STOP! DON’T LEAVE THIS PAGE!

Have you ever browsed YouTube and had adverts at the beginning of that hilarious cat video you just can’t wait to watch? You sigh as you wait a whole five seconds before you can skip the dreary, unimaginative kitchen bleach advert and get to the good stuff: cats wearing glasses! What am I talking about, we’ve all done that!

It’s a familiar sight.

HOWEVER, have you ever been halted on your journey to the “Skip Ad” button by a voice in the advert saying,

“STOP! WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T CLICK THAT BUTTON!”

It grabs your attention, and you smile fleetingly as (in my case) an animated yellow blob looks at me with pleading eyes, begging me to listen to him. I do.

And with that, the advertisers have enticed me, drawn me into their world and have me at their mercy.

They’ve realised that they have approximately 5 seconds to do this before we skip past them, and they’ve worked out how to connect with the audience in that short space of time. In this age of instant communication, where we desire access to material immediately, adverts can be seen as inconvenient time-wasters. So for one to delay us for 30 seconds when we could be moving straight onto the actual video is quite an achievement. It’s going to become essential for YouTube advertisers to reel in audiences the second the advert starts, essentially speeding up the entire industry.

Playing with Words

My dissertation has been finished ahead of schedule, bound and handed in. Let the relief flood in!

And do you know what I did the moment I had finished the herculean task of writing extensively?

I wrote extensively. But that shouldn’t surprise you, should it?

It was so liberating to write without needing to worry about grades and expectations; the words seemed so much more natural. Now, in a perfectly logic way, my brain decided it wanted to write about a sinking ship. Does this reflect my mind-set? Perhaps. Perhaps the stress of these past few weeks, along with the knowledge that I’ve still got two essays looming constantly before me, is finally getting to me.

Anyway, I thought I might as well post what I wrote here. It’s only very short, but I’d like to think it’s quite lyrical. Tell me what you think!

*

The waves

unfurl

around the ship,

the lush jaws of a Venus flytrap clasping around its prey. They suck it in, slowly devouring the bulbous hull;

gentle,                                                      reassuring.

The sailors’ screams are a tormented, tuneless lullaby, as though hushing themselves towards the final deep sleep. They cling to the ship like cats to land, sharing their senseless fear of the water. Although here their fear is justified, as they stare into the open jaws below them;

the mouth of hell.

The ship’s limbs are snapping and she groans in agony as her joints burst one

                                                                                            by

                                                                                                                                                           one

and her billowing sails are torn by the jagged fingers of the wind.

The sea begins to calm, satiated by its feast. It has consumed the ship, the crew, holding them in the awful silence of its depths, their voiceless bodies staring blindly through the black. It sighs with pleasure, stretching out to wait for its next meal, the next ship that dares to venture across it.

*

Hmm, that was slightly more deep (pardon the pun) than I had intended. I wanted to play with form as well as words, and the fragmented lines at the beginning were supposed to reflect the broken ship and tempestuous waves.

You can tell I’m an English student, can’t you?

Struck By Lightning

Have you seen the film Struck By Lightning, starring and written by Chris Colfer of Glee fame? I hadn’t until yesterday, and I’ve been in a state of anguish ever since.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while (and this month marks a year since I set it up!), you may know that I’m emotionally vulnerable when it comes to films. And this film utterly destroyed me.

I’m not going to give a detailed summary of it, because I don’t want to spoil it for people who are thinking of watching it, but what I’m about to say isn’t a spoiler because it’s revealed right at the very beginning of the film. But, if you want to know absolutely nothing about it, read no further. In fact, don’t read this post at all.

Carson, Colfer’s character, reveals immediately that he dies at the end. In fact, he gets struck by lightning and killed. Somehow, I managed to “forget” this fairly easily, as I was so sucked into the story. It’s not a happy story – it’s about a high school misfit (Glee, anyone?) who is passionate about writing and getting into Northwestern University. He is determined to become a journalist, and so sets up a Literary Magazine, blackmailing his reluctant fellow students into writing for it.

However, although he gets into Northwestern his mother hides the acceptance letter, he doesn’t respond, and thus forfeits his place. When he finds this out, he’s crushed, but that’s not the heartbreaking part. The heartbreaking part is, you guessed it, the fact that he dies. What got me was, as his voiceover says, he never got to go to Northwestern, write for the NY Times, the LA Times, or anything else he wanted to achieve. He never made a difference.

That hit me so hard. I’ve been so wrapped up recently in this assumption that I will become an author. I fully acknowledge and know how difficult it’s going to be. I’m prepared for rejection, I’m prepared to work for years on a book that will still get ripped by a publisher. But I can’t even consider the possibility that it won’t happen. I just can’t. The thought hurts too much. I can’t face living my life working in an office; my need to write, to change people’s lives by words, to stay connected to my youth, is so paramount that I don’t want to think that it may never happen.

Struck By Lightning forced me to consider this, and it hurt. A lot. As Carson reeled off all these things he never did, as I saw his mother grieving for him, and his best and only friend alone, watching videos of them together, I couldn’t stop myself from sobbing. Not just for the characters, but for me as well.

I know it sounds selfish, but it just hit me that this might never happen for me. What if it remains a dream? What if I don’t get off my ass and write? I haven’t done much to my novel recently because Uni work and ballroom have been taking over my life, but now I’m worried that I’ll let it slip away.

I don’t want any regrets in my life. I don’t want to look back in 30 years and wonder why I never finished that book, why I never got published. I need the hope more than anything right now, and that film robbed me of it. At the same time, that may just be exactly what I need: maybe I need the fear to galvanise me to finish this, to make me prove to myself and everyone else who thinks I’m just dreaming that I can, and I will, become an author.

Practising Poetry

I’ve had some kind of revelation. I was at Creative Writing Society last night, and this week we looked at poetry. I’ve always said that I’m poetically challenged, that I just cannot write poetry. I don’t really know what made me assume this… perhaps because I’ve never felt very inspired to write poetry, and that when I’ve been told to write it I seem to have some kind of mental block.

However, something happened yesterday at the Society meeting. I don’t know why it took 20 years for someone to say this and for me to actually listen, but the VP leading it really enforced the fact that poetry has no rules. You can do whatever the hell you want. Look at the modernists especially – ee cummings’s poem “Grasshopper” goes like this:

He wanted to reproduce the hop of a grasshopper through words. Pretty incredible.

Anyway, he made us sit there and write a poem. And I actually did! Not one, but two. And then I wrote another one today! Before yesterday, I had written three poems in my life, and now I’ve written 3 poems in 24 hours. It’s as though the floodgates opened and suddenly I could do it. So I thought I’d post them here. I honestly don’t know if they’re good or not, because although I may be writing them now, I don’t have the ability to know what makes good poetry, so PLEASE if you have any comments do give them to me!!

This  is untitled, and is about not being able to write poetry.

The clock

Is ticking

The tock

Is clicking,

And words

Fill my head

Like worms.

I see them in

A writhing mass,

Each one

Indistinguishable,

Each one

Unknowable,

Slippery, fat.

They burrow deep

Into the dirt

Of a thousand

Thoughts I’ve thought

Today,

Their tails vanishing,

Their bodies slithering

Until they’re much

Too far away.

The others I’ll post in the “I Write” section, here.

Triumph in the Ballroom!

So over the past few months, my recent participation in my University’s Ballroom and Latin dance society has taken over my life. I’ve been to 6/7 competitions, practised for at least 2 hours every other day, and fallen absolutely head over heels in love with it.

Last weekend marked my final competition. We’d done pretty well in the competitions before – coming third in Jive in our first ever comp, and 3rd in Waltz at the beginning of February. However, considering the amount of practise my partner and I both put in, neither of us were completely happy with how we’d done.

This competition was the big one. The National competition, with nearly 200 couples in the beginners section alone. I at least was starting to worry that we wouldn’t do too well – in fact, we both agreed that if we could manage to get into the Quarter finals – so the top 24 out of about 180 couples – in ballroom, we’d be happy. We didn’t expect much of Latin at all, because our success rate there is strangely sporadic.

So we travelled all the 6 hours on the coach to Blackpool, home of ballroom dancing, with the entire society, and prepared for one of the biggest competitions of our lives. I always get ridiculously nervous the morning before competitions, and I was trying to ignore the slightly nauseous feeling in my stomach as we stood up for our first Waltz.

I screwed up massively. I was so nervous that I messed up the timing and became stiff. I was worried we wouldn’t get through the round, having seen the level of competition. However, we were called up again, and again in the Quickstep, and again and again until, barely having realised what was going on, we actually danced in the Quarter finals for both Waltz and Quickstep! We’d actually made our goal!

They started calling out the numbers for the Waltz Semi-final, and when ours wasn’t called, we assumed that was it, but still were pleased with out progress.

But then. Semi-final Quickstep time. Our number was called. Now, I’m not the kind of girl who shrieks a lot, but I did when I heard that, and my partner had to drag me onto the dance floor because I was in such shock. I came off shaking, deliriously happy, claiming that if we went out in the first rounds of Latin, I would still be delighted with how we’d done. I hadn’t even considered getting into the final: it just wasn’t something that could happen to us!

But it did. We were called up once more, and this time I felt tears prickling my eyes as I walked up. Standing waiting for the music to start was exhilarating and terrifying, and I was making a strange shriek/whimper sound which I couldn’t control. I think my partner thought I was having a nervous breakdown.

At the end of the evening, it was revealed that out of 180 beginners couples, we came 4th in Quickstep. In the country.

But that’s not all because in Latin, even though we hadn’t expected much, we ended up Semi-finalling in Cha – much to my shock and, admittedly, horror. I always hated Cha! I won’t deny that there was more shrieking as our number was called up again and again and, although we didn’t final, we were one point off, putting us in 7th place in the country!

So out of 180 couples, we came 34th in Jive, 15th in Waltz, 7th in Cha and 4th in Quickstep!

I only started six months ago, and I can’t believe how much I’ve come to love ballroom dancing. I go to bed with the steps going round my head, I’ve spent countless hours in the dance studio practising, my feet have permanent blisters from my shoes (for four months now), and when I’m not dancing I want to be dancing. That was my last competition, as I won’t be at Uni next year, and I’m going to miss it so much, and yet I’m so grateful that we went out on a high. It was honestly the best weekend I’ve had in many, many years, and I feel honoured to have competed with (*and beaten*) so many fabulous dancers.

Dissertation Daze

My posting petered off for a while there, didn’t it? I’m not even berating myself for that this time, because I have been shockingly busy once again, and I feel like I’ve barely stopped! This post will actually return to one of the main reasons this blog was set up in the first place: to talk about writing! It’s the time for me which every student dreads: the days of the dissertation. And I’m in a dissertation daze. Fortunately for me, I’m doing one in Creative Writing – it was either that or a ridiculously long essay on memory and language in dystopian fiction and, as much as I love dystopias, I’d prefer to write a story.

Well, I say that. But the rate it’s going, an essay might have been easier.

I think I’m finding it so difficult to start because I have such high expectations of myself. This is the big one: the one that all students remember with a chill of terror. And for me, because it’s Creative Writing, I’m determined to do well. I’ve always had good grades before, but I want to do better. I can’t come out of this worse than at the beginning of this year, surely? I must have improved somewhat!

And yet, my writing seems to be developing a sort of self-consciousness. It wants to be clever, it wants to show off, and that is making it terrible. I feel like I have all these allusions or metaphors hovering tantalisingly before me, but I just can’t reach them. Or, if I do, I distort them slightly in my fist and they get a bit mangled. It’s not coming out right. I’ve tried to strip in back, to get the story out before I start to focus on the way I’m telling it, but I keep getting hung up over individual words, and then I’ll be lost in thought for five minutes over half a sentence.

I know writing takes time, and that you can’t always force it out. But at the same time, I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think you need to write through it. Sometimes when I sit down to write, I just have to spend a few minutes literally writing out my stream of consciousness so that I get the ink flowing both in my pen and in my brain (what is with these crazy metaphors in this post, why won’t they come when I need them?!). In addition, my 6000 word draft deadline is due in a week, and I only reached 3000 words today, so I really need to step it up. And I can tell already that much needs to be cut, as I’m not halfway through the story yet.

I have extensive train travel in store for me this weekend, as I need to go home and then head off to Wales for my 80-year-old Grandad’s wedding (no doubt more on that in a subsequent post). Point being, I write so well on trains (I really do need to meet JK Rowling…), so hopefully the spectacular scenery between Southampton and Waterloo, or between King’s Cross and the fabulous fens will inspire me.

Until then, I may be pulling some all-nighters.

The Child In Time – Ian McEwan

It’s been a while since I did a book review, and this one is so worth the wait.

This is the first book I’ve read for my new module, and if the rest are this good, I’ll be a very happy student. It tells the story of Stephen, a dispassionate children’s author who lost his daughter Kate in a supermarket when she was three. When I say lost, I mean she completely disappeared when his back was turned. He doesn’t know if she was taken (we assume she was), or what, but the fact remains that she is gone and will never return.

The novel starts a few years after this event, but returns to it through memories. Stephen and his wife Julie have drifted apart, unable to console each other together, preferring the cold solace of silence. He does little during the day save drink and watch TV; the only thing really drawing him out of the house being the meetings he must attend for a government committee of education.

This book really explores the  notion of time and what it actually is. Stephen’s friend Thelma, a physicist, articulates McEwan’s theories eloquently, and time is handled – and this is truly the best way I can think of to describe it – as “wibbly wobbly, timey, wimey stuff”. Yes, that’s quoting Doctor Who. Essentially, she says that time is not linear, that it shifts and changes, is intangible and is perhaps even subjective: we all perceive it differently.

Think about it – when you really don’t want to go somewhere, the time before arriving slips away from you. When you’re unbelievably excited to do something, the time leading up to it extends like a stretched elastic band. McEwan argues that this perceived time is not simply perception, but truth: that time really does move at different speeds for different people.

What has this to do with the plot, I hear you ask? Stephen is continually shifting in time, trapped in an endless cycle of memories which he is unable to change. He’s powerless against time. The scenes in the novel shift back and forth, sometimes dealing with the present, other times the pasts of different characters. But the theme of childhood is tied closely together with it, with Kate seeming to be the one thing that can defy time: she is timeless because she is everywhere. Everything Stephen looks at makes him think of Kate; he even convinces himself that a school child (who it is evident to us isn’t) is her. She meanders through time at her own pleasure, and reflects the innocence of children that McEwan portrays in the novel.

I loved McEwan’s approach to childhood in The Daydreamer, which I’ve also reviewed, and I think it would be fascinating to examine the two together in an essay. Given that this book is on a module reading list, I think I may well be able to manage that…