The Story of the I

More stuff cut from the same article:

“Your difficult could be very different to mine. It might be a quality found in the style, the construction, or the narrative of a novel. It might be found by reading non-fiction, or poetry, or a form of writing you’ve never read before . For me it might be in my picking up that book that dad was disappointed I didn’t understand when I was twelve years old. It might be anything, but I would be able to tell you why it was difficult for me and you would be able to see why it was difficult and we could both benefit from understanding the processes that took me from one place to another. It is an ineffable but recognisable quality and our engagement with it should be respected. When we see it in writing we should hold it up and say “this is good,” whether we like that writing or not. What we should not do is dismiss it as obfuscatory, pretentious or needless, because we do not understand it, or like it, or because it makes us uncomfortable, or because we are threatened by it, because without this quality there is no movement, no change, no progress, no development, just the constant re-reading of what we have read before and if it means we occasionally have to sit through writing that merely mimics difficulty without delivering on its promise then that’s just tough and who knows, perhaps we are misreading it anyway. Perhaps, if we came back to it in ten years time we might at last get the point of it and understand that writing we dismiss is often writing we do not understand.”

Reworking a short story today (by way of a change). Emma’s always got one on the go and I thought I’d follow her example (and that of Vikram – see yesterday’s post). My first short story – ‘The Man Who Drank Bleach’ – got published, as did the second ‘Charlie’, so I’m going for the hat trick. The closing date for the Bridport prize is coming up and, even though its a bit of a lottery (they get thousands of entrants and the name judge [short story supremo Helen Simpson this year] only reads fifty or so – and they charge you six quid to enter) placing in it would be useful pre-publication publicity for Grace and they include finalists in an anthology. There’s also the small matter of the £5,000 prize money. Emma’s got one going in too.