Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

I’ve just fin­ished that piece I was writ­ing. K thinks that it was pretty shit. I thought it was OK given that I was writ­ing to (what I con­sider to be) an uncom­fort­able length. Not short enough to be quick, witty and laced with a killer punch line, not nearly long enough to saddle the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of my down-trodden prot­ag­on­ists and the ill-gotten ways of their bas­tard spouses.

I think this is a by-product of read­ing too much 55 Fic­tion and Mar­tina Cole.

Appar­ently my char­ac­ters were flat. She just didn’t care about them enough, appar­ently. There was no “twist”. I said there didn’t need to be a twist; it was fam­ily saga, real­ism, I said. Her face said it was bol­locks. My face wanted to cry.
So I twis­ted it.
She said that it wasn’t enough and I main­tained that if I twis­ted the plot any more the poxy thing would be in knots. I only had 1500 words to work with here, for cry­ing out loud.

Cue major plot change just 2 hours prior to final sub­mis­sion, cue someone else now dying, cue my brain seep­ing through my ears and my self-belief under my wheels. It looks dif­fer­ent now, admit­tedly. Whether it’s “bet­ter” or not, I have no idea. To be hon­est, it was pretty half-baked from the get-go.

But, how I loved the prot­ag­on­ist. It was her that gave me her story. She sat in my head, her hip hitched up on the drain­ing board and told it to me whilst drag­ging on a crafty fag out of the kit­chen win­dow of my mind. Hav­ing then once con­sumed half the cigar­ette, she put it out by run­ning it under the tap and flicked the soggy ash down the sink. She saved the remain­ing end in the cut­lery drawer for later and car­ried on without so much as a pause. I was com­pletely cap­tiv­ated, given just a frag­ment with such poten­tial and now I’ve gone and bent it out of shape.

Still, it’s an exper­i­ence and a chance to at least try and prove to someone else what I have learnt. The good thing about it is I can always chat to her between now and Septem­ber, maybe then I can do her bet­ter justice.

Alas, it is now off into the digital ether, to be seen again only once battle has been fought. I expect it back bruised, bloody and ulti­mately judged in the com­ing weeks. Wish me luck. If this falls on its arse then come Septem­ber, I. Am. Shafted.