Drop in to any session and meet the other writers – we’re a friendly bunch!

If you write with your ending in mind you should know where your narrative is headed. Though you may decide to change the ending later, you are writing with a destination in mind. Citizen Kane will die and we’ll know what ‘Rosebud’ means. You would not think of telling a joke without knowing the punchline.

So a story should be a logical chain of cause and effect. Each incident should be caused by the previous incident, or some event which happened earlier in the narrative.

The word ‘so’ will lead you from the inciting incident through to the denouement.

In the legal drama The Verdict, for example, Frank Galvin, the character played by Paul Newman, is humiliated when he is thrown out of a funeral. A mourner recognises Frank as an ambulance chaser, a lawyer who only preys on the vulnerability of grieving families.

This humiliation leads Frank to realise how low he has fallen – he’s a drunken bumbler with a failed career and a failed marriage. These days he holds court in the local bar, rather than in court.

To recover his self esteem, Frank decides to fight the Catholic Church and the medical establishment over a case of medical negligence. A wrong dose of anaesthetic has left a young woman in a coma. The church is willing to settle out of court and compensate the family.

But Frank decides to fight the case. He is humiliated, SO he decides to try to win back his dignity and self respect.

When you get blocked in a story it is often because the logical next step is missing. Perhaps you don’t know what will happen next, or how to move towards the denouement.

This is where ‘so’ comes in: This happens, so this happens, so this happens…

The computers on a returning spaceship tell the crew stop at a passing planet. So…

The computer wakes the crew. So…

The crew go down to the planet, where they find mysterious eggs. So…

One of the crew, unwittingly, returns to the spaceship carrying an alien within his body. So…

As the crew eat their last meal before returning to sleep, the alien hatches out. So…

There is a hostile alien at loose in the confined space of a ship. So…

Only one woman is left. So…

Ripley must defeat the alien alone. So…

…the biggest word.

In the early hours of the morning, around one or two am, we were driving back from an engagement in Middlesbrough. It was a summer night. the  skies were clear and the visibility  good.  At that time of the morning the roads were almost empty. There was certainly nothing on the road when the incident happened. We were driving through Felling on the A184, just beyond Heworth Metro station, heading north to Newcastle.  We were starting to think about our warm beds. But we were all wide awake, though quiet. It was that dead time of the night.

The road which passes the Metro station is a dual carriageway. The road, as I said, was empty. We were driving – slowly – along a straight piece of highway. Suddenly the steering wheel whipped around to the right and the van swerved over. In a moment I found myself driving along  the fast lane. It was the oddest sensation, as if someone had grabbed the wheel and wrenched it around.

‘What was THAT?’ I shouted.

Martin said he thought he saw a child run from the side of the road and dart  in front of the van. But Martin was sitting too far away to have taken the wheel. He swore he had not touched it. As I felt the wheel turn I was looking down – I saw nothing holding the wheel except my own hands. We were all shocked and feeling a little shaky as we drove the final couple of miles home.

I met Martin  the other evening – at a Beverley Knight gig – and we started to talk about that incident.  Martin told me about this passage, which comes from Charles Shaar Murray’s book about John Lee Hooker. Hooker’s friend, Eddie Kirkland, was talking about their life on the road :

‘We made some long trips man.’

‘Well, I did all the drivin’,’ says Kirkland. ‘A lotta nights I drove all night long to get a place. We’d leave Detroit and wouldn’t stop till we got to Macon, Georgia. No sleep. The only times we’d stop was to get a cup a coffee, stop in Nashville sometimes. We’d stop for a few hours because we made a lotta good friends in Nashville. Most of the time Hooker would stay up with me all night and talk, sometimes he’d get tired and go to sleep. He’d always sit in the front seat, never in the back. At that time we’d see ghostses on the highway…’

He’s not kidding. And he says it wasn’t simply the effects of lack of sleep either.

‘No, that’s the way it were. That was for real. He’ll tell you hisself. We saw a lotta ghostses on the highway, in different places that we travelled to, and that was back in the ‘50s. Nowadays, you don’t have too many people sayin’  that they seen ghostses. Me and him we both seen ‘em. We seen ‘em man, cross the highways man, jam the brakes an’ shit, get out and there be nobody there.

Eddie Kirkland in Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century, by Charles Shaar Murray

The challenge is to write a complete story which can be read on a phone. The limit is 150 words – an interesting challenge. I find that one of the most enjoyable tasks is editing my work – keeping meaning and sense yet  conveying that in the most economical way . The Swing is a ghost story – I’ll be uploading it on here and possibly on the Rudham Books site soon. https://rudhambooks.com

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/node/80025