Writing: The Whimpering Beach

My notes on writing The Whimpering Beach:

When I first completed this work, I wasn’t sure that it was of any value. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be any substance to it. In the first draft, the story was left with a happy ending, but then I added the last two paragraphs which made the story seem much more realistic, and then I started to feel that perhaps the story was ok.

When I again read it back a few days later, I could see the strengths and weakness more objectively.

To me, the story still seems “lightweight”, but diverting. I found the ending poignant and satisfying (from a dramatic point of view) and the story was compelling but, for me, it still seemed to have no substance, no real content. Perhaps I only feel this because the last few stories I had written, had had much more substance to them.

The last few pages work as a poetic celebration of love and the sorrowful fact that it is incompatible with daily life, with all the problems of managing to live. I guess the whole story is focused on the searching for love, of that yearning for something that can never be. As an aside, the lovers are gay, which perhaps highlights even further the fact that their love is forbidden (I call this an aside because it has only just occurred to me—anyone analysing the story might conclude that this was used as a device purely to further highlight the fact that love is ultimately unattainable, which is an understandable assumption). So, the story’s message is that such beauty, which we all fundamentally desire, is not attainable; it is extinguished by the day to day concerns of life.

Why does the story seem lightweight

After thinking about this, I have realized why the story seems lightweight to me. The story cannot seem powerful because the characters’ histories are not given, in anything but the most sketchiest of terms. Therefore, by definition, it is not possible for anything of portent to occur. For this to happen, the reader needs to be involved with the characters, needs to care about their plight, which can only happen if they have travelled with the characters previously.

Prose style

Another interesting feature of this story, I found, was the prose style. As each story emerges, I seem to be tending towards the use of seemingly endless sentences—in certain passages. This story features them heavily. I seem to be doing something musical here. I seem to be using pace and rhythm. In these long sentences, there is definitely something other than the content that is being depicted by using this prose style. I am adjusting the pace and rhythm, and even sometimes using the sound of words, to add effect, and, for me as a reader, it seems that emotions are being evoked by the prose style in the same way that they are by the use of music in films. In some passages, I am using the prose style to add a musical “soundtrack” to the story. This has only just occurred to me, but now that I’ve realized it, it does seem that that is what I’ve been doing all along, in this and the previous stories, though I was not consciously aware of doing it.

Other content

A few times in my life I have experienced true telepathy, and the depiction in this story is a fairly accurate account of the experience.

At some point I will get around to describing my real-life experiences in detail. Perhaps I’ll do it in another  blog entry, or maybe I’ll come back and describe it here. I’m intending to start work on my acupuncture nonfiction book in 2010. There are some sections of that book that this type of content would be more at home in, so perhaps I’ll write about them there.

Do please let me know if the story works for you.

 

Read the full story here.

 

27 October 2009