Attendees: FB, IE, JR, JO, SB
Our first session of 2010 was a bit of a special one. Ellard and I had both taken part in the National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo) project in November 2009 and were cajoled into presenting our pieces to Fas for ritual humiliation. Ian had read mine, Spire & Pearl; I'd read his, The Otford Raptor. He presented a synopsis and then read selected passages; I did likewise. John, Jake and Sophie listened and were surprisingly kind. It was a strange sort of session: these novels were short, only 50,000 words, and only really first drafts that had been written at a rate of knots. So critique could not really be offered on the overall form, as that was incomplete, or indeed on any individual passage because each author was able to say "well, I'll change that". As such, an odd exercise. But important for two reasons:
- The stories seemed to remain, in themselves, watertight. Or at least, there was interest from the rest of the group in hearing what happens next and how plot and characters develop. That suggested that at least some of the ideas behind the writing were sound.
- The individual sections read did hold the attention of the group, to a certain degree, meaning that even if there were plenty of tweaks to be made, at least the prose of a given section was coherent and workable.
In itself both those things were promising pieces of news.
A personal thanks to Ian for slogging through Spire & Pearl.
Thanks be no thankings, Bernard, as a great fictional Prime Minister once said.
ReplyDeleteI loved Spire and Pearl, and can't wait for the next one, which I expect, on my desk at Faber, on 1st December 2010.
In return you can have my new novel about what would happen if cows had very short tempers.
I'm also thinking of writing some non-fiction about nostalgia for Kitchen Appliances in the 60s. Working title is 'Sympathy for the Breville'.
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