Graduation – The Day and the Future

Last Thursday, I graduated. And it was pretty great! I wore a suit and a robe and a funny hat that made me feel like I was balancing a dinner plate on my head. And whilst what I said last week still holds true and I perhaps didn’t feel as accomplished or worthy as some of the other people at graduation, I still had a damn good time and did manage to muster some semblance of pride in myself. It was wonderful to see my uni friends again to compare congratulatory hats, and overall it’ll probably go down as one of the best days of my life.

The craziest thing for me was that I wasn’t nervous. At all. And that’s kind of a big deal for me, because I’m the kind of guy who does get nervous about these things. When I first showed up and didn’t know where to go for a minute, I was a lil’ insecure, but that’s mostly because I don’t like looking lost and alone. And then my hat started to fall off mid-ceremony so there was some anxiety about it deciding to venture off to pastures new mid-handshake as I was on stage, but a quick re-adjustment whilst still sat down took care of that potential calamity. And besides that, it was smooth sailing. I don’t think I’ve felt confident at any public event in my life but something kept me calm, and I think it was the knowledge that I belonged there.

Of course, the issue with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing is that there aren’t exactly many job opportunities waiting for you when you step out of the sanctuary of purpose that is university work. As I discussed last week, I’ve found a surprising level of meaning in the job that I currently have, and it’s only proven to me that my path in life is going to stray from writing for perhaps a little while, while I sort things out. There are many aspects to each individual, and whilst I’ve dedicated an entire university course to writing over the last three years, that’s not the entirety of who I am as a person. It’ll always be a core part of who I am, though, and I’ll continue to express myself via blog posts and other little writing projects before I reach a time in my life when I start to dedicate more time to it.

 

Victory Yoghurt

The dissertation. It’s done. It’s in. For better or for worse, it is over.

So how was it?

Well now, that’s a very broad question. Firstly, I should address what my dissertation even was. I’m a Creative Writing student, so my dissertation was essentially to take everything that I’d learned and write an 8,000 word piece of fiction to hand in, alongside a 2,000 word critical commentary. At the beginning of the course, this sounded very appetizing. “We can write whatever we want!” I probably exclaimed. “Piece of cake!”

And unless I was talking about a cake made out of obsidian, then I was wrong.Whilst the prospect of writing 8,000 fictional words may sound promising when you have dozens of half-baked ideas swirling around your head, the time of actually choosing what story to write for your magnum opus becomes a little trickier. Suddenly all of those ideas are awful or previously used, and you’re left stranded in the dark with nothing but a vague “Write a good story!” to go off of.

I ended up writing a thriller piece named Rerouted, which I shan’t discuss too much here. Let’s just say that the narrative was experimental and focused on perspective, which is a key interest of mine. As a story in itself, I think it turned out alright. I’d happily return to it and tweak it a bit and include it in a collection of short stories someday. But a magnum opus it was not. In my opinion, it failed to delve as deeply into the fascinating possibility of perspective as it could, and the entire time I was writing the thing I had doubts about the actual message that the narrative would deliver by the end. It was not the intended conglomeration of writing skills and abilities I’d picked up over the previous semesters. It is merely, at best, a decent story with an interesting narrative perspective.

The critical commentary was worse though. For those of you who don’t know, a critical commentary is a creative writer’s chance to write academically about their own work, to prove that it reflects what they’ve learned in the module and that their fictional imaginings have merit as coursework by showing how it’s been influenced by the works they’ve studied. Of course, with the dissertation there were no set texts, merely a vague pointing towards the potential topics from previous modules. With this in mind, I focused on a text we’d studied last semester which had inspired my narrative style, and essentially tunnel-visioned it. By the end of my critical commentary I’d put almost no critical theory into the thing and had left little room in my argument for it, and by this point the deadline was fast approaching.

As a famous, lovable yellow bear once said, “Oh bother.”

So all of this has led to me frantically polishing and re-writing sections of my critical commentary, before handing in what will inevitably fall short of the grade I’ll desperately need if I’m to achieve a 2:1 in my university course overall. This did, you might imagine, leave me in a bit of an emotional slump, until I made a totally lighthearted Facebook post essentially daring anyone to be disappointed in me and was instead met with widespread support. Not only that, but we were gifted with frozen yoghurt upon handing in our dissertations. Frozen yoghurt! Who can stay upset when your university gives you frozen yoghurt? I might be dwelling a little too long on the frozen yoghurt. Let’s move on.

So why bother to make a public blog post to tell everyone about my marvelous underachievement? Well, personally, I believe that an honest assessment of one’s shortcomings is a healthy way to deal with such shortcomings. But if you want complete honesty, well, this dissertation has been practically my life for the past few weeks and so I have essentially nothing else to write about. In fact, I have more deadlines coming up! So that’s fine. I’d better run and start making with the fiction.

I wonder if they’ll have more frozen yoghurt on results day.

Actually, I’d better not think about results day.

Man the Artillery Cannons!

From the distance comes the dull thud of a faraway explosion.

“Mayday, mayday!” a voice calls through the mist. “All hands on deck, all hands on deck!”

“Private!” roars one of the crew. “What’s happening?”

“The deadline, sir!” the fearful young man replies. “Coming hard and fast!”

The lieutenant curses under his breath. They’d already fended off two of the damned things; this third one caught them off guard. This is bad. He frowns, shakes his head. “How many words do we have?”

“800 and counting sir!”

“And how many do you think we’ll need?”

His eyes grow wide and fearful. “Thousands,” he whispers.

The lieutenant stumbles backwards. “We should have been prepared for this,” he mutters, shaking his head. “We should have been prepared!” he roars.

Another explosion sounds, this one closer.

“Sir… what do we do, sir?”

The lieutenant grabs the private by the collar. “By all the gods you believe in, boy, face all attention span dishes forwards! Do it now!”

“Sir! Yes sir!”

“But sir!” rings a new voice, panicked and fearful. Another private appears through the mist. “Sir, it’s Tuesday!”

“What of it?” he growls.

“We… we have no blog post prepared…”

The lieutenant swears under his breath again, then stops to consider a course of action. “We’ll have to leave it,” he mumbles eventually. “We have to prioritize.”

“But sir… we haven’t missed a Tuesday for months, bar the scheduling incident…”

The lieutenant wrestles with himself for a moment, and then spits. “Fine!” he snaps. “I’ll spare you less than 300 words. But be hasty!” he adds. “Be hasty, lest we all sink to the pits of damnation!”

“Sir,” the private replies, shaken. “Yes sir.”

The private leaves. The lieutenant marches ahead. “Onwards!” he roars.

***

Alright, yes, I know, that was dumb and cheesy. I apologise for this blog post being what it is, but sometimes, we need to prioritise. Blog posts will continue as scheduled from Thursday onwards.

Flattening the Pedestal

This one’s a little more personal.

I often like to make jokes about the value of the university course I’ve chosen and how I’ll ultimately come out of it as the same person. These are, however, jokes, and they’re intended to reflect that foreboding existential crisis that every final year student probably deals with: Your time in education is almost over. What purpose will you have when left to your own devices?

Anyway, that’s a crisis for another blog post. I’d like to discuss how this university course (BA Hons Creative Writing) has shaped part of me as a person. And whilst I’d like to reiterate how I’m against blogging about myself personally, this one actually develops the reasons as to why that is.

When I began university, I secretly thought of myself as a sort of… prodigy. Just typing that hurts, but it’s true. I never swaggered about, rubbed it in people’s faces, or made hints to some inner greatness that lay within. (At least, not to my memory.) But I felt special, one of a kind, like I’d been through a unique journey that had shaped me into the prime, writing being that I was. I was Kristian goddamn Richmond, ready to take on the world by storm.

You might be expecting to hear that my first feedback was disastrous, that I’d written terribly and was too full of myself to see past my flaws. In fact, my feedback was basically telling me I was average. My writing had issues, it had merit, and it was a strong base to develop on. I wasn’t disappointed. I just thought, “Wow, if that’s the feedback I get for this hasty scrawling, imagine what I could achieve if I truly put my all behind a piece of writing.” And I went away. And I handed in more work. And I got more fair, average grades. And I continued to lie to myself.

I’m fairly quiet in my class, at least when compared to being in other social circles. But whilst I may not be overly talkative, I do observe and listen and come to understand those around me, and as we shared work and got to know each other I came to realise that I was normal. This special aura that I fancied myself to possess dispersed, mostly without my knowledge. Our lecturers spoke of the lives and loves of the writers we studied, and some come in regularly for us to meet and listen to. And slowly but surely, I stopped believing that I was some undiscovered star. I was a student writer. And I was, and am, very much still learning.

If anybody from this class is reading this, I would like to emphasise one point to my defense: I never looked down on any of you, or saw myself as above. I simply saw myself as outside, removed somehow, not better but developed differently, in a more unique way. And for the record, I realise now that this was utter rubbish. We all have our complexities, our unique traits, and specialties which define us. We all have our stories.

It was not until I’d seen some posts on various social medias from other university students that had begun their courses this year that I stopped to reflect upon my own development thus far. I saw shades of my own past conceit within them, and only then stopped to realise that it was gone. And for the people I’ve met and the hands that have guided me, I cannot thank them enough.

Finally, in relation to blogging, this journey away from self-admiration marked another change for me. I came to realise that nobody would be particularly interested in the thoughts of some random guy who wanted to ramble on about himself in this particular light. Just writing this blog post has been difficult enough; reading back over it, it feels pretentious, self-congratulatory and shaming. But I wanted to write a blog post on the necessities of learning to be humble, the flaws of holding oneself in a spotlight, and the value of any university course (or any path in life) in how it can help you develop as a person. And you know what, screw it, I still can’t write about myself without a lengthy disclaimer at the end!

Echk.

The Joys of Writing for Screen

It isn’t very often that writers get to play with writing in formats they’re not familiar with. As a young writer who has only just started his Creative Writing course, I have the privilege of discovering what it means to write in these new formats. I’m sure when I’m older I’ll miss this sensation.

Having to adapt is not a bad thing. There have been times when I’ve been writing a short story and have wished that I could just skip the descriptive writing and focus entirely on the dialogue; there have been times when I’ve felt the opposite. This isn’t a major problem as I’ll typically just write a dialogue heavy or overly descriptive story, but now I’ll stop to wonder if I shouldn’t simply write a screenplay instead.

I had to write a script for either stage or screen for my latest piece of coursework. Having only written a stage play once and never having seen a screenplay in my life, this prospect was both alarming and exciting. To begin with I decided to write a stage play, as I already have a small bit of experience in it. After writing two pages, however, I quickly discovered that this particular plot – a quick encounter between a beggar and two politicians rather conspicuously named David and George – had no substance. It was only after I’d written two pages of the play that my brain informed me that there was nowhere to go from here. Being eight pages away from a finished piece of coursework, I turned to screen.

The first thing I did was download Celtx. That program is simply benign. As I mentioned earlier, I’d never even read a screenplay, let alone written one, so I had no idea how to lay one out on paper. After grappling with the UI for about half an hour, I’d gotten the hang of Celtx, and from then on the pages went by a little too fast. When I printed it off, it actually looked like a real screenplay. It was fantastic. Hopefully the content was up to par too.

Perhaps this is just my experience, but writing a screenplay allowed me to focus more on characterisation than in a standard piece of prose. I felt like the text automatically focused on the characters and their nuances within conversation more than any short story ever could. It was an interesting experience to play with stage directions and pay close attention to how a character should say something and what their body language would be like when saying it. I focused on an argument between two characters who had met for the first time in four years, so naturally I had a playground of emotions to explore. We had to include a monologue too, which I naturally turned into a hate-fuelled rant. I loved it. It was liberating, in a way. I do worry that I was a little bit of a control freak with all the stage direction, though.

Maybe it’s just been a little too long since I wrote any good characters in a short story.

Anyway, that’s my take on writing in a different format for the first time. I can’t remember my first time writing short stories as I was too young; I believe I started at the age of six. (I would love to go back and read my first few, but sadly, those are forever lost. What does a six year old even write about? I vaguely remember floating islands.) I was barely a teenager when I began my first attempts at poetry, which I blundered my way through for years until I found a foothold in the climb to not being awful. I suppose this is the first real writing format that I’d been taught about before I even began to attempt it. Maybe that’s what started this entire experience.

The next time I write a new format will probably be the first time I truly throw everything I have into writing a novel. I’ve written chaptered stories before, but I hesitate to call them novels. Minimal effort went into them with no thinking ahead. Let’s call them something different. I’m going to go with… abominations.