{"id":1429,"date":"2015-08-05T10:48:53","date_gmt":"2015-08-05T09:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/?p=1429"},"modified":"2015-08-06T08:36:39","modified_gmt":"2015-08-06T07:36:39","slug":"alumnus-publishes-short-stories-on-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/2015\/08\/05\/alumnus-publishes-short-stories-on-amazon\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumnus publishes short stories on Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Tagart (Eliot 1978), who obtained both a BA in 1978 and an MA in 1983 from Kent, has published his first collection of short-stories on Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The title story Turning the Corner<\/em> is loosely based on his experiences at Kent in the seventies, with The Year I (Almost) Got Married<\/em> and A Christmas Carol<\/em> being Kent-linked, and the parents of the twin-narrators of Leaving Home<\/em> also being Kent graduates.<\/p>\n

\u2018Writing is in the family\u2019 explains Richard. \u2018Poldark author Winston Graham was my grandfather\u2019s younger brother, and I grew up hearing about Ross and George, Demelza and Elizabeth, as if they were real people, not characters in a book.\u2019 Richard began writing in his teens and penned\u00a0the oldest of the short stories in the early 1980s. Dissatisfied with what he had written, he put the stories in his bottom drawer where they lay forgotten.<\/p>\n

Upon graduating from Kent, Richard began to work in education. He moved to Antwerp in Belgium to teach at a British International School, and during this time he completed an MA in Education with the Open University. Having decided that administrative duties and meetings were superseding the teaching element of his role, he moved into translation and teaching English as a foreign language.<\/p>\n

\u2018Then in 2012, two things happened\u2019 explains Richard. \u2018I had a reunion with several secondary school classmates, who asked if I still wrote, and then I found the old stories whilst clearing out a cupboard in my parent\u2019s house, and decided they weren\u2019t so terrible after all. Soon after, I came across the photo which now features on the cover of my book, and it took me right back to the days in 1976-7 when I flat-shared with several fellow students in Herne Bay, and had the idea of writing a story based on that experience.\u2019<\/p>\n

Richard describes how writing often throws up ideas and scenes that can\u2019t be used at once, but lead on to a new story. \u2018The title story Turning the Corner<\/em> led on to The Year I (Almost) Got Married<\/em>, in which two people who almost got married as Kent undergraduates bump into each other years later\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

He is often inspired by incidentals, such as finding the photograph, or else hearing a song from the past. \u2018The whole story can appear in outline, or the opening and\/or closing words only, which then gives the challenge of how to build the structure of the story to link the two.\u2019<\/p>\n

Richard\u2019s advice to those wanting to write fiction is not to over-prepare. \u2018You need an idea, a situation, a story, but you need to begin without too much preparation, or you\u2019ll run the risk of getting bogged down\u2019 he says. \u2018The best advice I\u2019ve ever received is that it\u2019s never too late to start writing!\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Tagart (Eliot 1978), who obtained both a BA in 1978 and an MA in 1983 from Kent, has published his first collection of short-stories … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34788,"featured_media":1456,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[118124],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1429"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1468,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions\/1468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}