Elaina James

In a break from our fantasy theme of the last few weeks, normalcy was resumed with Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’ at this week’s writing class.  Jumping from fairy tales to the Vietnam war may seem like quite a change in pace, but given the dark grizzly origins of fairy tales that I have become enlightened of in the last few weeks, it’s actually quite refreshing to read something that’s actually about what it purports to be, rather than something darker hiding under whimsical fluffiness. It also meant that I was back on solid ground.  Real people, real problems and real emotions.  Or at least as real as you can get in fiction anyway.  But as Tim O’Brien says, it’s all about truth of one form or another. I have to admit that I’ve never read any of his work before, and while my class mates were grumbling about being weighed down by his lists of items carried and his need to inform the reader of the weight of each item, I was lapping it up.  I gue...

These days, attending my writing class is a mixture of eager excitement, nervous anticipation and complete and utter dread.  The result is a most disconcerting feeling, as I wonder whether I really want to go or not. The excitement is because I love what I do and once a week I get to spend two whole hours doing just that without any distractions, well other than the drama group that rehearses in the next room.  I’m nervous because, even though I’m nearly halfway through the course, sharing my work by reading it aloud to the class hasn’t got any easier.  And finally dread because, well sometimes I think I just don’t get it at all. The last few weeks have been spent on fairy tales and fantasies, and whilst I always considered myself to have a pretty active imagination, I’ve realised that compared to my class mates my imagination is actually quite tame.   Maybe it’s the accountant in me that requires me to be bound to realism.   Maybe I’m too tied down by ...