story – Page 2 – Ruth Livingstone

Difficult assignment

Difficult homework assignment.

How about this for a tricky bit of writing homework:

Rewrite the Hemingway story Hills Like White Elephants in the style of Gabriel García Márquez’s The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.

Hemingway’s prose is sparse and factual. For the most part, his story consists of dialogue between two people while waiting for a train. Márquez’s narrative is dense and mainly descriptive, told in the style of a fable or legend.

My task, therefore, was a difficult one. However, having spent most of a sunny Saturday afternoon struggling with it, I was quite pleased with the outcome. But my story seemed unfinished. I went back on Sunday and added an extra scene. This gave the story a better ending, but changed the theme into something a little different from the original Hemingway one.

Now, my next piece of homework: to rewrite the Márquez story in the style of AL Kennedy’s story, A Bad Son …..

First story up … on the Olympic Storyteller site

Yes, my first ‘story’ is up on the Olympic Storyteller site.

‘But that’s not a “story”!’ I hear you cry. No, this is not a work of fiction. And, making a wild guess here, I reckon that BT are not sponsoring us Olympic Storytellers because they wanted prize-winning fiction writers. No, they are after ‘stories’ that relate to, or comment on, the events surrounding the London 2012 Olympics.

Thinking of the stories I wanted to tell, I decided to ………

(Go on. Read what I decided to do here. And don’t forget to hit the [like] button. Thank you.)

Submitted

My final Open University assignment is submitted. Marking awaited. And no, somewhat to my own surprise, I did not leave it up to the last-minute, but submitted with 24 hours to spare.

Feel a bit lost now. What next?

I’m doing a 3 day course in ‘Short Story Writing’ at Knuston Hall in September. That’s next.

In October, I start at Birkbeck. Four years of part-time study, leading to a B.A. degree in Creative Writing. Can’t wait!

A question answered

Well, Jonathan Brownlee chose one of my questions to answer. Yippee!

The question he chose to answer was:

If you could choose your own theme music for the medal podium, what would you choose and why?

Err, hang on. Did he really answer my question?
Sort of.
Maybe.
Actually no.
No, he didn’t really answer my question. But I forgive him. He chose the national anthem after all.

Personally, I would go for something like this: Hawaii Five O.
You could choose Chariot’s of Fire, but this is too predictable.
Given Jonathan’s possible film ambitions, maybe he should choose 007 – licensed to thrill.

You can find the questions and answers here on the BT Storytellers website

Olympic Storyteller – site live

The official BT Olympic Storytellers site is now live, along with details of all the storytellers. They look an intelligent and talented bunch of people. I have no idea what I am doing among them.

Here is my page. I look a little stern. And somewhat confused.

Twitter is beginning to wake up to the fact we have Olympic Storytellers among the Twitterati. There seems a confusion of hashtags to follow, but the official ones appear to be:
#ldn2012story
#London2012
#btstorytellers

Personally, I prefer #olympicstorytellers – because what you see is what you get. But Twitter has a life of its own and defies all attempts at logical organisation (thank goodness). We will see what trends emerge.