What I Learned About Writing While in London

It’s been almost a week since we left good ole’ London, and I don’t think I’ve missed any place that I’ve visited for only a week as much as I currently miss that city. However, I did learn so much about writing as a whole that I was able to take home with me to Georgia.

I mentioned while on the trip that I am a creative writer that would like to be known as a Southern writer when it comes down to it. So what I picked up from the readings and the tours is to use everything around you when you’re trying to align yourself with a location. For example, Brick Lane used an actual street that we could go and visit and get curry from as it’s focus and title. Also there were really surreal moments on all the tours where the guide would, almost haphazardly, mention something like, “Oh yeah, Charles Dickens wrote about these steps in some of his works, and we just walked down them.” To the people that grew up around all these settings in major literature it was nothing to them, and in a way, it’s a goal for me to reach that point in my own writing. So, to be able to write about a location so flawlessly that a citizen of the city/town I’m writing about is just like, “Oh yeah, of course this is a real location, I see it every day, obviously the writer wasn’t making this up.” but to have a visitor to the same location already have a pretty clear idea of the settings in their mind, but be able to actually go and visit them as well and see a real and tangible experience that would add to the depth of a novel.

Overall, I learned a lot in London. Not only about what I would like to see and aspire to in my own works; but about traveling and culture, and maybe even a little bit about myself as well.

The Final Blog Post

Last post after an amazing and fun filled British week, so sad!

With that said, “The Embassy of Cambodia” was easily my favorite of the two short stories that we read this week. I really liked the characterization of Fatou and how she seemed to find happiness in what had not been a very happy life. She had her faith and she had swimming and even a possibility of a relationship with Andrew, and even in this weird postcolonial world where she was a worker for this awful family, she seemed at least content.

Going further off characterization, the entire family is hilarious and amazing in how God awful they are. I especially love how when Fatou literally saved Asma the family responded by just awkwardly thanking Fatou and then making fun of Asma for swollowing the marble in the first place before switching back on the tv like nothing had happened.

Overall, this was a wonderfully written story, but for me it was really the characters that stood out verses the overarching plot line.

Not A War Story, Not A War Post

I feel like I loved so many parts of this story, but I don’t know if I fully understand it, though I don’t if I was supposed to fully understand it. I loved, loved, loved the imagery of the moon in this story. Especially when it compares it to spotlights of the blitz era. It really hits a lot harder after the tour today too, because the characters in this story are so young and they’re forced to live in this constant state of terror where they could literally be hit by a bomb that they couldn’t even see or hear until it was right on them.

Also thinking about it and talking about it after the tour, it’s insane to even put myself in this situation. If my boyfriend had come home after being in the army for an extended period of time, I would want to be elated. But Pepita and Arthur can only find excitement in a mysterious and false world that isn’t touched by the blitz, both because it isn’t real but because it’s from a time in their lives before the war. Overall, I think the tour today makes the characters more interesting, but also makes the story so much more terrifying and heavy with anxiety.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

To answer that, I was. Totally. Getting through this book before London was, in a way tedious, due to the form and the narration style, it’s a tough read. However, during this trip, both during the class today and the Bloomsbury tour yesterday, I really admire and respect both Woolf and this novel as a whole.

Before yesterday I didn’t really know about the life of Virginia Woolf, but the tour yesterday really opened my eyes to a lot of things going on in both her life and the major comparisons between Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway. Both Woolf and Dalloway have similar romantic situations between there husbands and rumored female third parties, both are obviously living in the same area and roughly the same time, but most importantly both are struggling from depression (or at least some sort of mental illness with symptoms akin to depression). In a lot of ways, like I said in class, Mrs. Dalloway as a whole to me reads like an autobiographical take of Woolf herself.

So now that I’m seeing the book knowing this background information, in addition to the discussion we had on the form of the novel, I can’t help but really enjoy this novel both as a writer and as someone who sees literature as an interesting glance into a writer’s personal life.

But when I come to that conclusion, all I can think now is, what else am I missing in literature by not reading more about the author’s themselves? And possibly, should we be comparing fiction to the writer’s lives at all? Or is it detrimental to the fictional works to try and find autobiographical content within them? Is there aright answer to any of these questions, probably not as it would be different from scholar to scholar, but it’s something that I really enjoy to think about and will probably carry with me into the discussions of the short stories tomorrow ash Friday as well.

Feminist Theory/Termonology

So today when we were talking about gender studies in North and South we kept using words like “feminine” to describe weaker characters (like Mr. Hale) and kept calling Margaret “masculine.” When I read over the usage of these words in my notes tonight, I couldn’t help but look at North and South from the viewpoint of a modern feminist literary theorist. I think that I have an issue with Victorian literature at large because I hate how we use the terms feminine and masculine to describe characters as weak or strong, but when it comes to Victorian Literature and to the social conventions that is the best words to actually use for the descriptors. However, looking at the terminology from a modern feminist one finds fault with it and how it portrays women in so item at large. I think that’s shown in the time period of the Victorian age as well, as we talked about today in class with how women are were seen (examples being that they were always fainting and more easily seen as insane). We see this issue in other literary and historical movements as well (especially with tropes like the Southern Belle) and I wish that over all we didn’t associate “feminine” as a weaker character (regardless of sex) and “masculine” as the stronger character (again regardless of sex).

Victorian Similarities in Contemporary Fiction

So while we were talking about North and South today in class I brought up a few times how much the story seemed to be using a stereotypical Victorian storyline in order to make a larger point. Just to reiderate, I mean this in the way that there are so many Victorian novels that are written by women in which a marriage plot is involved.  Which made a lot more sense when Katie explained that it was almost essential for a woman to include this portion in the story because otherwise it wouldn’t sell or she would be shunned. However, within this novel, there are so many social and class themes woven in as well. In my head I kept comparing this to modern works, most often that of something like The Hunger Games. It seems like kind of a stretch, but if you read the novels they very much fit the popular theme of young adult dystopian future novels, which are extremely popular right now and hence sell. However, I believe an argument can be made that these novels also have a very political undercurrent involved in them between the popular seller themes and the romance themes. So I find it interesting that women writers today are using similar formulas to not only sell novels and hence make a living, but that they are able to weave in controversial issues that affect the society at large but present it to the public in a well liked book that evokes empathy more than a political upheaval.

Seeing Culture In Action

So something I found really interesting today was obviously being able to see the setting of a British novel in person (something that as a writer in Atlanta, Georgia I had never been able to say before about British literature). More specially, I found being able to see/smell/taste the spices that Nanzeen mentions in Brick Lane in person was really interesting. After the East end walking tour some of the group went to a curry house for dinner where we had a really interesting discussion about the different spices used in the dishes. I think it was interesting because as someone that has always lived in the South East of the United States I didn’t have much experience with spices like saffron outside of something like premade yellow rice. However, we read about all these amazing spices that take so much care to prepare for a meal that actually being able to see and eat and identify made me really appreciate and understand why one would go through all the trouble of preparing the different spices-because the dishes they turn into are amazing!

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