Vivienne Plumb answers queries posted by booklcubbers in last weeks session on her story, The Glove Box. (If you missed the story and would like to read it - click this link shortaustralianstories.au/ebooks/esingles/the-glove-box-by-vivienne-plumb/ Hello Kate Liston-Mills , thanks for your enthusiastic comments on my The Glove Box story. First of all I’ll say to all the Book Club members that I’m not that great at discussing my own writing. I work in a very solitary manner and rarely speak about what I’m writing. I just sit down and do it every day. What I prefer the most, is that people read the stories, and when they come back to me and say they enjoyed it, that’s terrific. I also write poetry and drama, besides fiction. I have recently returned from Christchurch (city of earthquakes) where I held the 2014 Ursula Bethall writer-in-residence at University of Canterbury, and while I was there I was working on making the actual Glove Box story into something larger. I feel there is a lot of information in the present story that could be enlarged upon. It’s been interesting trying to do it. By the way, Ursula Bethall was a wonderful NZ poet who in particular, wrote some beautiful poems about nature, and her garden. She was fairly opinionated and I think she would have probably done better than me in answering the Book Club questions. Anyway, here are my answers to your questions: Q: Before you wrote this narrative did you plan to structure it around photographs? A: Photographs can be strong indicators. I liked the idea that writing about photographs could indicate ‘memories’ to the reader. Q: Strategies and techniques for coming up with the perfect metaphor? A: Small phrases and metaphors can come to you when you least expect it. It seems as (to me) as if these things suddenly float up out of somewhere else. Then I always think: ‘aha’, and write them down. So my strategy would be: I have a pen and piece of paper in my bag. I think the longer you keep writing the more you understand the value of these small thoughts, when they arrive. Q: Is this story based on a true story? A: People love ‘true’ stories and always ask writers if the story is ‘true’. Q: Where did the inspiration (for the mother’s story) come from? A: That’s the sort of question writers don’t always wish to answer. And it could even be a little close to ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ The best answer I ever heard to that question was Stephen King’s. He said something like ‘there’s a little shop in the mall that I often drop into…’ I think the mother in this story is a character that we have all come across during our life – someone who is not coping, and is falling, falling. Sometimes we have even experienced that situation ourselves. Q: Were the characters based on real people? A: This is another question frequently asked of writers. And I guess that by the time the writer has finished the story, the characters do feel ‘real’ to them.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 11:30:58 +0000
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