One hundred ‘rules’ for writing fiction: 10-15:

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We are in the midst of the festive period and I’m deep in preparation for the start of The Echo Chamber rehearsals with the Llanarth group, which start officially tomorrow, yet I’m aware there are various blogs to be written….

10. When pushed for time and under pressure with a multitude of writing tasks backing up in what seems an endless pile, take the easiest, most fun option first. You’ll have something to cross off the list and will move onto the next task with a sense of achievement. (KOR)

11. Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.  (Roddy Doyle).

12. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money. (Jonathan Franzen).

13. Write only when you have something to say. (David Hare).

14.  There are three reasons for becoming a writer: The first is that you need the money; the second, that you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long dark evenings. (Quentin Crisp.  ’The Naked Civil Servant’).

15.  Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. (P.D.James).

Happy holidays.

x

The Feminist Spectator wins major award for dramatic criticism

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Jill Dolan

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I’m delighted to discover my friend, Jill Dolan, has been awarded The 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. This prestigious prize, administered by Cornell University in the USA, is given for her blog The Feminist Spectator. This is the first time in the Award’s fifty-two year history the honour has been given to a a blog.

Jill writes:

‘The Feminist Spectator ruminates on theatre, performance, film, and television, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, other identities and overlaps, and our common humanity. It addresses how the arts shape and reflect our lives; how they participate in civic conversations; and how they serve as a vehicle for social change and a platform for pleasure. It’s accessible to anyone committed to the arts’ political meanings.’

http://www.feministspectator.blogspot.com/

The Nathan award committee commended Professor Dolan for her consistently thoughtful and articulate discussions of the contemporary stage: “Dolan intersperses informed personal responses to plays and performances with significant historical, political and cultural insights that help frame and contextualize her remarks. A tireless champion of women artists, Dolan graciously, yet compellingly, enjoins us to be mindful spectators as well as lovers of the theatre.”

So many congratulations to Jill – well deserved.

Best wishes for the season to all and please do check out that blog.

That was the year that was. But has anything actually changed?

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The sublime Mandy Colleran in rehearsals of In Water I’m Weightless, National Theatre Wales, November 2011. All Photos: KO’R.

I began this blog back in August 2011 after I realised that 2012 would bring an embarrassment of riches production-wise. As the forthcoming work is diverse in aesthetic, process and content, I felt much might be learnt, and writing a blog might help externalise my learning, publicise the work and document the process(es).

For they are process(es)… Devising, playwriting, co-creating, collaborative montaging… I’m excited by what 2012 will bring, and the diversity both of the work and the creative approaches I’ll be involved with. It challenges that stereotype of the solo dramatist writing away, misunderstood and alone, in her garret – and the notion that there is only one way of writing plays/drama/performance work (delete as applicable).

But before moving forwards into 2012, and The Echo Chamber, the first project (which begins full rehearsals on December 28th 2011 and will be written about, here), I think it expedient to look back over the year at some of the projects I’ve made and the people I have collaborated with, particularly within disability arts and culture, and ask have we moved on? Has anything actually changed?

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Ali Briggs, in rehearsals of Forest Forge’s production of ‘peeling’, directed by Kirstie Davies, March 2011.

‘peeling’, first produced by Graeae Theatre Company and designed and directed by Jenny Sealey in 2002, had a revival in Forest Forge’s production, touring rurally. The director, Kirstie Davies, had been keen to find an opportunity to produce the script for some time and it was fascinating to return to an old script and see what had stood the test of time, what required updating, what was no longer relevant…

Perhaps it’s a sign of how far we still have to go in perceiving disabled and Deaf people as equal citizens and not ‘other’, but we discovered the cultural and socio-political aspects parodied or challenged in the play were still as relevant in 2011 as 2002. The only changes to the script I made were updating celebrity names. The stories in the play of being patronised, feared, or discriminated against still held – and the off-duty conversations we had in the green room about the challenges disabled and Deaf women face when working in the creative industries were as familiar and tiresome as they had been first time round, at the beginning of this Millennium.

Photocall: ‘peeling’ with Kiruna Stamell, Nicola Miles-Wildin and Ali Briggs.

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As I wrote during rehearsals in February 2011:

Ali, Nickie, and Kiruna are powerful, comical, and poignant… I am congratulating Kirstie Davis, artistic director of Forest Forge, on her superb casting and her liberating, inclusive attitude – for it is still extremely rare. Sadly, in my twenty plus years of professional experience in theatre, I have largely found a reluctance for companies to cast disabled and Deaf actors, even in parts written specifically for them. Perhaps this is based on fear, or ignorance, or uninformed preconceptions – things are certainly changing and improving – but we certainly need more like Kirstie in the industry.

I am also extremely excited by ‘peeling’s rural tour – bringing this work and this company to village halls and community centres. The fact large famous London theatres are still casting hearing, non-signing actors in Deaf, signing parts only highlights how quietly radical Forest Forge’s work is….   http://www.forestforge.co.uk/posts/45

This radical aspect to Kirstie’s programming was also appreciated by Mark Courtice writing about the production in April 2011 in reviewsgate:

Forest Forge, in taking [peeling] to the arts centres and village halls of Hampshire and Wiltshire,  demonstrate the sort of courage and enterprise that make the recent Arts Council decision to cut their grant seem more than usually incomprehensible. 

http://www.reviewsgate.com/index.phpname=News&file=article&sid=5563

Here is one area where I feel there has been a change: the 2011 reviews of ‘peeling’ were not as toe-curlingly insensitive or offensive as some had been, the first time round. Perhaps the influence of the Medical Model has begun to wane, but here were no lingering descriptions of the performers’ bodies or impairments, nor morbid fascination with physical difference. Thankfully, there was no polarity between ‘handicaps’ and ‘real people’ as there had been in The independent in 2002.

http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/31697/peeling

http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/leisure/entertainments/8946314.Sensitively_appealing/

And so from a remounting of old workmade new, to a new piece so new it has not had a production yet:

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Christopher Fitzsimmonds, Kiruna Stamell and Peader Kirk in workshop, ‘Your Tongue; My Lips’ , June 2011. 

‘Your Tongue, My Lips’ is work in progress exploring disability and sexuality, and part of my Unlimited Commission from LOCOG and the Cultural Olympiad, to develop new work inspired by disability experience. In June 2011 I had a residency at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, working with director Peader Kirk and performers Mat Fraser, Kiruna Stamell, Christopher Fitzsimmonds, Sara Beer, Tom Wentworth, Ben Owen Jones and Carri Munn.

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Mat Fraser

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I feel there has been a shift in many ways towards some of the work coming out of disability arts and culture – but it isn’t necessarily from the mainstream, but from what used to be snootily or suspiciously called ‘the avant-garde’.  In many contexts disability arts and culture has been viewed as either therapy or amateur expression – I have been wrestling with this for more years than I care to count. It comes then as no real surprise that many of the allies to my crip culture work have been artists working experimentally themselves, or gate-keepers to institutions or venues which value experimentation. Such was my experience when working with Peader and the actors at Chapter, and my interactions with James Tyson, former programmer of the venue, and Richard Huw Morgan of Good Cop Bad Cop, and Pitch, Radio Cardiff,  98.7FM.  

For a lengthy interview with the performers and me about this work, please follow the link below to Pitch,  ’a cool arts magazine, but on-air’ (The Guardian’).

http://www.culturecolony.com/videos?id=6464

It is an archive recording of programme 6 and the interview between Richard and I starts 31.58 minutes in.

In the second part of this blog, I will write about my work in the latter part of this year, working more in the ‘mainstream’.

One hundred ‘rules’ for writing fiction: 1-9.

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Having tea with a writer friend the other day, he challenged me as to why I haven’t yet written about fiction. Although my specialism is in playwriting and dramaturgy, I have published short prose in a variety of anthologies and am in the final (dying? thrashing? please-god-will-it-never-be-over-and-how-will-I-bear-it-when-it-is?) throes of completing my first novel.

He knows I’m a magpie for quotations and snippets of advice. I have books filled with notes from authors I’ve interviewed for Irish newspapers and Welsh journals, or scribbled down at literary festivals, or sucked up from articles and features, or worked out myself.

‘So why not share them?’ he suggested. So I will.

The title of this section has ‘rules’ in inverted commas, simply as I’m not a great follower of rules and am more likely to do the opposite once given them as commands. I prefer to be descriptive and disobedient, although I think the trick is to learn what others may think these commandments are – and then break them. I also found my original title One hundred quotations or snippets or pieces of advice for writing fiction isn’t as pithy a title and besides, it was too long for the ‘subject’ title.

So one hundred ‘rules’ it is and perhaps the first should be

1.   Learn what successful writers think the ‘rules’ are, then break them. (KOR)

2.   Do back exercises. Pain is distracting. (Margaret Atwood)

3.   Do not place a photo of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide. (Roddy Doyle).

4.    True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,                               As those move easiest who have learned to dance.  (Alexander Pope. An Essay on Criticism 1711).

5.    Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. (E.L.Doctorow).

6.  Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don’t follow it. (Geoff Dyer).

7.   When you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it. (HG Wells).

8.   The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.  (Anne Enright).

9. Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, “how to” books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise. (Hilary Mantel).

I hope these are amusing, illuminating, or helpful.

If you have any quotations or ‘rules’ to share, please do.

Enjoy writing, and good luck!

Several lives, more than one writing career.

Maybe it’s my greed for experience, but I have always wanted to lead several lives, a desire made manifest through my choice of projects and parallel careers. I have been a physical theatre performer, a chambermaid, a live art practitioner and a relief aid worker in war zones. I have written librettos, radio drama, short film, prose; sold shoes, meat, and advertising copy; directed film and dance theatre; been a writer in residence and Creative Fellow; and supervised postgraduate degrees in writing for performance whilst participating in Deaf arts, disability culture and the mainstream.

I think one of the most important lessons I have learnt is never to perceive myself as one thing. This business will often try to label us, slap a convenient sticker on our forehead and file us away under a limiting, narrow definition. Although often seen as perverse, I pride myself on not being easy to define. I try to keep experimenting, taking on new challenges and developing my skills.

I’ve often found in the UK that diversity is seen as an anomaly, a vulgar excess to be treated with suspicion. Phrases like ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ damn the Renaissance wo/man. I know writers who have limited their careers and creativity by believing it’s inappropriate to try something new (‘stick to what you know. Why change a winning horse?’)  or who believe that there are set patterns and processes to adhere to (if only they could decipher them),  rather than inventing new ones.

When engaging with press to publicise a particular project, in my experience they will invariably do one of two things: simplify my career and back catalogue in order to focus the article, or make a feature of the fact I write for more than one medium – but not necessarily in a good way: ’If it’s Tuesday, she’s writing a novel – the confusing life of playwright Kaite O’Reilly.’ This was the actual headline in a regional newspaper in 2008 (which I won’t name and shame) which begged the question: confusing for whom?

Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but achievement or multiple skills aren’t embraced in the UK as they may be elsewhere – unless you’re also undermining your efforts by making a self-deprecating comment verging on self-loathing.

I personally love getting to know a writer through different genres or forms: The novelist who also writes award-winning screenplays and illustrates childrens’ books and sculpts and paints (http://www.markhaddon.com); the poet who is also a novelist (ee cummings and his harrowing novel of the First World War, The Enormous Room); the novelist who also writes and performs Haiku (listen to Jack Kerouac on  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJdxJ5llh5A&feature=player_embedded). Such endeavours fill me with excitement and inspire me with possibility. Perhaps we’re back again to my greediness, but I just want more, more, more….

Back up your work – even blogs!

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Dejected today as the lengthy blog I was just completing, ‘Artists and Scientists focus on precision’, has somehow disappeared into the ether and despite saving it on wordpress, various searches have come up with nothing but an empty document… Clearly some kind of technical glitch or accidental finger-play involving a delete button has occurred….

So I am re-reminded of one of the key rules we should follow as writers: Back up your work – even blogs!

I shall go and tend my wounds and reflect on the wasted time and perhaps try to recreate the same blog….

If I choose to rewrite, perhaps this new blog will be better than the original. Rewriting from scratch, without reference to the original, was apparently something Chekov did and recommended. I also remember being advised by a literary manager early in my career to put away a script I was unhappy with, and start the whole thing again…

I tried to, but am such a pragmatic creature who hates leaving anything to waste, I simply went back and deconstructed the original, reconstructed it with more precision, and it went on to win the Peggy Ramsay Award.

No such luck this time.

In order to revise, we need to have saved the original….

Ho hum.

Please benefit from my error.

Back up your work! You never know when hubrus may strike.

LeanerFasterStronger – artists and scientists collaborating – part 1

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Official publicity image for LeanerFasterStronger at Sheffield Crucible.

Some years ago I was researching neuropsychology for my play The Almond and the Seahorse, which launched Sherman Cymru Theatre in Cardiff in 2008. I became fascinated with the brain and read widely and avidly (a habit which continues today, as my partner is writing about cognitive science and performance). During my research period, I spoke at length with survivors of Traumatic Brain injury (TBI) and the scientists developing our understanding of how this essential organ works,  longing for some sort of official collaboration.

Now, thanks to Chol and Sheffield Theatres, imove, the Cultural Olympiad and Sheffield Hallam University’s Sport Science Department, I have what I longed for.

Art/science collaborations often get negative coverage in the press, but this is due more, I feel,  to poor reportage than anything reflecting actuality. I know I’m in the presence of lazy journalism when scientists are referred to as ‘boffins’ (often caricatured in the regulation nerd black rimmed glasses and white coats, with bubbling test tubes in excitable, spilling hands), whilst the flighty, histrionic, egocentric artists are invariably ‘bohemian’.

There seems to be an artificial schism, a suggestion that the disciplines are opposites and never the two shall meet – yet both I feel require imagination and form in order to conceptualise and understand, and the fruits of both are responses to the world – whether this is a tangible, ‘seen’ Universe, or otherwise (quarks and leptons; dark matter, anybody?).

The Artist-Scientist is one of the Jungian archetypes in mythology, representing curiosity and wonder, the ability to focus and improvise unusual solutions to problems. Perhaps the ultimate posterboy is Leonardo da Vinci, whose ‘Vitruvian Man’ attempts to bring together art, mathematics, and science, considering the size of the human body in its relationship to geometry and the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.

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One of my favourite quotations from the notebooks and letters of Leonardo da Vinci is his instructions on how to develop a complete mind: ‘Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses – especially learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.’

Such vital words which could have been written for the first time today.

(to be continued)

Information on:

http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/event/leanerfasterstronger-12/

 http://www.imoveand.com/

The Almond and the Seahorse: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/mar/08/theatre

LeanerFasterStronger: workshop day

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LeanerFasterStronger workshop, Crucible Studio.

There comes a point when every playwright or performance writer needs to hear the words they have written outside the amphitheatre of their own head.

Many times I’ve said when working on an emerging script, whether my own or someone else’s: ‘we need to hear it, now’, for there’s only so much that can be done alone and on paper. Sometimes that ‘so much’ is a developed, close-to-final draft – but at other times, especially when trying new forms or aesthetics, the work needs to be tested earlier.

I’ve found the swiftest way of making a script unfamiliar and fresh (and thereby the writer alert to possible problems) is by putting it in other peoples’ mouths.

I’ve rounded up friends, their relatives, even reluctant neighbours in the past, when the desire to hear a script read has demanded action. Nowadays these (usually willing) readers are friends who are professional actors, directors, or dramaturgs, but there was a time when I was so stir-crazy with indecision about a particular scene, I asked the two Jehovah Witnesses who came to my door to read the dialogue aloud for me. They did, with surprisingly lovely baritones and a flair for speechifying. I paid for this unconventional script development with regular visits and editions of The Watch Tower coming through the door.

But now it’s Chol and Sheffield Theatres turn to help develop the second draft of LeanerFasterStronger, which I completed in Canada last month. We have a day in Sheffield Crucible studio, working with a group of actors (Anthony Missen, Balvinder Sopal, Gerald Fox and Stacey Sampson), Extraordinary moves artist/choreographer Laura Haughey, Susan Burns, producer of Chol Theatre, Rebecca Legg, project manager of Extraordinary Moves, and Andrew Loretto, creative producer of Sheffield Theatres and the director of this production.

The  designer, Shanaz Gulzar, and sound designer/composer Shane Durrant will also make an appearance, alongside Jenny Harris, the imove producer and our lead partner on the project, sports engineer Dr Dave James of Sheffield Hallam University.

It seems an awful lot of people for such a small step. I think had I been earlier in my career, I might have been intimidated by the numbers, but everyone is keen and supportive, with insightful comments on the theme of sport and human enhancement.

I was fortunate to have some days development back in the Summer working on the first draft, which helped clarify performance style and aesthetic. I had decided not to write a play, but a performance text – scenarios for theatre – and those days allowed us to experiment with how we wanted to engage with the audience and tell these particular stories.  Andrew had asked the actors to come prepared with short sequences based on sport activities, as I had written several scenes with dialogue in sync or counter-point to physical scores, and here was a wonderful opportunity to try it out.

The focus this time would be on tone, language, through-line, comprehension, plus what Andrew called the emotional hits. We also wanted to think about staging, for we were workshopping in the Crucible Studio, where the actual production will take place, so Andrew had a great opportunity to try it in the round.

I know from working with young in career writers how strong that impact can be, when hearing a script for the first time outside the inner voice, the voice in the writer’s head. I’ve sadly passed the point where there is a frisson for me. I’ve become workwoman-like; I want to roll up my sleeves and get on with the bloody thing. I want to concentrate solely on each moment as it happens, checking for flaws and inconsistencies, that the strands of text run smoothly throughout, looking for the extraneous, excessive fat to trim away.

It is a greedy, single-minded, deliciously precise experience for me. I already know my questions in advance, the lines or words or dynamics which I need to query, the exchanges I’ve composed minutely, whose musicality I need to test, down to each beat. I pay particular attention to punctuation: the incomplete sentence, the dashed interruptions, the dying away dot dot dots, which linger in the air…

It is one of the times I most relish and appreciate the skills of my collaborators, these generous artists who quietly and professionally help make my text better.

LeanerFasterStronger: The trouble with sport

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Crucible Theatre, Sheffield.                

Photo by Kaite O’Reilly

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I was an English/Drama student at Sheffield University, so The Crucible Theatre was well known to me, and not just for the televised snooker tournaments I watched alongside my Father. Although the city is now redeveloped to the point I no longer recognise anything but the most obvious landmarks, the Crucible’s blunt boxed facade is as familiar in my memory as the faces of my fellow students, sparking with youthful theatrical ambition. It was one of our haunts, alongside the Leadmill and a scoot over Snake Pass to Manchester’s Hacienda and Royal Exchange. It was part of our landscape, perhaps somewhere we aspired to, back in the day. And now I’ve returned to the city built, like Rome, on seven hills, as one of my scripts is going to be produced here.

I’ve written before about my research process for LeanerFasterStronger – a commission from Chol Theatre, part of imove, Yorkshire’s cultural programme for London 2012. A co-production with Chol and Sheffield Theatres, my work has massively benefitted from the project’s partnership with Sheffield Hallam University’s Sports Science Department and sports engineer Dr David James.

Part of the focus of this project has been the developments in the understanding and exploitation of the human genome, bioengineering, and human enhancement. All my research suggests we stand now at the threshold of a new age – “the new biology of machines” – and my prime concern has been how to tell stories connected to this without it becoming too technical and futuristic, or plain science fiction. The research has been fascinating, alongside the bioethical concerns which have become almost an obsession – source, I’m sure, of blogs in the future.

The project is also about sport and bodies in motion, which has set me further tasks. Dramatically, competitive sport gives only a few possibilities plot-wise: the sportsperson wins or loses; they succumb to pressures of doping, or they stay ‘clean’; they are injured or grow older and so the young athletes overtake them; they retire or are injured out, and are faced with the existential dilemma of what to do next…

The sports field or team is also often used as a microcosm for a particular sector of society, or the fans and extended community are caricatured or analysed in minor ‘state of the nation’ plays.

Or so I concluded, after reading all the existing sports-related plays I could find, everything from David Storey’s 1971 The Changing Room, through Louise Page’s doping drama Golden Girls, via a whole scrum of sports-specific John Godber scripts, alongside Arthur Smith and Chris England’s celebration of the beautiful game in An Evening with Gary Lineker, a swim in an empty pool with aptly-named Steve Water’s Amphibians, to last year’s boxing duo, Bryony Lavery’s Beautiful Burnout and Roy Williams’ Sucker Punch. There are other scripts by Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Alan Ayckbourn which are strewn with cricketing references, and films too numerous to mention dealing with the challenge and anguish of humankind versus sport. But it all seemed too much of a binary to me dramaturgically, and I struggled with finding something new to say.

‘The rules define the test’ my Sports Science advisor, Dr Dave James, often told me – so often, it is a line that has gone straight into the script. For elite sport tests the limits of what humans can do – and put in this context, the polarised, linear-chronology, ‘will she or won’t she’ trouble with sport-related  plots I had previously identified, melts away.

Quite how successful I’ve been in exploring alternative narratives will be tested this week, working at the Crucible with director Andrew Loretto, producer Susan Burns of Chol, Sports engineer Dr David James and a company of actors. I’ll be writing about our process, so you can have a ring-side seat.