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A massive dump of creative writing

So the blog posts have slowed down recently. Mostly, I've just been very busy, and a lot of the most interesting things that have happened to me that I can reflect on are not really things that I can write about on a public forum. Those are all being parked and worked on in the background, to perhaps be published one day in some form.


One thing I have been doing is a lot of creative writing, to various levels of success, and I thought that rather than trying to write individual blog posts on each one, I'd play catch up and do a massive drop of pieces for anyone that cares to read or comment.


A few quick notes on the attached pieces.


Call's Rare Books and Furniture


This came from a prompt of "Set a story in an antiquarian bookshop". I had a few false starts on this prompt, and I have one idea that still has some potential, but doing it in a short story was terrible. It would need a lot more work.


What I really like about this story is that it came to me in a flash, and was 99% complete around an hour and a half later. The characters and the jokes flowed pretty nicely and naturally. What I also like is two of the characters are blatantly based on friends of mine that do actually work in the same bookshop, which allowed me to shortcut a lot. It's also something that I see very much in the style of of urban fantasy that I read, with obvious hints of Gaiman and Pratchett.


When I read this out at my class, I was greeted with the happiest and scariest comment, "What happens next?". The truth is, I had no idea, and thought that the ending was tight. But then a friend made a suggestion, which has fired the little grey cells somewhat.


Face to face with my cousin


Some people who know me, will know what I'm ripping off here. It was fun to write, especially trying to make the two voices different, and I obviously used some text structure to do that.


It doesn't quite work though. The intent is that this is a pair of internal monologues that happen very quickly, and that it would be very different if the two characters spoke. The fact it isn't spoken isn't clear though.


The language doesnt quite work for the two characters, and there are various places where I am still unsure if I should have done more or less.


I was also slightly overawed by the fact that this is a re-working of something else, and the fact that I am writing with a lot of backstory that isn't clear from this makes it unwieldy.


A man gets on a tram in three different ways


This was an exercise based on "Exercises in Style" by Raymond Queneau, which is a wonderfully bonkers read. The author write the same story in 100 different styles, some of which are ludicrously imaginative and difficult.


My pieces are all based on the same (very) short story, and gave me a fun chance to experiment. One piece is very natural for me to write, one was a deliberate attempt to do something totally opposite of that, and the other was an experiment to do something that I normally not do. But once it could be treated as a slightly throwaway exercise, I thought why not. It's a clunky end, but it was my first time doing such a thing.


Lunch at the railway station


This was a first for me, as it was a direct follow up to an earlier piece, which was actually the one posted in an earlier blog post https://www.stevemorrell.fi/post/creative-writing-is-back


This was blatantly an attempt to shoe-horn the characters into a prompt of "set the story a the railway station", but I am enjoying writing these characters, and seeing where the story develops.







 
 
 

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