A poem on the concept of 'Retrospectivity'

Perceived before dawn

As the dish of the day

By noon, a squeeze of lemon

Undiluted on the tongue

Altered tastes of things to come

Memories played back in repetition

A hundred eyes morphed into windows

Each looking at the same sun-bleached canvas

An unmistakable likeness to an old crime

Dusk descended on a routine day

The previous night’s convictions

No longer fired up in the belly

Sleepless in St Leonards

When a character first introduces itself to me, we share a lengthy conversation. This usually takes place when I’m in bed, which gives me time to sleep on it. As a rule, the next morning, or sooner if I’m particularly enthused (which is almost always the case), I compose a quatrain based on the character's main projection at the point I'm first introduced to their narrative. For example:

I can still smell your leather
When you kissed me in the rain

That memory belongs to me

You can’t piss it down the drain

This is Vivian’s quatrain. Vivian is a character from a sitcom I’m currently writing. She is a middle-aged British woman living in a small town on the south coast of England with her 21 year old daughter Lucy and a Great Dane. She owns her house and has a comfortable career in the public sector. She is single, having long divorced her husband Tom; and hasn't been with anyone since. They had a short-lived romance fuelled by their mutual addiction to life in the fast lane. They got married but almost immediately faced a demoralising obstacle that sadly they didn’t make it through, each fashioning their own incompatible way of coping with the hardships it presented. Tom found respite in his escalating alcoholism and Vivian came to rely on a resurfaced addiction from her childhood. Still in the early stages of their careers, a low income threatened the arrival of their first and only child, followed by an emotional and very messy working class divorce.

At every stage of character development, details need to be subject to change, as there really is no room for being precious. I heard Vivian's voice, then learned of her sorrow, then fleshed out her environment all in the hours preceding her quatrain. Yet after it was written, details in her environment changed multiple times.

The character chooses a title for the quatrain based on the view they hold of themselves. 'Sensibility' is the title Vivian chose. It can be any word or phrase from a sentence they might use to introduce themselves, let's say, on the first day of group therapy or any self-reflective scenario really. Vivian lifted her title from a conversation she had with her best friend and confidant Penny "I'm a bit of an Elinor Dashwood, you know, from Sense and Sensibility."

The body of the quatrain expresses what they might not necessarily vocalise but is undeniably the thought that features most heavily in their mind or perhaps even the moment in time that comes to define them. In Vivian's case, she's very much stuck in the moment when she lied to Tom about giving his jacket to charity because he wanted to sell it and she wanted to hold onto what she felt was their last perfect moment.

As Vivian is in the very early stages of development, I can’t give you more on her, but if after reading this post you have a general interest in my personal journey through the character development process, you can read about Steven, who is an entirely separate character, much further away from inception and somewhat closer to production. I'm happy to share his particular story before the end product appears in the public domain but I can’t publish his quatrain, as it would be deemed inappropriate by some readers.

The Horrors of Sleep by Emily Brontë

Sleep brings no joy to me.
Remembrance never dies.
My soul is given to mystery,
And lives in sighs.

Sleep brings no rest to me;
The shadows of the dead
My wakening eyes may never see
Surround my bed.

Sleep brings no hope to me,
In soundest sleep they come,
And with their doleful imagery
Deepen the gloom.

Sleep brings no strength to me,
No power renewed to brave;
I only sail a wilder sea,
A darker wave.

Sleep brings no friend to me
to soothe and aid to bear;
They all gaze on, how scornfully,
And I despair.

Sleep brings no wish to fret
My harassed heart beneath;
My only wish is to forget
In endless sleep of death.

Pretty Prison Dream

Clutching a pile of folded fabrics and smelling like a new born, I walked into the cell, and the metal bars slammed shut behind me, like in the films. My new roommate looked up at me and smiled. I wasn’t sure how to take it; it appeared sincere and warm, but in the climate, I remained unsure. Still, I smiled back and nodded my head. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out, then she returned to her writing. She was using a tiny pencil and what I came to know was the standard issue lined letter writing paper, A5 wide, wafer thin. She had three piles of the stuff under her bed, and a sharpener. No envelopes, no binding; certainly no paperclips or staples, thank God. How much damage might a small pencil do? I asked myself. I wasn't sure if she heard, so I cleared my throat. She shook her head. I heard my voice asking her if she was writing a book and why she didn’t use the library computers. I didn't get a reply so I lay down and turned to face the wall. I made my peace with death and drifted off.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

I’m known to assign racism to a lot of my negative experiences, to the point where those closest to me no longer call it when they see it (if I’m in earshot) for fear of opening a can of worms. One of my many consistently negative experiences is job hunting. Admittedly, it doesn’t help that I dropped out of university twice, but it’s not like I put that on my application. So, why don’t I make the shortlist of candidates invited to interview?

If you read my last post, you'll know I very recently joined the 7.7 percenters. Well, since my initiation, a lot’s happened. For example; I've learned the recruitment industry is yet another in a long line of industries to cash in on the DIY culture. By DIY culture I don’t mean the anti-consumerist ethic, of which I am a born believer. No, I’m talking about the evil culture in which you have to jump hoops and do all their work for them before the power-holders will meet you less than a quarter of the way.

Let me get this right; I’m supposed to create an account and profile for every recruitment agency, upload my CV, portfolio, and in some cases photograph, references and CRB (that I have to pay for) before you’ll even forward my application to the advertiser? 

Go to hell.

So, I’m now on Arts Jobs minding my own business when an ad pops up from an agency website left open in another tab, and I have to go and click on it - I never ever do that. Actually, that's a good point, I'm sure ABP was blocking my pop-ups before I installed Windows 8, but anyway, the pop-up leads me to a blog and the blog leads me to a survey, where interestingly there’s another unsuspecting job-seeker who’s just left a well thought-out comment on racism in recruitment.

He quotes from a Harvard essay concluding ‘racial discrimination in the labor market is still very much at large’ – their findings show an alarmingly high percentage of American employers still prefer to employ people with ‘white sounding names’. Not much of a revelation, you might think (but never say out loud).

I can barely breathe on reading these words. Don't get me wrong, of course that very same thought has ran across my mind a hundred times and has been the main feature of a hundred ‘post 9/11’ tirades, but to read it in a non-YouTube environment, well, let’s just say it hurts.

I’m in bed thinking about it all night and hardly getting any sleep, fully aware the UK is no different, if not worse, especially my town. The next morning, just out of curiosity, I open a new email account and begin applying for jobs in the name Emma Jones. Other than the name I don’t change one word of my CV.

I can almost hear my heartstrings playing a major to minor chord-change when Emma gets a response before me. I'm crushed, to say the very least. Emotions and indeed separate identities become increasingly difficult to control once the phone starts ringing.

I should never have put a phone number down but I wanted it to be a fair test.

This one company rings up merely to inform her that her application is being considered. Come on, who does that? Why is Emma getting so much respect? Luckily at this point I'm out on my Brompton and miss the call. But later on, somewhere between bitter envy and humiliating despair, I decide to respond to the message; simple enough, as I have a white sounding voice, but that’s another topic.

I'm now speaking to a bloke who I manage to convince to interview me the following day due to a pending job offer (fictional, of course). If it didn't go against every fibre of my being I guess I'd have made a pretty good salesperson. Anyway, so I attend the interview and quite frankly there are absolutely no issues or double-takes when I arrive. But then, what are they going to say?

Hang on a minute, you’re not white. With a name like Emma Jones, you led us to believe you’d be white. Please leave the building in a respectable manner as we have real white people at work here.

Of course nobody's going to say that and obviously I realise there are lots of ‘non-white’ people with white sounding names in the UK and hundreds of them might even be called Emma Jones, but that’s hardly the point. My name isn’t Emma Jones and my name didn’t get me into that building.

Okay, so I make it through to a second interview, fight off three other candidates and actually get the job. I’m so pleased with myself and totally caught up in the hype that I’m actually considering changing my name to Emma Jones before the employment contract commences (deed poll is quicker than one would think). Then I picture the faces of my family and friends on hearing I've changed my name to Emma Jones... I decide I'd rather come clean to the company.

Maybe they’ll understand. I’d understand if I were in their shoes. Why wouldn’t I employ a liar?

Maybe not.

So, the next day I send them an email thanking them for their consideration and informing them I'll be taking up the other offer (the fictional one). My interviewer rings me up in response and tells me how disappointed the company is and would I reconsider. My sliding door - But in the moment I freeze, and apologise, and thank him politely.

As I'm writing this, I’m seeing that perhaps I'm the exact kind of fraudster that causes the racial profiling I’ve spent most of my life being a bitter victim of... Oh dear God, I need to think...