Micro-fiction for Climate Workshop with Olivia Pinnock, prompt "More-than-Human Stories"

Bethany suggested this workshop and we both attended. The workshop was run by Olivia Pinnock, a fashion sustainability journalist, and lecturer at the LCF. Turn-out was poor, but it was good because we got a disproportionate amount of focus! 

We did a free-writing exercise first to generate ideas. I wasn't sure how this would work, but it worked amazingly well. Previous free-writing exercises have been either completely asemic or unprompted. I wasn't sure how writing on a topic would work, but it as strange, the words just flowed out of me. Not everything made sense, but the ideas and thoughts flowed freely, it was almost like dreaming while awake! I need to experiment with this as a way of generating ideas again.

With that done, we were given 45 minutes or writing time, to write 100 words. I can bash out 100 words in about 2 minutes, so I was expecting to sit for 43 minutes... But actually it was very hard to write so few words, and to do so in a way that made for something worth reading.. Despite having a fair idea what I wanted to write (to write about some form of non-human protagonist experiencing deep time in a post-Anthropocene world), I spend a good 10 minutes staring at the ceiling, working out how to start... Starting is always the hardest part! 

Once I got going, I finished my hundred words in about 20 minutes - I chose them very carefully. Then I took a few depth breathes, and went back to check them. At this point I found myself back in my usual pattern of writing fiction - revising and revising and revising, trying to find the perfect words... I sort of hate it, but I also sort of take pride in it too.

This is what I ended-up writing:

The water swirls between us as each wave recedes, sucking at our rough skin, pulling at the gravel and pebbles that hold us upright. The water stretches from here to the horizon, dark grey like the dark grey clouds that fill the late evening sky. Ebb, flow, push, suck. Time no longer passes. We stand in silent condemnation. Rain, sun, mist, fog. We remember, we memorialise, we judge. Wind whipped swell, flat calm. We bore witness, we gave no warning. Dawn, day, night. They took the seasons from us, but day and night remained beyond their grasp. Nothing moves save the restless water.

A few bits feel a bit clunky, but generally I'm happy with it. I realised I was unconsciously influenced by the movie 'Flow' and by this poem which I read as a teenager, and which I finally managed to find on-line:

The wind in the pines

Soughs night and day

In the ears of the stone horse

At a mountain shrine

Where no man worships.

 

- Ishiwaka Takuboku

Hopefully the influence is clear. I was thinking I might illustrate this with an AI image a 3d render*, or even get TTS to read it, and add a AI 'movie' - why AI, because I don't want to spend hours making a 'real' movie.

It certainly reminded me how much I love writing.

*I went off to make an AI image and thought 'no, I will have more control and it won't take long to make an image in Blender' - so I did... And there went my evening!