Jack Wright of Welwick

A writing exercise for the FutureLearn course - Starting to write fiction

Jack Wright strolled down to the pub from his rented cottage on the edge of the village. On the way he passed the tall corten steel sculpture of the four Jacobeans with their barrels of gunpowder. He was wearing a pair of dark blue jeans, low heeled boots, and a black jersey. The collar of a blue and white striped shirt just showed above the neckline, and he ran a finger uncomfortably under the cloth as he walked.  He had tried various outfits in the month since he arrived, but none of them seemed to sit well with the locals. He always felt uneasy when he walked through the doorway into the bar and silence fell, as many pairs of eyes turned on him with an air of disapproval. Despite smiling and wishing everyone a good evening the best he had elicited from anyone was a brief grunt. Even the landlord managed only a curt, “Jack” then waited for his order.

Ever since moving to the village Jack had been aware that he had the same name as one of the four figures in the artwork. The original Jack Wright had been part of the Gunpowder Plot, as had his brother Kit, though their given names were John and Christopher. Jack wasn’t short for John in his case though, he’d always been Jack. He thought perhaps the coincidence was part of the reason for the locals’ poor reception of him. As an early thirty-something he was half the age of most of the old codgers around the bar, which didn’t help either, but he suspected the real trouble was yet to come when he introduced his partner into the mix. Why did he have to have a partner called Kit? A male partner called Kit. He was pretty sure this place wasn’t ready for a gay couple, especially where one was such a flamboyant peacock as Kit Spencer.

Not NaNo 3 November 5

I’ve missed a couple fo days beause we’ve been away so I have some making up to do. I’m not going to lie and say that I did this on the right day. I admit I’m a couple of days late but at this stage I have the rest of the month to make up. I probably won’t till next weekend, because I’m not sure what time I’ll be home every day. I took my laptop to work to do stuff at lunchtime on Friday but it didn’t happen. Oddly I felt insecure about doing it. I intended to spend an hour doing my own thing but it didn’t seem to work. Maybe I’ll try again this week. I just need to find somewhere that I can sit on my own without anyone to interrupt me, but I have no idea where that could be. I thought about the car, but it seems rude somehow.

Anyhow, I have some writing to do to keep up to date – or more accurately to catch up with where I should be.  I guess I’ll have to start somewhere. I was going to talk about my childhood and how I got into this word smith thing in the first place.

I was very young when my parents first decided to teach me to read. I must have been about three because it was a long time before I started school. My Dad thought that reading was important. He read every day. His job was sedentary and most of the time he didn’t actually do much. He had to be at his post in case something happened, but for huge parts of his eight hour shifts it didn’.t. So he read. Sometimes it was a novel. Sometimes he read things he’d read before. Captain Blood was a favourite and he probably read it twenty or thirty times that I knew of, not to mention others before I was born. It was one of his favourite films too, with Errol Flynn in the title role.

He was fond of historic navel stuff too, but he also read classics. He felt he’d missed out at school. He was forced to leave at 14 and went to work on te land. His family weren’t too bothered about learning an were more bothered about earning a living and making sure everyone was fed. Probably to do with their backgrounds. No-one in my history has been rich. I guess I don’t fully understand the need to earn all the time. I’ve always had a reasonable amount of money in the bank. We had to watch what we were spending from time to time but we were never really poor. We always ate well, if not excessively. (Even though we’ve all quite big!) We went places, we did things, and we were surrounded by books.

There was a monthly magazine called Argosy that we had delivered regularly. It had short stories by well known and lesser known authors. It was paperback so nobody was too worried about damaging it, and piles of them were kept on the side of the bath where mother could read them while she soaked for hours on end, avoiding the films that Dad used to watch. Captain Blood wasn’t one of her favourites. Of course, just because books were all around me didn’t mean that I could read them instinctively. I was taught to read, ot with children’s books, but with what was around me. For example, my parents were avid crossworders. Some of my earliest memories are of Dad reading the clues: “Is it made straight for the hive? Seven letters, ends in e.”  It’s beeline, of course, and I can remember early on asking why the answers were what my parents wrote in to the grid.

I  can remember sitting with my dad while he read out each clue, running his finger below the words as I watched. Eventually he started asking me to read the words to him. It was a faltering start but I made progress.  So I learned some very strange words very early on. I mean, have you read crossword clues?  They make no sense in a conventional way. So I had to be able to work out the actual words. There are no hints within a crossword clue about what the next word will be.

For very long words Dad taught me how to break down each one into smaller components so I could say them out loud. I probably had no idea what the words meant. Such as convalescence, for example. I could break it down into con val es cence and say it to me Dad and he’d tell me I had it right. And then he’d explain to me what the word meant. But mother would work out the answer to the clue and then we’d go through why it was so.

That’s how I had such a huge vocabulary by the time I started school. I can remember the first day, being asked to read a list of words to my teacher. Far from Janet and John, I had lots of very long words at my fingertips. Did I know what any of them meant? No. But I could read them and pronounce them, so it was decided that I had a reading age of about 10. And by the time I left primary school at the ripe old age of 10 they said it was 16 (which was as far as the measurements go. That just meant ‘grown up’.

I’ve gone off track a bit here. I’m supposed to be talking about my childhood writing, it’s just that reading came first. I had two primary schools, and I don’t remember much about the first one. I can picture it and I know where I had to walk to get there, but there’s not much about my life there that’s stuck i my mind. The second one, though, that’s different. I had some corking teachers who decided to support my skills, rather than just record them.

We were taught all kinds of complicated things under simple headings. Under the guise of ‘how things began’ my vocabulary grew even further as words like Ordovician and trilobite were added to it. As part of ‘seashore life’ I learned Laminaria saccharina and Patella vulgata. (That’s a sort of seaweed, and the common limpet, if you want to know.)  It soon became obvious to my teachers that I had skills in English, both reading and writing. A wonderful, inspiring teacher called Mr Childs encouraged us to take part in writing contests and I can remember one that was run by the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury. I wrote a story about a chocolate bar that didn’t want to be eaten, so it ran away. It had a very bad time of things as a result and ended up cold, wet and miserable after being swept through a storm drain. In the process its wrapper fell off and it was depressed and lonely when a dog came along and ate it, so it realised its true destiny.

Of course I’ve learned since then that the dog would have been very ill as a result, but I didn’t know that when I was a kid. It seemed like a good tale, and the Cadbury judges must have agreed because I won a first prize certificate and a huge tin of chocolate things. I was told I was imaginative. These days they call it creative, but I’m not sure what to call it. I suspect I just like iving in a world where everything eventually works out for the best.  I’ve always thought my version of the world is better than the real one.  In fact I still have an active fantasy life. I sometimes see people walking past me and create whole back stories for them to suit what they’re wearing, how they walk, what they are carrying. I imagine where they are going and what they plan to do. I create whole stories in my head about their lives and what they do. The worse I feel the more creative I am about their stories. It’s amazingly cheering.

Then there was Mister Wilson.  He was the headmaster and he was a great believer in expanding children’s horizons. He had a theory that, if you’d learned to walk, talk, interact with people and generally live by the time you’ve five why should you slow down the rate of learning? So he felt that kids should hear the classics, and try to understand what they were about and try to understand where the story was going. If you hear the start of a story you should be able to predict where the tale is going. Or alternatively you can create a whole new direction for it and make something totally different happen. So he would read us the first half of something then make us write our own ending for it, in the right style, even if it was poetry.

I remember one day he read us the first half of the poem Lochinvar. “Oh young Lochinvar is come out of the west, through all the wide nation his steed was the best” or something like that. The tale is a proper story of romance and heroism in which Lochinvar eventually rescues his love from an imminent marriage to the wrong man. Sure enough, I wrote the correct ending because, like I said, I always want the world to have a happy ending!  So Lochinvar gets to ride away on his fine steed with his lady love.

So my creative writing was encouraged early. My teachers wanted us to be imaginative and to write as often as possible. And I was happy to take part in it. By the age of 10 (which is when I moved on to secondary school ) I was recognised as being ahead of my school pals in writing, spelling, reading, using words. I was already a writer and already wanting to do it for a living when I grew up.  At the age of 10 that was how life seemed to be going. I knew that words were my friends and I already felt that they would do what I wanted if I asked them.  

The Winter Ghosts

There's no doubt that Kate Mosse can spin a good yarn. Labyrinth and Sepulchre were two of my favourite recent reads, so I was delighted to spot The Winter Ghosts in my local library. (Even though it's August!) I didn't read the jacket blurb, trusting to past experience that I would enjoy the book, so I was slightly disappointed to realise from page one that it's set in exactly the same area as the previous novels.

The set-up is different. Freddie Watson has been sent to the South of France in 1933, to recuperate after a serious illness. He's still obsessed with the death of his elder brother George on the eve of the Battle of the Somme. It soon becomes clear that Freddie is sick in mind as well as body.

In a foolhardy attempt to make his way through the Pyrenees in an unreliable car he almost veers off the road and has to find help in an isolated village with a strange atmosphere. The locals make him welcome, and even invite him to a local festival, where he meets a beautiful woman called Fabrissa. As the evening passes and the wine flows he finds himself talking about his fears and loss for the first time. She tells him a tale of how her family had suffered at the hands of soldiers and the pair talk all night.

The morning after, quite predictably I'm afraid, Freddie's back at the boarding house and nobody has any memory of his being at the fete. No-one has heard of Fabrissa or any of the other people he met at the party. His coat still hangs on the hall stand and his boots are not even wet, in spite of the winter snow.

By that time it's clear to the reader that Fabrissa is one of the Winter Ghosts of the title and yes, fancy that, she probably wasn't talking about the same war that triggered Freddie's mental health problems.  I won't spoil the tale for anyone who plans to read it, but if you've read Kate Mosse's other works you'll have worked out for yourself who Fabrissa is.

Confession time - I knew nothing of the relevant period of history before I read Labyrinth, and I learned a lot from it and Sepulchre, but The Winter Ghosts is really a book too far. Time for a new research topic Ms Mosse. You write excellent and engaging prose. Your books truly are gripping, page turners, but it would have been possible to tell the same tale in reference to a different era. Man's inhumanity to man is not limited to 14th century France.

The original version of The Winter Ghosts was published as The Cave in 2009, as part of the Quick Reads initiative, aimed at young adults. Its length and simplicity show through in the later book. If you're already familiar with Mosse's work you know what to expect. If you haven't read Labyrinth and Sepulchre this might be a good place to start, then move on to the meatier works to find out more about the topic.

Time slip

Ben Elton is perhaps best known as a comedian, but there are not many laughs in his novel Time and Time Again. It does raise a few wry smiles, but it's far more thoughtful than mirthful. It starts with an interesting premise: suppose you could go back in time to change one thing - what would it be?  I have no idea whether Ben Elton's version of Newtonian physics that explains the time shift is even vaguely possible, but it's a challenging idea. Before you start working your way through all of history to pick your moment, let me warn you - for purposes of the storyline, you're limited to arriving in 1914. Does that give you a clue?

The tale centres on Hugh Stanton, a former soldier who has no personal ties since the loss of his wife and children in a motor accident. A bunch of  Cambridge university professors persuade him to travel back to the months before World War One and charge him with a mission. He has to prevent the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo - the event generally accepted as the cause of the war - and so save millions of lives that would otherwise be lost in the conflict. But it soon becomes obvious that the academics' theory fails to take account of history's power.

Stanton arrives in the early twentieth century with good intentions, but quickly paves a path to hell as it becomes obvious that he must take several innocent lives in order to carry out his instructions. In fact the bodies fall fast at Stanton's hands and the butterfly effect of his killing begins to change history much earlier than the Cambridge Dons had planned.

Stanton spends much of the book trying to put right the wrongs he has caused, with much soul searching over the moral questions raised by his meddling. It makes for fascinating reading as an adventure story unfolds, but makes the reader agonise along with Stanton over the justification for his actions. I'd recommend it.

Falling Star

Dirk Blaise looked hard into the mirror to check the crow's feet around his eyes. "Time for another tuck, Dirk baby," he muttered, as he continued to brush dye onto the canescent patches around his temples. "Or they won't be casting you as the varlet much longer."

He smiled his youngest-looking grin, revealing his newly re-whitened teeth.

"You CAN still pass as the juvenile lead," he asseverated, at the face that grimaced back at him.

But his reflection looked unconvinced.

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February 2011.  Originally written as part of the Three Word Wednesday challenge that featured on the Reading and Writing by Pub Light blog.  (You're given three words that you have to incorporate into short story) Later included in Microstory a Week.

Invention

He knew as soon as his boss told him the plan that it was a bad idea. Yes, the device needed to be revealed to the world, but this was not the way to do it. They wouldn’t understand the importance of the find. Thanks to some incontrovertible evidence in the tomb, it was possible to date the parts very accurately, and they proved that mankind invented clockwork millennia earlier than was previously thought. This was big stuff; but would the uninitiated grasp the significance? Of course not – and he knew he’d be the fall guy.

Dennis had spent two years painstakingly copying each of the cogs and wheels and creating a working model. It had been in a woebegone state when it first arrived at his workshop. The rest of the team of archaeological investigators had carried out all of the tests they could on the bits and pieces and then brought him the remains to interpret. Luckily, many of the sections were still intact, thanks to the lack of rain at the dig site, but connecting up all the Heath Robinson gearing had given him a few challenges.

The work had been tough, but the finished article was a triumph. The key mechanism had been the trickiest: making sure it connected all of the rotors so that, when the brake disengaged, the whole apparatus danced majestically. Ratchets engaged, spheres spun, pivots balanced and the two flagellate arms swept delicate arcs around each other, making a soft swishing sound.

It was inevitable that the museum director wanted to make a show and so a press conference was duly called. Dennis was given his orders to set up the machine prominently so that, at the right moment it could be switched on for the crowd to admire. After a gushing introduction, the director handed over to him to explain how it all fitted together. The journalists made suitably admiring noises and Dennis tried to give them every possible fact he could so that he could avoid the one question he dreaded: the one thing he could not answer.

As he reached the end of his talk and applied the brake to bring the mechanism to a controlled halt he hoped he had got away with it, but he should have known better. Just as the gentle machine hum ended a voice spoke up: “But what does it do?”

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This story featured on the Microstory a Week blog in 2012