch into yet another tirade about the new English A levels ('It is an ancient mariner-lass, she stoppeth one of many - have you heard about these syllabuses ....?')

But I'll restrain myself. Can't promise to maintain that, though. In the meantime, I've been taking stock of the year to come and what I want to achieve with it. Here you can help me out: I am hoping to set up occasional day courses in creative writing here in Oxford. They'd be based on the sort of thing I do at Winchester and have done for the university's Department of Continuing Education - but with me in charge, ha, ha! What I'd like to ask is that if any of you out there would be interested in that sort of thing, you might like to let me know via this blog (all you need to do is create a Google account so you can comment on my posts - and even I have managed that sort of thing!)

Now, let's see about adding that photo ...