If I'd meant to take a photo of my foot I'd have done it better While it’s often difficult to trace the creative process, I love how we build our fiction from seemingly random elements of our lives. A snatch of conversation meets with a snip of memory merged with the odd gait of a passing stranger and we’re off, incubating a story in our minds. We find a similar process in the blogosphere: prompts, questions and opinions the cue for our own next post. Sometimes the blending of ideas occurs unconsciously; sometimes the links are more intentional, as when I took great delight in satisfying two blog prompts with my bad-hair-day flash.
This week, when Charli asked for a 99-word story about a photo bomb (a serious scene interrupted by something absurd or unexpected), I was still musing over Clare O’Dea’s post about horrible husbands in fiction. They make such great characters, yet they haven’t often taken a starring role in my own reading and writing. Nor are mine as deliciously evil as those Clare has dished up.
This week, when Charli asked for a 99-word story about a photo bomb (a serious scene interrupted by something absurd or unexpected), I was still musing over Clare O’Dea’s post about horrible husbands in fiction. They make such great characters, yet they haven’t often taken a starring role in my own reading and writing. Nor are mine as deliciously evil as those Clare has dished up.
In Carys Bray’s A Song for Issy Bradley, we can’t help but extend our sympathy to Ian, even as his religious fervour exacerbates his wife’s distress. In Paula Daly’s Keep Your Friends Close, it’s the “other woman” who gets the blame for the husband’s infidelity. The philanderer’s ex-wife still is sufficiently forgiving to show up in his hour of need in Jill Dawson’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
It’s not only female writers who find a way to excuse a husband’s infidelity: Richard Flanagan has described his Booker-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, as a love story, yet little of that love can be found in his marriage. Morgan McCarthy is a little less sympathetic to Jasper in Strange Girls and Ordinary Women, but his extramarital affair is nevertheless addressed as less his problem than that of the two women in the triangle.
The most chilling husband in my recent reading is Hector in Emma Chapman’s How to Be a Good Wife. The control he asserts over Marta is camouflaged by a patient sympathy. But even this is left for the reader to decide whether to believe the husband or the wife.
Two of my short stories begin with straying husbands: The Good News and In the Interim, by sheer happenstance both on the same site. But to redress the balance, I also have a story there with a wandering wife.
The fictional wounded wives of my acquaintance are regrettably slow to punish their recalcitrant husbands. While Natalie Young serves up a dish of cold revenge in Season to Taste, her husband’s main offence seems to have been being boring.
So how much of this has found its way into my flash? I leave for you to judge.
It’s not only female writers who find a way to excuse a husband’s infidelity: Richard Flanagan has described his Booker-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, as a love story, yet little of that love can be found in his marriage. Morgan McCarthy is a little less sympathetic to Jasper in Strange Girls and Ordinary Women, but his extramarital affair is nevertheless addressed as less his problem than that of the two women in the triangle.
The most chilling husband in my recent reading is Hector in Emma Chapman’s How to Be a Good Wife. The control he asserts over Marta is camouflaged by a patient sympathy. But even this is left for the reader to decide whether to believe the husband or the wife.
Two of my short stories begin with straying husbands: The Good News and In the Interim, by sheer happenstance both on the same site. But to redress the balance, I also have a story there with a wandering wife.
The fictional wounded wives of my acquaintance are regrettably slow to punish their recalcitrant husbands. While Natalie Young serves up a dish of cold revenge in Season to Taste, her husband’s main offence seems to have been being boring.
So how much of this has found its way into my flash? I leave for you to judge.
When I found the texts on Brian’s phone I assumed our marriage over. Yet, following the tears, slings and arrows, we booked the second honeymoon we couldn’t afford first time. Confirming our vows in a hot-air balloon above the rift valley, a champagne breakfast laid out for us below. Our Massai guide was somewhat clumsy with the camera, but we raised our glasses and beamed.
Brian had been dead a year before I could face the photos. Our joyful innocence made me weep. Distant, but crystal clear, our marriage end was looming: it was breakfast time for lions too.
Brian had been dead a year before I could face the photos. Our joyful innocence made me weep. Distant, but crystal clear, our marriage end was looming: it was breakfast time for lions too.
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