Whether as speaker or addressee, when caught in the act of dialogue we are at our most linguistically vulnerable. Moreover, utterance is far messier than ‘literature.’ Utterance refuses to summon ‘the best words in the best order.’ It is a muddled, imperfect business. Utterance is partial and incomplete. It stops, starts, hesitates, struggles; it is fraught with the dangers of ‘thinking on our feet’, saying the ‘wrong’ thing, ‘thinking out loud’ etc.
An experiment: what happens when the mind, hands, and eyes are left to their own devices? I tried not to imagine. And going backwards, I can see how somewhere in its origins, it wanted to be a map. A circle. A creation that dipped in and out of lucidity.
Matthew David Scott I don’t really write about writing. But ‘Windfall’ is me writing against some of my own instincts so perhaps it’s fitting that I am. For a start I don’t really write many short stories. I’ve always been afraid of them. I see short story writers as having a certain expertise that I…
I decided not all that long ago that I would write a short story a day for a month. I work best when setting myself ludicrous projects. Some of them actually come off. I’m not a lunatic, however – I knew from day minus 3 that I would not end up with thirty short stories. And I did not write one per day in the end. Things got in the way. But I did stick to it initially, and by the end of that month I had around twenty short stories, in various states of dress. Looking back over them I decided I had ten, maybe fifteen, that could be brought to term. Some finished, some good ideas that needed some loving. “What Have We Ever Done For The French?” was one story that came out of that period.
There seems to be only a distant relationship between my fiction and poetry, which may be evident in the work in terms of themes and so on, but importantly I often feel as if the two are written from different parts of myself. Or more precisely different parts of my brain. I half mistrust the part that writes poetry, she is vulnerable and dangerous at the same time. She has been around for a long time – since earliest childhood and she is a dreamer, a romantic.
My writing often starts with a memory of an object, place or circumstance that held some meaning for me at the time, but has the potential to turn into something much bigger in fiction. I thought of the game and wondered what would happen if children took it seriously, asked the stones important questions and pinned their hopes on the outcome.
Theophilus Kwek They say first impressions are lasting. When ships under the command of Diogo Lopes de Sequeira berthed near Malacca in 1509, they stumbled on a cosmopolitan harbour that had been thronging with traders and travellers for at least a century. According to the Sejarah Melayu (the Malay Annals), the Malaccans – steeped in…
Uschi Gatward I was researching a story about surveillance when I came across a below-the-line comment on the Guardian site, appearing after an article by GCHQ in defence of DRIPA (Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act). If you start reading those comments it’s possible you’ll fall down the same internet wormhole I did, but the…
C. G. Menon I’d been living in Cambridge a few months before I took my first trip out to the fens. Living in the suburbs of the city itself had been a study in watching movement, in watching change. By contrast, the fens were a study in timelessness. There’s something terribly contemplative about a flat…
Catherine McNamara On Writing ‘The Ukrainian Girl’ ‘The Ukrainian Girl’ was written as the third or fourth story in a series that has now become a collection. In this collection my aims have included the investigation of cultural displacement and adaptation, but my main and endless interest is the telling of stories. For me the…
Giles Rees Ted Hughes said, ‘As an imaginative writer, my only capital is my own life.’ Though I hesitate (correctly) to mention myself next to a writer of Hughes’ stature, I know what he meant, I think. The narrator of my new story ‘Priest’ is a British guy living and working in Moscow (as I…
Siân Melangell Dafydd Spitting Distance started in Serbia. Far from my milltir sgwâr (square mile), before I knew that I was writing it or gathering details for anything specific, I was at a literary festival called Kikinda Short (July 2011). Let me tell you a bit about this place first. Kikinda: beautiful name to say…
Katherine Stansfield Tonight, for the first time in many years, I’m missing the semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest. I will also miss the final itself when it’s broadcast in a few days’ time. The annual musical gathering of nations is a highlight of my year (in all seriousness – I love it), and whilst…
Diana Powell I was supposed to be writing about a shooting. A man and woman, alone in a room; a gun. The gun is fired. ‘So much blood…’ The man was Edvard Munch, painter of ‘The Scream’, one of the world’s most iconic images; the woman, Tulla Larsen, his former lover. And the blood came…