Last week I got myself three new tattoos, taking my total up to five. Of course they are all movie related. I'll let you work out what the movies are.
I'm going for a full patchwork sleeve eventually, building it up one (or three) tattoos at a time.
Chapter Seven of Le Grande Mystérieux — Footprints in the Frost
‘Where is Mystérieux right now?’
Miss Fenwick glanced over her shoulder, as though he might appear at any second in a puff of smoke and a crack of thunder. ‘I don’t know. The maid told me he barged into the house as though he had all the right in the world to be here, and then spent some considerable time examining that … that thing, before rushing outside.’
‘Come, let us see if we can find him.’
Outside, the cold bit into our bones, despite the layers we had enveloped ourselves in before venturing into the freezing fog. We found Mystérieux by the light of his oil lamp, the diffuse, yellow glow marking his spot in the garden.
Le Grande Mystérieux is a serialised story for paying members.
You can read a preview of Chapter One here:
Word Wrangling
There are days when a sentence never looks correct, when there is simply something off about it, but what that ‘offness’ is, who knows? I would not describe myself as a technical prose writer. When I am writing a novel I am not worrying about prepositions and subjunctive verb forms, and please don’t ask me to tell you the difference between a subordinate clause and a subordinating conjunction.
I simply write, describing the action and the environment in which that action happens.
On Saturday I was leading my monthly adult creative writing workshop (started in 2016 and still going!) and used photographs as story starters. The idea was to write a story and then cut it down to around 250 words.
This got me thinking about language and sentences, and how many ways there might be to write a simple description.
This was my prompt:
And here was my first sentence followed by twenty variations.
They met every morning at 9:15 on the corner of Temple and Foster, for a brief meeting.
- Every morning at precisely 9:15, the three men gathered for a brief meeting on the corner of Temple and Foster Street.
- At 9:15 every morning, the three men met briefly on the corner of Temple and Foster.
- The three men gathered on the corner of Temple and Foster for a brief meeting at 9:15 every morning.
- They met every morning, the three of them, for a brief meeting on the corner of Temple and Foster.
- On the corner of Temple and Foster the three men met for a brief meeting every morning at 9:15.
- For a brief meeting the three men met every morning at 9:15 on the corner of Temple and Foster.
- You could find the three men gathered on the corner of Temple and Foster for a brief meeting every morning at 9:15.
- At the point where Temple Street meets Foster Street you could always find the three men gathered for a brief meeting at 9:15 am.
- They always meet at 9:15 am, those three men, but only briefly, on the corner of Temple and Foster.
- The three men always gather at the corner of Temple and Foster for a brief meeting at 9:15 in the morning.
- The three men gathered without fail at 9:15 every morning on the corner of Temple and Foster for a brief meeting.
- Every single morning at precisely 9:15 those three same men gathered for a brief meeting on the corner of Temple and Foster.
- You can set your watch by those three men who meet on the corner of Temple and Foster every morning at 9:15.
- The same bloody time every single morning, those three men meet on the corner of Temple and Foster, and that for four minutes only, mind.
- They’ve met every day now for the last, oh I don't know how long, at 9:15 in the morning on the corner of Temple Street and Foster Street.
- They’ve been meeting every day on the corner of Foster and Temple at 9:15 in the morning for years now.
- It’s 9:15 in the morning and there they are, the three of them, for their brief meeting, like every other day.
- There they are again, the three of them, meeting every morning on the corner of Temple and Foster.
- They only meet briefly, but the three of them do it every morning at 9:15 on the corner of Temple and Foster.
- You know where Temple Street meets Foster Street, right, well that’s where those three men that I’ve been telling you about meet every morning, around 9:15 like.
You can see that at first I am just rearranging words to vary the sentences. By version thirteen I introduce a voice—this sentence sounds like something someone might say, a very particular someone with opinions and an identity. This voice grows stronger in sentences fourteen and fifteen before mellowing a little for the remaining sentences, although still containing an identity in there.
This is a similar exercise to the free writing one I talked about last week. In the free-writing exercise you have to push yourself to keep going, to keep writing, not stopping to edit or think, just keep that pen moving across the page until, eventually, something happens, and you find your unconscious has taken over and produced an idea or a description that might never have arrived any other way.
Here you have to push yourself to go beyond the obvious sentences. You might simply rearrange the words on the page fifteen or twenty times before a voice arrives, and the writing becomes alive.
And you wind up somewhere in your writing you might never have found if you had stuck with that first sentence.
This exercise was a lot of fun, and I encourage you to try it out with your own writing.
Currently Reading
Now reading A Very Vexing Murder by my friend Lucy Andrew, which is set in the world of Emma, by Jane Austen.
Reading this as research for my next novel.
Movies Watched This Week
Watching 365 movies in 2026
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123
Pretty good, and still holds up really well.
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124
Trippy, unfocused satire. Lacked logic but maybe that was partly the point.
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125
Cillian Murphy snorting coke and sweating is the best thing about this. And I figured out the ending way too soon.
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126
Michael Smiley is in this and he makes every film better.
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127
Why has it taken me this long to watch a Fassbinder movie?
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127
It’s a prequel to a prequel?
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