I haven't written a post since returning from
Singapore, over three months ago, so I thought I'd better crack on before you
all started to think I had shown mercy. So here it is, the first one back in
the UK, and the first of 2018, also.
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I signed up for one of them Lifelong Learning courses with the
university. Even the name makes your skin crawl, doesn't it? These days, I
refuse to learn unless paid to do so...or tempted with biscuits at the very
least. Learning for life and paying for the privilege is a Kafkaesque kind of
terror. I felt like an undergrad again, handing over money I haven't got to
"The Man" who only carries on pleading poverty anyway. Then again, it
was only £90 for 12 hours' teaching, and there ain't no undergrad this side of
Scotland that's going to get 12 kicks in the teeth for that price (in Scotland,
of course, they'll kick you all over for free). It's a course on creative
writing. As it's getting near crunch-time-thesis-writing-time, I thought I'd
sure need a bit of advice on writing believable fiction!
In fact, I have spent the last few
weeks working on a journal article. And I have found that writing science is
much nicer than doing science, especially if there's hardly anything to say.
Around the time I started writing the paper, I discovered this course buried
away in an e-mail. I jumped at it for the chance to flex my puny muscles on
something other than dreary, terse statements about tube furnaces. When I have
been writing science, I have found time passing by serenely, often to the
detriment of terseness, and to the scientist type, this is bad. But that's what
rekindled my interest in writing. Thus, we come to the happy accident of this
course.
The title of the course is, 'Made to
be Broken: Writing Experimental Fiction'. Now, apparently, one type of
experimental fiction, which the class will learn about soon, is the concept of
the unreliable narrator. Think of Donald Trump if he ever became President of
the United States. Fortunately, Americans are notoriously easy to reason with,
so there isn't a writer in the world who could make that sound convincing, is
there?
This whole thing has got me thinking:
why do they get PhD candidates to write their own theses? Surely that is the
definition of propaganda! It should be written by a neutral observer, a
disinterested (and quite possibly uninterested) party. It should be written by
someone who has absolutely nothing to gain or lose regardless of what happens.
Some furtive and nondescript person who blends in to the background, noticed by
nobody. Trouble is, I don't think there are enough Liberal Democrats to go around
for all of us.
Anyway, when my fellow
experimentalists and I arrived at the first class this evening, we
discovered that none of us had been able to access the online lecture notes. It
turned out that the lecturer had given us the wrong course code in the
enrolment email. And I thought that was wonderful because she has now become
the living embodiment of her course, the unreliable narrator made flesh. What
devotion to the art! The Daniel Day-Lewis of Portswood. It was then I realised
that this course was going to be just fine.
At the end of the first lesson, we
were challenged to expand on the opening paragraphs of some famous works by
dead literary sorts, but to give them all various experimental twists. Having
read them back, I now know what it feels like to be on LSD. I think that when
the lecturer told us to give them an experimental twist, she should have
specified that most stories have more traditional fillers too…
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By:
The Imperial Orange,
15th January 2018
