In Water I’m Weightless: Preview programme for London 2012 Festival

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Delighted to see In Water I’m Weightless, my Unlimited Commission to be produced by National Theatre Wales in 2012, was included in the preview guide to London 2012. ‘Britain’s biggest ever cultural festival’ over the weekend.

I quote from the festival supplement, written by a journalist:

Stories that Come to Life

A character hears sound for the first time, while the audience reads sign language in back-projected subtitles in a powerful experimental work that treats disability as entirely normal, exploring the endless possibilities created by “human difference.” Writer Kaite O’Reilly, herself visually disabled, spent three years talking to deaf and disabled people, creating a collage of fictional monologues that is poetic, moving, challenging and often very funny. Six of Britain’s leading disabled actors, often performing outside their own disabilities, take part in a dynamic, expressonistic staging that contrasts the warmth and intimacy of stories told direct to the audience with dance and live projections.

In Water I’m Weightless Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, July 26-August 4 2012.

Revision notes (6): As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

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It was Mark Twain who, in 1894 in Pudd’nhead Wilson, dealt so succinctly with the adjective: ‘When in doubt, strike it out.’ Even earlier, in Boswell’s 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson, a similar sentiment can be found: ‘Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’

It took me several years to come to my current understanding of these aphorisms. As a student I was bewildered, thinking these writers were advising me to sabotage my work by slashing out what I deemed ‘the best bits’. Giddy on Joyce and the rich, pungent gush of Irish words, I wanted MORE in my writing, not less. To cut what I imagined was a fine passage felt like mutilation, a blood sacrifice to some demanding, ancient deity called Great Old Dead White Male Writers. Was it a rites of passage, some initiation I needed to go through before I truly understood what it was to write?

No. I was simply very young and very earnest and as green as the distant hills. Experience has shown me the clue is in: ‘a passage which you think is particularly fine…’  Johnson was quoting advice given to him by his college tutor when a young man, filled with his early fascination for language and intoxication with words.

Less is more and taste is all. Overwrought poetry and prose topples under the weight of its adornments. Like an over-dressed Christmas tree, you can’t see the pine for the baubles and it’s likely to keel over headfirst.

When revising work, we need discipline and distance so we don’t become self-indulgent. Nothing extraneous should be in our work. We can’t keep the beautifully put phrase that no longer fits the content, nor allow the favourite, fine piece of writing stay without fear of it upstaging the rest of the work. So many times when I’ve been reading work I’ve tripped on a well-turned phrase that somehow jars. When I point it out (which will invariably happen) the writer smiles ruefully, muttering ‘I know, I know… I should cut it, but I just love that line…’

Which brings me rather neatly to Mamet and his infamous ‘Kill all your darlings’. He is not, I believe, inviting us to get rid of all our brilliant ideas, or the plots, characters, and dialogue we are engaged with and incubating, bringing to completion. He is demanding we press delete on the parts that make us act indulgently, ignoring the faults of spoilt, precocious lines which disrupt the otherwise beautifully composed page with their noisy, attention-seeking LOOK AT ME! AREN’T I FINE! effect.

Alternatively, I interpret this as cutting the now defunct sections, perhaps the original seeds of the work, carried since the initiation of the script/book/story/poem, which we can’t, just can’t imagine NOT taking the rest of the journey…

We can and we should. Editing and revising work is not a process entirely free of pain.

Here’s some other quotations about editing which I’ve found to be sound advice and salve to that ache:

 Omit needless words…A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

William Strunk  The Elements of Style (1918)  [I highly recommend this book]

If there is anything said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly said in one, then it’s amateur work.

Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to William Archer, 1888

I often covered more than a hundred sheets of paper with drafts, revisions, rewritings, ravings, doodlings, and intensely concentrated work to produce a single verse.

Dylan Thomas  in a letter 1940′s

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

F Scott Fitzgerald.  1959

And finally:

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff in the basket. 

 Ernest Hemingway

Good luck and enjoy.

© Kaite O’Reilly 26/11/11

Neglected Voices: Published by Disability Arts Online

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Wendy Bryant

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This is the press release I received today about an unique and important project:

‘Neglected Voices’ published by Disability Arts Online

‘”Neglected Voices” is one of the best creative responses to our social exclusion I have seen for a long time.’

Baroness Campbell of Surbiton

Disability Arts Online has just published ‘Neglected Voices’, a set of four cycles of transcription poems about disabled people’s experience created by writer Allan Sutherland.

The project was produced during his one-year tenure as poet-in-residence at the Centre for Citizen Participation, Brunel University, West London.

Sutherland, an award-winning disabled writer, created ‘Neglected Voices’ by carrying out life history interviews with four disabled people, then editing and shaping them to create poems, using the skills he learned during his 15 years as a radio and television scriptwriter.

“These cycles of poems tell the life stories of four disabled people, drawn from the range of people involved in the Centre for Citizen Participation,” explains Allan.

“They have important and interesting stories to tell. But then, in my experience, so do all disabled people.”

“Neglected Voices” gives these four people the opportunity to tell their own stories.

“We get looked at a lot,” Allan says, “and talked about a great deal. We get poked and prodded and have crass jokes made about us, but we don’t get listened to very much.  This does not mean that we have nothing to say.”

‘Allan Sutherland’s residency as a disabled poet under the auspices of the Leverhulme Trust has given real power to our work’ says Peter Beresford, director of the Centre for Citizen Participation.  ‘It has highlighted the creative role that the Arts can play in a university context.  It has also generated a new inclusive art form.’

The work has evoked a strong response from disabled artists and activists. ‘“Neglected Voices” represents the lives of a small group of disabled people in a way that their voices, personalities and experiences ring from the page,’ says disabled film-maker Liz Crow.  ‘Sutherland is developing a very interesting new narrative approach.  This is an immensely valuable contribution to recording the lives of marginalised communities.’

“Neglected Voices” is published on Disability Arts Online

http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/Neglected-Voices

Notes

Allan Sutherland has for thirty years been exploring ways of making heard the voices of disabled people, including stand-up comedy, performance poetry, radio and television scriptwriting and journalism.  His book ‘Disabled We Stand’ (1981) helped many people to identify as disabled.  He has worked for The Guardian, Guardian Online, ‘EastEnders’, The Observer, Time Out, Sight and Sound, Disability Now, Disability Arts in London and Disability Arts Online.

His residency at the The Centre for Citizen Participation at Brunel University, West London was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

The Centre for Citizen Participation at Brunel University, West London, is a research centre which has a particular commitment to user-led research and to the involvement of service users and the subjects of social and public policy in research and policy development.

Revision notes (5): Script presentation

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So you spend all that time dreaming up a complex web of engaging characters, writing audacious but credible dialogue which shimmers within the incredible world of the play with its astonishing, gripping plot – and then you type it all up without a moment’s thought of layout or presentation, bung it in the post and then wonder why the phone doesn’t ring….

Despite the above, I do actually believe that quality will out. There is always some story doing the rounds about the one script which found its way to the right desk and the significant reader, despite all the odds.

And they are huge odds – which is why I’m perpetually amazed at writers’ nonchalance about the appearance of their work as they send it out into the world. Maybe it’s like personal grooming – we don’t want to appear to be trying too hard, and deep down we believe it’s what’s inside that counts, not the shiny wrapper. This may work for nice boys and girls in literary novels, but in the (now fabled and close to extinction) literary manager’s office, where in-coming scripts stand in swaying piles ear high – spare a thought for the over-worked and committed readers.

Scripts pass through a plethora of hands before they reach someone who may be in the position to make real decisions about the script and therefore your career. Most theatres which accept unsolicited scripts have a series of rounds that the scripts pass through – an outer circle (usually made of volunteers or minimum waged enthusiasts who are writers themselves or working their way up the rungs of the ladder) who read and make comments on the scripts, passing them on to the next round if they feel they merit a second read. Few make it all the way to the artistic director’s hands, but this is one way promising writers are identified and perhaps invited in for that perplexing but important ‘coffee and a chat’. Building a relationship with a dramaturg or director is the way, eventually, work gets made or commissioned, and having your script recommended is one of the routes in. So, bearing in mind that initial passionate but over-worked reader, what kind of script do you think s/he will light up at and pick first to read off the pile?

• the one clearly printed on clean paper, not photocopied to hell, dog-eared and beaten up from doing the rounds.
• the one which has lots of white space on the pages – double-spaced and not (as was once my misfortune) handwritten in purple ink on yellow paper.
• the one which is in at least 12 font (arial is my favourite) and not (which was also once my misfortune) font 8 single spaced in lucida Blackletter.
• the one that is in loose leaf form, but page numbered, and not held together with a rusting bulldog clip/vicious paperclip, which will stab you when you you try to remove it so you can turn the pages and read the bloody script, then require you to get a tetanus jab (thankfully not my misfortune, but a true story from a friend who was first reader (‘the sieve’) for a large and prestigious short story competition). Also not bound, or tied with ribbon/string/an old shoe lace/plastic grips from bread wrappers/knicker elastic.
• the one which has been checked for spelling and grammar and sense,  not the one full of typos and errors, crossings out, inserted words in blue felt tip with little arrows put in the wrong places.
• the one which suggested professionalism and pride in the work, not something that seemed spawned from a long sleepless night and thrown together without any care for it or those who might be asked to read it.

Try not to be one of the writers who seem consistently happy – eager, even – to sabotage their work by the carelessness of their presentation.

Enjoy. Take pleasure and pride in your work.

And good luck.

(c) kaite o’reilly November 2011.

In Water I’m Weightless: in development

Nick Phillips and Sara Beer in NTW’s developmental workshop of In Water I’m Weightless.

Many text-based productions are straight-forward in content and form: they are interpretations of existing scripts. So what’s the process for a ensemble piece using music, design, movement and selected monologues, with a newly-formed company who have never all met, never mind collaborated before?

This has been the challenge to National Theatre Wales this week, in development with In Water I’m Weightless, my commission from Unlimited, part of the Cultural Olympiad.

We have a sterling cast of emerging and established performers: Mat Fraser, Mandy Colleran, David Toole, Karina Jones, Nick Phillips and Sophie Stone working alongside director John McGrath, designer Paul Clay, movement director Nigel Charnock and emerging director Sara Beer. It’s a dream creative team – almost an embarrassment of riches – and the prevailing question in the weeks leading to this r&d period was where and how to start?

John decided for us, feeling the actors should lead this part of the process. The text we will eventually use in the production next year will be culled from a large body of work I’ve been developing over several year, The ‘d’ Monologues, which have been created specifically for Deaf and disabled actors. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about the issues surrounding casting (Cripping up is the twenty-first century answer to blacking up) and John felt this was a creative place to begin. Alongside the texts sent to the cast in advance, John posed several questions, including asking the performers to select parts they’d love to play but would never usually be cast in, and to identify sections which had resonance for them, which felt closest to their ‘voice’.

What followed was a fascinating exploration which challenged casting to ‘type’. As a way in to the work, we cast across gender, age, impairment, and sexual preference, reading the speeches the actors felt they would never usually get to play, making some wonderful discoveries – for example, a middle aged man can play a part written for a child without prompting unintended humour. We also found a universality in this non-traditional casting – our characters became Everyman and Everywoman, rather than the monologues being seen as autobiographical, specific only to that individual.

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Aided by his fantastic music collection, Nigel got the company moving, magically (and almost invisibly) creating shared physical vocabulary, so by the end of the week the actors were presenting physical scores and short choreographed sections. Combined with the projected animated text and live camera work Paul introduced, it was an impressive start to a process.

Those who saw our work-in-progress sharing on Friday were struck by the sense of a tight ensemble dynamic already in existence.

Our only complaint as we parted after the intense week was that seven months would have to pass before we got together again.

In Water I’m Weightless: first workshop week

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The cast of In Water I’m Weightless: second day of workshop.  Photo by Kaite O’Reilly.

So we’re dancing to jukebox Nigel Charnock at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. We’re following John McGrath’s directions, being imaged by designer Paul Clay and exploring yours truly O’Reilly’s words. It’s the end of the second day of a workshop week on In Water I’m Weightless, a National Theatre Wales production which will be happening next year as part of the Cultural Olympiad, and I’m giddy and exhausted and uncertain if we should really be having so much fun….

The Echo Chamber.

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Ian Morgan and Phillip Zarrilli in rehearsals.                                                                   Photo by Kaite O’Reilly

It feels like I’ve gone straight from the airport to the rehearsal room – a subterranean studio by Euston with rolling stock atmospherically rattling across the ceiling every twenty minutes.

I am back to where I started – my opening blogs in August about beginning to make The Echo Chamber with Ian Morgan, director Peader Kirk, and Phillip Zarrilli of The Llanarth Group. The performance will premiere at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff  from 27 January 2012 and we four co-creators are often scattered across the world, working in America, Poland, Greece and the UK. Until our official rehearsal period begins in late December, we seize the opportunity to meet when and where the possibility lands – in this case, with my flight from the US.

It is difficult to know where to begin when so early in a deliberately interrupted process, so we start as we did, before: two bodies in a room, listening and responding to one another. Phillip and Ian immediately find their complicity and Peader and I find ourselves sitting there nodding, sensing the possibilities of what these two performers could do together.

Referring to copious notes and video, we go back and revise, revisiting the semi-structured improvisations and created or found text collated in our August days together. Certain themes emerge – how memory is formed in the brain,  the composition of natural phenomena, the Japanese concept of Yugen, what lies beneath… We open up new improvisations and possible physical scores, agree individual tasks to be completed before our rehearsals in late December and then depart, scattering again in different directions across the capital, dragging, as usual, suitcases behind us.

Information on The Echo Chamber and a downloadable poster and postcard can be found on News on my website: www.kaiteoreilly.com

Occupation as cultural intervention: The Mavili Collective

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I received this today from a friend and practitioner in Athens.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today 11 of November 2011 Mavili Collective occupied the historical disused theatre building of Embros in Athens, deserted and left empty for years by the Greek Ministry of Culture. We aim to re-activate and re-occupy this space temporarily with our own means and propose an alternative model of collective management and (new) post-contemporary forms of creative work. For the next 11 days Mavilli will reconstitute Embros as a public space for exchange, research, debate, meeting and re-thinking.

 

We act in response to the total lack of a basic cultural policy on the level of education, production and support of artistic work as a national product. We act in response to the general stagnation of thinking and action in our society through collective meeting, thinking and direct action by reactivating a disused historical building in the centre of Athens.

From the 11/11/2011 until 22/11/2011 an open, intense daily program will run throughout the space with an emphasis on access and action. Emerging dance and theatre makers will share tactics and methodologies for development, panels will be organised by scholars as public debates on urgent issues, we will archive live the currently undocumented and unknown “Greek new work” inviting artists themselves to present “live” parts of their archival material. Artists, theoreticians, practitioners and the public will “meet” and try out models beyond the limits of their practice and the markets’ structural demands of “the artistic product”.

This re-activation is not a proposition of a “better” model of production and management but is a proposition of re-thinking, responding and re-making. This model emerges from the current lacks and shortfalls of our system and attempts to interrogate the global changing landscape at this moment in time. We challenge our own limits and understanding and we propose and operate this space as a constantly re-evaluated model by both ourselves and the public – an open system that might offer the potential to re-think relations between people and possible roles for art in society.

In the sight of the current situation we refuse to wait for “better days”, we refuse to accept the current crisis as terminal and we refuse to sit back. We actively propose new structures, which we hope, can become sites of negotiation, debate, re-formulation.

The Mavili Collective

Mavili Collective was formed during summer 2010 as an autonomous collective structure for emergent practitioners and came together in order to re-think and re-imagine the current Greek cultural landscape and propose structures, platforms collaborations, projects that produce new alternatives.

Mavili Collective is committed to producing nomadic, autonomous collective cultural zones that appear and disappear beyond the logics of the market.

 

For information:www.mavilicollective.wordpress.com

 

Mavili Collective: Gigi Argyropoulou, Anestis Azas, Argyro Chioti, Giorgos Kolios, Kostas Koutsolelos, Georgia Mavragani, Vassilis Noulas

 

::::Please feel free to circulate to your friends and networks  - we need your support::::

 

‘Cripping up is the twenty first century answer to blacking up.’ Peeling and The ‘d’ Monologues.

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Kiruna Stamell and Ali Briggs in Forest Forge’s production of ‘peeling’, directed by Kirstie Davies, Spring 2011. Photograph by Lucy Sewell.

Some years ago I received a Creative Wales Major Award from Arts Council Wales, to begin a project I called The ‘d’ Monologues – short dramatic solos written specifically for Deaf and disabled performers. There is a dearth of plays with disabled characters, and when these are produced, the parts are invariably played by non-disabled or  hearing actors. Those who know me and my play peeling will know I’m not a fan of this kind of casting. As one of the characters says in peeling, a play all about performance: ‘Cripping up is the twenty-first century answer to blacking up.’

The Western theatrical canon is full of disabled characters: From the pathos of the blinded Oedipus to the personification of evil in Richard III, the impaired body has often been used as a metaphor for the human condition. But seldom have the plays been written from a disability perspective, or performed by disabled actors. This was the impetus for my writing peeling in 2002 for Graeae Theatre. I wanted to write an edgy, inventive, and humorous play specifically for Deaf and disabled actors, which used Sign performance (theatricalised British Sign Language), and reflected the experience of disabled and Deaf women. Unfortunately so often in the media, we are portrayed as the victim or the villain – the object of sympathy, or charity, or superhuman inspiration. In peeling I wanted to create women who were witty, sexy, complex human beings who made difficult decisions about their fertility and potential offspring; women whose lives didn’t necessarily differ so much from non-disabled, hearing women’s lives.

A triumph in its original production, directed and designed by Jenny Sealey, and remounted earlier this year by Kirstie Davies of Forest Forge, peeling garnered prizes alongside outstanding reviews and is now seen as a watershed moment in the relationship between disability arts and culture and the ‘mainstream’ media. It was arguably the first production written, directed and performed by disabled and Deaf practitioners to be reviewed widely and seriously by all national press. A similar response came from within the specialised disability press: ‘Disability art grows up’ was one heading. The play was – and remains – controversial in elements of its content, politics, and depiction of disabled and Deaf women – but also for my refusal for it be performed by anyone other than Deaf and disabled performers.

I find non-disabled actors impersonating people with physical or sensory impairments extremely problematic – akin to the now offensive ‘blacking up’ of white actors to play Othello. This is not me being overtly PC, simply my rejection of what that message implies – that there are no black or disabled actors good enough to play these parts and that Caucasian non-disabled actors will always do it better…

I remember when it was announced the first black performer was going to play Othello  at the RSC. If my memory serves me right, I was in my early teens at the time and horrified when this came up, presented as some kind of celebratory cutting-edge news item on the local television station. “What?!’ I remember thinking. ‘There hasn’t been a black performer playing that part until now?!’

Everyone interviewed seemed to be most relieved this prejudice had been finally put to bed and shook their heads over the onerously-held negative opinions of actors of colour in the past. There would be no more boot polish and burnt corks smelling out the dressing rooms of the RSC or the UK regional repertory theatres. Caucasian actors blacking up to play the Moor owing to their supposed superior acting skills, knowledge of the Bard and ‘his’ language no longer held sway… And I look forward to the time – in my lifespan, I hope – when a similar change occurs regarding disabled performers and characters with impairments, whether congenital or acquired.

In the meantime, I’ll grit my teeth when every Oscar-hopeful pulls off their studied gimp impersonation and offer resistance by writing what I hope are interesting and subversive parts for Deaf and disabled actors.

I’ve been writing plays with disabled protagonists for almost twenty years. Throughout that period I have heard the same argument from theatres and directors from both sides of the Atlantic: How will they cast it? Where will they get good, experienced, professional actors who identify as disabled or Deaf? They just don’t exist! The audience or critics or theatre cat won’t accept it! and yada yada in finitum blah de blah until fade…

These preconceptions are incorrect. There is a vast collection of talented, professional performers, theatre practitioners, and live artists – and the numbers are growing. An incredible amount has been done to change perceptions and open up opportunities for training and professional work since my acting debut with Graeae Theatre in 1987. There is an army of the great unsung who have worked tirelessly and continuously to raise the portcullis of fortress professional theatre in the UK and elsewhere – but this has also predominantly been our own actions, created or ignited within the disabled community, working with allies.

Bringing this talent and experience centre stage on major platforms has become something of an obsession, and I’ve spent the past four years developing several projects which now are coming to fruition – projects I’ll be writing about on this blog in coming months.

When I received my ACW Creative Wales Major Award back in 2008, I spent a year exploring the form of the dramatic monologue, seeing solo work in Europe and the US, meeting and being mentored by experts of the form, like Sara Zatz and Ping Chong Company in New York. I shadowed part of Ping Chong’s  Undesirable Elements Series, watching testimonial theatre in various school halls and community centres in Brooklyn, the participants/performers using their own autobiographies to address the experience  and reality of being disabled in NYC.

Throughout this period, I was writing monologues in a variety of styles and dramaturgies, informed and inspired by my interactions with Deaf and disabled people across Wales. Unlike Verbatim, or the testimonial theatre of Ping Chong Company, I chose not to use the actual stories I had been told, but used  these anecdotes and experiences as inspiration, and created fictional drama informed by these interactions.

At the end of the year, the experiment proved to be a success and worth persevering with. A script-in-hand sharing of early work at Unity Festival at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff brought outstanding reviews and I later brought what I coined ‘The Cymru Crips’, a group of performers I’d been working with in South Wales – Sara Beer, Rosaleen Moriarty-Simmonds, Kay Jenkins and Macsen McKay – to The National Theatre Studio in London, for a further script-in-hand showing when I was there on attachment in 2009..

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Kay Jenkins, Macsen McKay, Rosaleen Moriarty-Simmonds, Sara Beer, Phillip Zarrilli, Kaite O’Reilly and Maggie Hampton at the National Theatre Studio 2009.

I was further encouraged by receiving an Unlimited Commission from the Cultural Olympiad, part of the celebrations to develop the project across the UK. But that is a further story…

Part of this blog originally appeared in: http://www.forestforge.co.uk/posts/45

http://www.kaiteoreilly.com/plays/peeling/index.htm

http://members.multimania.co.uk/graeae/productions/peeling/peeling.htm

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peeling-Kaite-OReilly/dp/0571215947

http://www.artswales.org/what-we-do/funding/what-we-fund-in-wales/cultural-olympiad/unlimited/awards

http://press.artscouncil.org.uk/Resource-Library/The-Llanarth-Group-Wales-482.aspx

Revision notes (4): Hemingway’s shoes

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I’m still in the US, mentoring young writers long distance, by email. I recently responded to a fragment sent for possible inclusion in Fflam Pwy? Whose Flame is it, anyway? the anthology I’m editing for Disability Arts Cymru as part of the Cultural Olympiad, celebrating the 2012 London Paralympic and Olympic Games. As I anticipated in the previous post, editing and mentoring provokes reflection on form and process. I include parts of my email here, as it seemed pertinent to ‘revision notes’:

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First: We need a story. Even with the most brilliant description and writing in the world, we need more than the observations to make our reading really satisfying and our writing successful.

This story doesn’t have to be a huge world-changing event – it can be a very small and simple discovery. Basically, by the end of the piece, SOMETHING MUST HAVE CHANGED – even if that’s our (the readers’) perception.

Second: A writer must have something to SAY – something to communicate to the world, otherwise we’re just examining our navels….

Apart from capturing the characters and this moment in time, what would you say you wanted to communicate in the fragment you sent? I had a sense something might be about to happen. I was expecting some revelation that would allow me to ‘see’ the characters in a new light – or even challenge my preconceptions as reader. I was waiting for an extra detail to turn the situation upside down – to subvert, surprise, reveal…

To really engage me as a reader, I need a plot, or something happening, or some action, or something promising to be revealed. There is a theory that we write and read in order to understand what it is to be human. When I think of the great short story writers I admire and the insight into humanity their work allows , this certainly seems to be the case: Grace Paley, Anton Chekov, Alice Munro, Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Elizabeth Bowen, Yiyun Li, Flann O’Brien, Angela Carter, Edgar Allen Poe, Italo Calvino… More recent writers include Jackie Kay, Helen Simpson, Claire Keegan, AM Holmes – the list could go and on…  What they bring to me is a distilled moment from a life, which hints at the complexities in existence, in human interaction, in being.

On a prosaic level, we also need a beginning, a middle and an end…

As an exercise, see how short a story you can tell. Ernest Hemingway famously created a whole short story in six words:

FOR SALE. BABY SHOES. NEVER WORN.

In that, we have the whole world of the story and its tragedy – our minds are making up what might have happened: the baby died – or was adopted – or was a phantom pregnancy – or was stolen – or was….? My mind is alive with possibilities… and Hemingway suggests enough to get our imaginations and emotions activated (the pathos of those baby shoes), and then wisely leaves it to us to complete the story…

It has a beginning a middle and an end – but the end is ‘open’ and lets us make up what happened – but it still ends – and although we’re not told exactly what, we know something happened along the way – something fundamental, made of the stuff of life…

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I hope that those thoughts are useful for thinking about the basics of story writing.

For writers reading their favourite stories, go to The Guardian’s short stories podcast:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2010/dec/07/rose-tremain-yiyun-li-extra?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487