Studio of ....(A Homage to Tim Pears)

Visiting art galleries or exhibition, I'm always intrigued when the notes about a particular picture say, Studio of Raphael, or Mantegna, or whoever. This is partly because I'm intrigued by the anonymity of the artist or artists involved and also because I'm interested in the relationship between them and their more famous master: the jealousies, the rivalries, the resentments, the adulation.

I'm also enthusiastic about the idea of studying a craft from someone more experienced than yourself.  With writing, the obvious way to do this is to read voraciously and widely: read around your subject for research purposes, read writers you admire, read writers you dislike but who are extremely successful and then try to work out why - just read.

You can also learn at a micro level.  If you want to find out about the nuts and bolts of good prose, it might be an idea to pick a paragraph written by an author you rate and then deconstruct it. I adored In the Place of Fallen Leaves by Tim Pears when I first read it and I have pasted in an extract below. Go through it with a fine tooth comb.  There are seventeen words in the first sentence, the majority of them only one syllable long. Choose a subject that you want to write about, but use an identical framework to Tim Pears, ie your first sentence should have seventeen words in it, one syllable for the first, three for the second, one for the next three and so on. It's an incredibly rigorous exercise, which can be inhibiting and confining, but by the end of it you will be infinitely more attuned to the structure and rhythm of good writing.  You will also be a more analytic reader.  It's a win / win result.

 

Extract from In the Place of Fallen Leaves by Tim  Pears

One Saturday back in May Ian had asked me to check the cows in the far pasture. Half the herd were heavy with calf, ponderous in movement, passing through time itself at a different pace, appropriate to their weight and condition. I stood on the lower rung of the gate. The sun was slanting across the field and the cows had scattered themselves across it, grazing. I was about to leave when I realised that, without fuss or warning, no more than thirty feet from me a cow was giving birth: she stopped grazing and started to drop her calf, just like that, still chewing the cud. But it didn't come out all at once: the top of its head appeared, and then a little more, and then all of its head up to the shoulders. There it stayed, its eyes closed, half in the world and half still in its mother's womb, as if reluctant to wake up from the long sleep of gestation into the bright light of life. Its mother, too, looked unsure, not quite able to make up her mind whether or not to let go of the companion who'd shared her body.

It was in case of just such an eventuality that Ian had sent me there, and I knew I should jump off the gate and run home to tell him it had started, so they could bring them into the barn, and Tom could help them with his inborn skills of the midwife. I knew I should; but I was transfixed.
It seemed like ages I stood there, gripping tighter the bars of the gate, silently urging the cow to push, mother, push it out of you, but nothing was happening, the calf was stuck and I was getting worried when quite suddenly it came sliding out all at once, afterbirth breaking up around it, tumbling into existence trailing its umbilical cord like a kite string.

 SMALL PRESSES

Atlas Press specialises in extremist and avant-garde prose writing ("anti-classics")  from the 1890s to the present day and  are the largest publisher in English of books on Surrealism.

Bandersnatch Books is a cooperative of writers, artists, editors and designers specialising in alternative fiction.

Bedlam Press, now associated with Necro Publications specialise in hardcore horror and have recently launched a range of e books.