String has a story to tell too by Pete Walsh

String has a story to tell too

(The length and breadth usually brings you to somewhere in the middle)

 A piece of string:
- look along it and you can’t see the other end
- walk along it and where you started from is soon forgotten
- make of it a loop and try to remember where it joins

the beauty of paradox.
Something like what Carver said about Hemingway (look it up)

I have adopted a device (excuse) as a writer in that all my stories evolve. I’ve put the plot sheets away and let the evolutionary process encourage the stories to have their head. The head usually shakes like an unruly horse before the story is influenced by something and then the horse gallops.

The galloping is controlled in a way, and not by means of reins or spurs or a vicious crop. This is nothing about equestrianism. Chekov had a gun – mine is not a starting pistol, not even a catapult and a few choice polished stones.

I reflect somehow on creativity as a whole, and Quantum Physics are playing a bigger part in how I imagine nowadays. It appears that not all we see or know is how it appears to be (yes, I know) or is in the same time and place (again, yes, I know).

Einstein didn’t like the idea of Quantum Mechanics or Quantum Physics, and I’m reminded, kept on the straight and narrow by a favourite quote:

“Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere"

Albert Einstein

Kandinsky warbled on about creativity in the image, and let’s face it, image is our face-saving feature in storytelling. It matters not whether our piece is a 100k word epic novel, metafiction, poetry, a traditional short story or any of the growing number of the sub-species of micro and nano-fiction leaving the great creative keyboard, image is the means-to-an-end in showing the engaging picture.

Get the image right. A poor image without any poetics (poetics can be the visually imagined, sponsored by the read or heard word) tends to disengage a reader, so make the image as beautiful as possible without going overboard – Orhan Pamuk’s work shows good examples of poetic imagery.  

Pamuk’s influence shows in my ebook novel Cascade, found on Amazon.

Read: Orhan Pamuk, My name is Red, or Snow, and you’ll discover what I mean - Pamuk was Nobel Laureate for good reason.

Enough about other authors – I start a course, MA Writing, at Sheffield Hallam University the first week in October. I’m pleased to have got there through attaining First Class Honours in a BA in Creative and Professional Writing at The University of Nottingham this last summer and in response to the quality of my writing in the MA submission.

I’ll try and reflect both on my MA and my usual writing experiences in subsequent blogs.

So keep image in mind and don’t let it slip away. Also, keep hold of one end of your piece of string so that one way or another, your story should reach the other end (Quantum Physics permitting).

Besides being found on Amazon with his ebook Cascade,

Pete can be befriended on Facebook or seen here and there on Brit Writers, http://britwriters.blogspot.co.uk/ & http://petewalsh.webeden.co.uk