I’m at that stage I call the accummulation of random facts.\u00a0 It involves reading, of course, and a lot of lying around half-asleep.\u00a0 I wake up in the middle of the night and scribble sentences in a big A4 hardback notebook.\u00a0 Random scenes begin to emerge.\u00a0 Sometimes they’re no more than a glance between characters.\u00a0 Sometimes snatches of dialogue or descriptions of a place with its particular atmosphere.\u00a0 What I should be doing according to the standard ‘how to write a novel’ course is fleshing out my characters and refining my plot lines.\u00a0 When I taught creative writing a few years ago in London I began with the line:\u00a0 there is one rule for writing a novel , at which every pen became poised, only to say:\u00a0 there are no rules.\u00a0 Philosophically, of course, it’s ambiguous, but you get the point I’m sure.<\/p>\n
I’d planned to write chapter one on Monday morning but am being pulled by wild horses towards starting tomorrow.\u00a0 Hildegard is eager to get up and at ’em.<\/p>\n
A point worth remembering is that words are not sacrosanct until you make them so.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile I read Chaucer writing about his astrolabe yesterday.\u00a0 His son, ‘lytel Lewys,’ must have been a bright spark.\u00a0 At the age of ten he was begging his father to show him how the astrolabe worked and Chaucer, good dad, decided to write it out for him like a little lesson, beginning with a description of what the astrolabe looked like and how it should be held and then going into ever more detail to demonstrate what it could do.\u00a0 Apart from being able to measure the altitude of the stars, movements of the sun, timing of the tides and so forth, it could be used for astrology.\u00a0 Chaucer set his constant fix on Oxford, that hotbed of Lollardry, so-called.\u00a0 The scholars were free enough in King Richard II’s time to follow their researches into the seven liberal arts of which astronomy was one, without danger to themselves – until Arundel decided to hound them out.\u00a0 This led them to a small fenland port on the river Cam where they set up shop again.\u00a0 I believe there’s a unniversity and a science park there to this very day.\u00a0 It was ten years later after usurper Henry IV seized the throne that burning at the stake was introduced into England as punishment for pioneering scientific thought, or indeed, any thought at all.<\/p>\n
I really need a stroll round Netlay Abbey to find out exactly where the guest quarters were and how the brothers got down to the quayside to unload their imports.\u00a0\u00a0 Fat chance though.\u00a0 Car still kaput.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m at that stage I call the accummulation of random facts.\u00a0 It involves reading, of course, and a lot of lying around half-asleep.\u00a0 I wake up in the middle of the night and scribble sentences in a big A4 hardback notebook.\u00a0 Random scenes begin to emerge.\u00a0 Sometimes they’re no more than a glance between characters.\u00a0 Sometimes snatches of dialogue or descriptions of a place with its particular atmosphere.\u00a0 What I should be doing according to the standard ‘how to write a novel’ course is fleshing out my characters and refining my plot lines.\u00a0 When I taught creative writing a few<\/p>\n[Read More...]<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":624,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions\/624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}