Research on the Internet - D.H. Lawrence

I spent a very pleasant morning at the University of Huddersfield having my library induction. Not only are the newly refurbished facilities top-notch, but it's also amazing how much we can use the library's wonderful resources without even setting foot in the place!

Today I'm going to share with you one of the resources that the librarian told us about - one that you too can use on the internet without having to be a member of the university library. It's Intute.

When you search for something on Google, you may end up with lots of references which aren't what you're looking for. For example, if you were to type in 'hairdressing', you wouldn't just get articles about how to do hairdressing - you'd get hundreds of adverts as well for hairdressing salons and products.

Intute is a site that has been put together by university librarians and academics, so if you use it to search for something, you know that somebody reliable from the world of education has already filtered the sites it leads to and checked that what you find should be useful.

I decided to use Intute when I got home to find some more information on D.H. Lawrence, whose short story, A Sick Collier, my Thursday night class had been studying. Intute directed me to a website run by Nottingham University, which has a famous archive of works by and about D.H. Lawrence.

Particularly interesting was the D.H. Lawrence Portal which you can access by typing in www.dh-lawrence.org.uk/ This provides a wealth of information about the author, his works, and his links with the East Midlands. It's a great place to look if you want to find out about his life or to see some of the collieries that provide the backdrop to his writings.

Another useful site which I found was www.mantex.co.uk/ou/a319/dhl-00.htm.

It's possible to read lots of DH Lawrence's works straight from the internet, including A Sick Collier, which was originally published in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914). If you type the name of the collection into Google, you should eventually find the text of the stories.

Finally, if you'd like to read about some of the greatest short story writers, there is a very informative article on the mantex site: www.mantex.co.uk/ou/resource/story-00.htm.

Happy browsing!

'Christmas Comes But Once a Year!'

When I was young, the run-up to the Christmas season used to last about a month. Santa would arrive in the big shops, and we children would get excited about our annual visit to see him. The silver Christmas trees would appear on the canopy of McGills, the department store opposite my flat, just as they had the year before and the year before that - in those thrifty days it didn't seem necessary to change the Christmas decorations annually.

But over the years, shops have gradually extended their Christmas shopping season. When my son was small, I used to think it began at half term, in the last week of October. That was when the shops were beginning to stock up with Christmas cards and gifts.

But this year, I was rather shocked to discover that my favourite local garden centre was already setting up its Christmas displays before the kids had even gone back to school after their summer holidays! Lots of other shops seem to be getting in on the act, too - even Lidl!

It seems a bit of a shame to me, as it's hard to stay excited about Christmas when you're thinking about it for a third of the year, instead of just a month. But on the other hand, what about those people for whom Christmas doesn't come just once a year? People who may be having their Christmas celebration at an unseasonal time?

It might be because the family can't get together at Christmas, so they're rescheduling it to fit in with them. Perhaps someone isn't sure that they'll still be alive and well enough to celebrate Christmas in December, so they're making the most of the time they have left. I have even heard of someone who is so mad about Christmas that they celebrate it every day of the year! I don't think I could cope with that much Christmas pudding though!

Why not use this as a trigger for your writing? You could write an opinion piece about how we've lost the spirit of Christmas by having the shops full of Christmas tat for months on end.

Or maybe you'd prefer a short story about someone who is celebrating Christmas in an unusual setting or at an unusual time of year. You might have a central character who is obsessed with Christmas or one who hates it and can't wait till it's over for another year. What would happen if they were thrown together?

One thing is sure - if you want to submit your Christmas story to a magazine, you'd better get a move on. Magazines really do start planning early for Christmas.

Write from a Different Viewpoint

Today I've been working on a short story I wrote some time ago. I thought it worked and it was quite a good story, and other writers I trust liked it too, but after it was rejected by a magazine I had another look at it and thought about what I could do to make it work better. What I chose to do was to alter the viewpoint.

Viewpoint in fiction writing refers to whose eyes you see the story through. The same events will seem very different when experienced by the various people involved. Adopting a particular character's viewpoint can allow us access to what that character knew and how they felt, but it can also be limiting - how can we write about events to which the character did not witness and had no knowledge of?

The story I was working on today was written from the point of view of a ten-year old girl, which was useful in that it allowed me to really show how passionate she was about what she wanted - she was desperate to learn the clarinet. But I felt that maybe my characterisation of her and her father wasn't strong enough and it was quite limiting to see everything from her viewpoint especially as she was very young.

So I had the idea of re-writing the story from the point of view of her big sister. She can let us see some of the same events happening, but being that bit older she has a more sophisticated understanding of them. Writing from her point of view also allows me to add a touch of humour to the story and to explore the family dynamics a bit more.

The writers' self-help group that is going to meet on Tuesday is going to read both versions, so hopefully I will find out then if my strategy has worked.

Meanwhile it's worth bearing in mind this approach - if you have a piece of writing that isn't quite working, try writing it from another viewpoint and see what effect it has on the story. It's worth a try. Keep your original version safe too, in case you decide it was better after all.

Another Day in the Life of a Writer

I didn't get quite as far with my next short story as I was hoping. I couldn't find it on my hard drive, so I ended up retyping it all from the print-out, editing it as I went. I think, on reflection, it was quite a good way to work. It's easier to make radical changes if you're typing than if you're tinkering.

I took most of the afternoon off to go to Aquafit with my friend and fellow writing tutor, Lindsay. Neither of us had been to Aquafit for a few months, so we approached the class with trepidation as our instructor works us pretty hard. We survived the class, but by the time we met up again this evening at the Authors' Circle, we were both starting to pay the price, Lindsay with sore shoulders and me with knees that didn't want to work.

We had an excellent workshop at the Authors' Circle tonight. Kate led an exercise where we had to write about either our beds or about things we have hated. There were actually three tasks we had to perform, but I don't want to talk about them in detail here in case I decide to use the exercise with my students next term. Suffice it to say that everybody produced some fascinating material and we ended up having a fascinating discussion as well about incidents from our childhood and from family life.

Something that surprised us was that all the women chose to write about their beds and all the men chose to write about things they hated. I wonder if I'll find the same male-female divide when I repeat the exercise in my class.

So it's been a busy old day, both physically and mentally. I hope you've enjoyed your day and that you've managed to get some writing done. You can reflect on our workshop when you tuck yourself up in your bed tonight. Sweet dreams!

Writing in Progress

I'm dying to submit more writing to Triond, but meanwhile there are some other things I have to do first. I'm a member of a self-help group of experienced writers which we call the Gang of Five. We get together every couple of months to discuss in detail a piece of work by one of the group members.

As the other four are all writing novels, we usually read about fifty pages of their latest work in progress and spend the evening analysing what works, what doesn't, and how it could be fixed.

On Tuesday it will be my turn, so I must sort out what I would like them to read. I think I'm going to send them two or three short stories that I've been working on, but I need to do a bit more work on them first.

Today I've been finishing off one of the short stories. It was one I started writing about three years ago and never finished. It was still hand-written and buried away in one of my many notebooks somewhere. I had been wondering where it had got to for ages, and I only rediscovered it at the weekend when I was looking for pieces to send to Trion.

I managed to finish it this afternoon, so I shall e-mail it this evening to my colleagues and see what they think of it. I always feel a bit nervous at this point. I think it's turned out quite well and my husband likes it, but you never know what reaction you're going to get from other people.

What I do know, though, is that whatever they think of it, they won't leave me feeling hopeless. As a group we are very good at coming up with solutions to things that don't work in each other's writing. It will be interesting to see how they deal with a short story though, as the main problems we encounter in each other's novels are usually structural.

I'd better go and get my e-mails done now. Hopefully, by the time I speak to you tomorrow, I'll have polished up at least one of the other short stories as well. It's so good to have the time and energy to devote to my own writing, though. It does rather take a back seat during term time when I have a lot of marking and preparation to do for my students.