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Raw Material
A downtrodden creative writing teacher despairs at the efforts of his students, at turns nakedly autobiographical or fanciful beyond reason. When an elderly lady begins submitting work in accordance with his 'write what you know' directive, his enthusiasm for the craft re-emerges. However some sources are best left unexplored.
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.
46 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 17, 2011
29 people want to read
About the author
A.S. Byatt
197 books2,849 followersA.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;
Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor
Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.
Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.
Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.
Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999
Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;
Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little
BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;
Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor
Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.
Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.
Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.
Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999
Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;
Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 8, 2018
What should - and should not - be a writer’s driving force? What is fair game as raw material? Whose opinion of their work matters?
There is self-referential layering, and a dark revelation at the end, linking neatly to the title. It's written by an author who has presumably visited or led creative writing classes and met these caricatures. And it includes two long pieces by one of the students. Pieces that demonstrate the sort of descriptive writing Byatt excels at.
How to Write?
Cicely Fox, an 82-year old spinster, joins a creative writing class led by Jack Smollett, who wrote a successful novel in the 1960s. He always tells his students:
“Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it.”
But they always go for melodrama. He’s given up telling them that creative writing isn’t a form of psychotherapy.
Cicely says she writes because she likes words. “She came to his class, but did not submit herself to his, or its judgement.” Her descriptive pieces are How We Used to Black-lead Stoves, and Wash Day.
The stoves are very black and the washing very white. Both vividly capture the quotidian of times past by careful and detailed multi-sensory descriptions.
Somehow, she lends a sinister air to the latter. She’s “haunted” by piles of clothes, likened to “accompanying angels, souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb, surrounding us with their rustle and their pale scent.” The pile of ironing is “like dead choirboys in effigy”.
Jack loves her pieces: “They made him see the world as something to be written”. But they lack the melodrama or even plot that the other students crave.
The Black isn’t from the Stoves
The unexpected darkness is multi-faceted. Big .
Quotes
• “Coal has its own brightness, a gloss, a sheen… The compacted layers of dead wood… give out a black sparkle. The trees ate the sun’s energy and the furnaces will release it.”
• “A silvery leaden surface - always a black surface, but with these shifting hints of soft metallic lightness… a taming and restraining both of the fierce flame inside and the uncompromising cast iron outside.”
• “They offered themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates.” Students’ lives as possible raw material for Jack’s writing.
This story was published in Byatt’s “The Little Black Book of Stories”. See my review HERE for discussion of the shared themes, as well as reviews of the other four stories.
There is self-referential layering, and a dark revelation at the end, linking neatly to the title. It's written by an author who has presumably visited or led creative writing classes and met these caricatures. And it includes two long pieces by one of the students. Pieces that demonstrate the sort of descriptive writing Byatt excels at.
How to Write?
Cicely Fox, an 82-year old spinster, joins a creative writing class led by Jack Smollett, who wrote a successful novel in the 1960s. He always tells his students:
“Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it.”
But they always go for melodrama. He’s given up telling them that creative writing isn’t a form of psychotherapy.
Cicely says she writes because she likes words. “She came to his class, but did not submit herself to his, or its judgement.” Her descriptive pieces are How We Used to Black-lead Stoves, and Wash Day.
The stoves are very black and the washing very white. Both vividly capture the quotidian of times past by careful and detailed multi-sensory descriptions.
Somehow, she lends a sinister air to the latter. She’s “haunted” by piles of clothes, likened to “accompanying angels, souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb, surrounding us with their rustle and their pale scent.” The pile of ironing is “like dead choirboys in effigy”.
Jack loves her pieces: “They made him see the world as something to be written”. But they lack the melodrama or even plot that the other students crave.
The Black isn’t from the Stoves
The unexpected darkness is multi-faceted. Big .
Quotes
• “Coal has its own brightness, a gloss, a sheen… The compacted layers of dead wood… give out a black sparkle. The trees ate the sun’s energy and the furnaces will release it.”
• “A silvery leaden surface - always a black surface, but with these shifting hints of soft metallic lightness… a taming and restraining both of the fierce flame inside and the uncompromising cast iron outside.”
• “They offered themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates.” Students’ lives as possible raw material for Jack’s writing.
This story was published in Byatt’s “The Little Black Book of Stories”. See my review HERE for discussion of the shared themes, as well as reviews of the other four stories.
Displaying 1 of 1 review