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I used this photo as I thought it was interesting that the floors are kind of the same as they used to be back in Foxes Books. This shows there is still remnants of the shop inside Current Affairs despite Foxes Books being gone. This brought along the idea of writing the piece like a memory, of a character reminiscing and remembering how the floors used to be as they visit. It also gave me another little detail of the produce inside Current Affairs.

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Current Affairs, own photograph. Potential Idea.

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Current Affairs, own photograph. Potential Idea.

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This is important to the project to see how it seen when you first turn the corner, what first appears when a person would walk by. The beige bricks help write how the shop appears (and how the character walks towards the shop, as originally I would advise they were cobblestones.)

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Current Affair, own photographs. Potential idea. 

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Current Affair, own photographs. Potential idea. 

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This photo was important to for my piece because it meant I could pick up more details to use. I didn't want to miss out even the littlest of details that makes the piece real to the reader. Perec taught me this: how every detail was important and that even the most mundane details can be essential to your writing.

From this angle, not only could I clearly see what was in the windows I could also see slightly inside, at the fridges that used to be bookshelves, that now holds cold beverages and quite possibly food. I could use this angle to help compare the windows of Foxes Books and somewhat inside.

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Foxes Books, google photograph (when it was open) Potential Idea.

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Foxes Books, google photograph (when it was open) Potential Idea.

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Things I can see inspired by Perec's method (of making a list.)

Hanging plants

Blue paint

Blue door

Blue sides

An orange poster

A QR code poster

A poster advising the max number of people in store

A white painted fox reading a book on the door

Pillows in the window

Cushions to perhaps sit in?

Different sizes of wooden bookcases

Different books

Chairs to read in

A round table

Hand sanitizer on a table

Open sign.

Name of the shop - Fox's Books sort of scrubbed away - or in silver paint.

Grey shutters

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Foxes Books, google photograph (when it was open) Potential Idea. 

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Foxes Books, google photograph (when it was open) Potential Idea. 

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Things I can see: inspired by Perec's method of making a list

Windows

Rocking chair and stool

Grey carpet

A carpet by the door

Plants

Books

Table

Different sizes of wooden book cases

Pictures

Lights

White slanted ceeling

Wooden floor

Cushions

white wallpaper

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Things I can see: inspired by Perc's method of making a list.

An painted fox reading a book

A open sign

A lot of books on display

Different sizes of wooden book cases

An arm of bookcase sticking out

A cute elephant ornament

A diffuser

Wooden blocks on top of bookcase

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Potential Avenue / ideas for Creative Work:  Current Affairs and Foxes Books

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Potential Avenue / ideas for Creative Work:  Current Affairs and Foxes Books

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The original inspiration for my idea came from Tom Hicks, who advised how his own work doesn't feature people but is "about people and traces of their activity".

A long time ago, I visited Foxes Books, an independent book store in Leicester that was unfortunately closing down. I felt like I could use this to inspire a piece of writing. However, upon further research it had appeared it had already closed and reopened as Current Affairs.

This inspired a few new ideas. To start with I thought about writing about the bookstore as a past memory, in which the character could pretend the bookstore was still there. Using google images of Foxes Books (as unfortunately, I was unlucky not to have photos of when I had visited) and my own photographs from Current Affairs recently, I could compare the two and write an inspired piece about place and a main character who remembers the bookstore as she scours through the new shop.

However, it also inspired me to think about the 'what if' genre: what if, as Current Affairs is a vegan shop, Leicester was taken over by veganism and replaced all other shops suddenly? This could be better for me to write because I am used to writing fantasy rather than ghost stories and also works with writing the memory of a place as I could compare the two shops together.

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From 0.16-0.29 and 3.42 - 3.51

"Places is something more than a decorative place you’re telling. A lot of the time place is inseparable from the story you’re telling because we’re all affected by our environment to a certain extent."

"That as much as you drip feed charactersticis from your protagonist / main characters into your story, you want to drip feed awareness of your world.”

These two quotes are important for writing my piece, as it changed the way I thought about place itself. Orginally, I considered place to mean setting, as in just setting the place the characters are in before moving onto the actual story. I would set upon just describing things in the place I was writing about in order to create the picture for the readers before quickly moving onto the plot.

However in discussion with my tutor, I was advised writing place is more to do with atmosphere and how it effects the character as they continue through the story. Upon reading these quotes I felt this was further made clearer to me and instead set upon placing high importance into place and characters and mixing them both together to create a new peice.

As well as this, I took special interest in the advice to 'drip feed' in the details. This changed the way I would write my assignment peice because it showed how how unneccessary (and potentially boring it can be) just have long descriptions about a place that I was used to seeing in books I read. Instead, I liked the idea of using the little details like a jigsaw peice, that once put altogether, created an interesting atmospheric place for the reader to experience. A good example of doing this was in Shadow by Alice Oswald, in which there is not a mention of the place it is set yet the vivid details speaks for itself.

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Potential avenue or ideas for creative work. 

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Potential avenue or ideas for creative work. 

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Although, at first, it seems just like a door hidden behind a curtain I thought there was a lot more details in this photo than at first glance that could be used to create an creepy atmospheric story. Like:

1. The detail of the floors as they crisscross together, making the echo sounds that seem to reverberate around the room.

2. The long red DMU curtains, that were heavy on touch.

3. The brass door itself, with an old lock on it and a old brass handle.

4. The large sealed away document.

5. the fire exit sign at the top, indicating the only way out.

6. The white paint almost looking new - had it had to be repainted?

With these details, I imagined how it would look at night, if the door was covered would someone be able to find it? This helped inspire more ideas for my piece and the genre I wanted to explore. I could write a ghost story despite having less experience in doing so.

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Potential avenue / ideas for your creative work. 

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Potential avenue / ideas for your creative work. 

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In order to find inspiration and a place to write about, I used my two words 'bookstore' and 'visit'. However, whilst this sparked ideas I also liked the idea of 'abandoned'.

On a field trip to a church, I liked the difference between the new and old windows in which the old gave an 'abandoned' feel to it. Also the idea of a door hidden behind the curtain inspired an idea of a secret place that perhaps no one knew. This inspired me to consider writing a ghost story for the assignment, using the windows and the church as the place to write about. However, I do have less practice with this and considered a more better approach.

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Contextual comments linked to independent reading 

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Contextual comments linked to independent reading 

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"start with one word - any word - and it will lead to many others." (pg. 3 of The Writing Experiment : Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing

"if you start with an idea it still has to be converted into language - and that is the most difficult part - because you can have the most amazing idea in the world, but it is not easy to always find the right words to express or fully convey its complexity." (pg 4 of The Writing Experiment : Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing.

A common problem I often suffer with is overcoming writer's block. With this assignment, I wasn't sure where to begin.

However, in a lecture we were asked to name our favourite places in different times of our lives. Mine were:

1. At age 8 the post office, to spend my saved up pocket money either on a magazine or candy.

2. At this age (27) the bookstore. I like the quietness, the way there's so many books lined up on the bookshelves just waiting to be read. There seems to always be something new to read.

3. In my imagination: I like to create different worlds, different from reality which there are so many possibilities and setting that you could use.

Starting with an word from the list, the one that stuck out the most for me was 'bookstore' as I enjoy visiting bookstores the most - not only in Leicester but also on my travels abroad. I had also recently applied for a job in a bookstore, so it was on my mind.

Using 'bookstore' and 'visit' this then blossomed into a few different ideas for writing place and also turned towards genre of speculative fiction asking 'what if' questions: what if someone visiting an abandoned book store or what if everything was suddenly only vegan shops?

As I am used to writing fantasy fiction, writing in speculative fiction was a good idea since I was used to it. However, I did consider whether to try writing in ghost stories too.

To beat writer's block, I felt I could use the advice to start with one word, then another until an piece was formed - rather than the pressure of writing the whole piece immediately.

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Field Notes of Current Affairs, taken on site for 12 minutes.  

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Field Notes of Current Affairs, taken on site for 12 minutes.  

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Inspired by Perec, I decided to use the same strategy to sit outside Current Affairs and pick out details for 12 minutes.

This is important because Perec showed how even the everyday mundane details can create a interesting piece that that invites the reader in. This establishes an intimate connection that the reader and writer share as they're experiencing the same sights and emotions, even if the reader has never visited or been to the place or country. An example of this is done well by "An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris". Although at first glace it can be quite tedious and simple, the intimate experience is created by mixing details big, small and somewhat familiar to invite the reader to experience and look at Paris in a new, non-tourist way.

This changed how I did the field notes; not wanting to miss out even the smallest of details to create the place. As well as this, it would help me to write more in the assignment. Although Foxes Books and Current Affairs aren't especially known, by using Perec's method of picking out even the mundane everyday details they can become something more to the reader and be as if they have visited before and thus creating that experience with the reader also.

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Audio of the area near Current Affairs on a weekday, late afternoon

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Audio of the area near Current Affairs on a weekday, late afternoon

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This was an important audio as it shows the atmosphere around the shop, that is crowded by other pubs and restaurants. It highlights the sounds of the area which I could use in to add more details into the piece. From this, it seems it isn't a highly known place, quite quiet as if secluded into a corner (as it is tucked behind a bend.) and perhaps not well known.

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Short excerpts of exploratory writing (trying to 'drip-feed' in the details like Alice Oswald)

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Short excerpts of exploratory writing (trying to 'drip-feed' in the details like Alice Oswald)

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Towering above the busy streets, a balded man with a grey beard shouts obscenities down to the busy street from his truck, hopeful that this time they would finally move out the way. He honks, slamming his hand on the cheetah printed steering wheel for way too long. He watches satisfyingly as people jump and dash back onto the crowded pavement where they should have been all along. Without sparing a glace at them, he tries to move off with the stop-and-start traffic only to start swearing at a yellow taxi as it successfully cuts him off. In his wake, he leaves the people rumbling; some victims and others innocent bystanders whom, had followed the rules, yet still suffered the consequences as a collision of people clamber their way for a space on the already-occupied street. Quick hasty apologies follows yet none are accepted, of course. Still, tourists, unfamiliar and unawares continue to annoy, holding people up as they start to pick up things they'd knocked; an overturned business sign or a blackboard with chalky-white 'OPEN' written on it. One angry waiter pushes an terrified female and their dog away from him, adding grease stains to the many marks onto his used-to-be white apron as he complains about the smell of a 'wet dog'. He swears in an Italian accent before replacing the stench of rubbish and street for the sweet aroma of home-made pizza. Just before he returns towards the frowning patrons as they wait for their meals to be served, he happens to look back towards the woman. She still stands there, posing in her black coat and loosely held purse, smiling like the whole thing hadn't happened. She doesn't hesitate to pose for the nitwit with the expensive looking camera in front of her, the dog in her hands shaking over their experience. The waiter mumbles something again. "Stupid tourists."

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Contexual comments linked to module reading

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Contexual comments linked to module reading

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"Outside: the green misted fields glimpsed from the car window, stretching out wide and far away, on my way to school.

And inside: the flat stone floors of the house. I can still feel them against my cheek, under my hands. Caramel-coloured marble blocks, each just under a metre square. They were embedded with grey and white and pale blue pebbles, and sheared perfectly smooth: joined together with frosted dark grey glass. In the heat of the day, every day, I lay on that cold floor, moving my hands over it slowly, in small circles and in large ones.

When I stare at any flat landscape now, I get the same feeling of coolness: in my throat, in my hands, and at the back of my neck."

- A flat place, chapter: the first flat place page 13.

One of the aspects I had to think about was how to tackle writing about a place that no longer existed. This would be harder to do so and with only photos from google and my own images to compare, would not be able to achieve that intimate connection with the reader like I wanted.

Yet Paul Ricoeur in Remembering Places : A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship Between Memory and Place advises that there is a connection between memory and place saying that "it is on the surface of the habitable earth that we remember having traveled and visited memorable sites. In this way, the “things” remembered are intrinsically associated with places.” This inspired me to write the piece like it was a memory, to bring the reader to the place using familiar, small details and create the connection between the place and the reader even if they've not visited before.

A Flat Place was a good example of doing this. Rather than using 'I remember' Noreen Masud cleverly uses fantastical descriptive details to explain the place that is written in such a way that you don't know it's a memory of hers until the very end. It seems to be written to be in the present tense yet at the end becomes in the past tense making it more than just a description she remembers and more into a creative story-telling way.

She describes "the green-misted fields glimpsed from a car window. The flat stone floors of the house. I can still feel it under my cheek. When I stare at any flat landscape now, I get the same feeling of coolness: in my throat, in my hands, and at the back of my neck." creating the picture in the reader's brain, little details that they too would know of despite it being somewhere they may not be familiar with.

Using this as an example, I would also want to use this in my writing because I feel it would connect with the reader more and enhance that experience as if the reader had been there. I liked the way Noreen Masud wrote her piece without avoiding the typical 'I remember when' like how I would think a memoir would use and thought about how I could also do this

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Contextual Comments linked to module reading presented in workshops

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Contextual Comments linked to module reading presented in workshops

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"Shadow" by Alice Oswald was an good example of 'drip feeding' in the little details for the reader to interpret themselves. She uses poetic words and carefully planted vivid details throughout her poem to describe the place without ever confirming to the reader exactly where it is. In the end, she doesn't need to.

For me, I interpreted this as set in an wide open space, perhaps a field or a meadow untouched by humans. I get this from:

1. "with the rooks flying upwards snipping at the clouds" (Rooks are types of birds, more specifically birds. Upon further research, it seems they like to stay in farmlands or countryside than in busy towns or cities. She can also see clouds above her, which means there's no shelter or ceiling above her head, just endless sky.)

2. "[..] if I move one hand I hear the hiss of flowers closing their eyelids and the trees as if dust was being beaten from a rug shake out their birds" (the flowers and trees indicate somewhere growing naturally, a place undisturbed by humans. She mentions trees in a plural sense indicating that she may be surrounded with trees rather than just one or two. The idea of beat makes it seem have to do so furiously, as if there's a lot of wildlife that needs to get out quickly. Therefore, there's a lot of wildlife and trees nearby, which tend to be more countryside places rather than rural towns.)

I thought this was inspirational to my piece as it explored a different way to write it by 'drip feeding' in little details that the reader connects together themselves without specifying the place set. Instead they get a confirmation through the text of where the place is, a place they themselves have gone to or know of, and therefore creates that intimate, fully immersive experience between the reader and writer. I thought this could be a good technique to use also, especially as Foxes Books may not be a familiar place either but can still become something to the reader.

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Short excerpts of exploratory writing of Foxes Books

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Short excerpts of exploratory writing of Foxes Books

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Hidden away to the public eye, a lonely shop waits for someone, anyone to notice it. Newly painted white to hide its ugly old cracks, determined not for the old blue to show. There are only a few people around, though no-one takes a second to look at the shop on the corner, only using the space as a quick shortcut to get to their actual destination. Still, the cobblestones keep the people’s presence a secret, like they could only allow a few people to know of their attendance. The book shaped dust on the windows poke their timid heads, afraid to be moved after all this time. They don’t recognise the space around them, wishing, hoping that their old friends would return but only found them replaced by cold strangers that seemed to whir as they worked. Everyday they lost hope they would ever return.

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Audio of outside Current Affairs at 3.20pm, Sunday

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Audio of outside Current Affairs at 3.20pm, Sunday

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I did a second audio file because I wanted to be able to compare sound depending on the time of day I will set it. It seems on a Sunday night it becomes more busier around the area, though this might be because there's more restaurants and pubs around as the shop is closed. However, although audio one is good this really picks up more details that may have missed - the way steps can be heard as they walk through as they hit the red bricks, the chatter of people. I would still say that Current Affairs is a tucked in quiet place, however with the knowledge it's around pubs and restaurants I could consider writing it as a place that's a bit out of place. This helped to add in sight and sound into my piece.

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Contexual comments linked to independent reading

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Contexual comments linked to independent reading

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As I am unfamiliar about writing place, I wanted to research how other authors have done it well, to inspire and help me with my piece. I landed on Concreate Island by J.G Ballard, as this was a recommended story for writing place and is a fantasy novel which I enjoy reading and writing in.

It follows a man named Robert Maitland whom becomes involved with a sudden accident that sends him off the road and onto a concreate island where he struggles to escape and no one can help him. In the end, it's a big question if he wanted to escape at all.

I felt this was a good example for my piece as it shows exactly what Joanne Harris (from 10 things about writing) was explaining when she advised "a lot of the time place is inseparable from the story."

Throughout the story, it is obvious place and the character are inseparable in the way that any change in the story impacts both the place and character at the same time. In the end, it makes the place the 'star of the show.'

As well as this, J.G. Ballard makes sure by the end of the first half, although the reader doesn't know it yet, you've already met two characters. By reading this book, my thoughts on writing place had changed, instead of using long boring descriptions I could make it so that anything in the piece is impacting both the character and place it was in and make the place a character themselves. Concreate Island was useful as a good example of this.