Of Gradgrinds and Great Expectations

Prompt of the Day #

It is the late 1800s and the world around you is a strange, cold place. Manners dictate your interactions with men and women. The lull of the country and the lure of the city compete for your affection. Industry is overwhelming traditional ways of life. The middle classes are entrenched into society but a 'self-made man' is still an object of scorn. Utilitarianism and Religion compete over societal morals. Everyone and everything is moulded to fit the figure of a newly mechanised world. 

Write about a day in the life of the19th Century. 

Happy 200th Birthday Mr Dickens

Many of you will have noticed the Google image of the day: all in honour of one of the greatest writers than Britain has ever seen. 

Prolific, passionate, political - Dickens' novels remain some of the most influential works of fiction in the English canon. From Hard Times' clinical consideration of the effects of extreme Utilitarianism and the import of imagination, to the the heart-wrenching stories we find within a Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickelby or Oliver Twist, Dickens was a master of character and plot. His ability to write serials, a term referring to the presentation of chapters published one at a time either days or weeks apart in magazines and newspapers, was crucial to his success. Even if he was boring you to tears at the beginning of a 'chapter', he could have you coming back for more by the end of it. Part of this is through suspense, other times it's through the introduction of sideplots and mysteries that you feel the urge to unravel. 

Many critics, including James Wood of 'How Fiction Works' laud his ability to create characters. In Hard Times, the plot is driven by our understanding of the 'metallurgical Louisa' and her relationship with her 'mathematical' brother, her 'eminently practical father' and the 'brazen' Mr Bounderby. Epithet-type motifs such as these recur through the novel (in fact 'eminently practical' appears no less than 7times - mostly in one chapter!) and act as signs for the characters. Similarly, the voice of the narrator will often bleed into the voice of characters - for example with the heavy repetition of the word 'facts', this is firstly the voice of McChoakumchild but later is adopted by the narrative voice to describe the city - this creates a sense of how man shapes a society, how philosophy can change language, thought and appearance.

For me, I see the conflict of the novel as a dialectic between the social and the personal - where the social dictates that Louisa marry Bounderby or that Coke Town work its weary way into the ground; but also where the personal suggests Louisa wants to 'burst out' of the fire, that Coke Town still glows with 'faery palaces'. Dickens' art is thus in the way that he sets up characters as caricatures, embodiments of the problems at large, whilst maintaining the reader's sympathy. 

Character is certainly an art and its well-worth figuring out if you have that Dickensian grasp on characterisation. Not everyone does, Iris Murdoch still claims that though the mark of a great novelist is to be able to create a plethora of characters that are unlike oneself, she has not achieved this. James Wood even cites her as saying: 

"How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense 'interested in other people', this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one's failure here as a sort of spiritual failure."

Whilst you could be as melodramatic as Murdoch, you could also realise that Dickens had a talent - he was a daily rag writer, surrounded by the great age of satire and the caricature was a natural tool in his belt of brilliance. You don't have to be disheartened. You can think about which of these sorts of writers you are. Try you hand at creating character upon character, think about their voices and their mannerisms. Is there a particular word or phrase that summarises their situation or personality? Have they 'freedom' from the inky dictatorial pen? Try thinking about how you introduce them - Dickens has an amazing way of describing everything about a person, except their appearance. And why not play with their situation - what world are they born in? Are they white or blue collar? What's the political situation of the time? 

Let Dickens' influence continue and wish him a very happy second century.  

Not for the Weak of Heart

Writing is a way of life. Books are a way of life. If you're a writer, you're on a mission that will take you through the highs and lows of human emotion. In fact, your journey is just as complex as any of your characters. The difference is, you have to shape your characters, mould your words, create an imaginative space for the readers of the world. 

This is your life. So forgive the crudity, but we might as well start breeding a new generation of readers too. 

Image suggested by the Amazing Alexandra Lloyd

Of Freedom and Freeverse

Prompt of the Day #5

What is freedom? People fight for it, people die for it, people march down streets proclaiming their right to it; in fact, we all seem to believe that we're free and feel terrified when our autonomy is threatened. 

Write about Freedom. 

Be it to do with the abstract, a character, society or something else entirely. This week is all about Freedom. 

Freedom today is a massive issue, particularly when it comes to things like Freedom of Expression, Intellectual Freedom, Free Speech and such. When you think about it, it seems like its constantly under threat, think about things such as CCTV which are already an everyday aspect of our lives, or the Congressional attempt to introduce SOPA. Think about how debates rage over whether or not we have the right to know about the lives of football players or whether they have the right to privacy. It's about the freedom of the press - shouldn't they be able to publish whatever they see fit? Surely a super injunction impinges on the freedom of speech and expression? But then what about the right of the subject in question - are they not allowed to live their life the way they wish to without worrying about it being splashed across international news stands?


Novels such as Orwell's 'Nineteen-Eighty-Four' build off the fear of what would happen in a world without freedom of anything, where autonomy is a vague dream. Both the film and the original graphic novel, 'V for Vendetta', continue along a similar idea, where totalitarianism grows out of human greed and fear and overwhelms society. Banksy, the elusive British street-artist, frequently alludes to a belief in the power and necessity of freedom. 


When poets such as Owen, Sassoon, Pound, Lowell, Yeats and Eliot were writing, free verse was an expression of freedom too. Many of their writings reflect the deterioration of society, a breakdown in structure and hierarchy. Lowell's poems 'Memories of 5th Street and Lepke' as well as 'For the Union Dead', look at how, on the one hand the writer and others like him were prosecuted despite acting within the realms of freedom of expression, compared to the blind 'savage servility' of the modern man going about his day. His writing evokes images of acceptance - as if fatalism is our own creation. Similarly Eliot addresses this idea in his own writing with what we would likely describe as a strange sense of existentialist anxiety. To these poets, form could either instruct or undermine an idea. All of them were well-acquainted with sonnets and villanelles, iambs, trochees and anapests - they experimented with meter and verse to emphasise the conflict between freedom and society, the interplay of rules. 


If you're a writer, you not only have to be somewhat aware of deep-seated, human emotions towards themes such as these (even if it's only on a vague level), but you also have to think about your form and what that will do to your writing. This latter point may seem more valid to the poet but the short story writer can play with just as many conventions - think of Joyce and the voice of the nationalistic Dedalus, or the way Dickens' characters sometimes take on the voice of the narrator and vice-versa. 


So think about what you're writing about and whether there's anything deeper to the ideas that you're exploring. Think about the modern day mindset and how your themes can appeal to them. And while your at it, why not explore ways of emphasising things in a way that's subtle and interesting as well as unique. 

Please note that this is the first Monday of our blog and therefore we are introducing the weekly theme for all of our prompts until Sunday. 

A Brief History of English

Love your Language

Language is exciting, here's a video you all can watch and feel as excited as I do! From the Anglo-Saxons and the influence of Latin to Shakespeare, the King James Bible and imperial additions to the language, this ten minute compilation offers an amusing look at the development of how we speak and write. 

Feel the wordy love. 

Of Explorers and Elements

Prompt of the Day #4 

Imagine that you or a character has just come home from the longest journey they've ever made. Think about their immediate reactions to being home - relief, joy, worry, distaste -  think about how they might narrate their story to friends and how it might change over time. How do they feel after the initial return - content, restless, excluded, changed?

When Homer wrote the Odyssey, the protagonist, Odysseus has set sail from Troy after the happening of the Illiad, and is trying to return to his native Ithaca after ten years of war with the Trojans. His voyage, which should have taken a couple of weeks, takes him ten years. In those ten years he battles monsters, listens to Sirens, meets and 'befriends' two beautiful Goddesses: Circe and Calypso, blinds a Cyclops, travels to-and-from the Underworld, loses all of his comrades, wanders from civilisation to civilisation and eventually returns to discover his wife is being pressured by a bunch of irksome suitors trying to usurp him from his rightful throne. As an epic poem it has been one of the most influential pieces of literature in Western canon, inspiring hundreds of writers from the other much lauded Classic: Virgil, to Shakespeare and James Joyce. In fact, poets such as Tasso and Spenser, who both wrote Christianised epics, followed very closely to the themes and even the language of Homer, recreating almost the entire Odyssey albeit with characters plucked from morality plays. Similarly, if I was going to bore you into a blob of vapid expression, I would list the huge number of poets that have taken twenty lines of the Odyssey (or the Aeneid) and turned them into page long poems. 

The influence of the Classical Epic is phenomenal and it is characterised by voyage. Not just any voyage mind you, but long, never-ending, traumatising, life-destroying, character-building voyages. Christopher Booker even acknowledges this as an archetypal example of one of The Seven Basic Plots: Voyage and Return. Many fantasy novels are based on this idea - take the Lord of the Rings, or the Belgariad as examples. In these, 'The Quest' may start as the general premise, they may have to 'Overcome the Monster', there may even be hints of Comedy, Tragedy, Romance etc but ultimately the 'Voyage and Return' is the overwhelming plot for the story. Why? Because a voyage, like an epic, can encompass hundreds of different ideas and emotions and can reflect both literal and metaphorical transformation. With Odysseus, he desperately wants to go home, but he has to overcome dozens of trials in his wanderings. With the Red Cross Knight or the Knight of Termperance (The Faerie Queen, as inspired by Homer), these figures have to encounter the thing that most tempts them, their apposite character, in order to really become the embodiment of a virtue. Voyage, in allowing a character to travel from place to place, also allows them to develop through obvious challenges, to triumph and fail and gives the writer free reign to examine a plethora of human emotion.

The Return is equally important. Of course, the joy of arrival for Odysseus is somewhat dampened by the fact that he has to disguise himself in order to judge the loyalty of everyone he has ever known - the slave woman that nursed him as a babe, his wife, his father etc. Furthermore, he has returned to discovered he is MPD and his wife is being heckled by a number of lascivious old aristocrats. He promptly smites them, intending to remind you of how he is both Odysseus the Wanderer but also a hero of Troy but he still has to go through the trial of Revelation and after all this, he finally, truly 'Returns'. Inspiration, can come from the different monsters he fights (ie. The Lotus Eaters), the different people he meets (ie. Circe), the great and ridiculous 'weeping', the moments of intense ekphrasis... the list goes on. 

Tennyson's poem 'Ulysses' is one example of how a writer uses a classical text to inspire his own writing. Tennyson, despite not having such a helpful manual as Booker's explanation of plot, considers the character of Odysseus/Ulysses and using the voice of the hero himself, imagines what the man thought of his life twenty years on from The Return. So if this is the traditional timeline for Odysseus:

Then add another twenty years on with Odysseus back as king of 'barren' Ithaca and you can imagine how he might be feeling. He had ten years of war, ten years of voyaging and then the following years of peace. Tennyson, who also rewrote the scene with the Lotus-Eaters, created a scene where Ulysses seems to want to return to the life he lived as a traveller, as famous hero surrounded by myth instead of fact. Yet the narrator also seems reminiscent of the Sirens, who promised him both fame and 'knowledge ... beyond human understanding', often described as mantric truths. This is Tennyson's 'gray spirit yearning in desire/ To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost bound of human knowledge.' His creation is one that is no longer content with the 'still hearth' and 'barren crags' or the 'aged wife' he fought for in the original epic. This is a character who seems to have carried the temptations of the Siren song home with him, has become obsessed with it, who has romanticised the 'dark broad seas' so that even Charybdis's gaping mouth and Circe's idyllic island become an equally enticing adventures. 

It's almost as if Ulysses is going through a mid-life crisis. As the fear of being 'made weak by time and fate' juxtaposed to the idealised 'old days', remains emphasised throughout the poem, we initially imagine that this character is sincerely desirous of the travelling life because he is ageing, realising his increasing impotence as his son takes over the rule of Ithaca. Yet, due to the hints towards the sirens that he alone heard, we are also encouraged to doubt, to read with a pinch of scepticism, a slither of active readership. Why  are the 'gulfs' that  'wash ... down' and the 'Fortunate Isles' are juxtaposed against each other as similarly lauded adventures? Is the poem really about literal travel? Does he really want to return to a 'newer world' or are the references to age, the 'end', seeing 'the great Achilles' actually suggesting that Ulysses is ready to embark on the last adventure, into death itself? Or does the final sentiment that determines 'not to yield' imagining that he is desperate to cling to life, to return to life? Does the siren song promise him an escape through life or through death? And is Tennyson being serious with all of this? These are all questions that we can play with. 

Tennyson, doesn't just use very deliberate allusions linguistically but he also uses meter to emphasise the conflicting rationales behind the narrators opinions. This is particularly evident with the use of spondees in the lines, slowing them down as if the narrator is luxuriating in them, emphasising the sense of idealism, whereas the following line uses a trochiac opening to accentuate the feverish fervour of his excitement. Against a predominantly iambic poem, lines like these are striking, lending a sense of strangeness that suggests that maybe the character is not entirely in his right mind. 


You can read a poem like this in dozens of different ways. I tend to read it ironically. But what we all have to see is how Tennyson uses a familiar trope and a well-known story and develops it into his own, expressing something that is ultimately very personal and unique to his time. A new perspective on a hero can usurp  convention. In this case it's the opinion that once the story is concluded, the voyage complete, the return celebrated, things will right themselves. In the case of the Odyssey, we're even guaranteed an end to his tribulations through the use of deus ex machina. Yet Tennyson's poem reopens the page for us.

When you're creating a character, think about how you're developing him/her. Consider what journey your character is going to go on, whether it be literal or internal and think about what sort of person they are, not only in the past but in the future. 


Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER

Of DOs and DON'Ts

 Prompt of the Day #3

Think about the worst mistake you've ever made, or the worst mistake you think someone you know has ever made. What was it? Was it highly embarrassing or did it hurt somebody? What happened afterwards? How did you feel when you did it? How did it feel afterwards? A thousand emotions can stem from looking back at a moment but it's harder to remember the exact emotions of the actual experience. 

Try writing two versions of the same scene, one in the present and one in the past. Contrast what the immediate experience is like compared to the feelings that run through one's head in hindsight.

Oscar Wilde said: If at first you don't succeed, redefine success. When you think about it, this is all literature is about. Shakespeare redefined the sonnet, Laurence Stern redesigned Sentimentalism, Descartes revamped philosophy, Pope reconstructed English Nationalism. In fact, not to reinvent the wheel, but if we go back to considering Shakespeare - he rewrote dozens of stories, turned them into miraculous plays that most of us literature students still have to study today. I've even heard him called 'the Father of Fanfiction', which I suppose if you consider plays such as King Lear or Romeo and Juliet then you might just see what they mean. 

If you look at history you can see the effects of literature on the psyche of societies. In the 18th Century, Bardic writers were trying to convey the sense of a new, powerful, affluent England and in order to do so, like Pope, they used Classical mythology to imagine that once upon a time this is what our country was like. You see it in America too - the creation of a sense of identity through literature, for example in the Jack Tales. The idea of Sage writing, including the criticisms of Ruskin and Arnold, or perhaps simply the didactic works of Dickens, were similarly about evoking a sense of literary identity and society. When you come to writers such as TSEliot and James Joyce, what were they doing if not showing how literature and how we think about literature needs to adapt and challenge and engage with the modern man?  

How about Realism? Realism with a capital R, is supposedly a movement that started in France circa 1800 appealing to lofty ideals such as verisimilitude and poetic mimesis. Yet these are ideas that Aristotle and Plato debated whilst they reclined and had grapes fed to them by small boys. When you actually try to read some of the novels produced through this 'movement', you have the extremities of Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot and Dostoevsky. The fact that there are so many differences between them - Balzac claims to be a 'historian', Flaubert to have written about 'nothing' etc - only emphasises how even with those who desire to appeal to the same ideal, in actuality are simply redefining what came before. 

If we break it down even further, we can inspect Christopher Booker claim that there's only Seven Basic Plots. So whether you're a writer of crime fiction or romance, fantasy or drama, poetry or prose, all you're doing is redefining what is already written. But that doesn't mean that your story is any less important, there will be different characters, different styles of writing. 

When you write, think about the story and its predecessors, think about where you're coming from and what you're recreating. Think about the way you think you can improve upon what's come before, or how you think you can offer something unique. Don't be afraid to draw upon the works of your literary ancestors, as long as it's not full-on plagiarism then, if they're not dead, they should be flattered (for example, if you have a favourite poem, write a response as I did in 'Dear Mr Eliot'). 

To end, Albert Eistein said:  He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice. 

Don't be a satisfied pig, fellow Scribblers, and don't march in line like sheep. Even if your writing adheres to convention, play with them. Sometimes all it takes is a little, deliberate mistake to turn your writing into the extraordinary.  

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER

Dear Mr Eliot

Dear Mr Eliot.


It is London and this a crueller month.
Row on row, the people go their slow way,
hunched beneath 'brollies that bend in the wind
like they've sucked in their black cheeks, shrinking in
towards the huddled bundle of blood-warmth
beneath. Let us go, 
darting through the crowded streets,
twisting round the wool-clad sheep, just laughing,
dancing as we go. 

Do you recall how
the cost of his words was silence,
stretched out like a lobotomised child?
Standing sedate with a wide lolling grin,
smiling, selfless, as if any thought could
ever have presumed to flitter through 
her small, stubborn mind. 
The hush hung over the girls sitting with us
as their empty, painted mouths hung open.
His flickering tongue played with his bottom lip,
then lifting his mug he took a sip
and he glanced first at you, then I. 
Imploring, not ashamed.

Do you remember the story of the girl unnamed? 
On the roof they sit in inky rows
With beady eyes and scratching toes. 

At first they claimed it was our youth that kept 
us in their safe sepulchre. These, he said,
are the tranquillised years. When he left 
though, the days were busy with red cars and words
that tilted their meaning like curious heads.
From breakfast to lunch, lunch to tea, 
The girls fluttered around us, you and me.
Now precious to them after all he’d said.

The shadows slinked down from their eyes and crawled the streets,
The shadows slunk , ink-winged, though the empty city streets,
Scraping the yellow smoke that drifts through lights,
Tugging at the frayed edges of the shifting yellow lights,
The shadows sulked and spun, yellow eyes glinted,
One eye on you, the other on me, perched
On the wires, trees and rooves of flint. 

On the roof they sit in inky rows
With beady eyes and scratching toes.

In the years that came and drifted by, 
the shadows caught and stained our eyes. When he
came back, old and with eight fingers, he asked
us the question. Had we danced?
Could we dance in our sepulchral haven
with mothering gazes ever seeking 
our wasp-waists and vogue fashioned coats?
He was not offered tea but ushered away
from us. We watched his ambling steps on pavement stone,
the shadows drifted behind him.

Above us they caw and scuttled on slate,
mocking our flightless world and drear dim
home that gravely sits on its mounded hill.
Sweet stories rustle through obsidian wings
And we whisper them between us.

The streams of people swim by in savage
servility. Their heads are bent, eyes to their shoes,
their faces buried in the Metro News.
Sometimes a girl with a vacant smile grins,
her head held high and the wind in her hair,
because she does not realise the cliché
that condemns her living. You and I,
we should be more like her. 
Let us be selfish. And dance out
across the street, between the sheep,
and after the man that plays his pipe
and leads us. 


By M.H.Allner
First Posted: Circle of Stars, 30th January 2012 @ 2.22pm