J is for Jazz Night

Okay, I admit, this one is a bit of a shameless plug, but J is for Jazz Night - my first ever published poem.

The process of writing the poem started in September 2010 with a freewrite based on a picture by Jack Vettriano (below) and the song 'It looks like rain' by Jann Arden. At the time I wrote 'I can easily imagine this song being sung late at night in a club with dim lights and small tables. I'll see where that takes me and go from there.'

After I'd done the freewrite, it sat around in my files for a few months until I had an assignment for my Open University course on poetry. I dug out the freewrite and looked at it to see if it was suitable for making into a poem, and then started tearing it apart, separating sentences, looking for rhymes and rhythms, and seeing if I could recreate the picture I'd been using as a prompt in poetry. The rhyme scheme was deliberately relaxed - ABBA and not AABB - and loose, breaking down completely in the last stanza.

The finished result was published by Every Day Poets in June 2011, nine months after I wrote the first freewrite. It got some very positive feedback and was also one of the top poems of the month. Writing Jazz Night was a good lesson in patience and revision, as well as proof to myself that I could produce something that other people wanted to read and that was worth doing.

Jazz Night by Pam Griffin

The tables set back from the glare
seat men who come to lose the night
in whisky under muted lights,
in jazz, in blues, in cheap affairs.

No talking here, no friends, no food,
just whisky poured out by the dram,
and saxophone, piano, drum -
The perfect place to sit and brood.

The sultry singer shows her range
and tells about her latest sin,
while drinks are served by faceless girls
who take your cash – and keep your change.

Jazz Night on Every Day Poets

My poem was published on Every Day Poets on June 17 and it seems that people like it as it's currently in the top ten favourite poems of the year list!
If you're one of the people who rated it, thank you! If not, then please go and read it and let me know what you think.

Decisions, decisions!

The last month has been pretty hectic, which is why I've been quiet for a few weeks, sorry...

My final assignment for my OU course is due in at the start of June, so I'm working on that at the moment. I'm torn between whether to do the whole thing in fiction or whether to throw in a bit of autobiographical travel writing as well. And then I came up with an idea for a new novel, so now I'm wondering if I should use that instead. Decisions, decisions!

And some news - my poem Jazz Night, which I originally wrote as part of the OU course, will be published on Every Day Poets on June 17. I'll post the link here when it appears.

Write for Japan & poetry

The Write for Japan project is well and truly off the ground now. To find out more visit www.writeforjapan.com, and please, please, please do consider donating.

All the authors are writing stories on the subject of destruction and/or hope. I don't know exactly what form the stories will take, but I'm looking forward to finding out. My story - Generation Three - is a sci-fi one set on board a generation ship, taking the human race to find another world after the Earth became uninhabitable.

And changing the subject completely, my poem Jazz Night has been accepted by Every Day Poets!

Poetry and charity books

Not much to say today. I didn't think poetry was my 'thing' but I seem to have done alright in the poetry part of the creative writing course, and one of my poems is now being considered for publication at Every Day Poets!

In other news... I'm getting involved in a project called (provisionally) Write for Japan, which is hoping to produce a book of short stories to sell for charity to help with the aid and rebuilding work for victims of the Japan earthquake. I'll keep you posted...

Entering flash fiction competitions

I am a firm believer that in order to write well you have to read a lot, and not just a lot of one type of story, but a lot of every type of story. One way I get my daily fix is from Every Day Fiction, which drops a nice piece of flash fiction into my inbox every day. Sometimes I'm not particularly impressed with what I read, and other times I can't stop thinking about the stories, but because they come from writers all over the world they're always different.

I've mentioned EDF before because I submitted a couple of stories to them last year, but this week they're running a competition to write a flash fiction of up to 250 words based on a 10 word prompt. I've just submitted my entry for the competition, entitled 'Purity', and I hope I'll be able to submit another as well before the competition closes on Sunday.

If anyone would like to have a go at the competition, the details are here.

Top tip - Topic sentences

I subscribe to quite a lot of writing newsletters, competition updates and writing blogs, and one of my favourites is Flash Fiction Chronicles on the Every Day Fiction website.

Earlier this week I had an update from the site with some writing tips from John Arthur Miller. One of the tips he gives is about how to construct paragraphs. It's one of those tips that when you hear it you think "oh yeah, of course!", and then go back and check your own writing to make sure you're doing it!

Here's the tip:

Top every paragraph with a topic sentence. The topic sentence should explain what happens in the paragraph. Don’t make the reader guess. Everything beneath the opening topic sentence should HANG from the topic sentence. Don’t describe a room first; have your character look around the room or enter the room. This adds clarity of thought, purpose and action of the paragraph. It’s grade school, but too many times have I purchased anthologies or novels in which the author doesn’t know how to use topic sentences for the reader’s benefit.

The rest of the article is here, and I really recommend reading through it.

Song challenge: Day 5

Day 5 – A song that you know all the words to

Difficult one this, because I know the words to a lot of songs! In the end I've plumped for Ain't No Sunshine, as sung by Eva Cassidy.

To inspire me for the writing I did a Google search on the song title and it brought up this image from Flickr, so I'm going to do something about this girl. She looks like she could be waiting for someone...

In case anyone is wondering where the stories are... well, I'm polishing them as I write and then submitting them to Every Day Fiction. Unfortunately one of the rules of submission is that they aren't published anywhere else - including on blogs - and so I can't post them here. If they get accepted I'll post the links, if they don't I'll post the stories.