Get Building

Build it and they will come, says author and tutor Ian Ayris, as he invites you to consider: What sort of writer will you be?

There appeared in 1757 the first volume – of an eventual nine – of a strange novel entitled The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, by the Reverend Laurence Sterne. A stream of consciousness narrative a hundred and fifty years before such a thing was, well, such a thing. The biography of the fictional Tristram Shandy is famous for its hilarious, rambling digressions. Tristram isn’t even born until volume three.

Now, I hadn’t planned our journey through the Building Blocks of Creative Writing to be quite so Sternian in nature – I guess by devoting the first paragraph to a mid-eighteenth century novel I have already failed on that point even in this article. And I know I mentioned at the end of the last article we might possibly look at the advantages or not of planning, but I suspect most of you knew that was only a remote possibility. I always knew I wanted to take the opportunity given me in these pages to not only examine the Building Blocks of Creative Writing and the structure they form, but also the mortar binding the blocks together and, most of all, I wanted to take a close look at the builder. For it is the builder in whose mind everything exists. Castles in the air, and all that.

So, let us return to mid-eighteenth century England and . . .

Only joking.