One hundred ‘rules’ for writing fiction: 16-21

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Further thoughts and quotations on writing I’ve collected over the years:

16. Have more than two irons in the fire at any time. I try to be reading research material for a project that’s forming whilst revising or working on a developed project – that way if I want a day off from something, I’m still being productive. It’s good to feel I’m playing truant – whilst also knowing I’m moving forward. (KOR)

17. Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”  (Elmore Leonard)

18.  Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.    (Esther Freud)

19. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.  (Margaret Atwood)

20. All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day – even if I’ve a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re professional. There’s no other way.   (J.G.Ballard)

21. Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.  (Geoff Dyer)

The Echo Chamber: Opening

.

.

.Publicity image for The Echo Chamber

At the dress rehearsal on 26th January, I felt I was seeing the work for the first time. It always seems a paradox  - work that you know so intimately suddenly transforms, becoming itself once the lights and sound are in place and what we might call the performers’ score, fully embodied, comes to the fore.

Phillip and I wrestled with the programme notes, trying to condense the subject matter and its influences – which suddenly seemed to encompass everything from Quantum mechanics and Japanese Death poetry to Ernest Hemingway’s clipped, stilted dialogue from A Farewell to Arms - into a cohesive blurb. Flowers arrived. A reviewer emailed to arrange comp’ tickets. Tea was made. A soundtrack carefully arranged and selected by Peader was burnt onto several CDs. I swept the stage. The performers walked through some choreography. Ace ran a cue to cue. Coffee was made. Phillip and Ian began their warm-up for the premiere. I chose my seat carefully, then sat in the warm, quiet auditorium, emailing my sister, telling her this was one of my favourite moments in life – sitting in a warm, quiet auditorium as the performers warmed up on stage and the technician made his own preparations in the lighting box.

Ace put on the pre-show music and lights. Phillip and Ian went through some yoga sequences and breathed together, then went backstage to the dressing room. The house opened and the audience came in. The lights went down and the performance began.

PROGRAMME NOTES: THE ECHO CHAMBER

      Two men…something splintering through the skin.

      99% of the human body is made of just 6 elements…

        …something immeasurable is unaccounted for….

A poetic/performative meditation on time, memory, and our place in the universe. Informed by Quantum theory, and ancient/current thinking about matter, cosmology, and the infinite.

 Performers: Ian Morgan, Phillip Zarrilli

Text and dramaturgy by Kaite O’Reilly with contributions from the company

Direction and sound design by Peader Kirk

Design and Lighting by Ace McCarron

27-28 January, 2-4 February 2012, 8pm. Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.

.A

The Echo Chamber: The tech’: day one.

Technical rehearsals have a bad reputation: tiresome, long, interrupted, full of tension and bad tempers. Or so the theatre myth goes. I personally love this time of preparation and problem-fixing, of seeing ideas become flesh, but also, paradoxically, light and shadow…

Here are some photographs I took today, with a few soundbites from the company:

.

.

.

.

.

.

Eleonora in backstage last minute preparations.

‘It’s a necessary step during creation: Giving colour to a black and white drawing.”  Eleonora Marzani, The Llanarth Group international intern.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Ace’s notes on solving a lighting problem (rejected: he found another, better solution).

“The tech’ is where you convert the text and design and rehearsal into theatre.”     Ace McCarron, design/lighting for The Echo Chamber.

.

.

.

.

.

Phillip going over his lines in the dressing room

“It’s the moment where you begin to make the show and you’re painting in the outlines of the actors and their work with sound and light. It’s the bit I most enjoy.”    Peader Kirk, director.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Ian on stage.

The Echo Chamber premieres:

CHAPTER ARTS CENTRE (Cardiff) 27-28 January, 2-3-4 February, 2012, 8p.m. [Market Road, Cardiff CF5 1QE: 02920 304400 http://www.chapter.org

The Echo Chamber: getting in, getting ready

.

.

.

.

.

Start of the get-in for The Echo Chamber, Chapter Arts Centre, 23rd Jan 2012.

It’s a moment I love – that first day of transition – starting the process of transferring the performance you’ve been working on into the actual space. The studio is blank, full of potential – props and set are stacked indiscriminately in piles across the floor. There’s a sense of possibility – and then we step across into the space, placing furniture, measuring, walking the diagonal, checking that everything is in the correct relationship, spiking the set once we feel confident of the placings, and trying out the sound system (there’s always a first burst of something inappropriate – in our case it was Abba. I’m sure the techies do this deliberately, as a panacea to the quiet reverence those like me feel on first day of the get-in).

It’s a time of all hands on deck, of learning new skills. Eleonora Marzani, the international intern who has been shadowing Phillip Zarrilli for the past six months, discovered unexpected talents with a drill and impromptu set making.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Eleonora learning unexpected new skills

It’s the time for last minute script alternations and for sitting in an empty auditorium making a clean script for the designer, Ace McCarron.

.

.

.

.

.

O’Reilly in the auditorium.,

It’s time to start transposing previous rehearsal spaces onto this one.

The Echo Chamber premieres:

CHAPTER ARTS CENTRE (Cardiff) 27-28 January, 2-3-4 February, 2012, 8p.m. [Market Road, Cardiff CF5 1QE: 02920 304400 http://www.chapter.org

The Echo Chamber – testing, checking, trying – 3rd week of rehearsals

.

Ian Morgan in rehearsals for The Echo Chamber. All photographs Kaite O”Reilly

The last weekend before our move to Cardiff and final rehearsals and tech’ before opening. We have been scrutinising the structures (or ‘scenes’, or individual moments), asking what work they are doing dramaturgically.

We.

We have been asking what motifs each scene/structure establishes and what it seeds or contains re-action, aesthetic, meaning, complicity. This is done on the floor – us charting and navigating our way through sequences.

Phillip Zarrilli

Peader Kirk has also been working on a sound design, mixing and experimenting as Ian and Phillip move through their paces.

.

. . . . . .

I have been fine-tuning the texts – found, co-created, and written – trying different rhythms and combinations: scientific, poetic, prosaic and metaphysical, tracing the bedrock of images through the whole and the moments where they appear explicitly in the work.

.

We have been trying out possible structures and running orders before small invited audiences in the rehearsal studio in Llanarth.

…

Tomorrow we run the whole once more before loading the cars and heading off to Chapter Arts Centre. 

And then we begin.

copyright 21/1/12 Kaite O’Reilly

The Echo Chamber: Dramaturgy and different kinds of text

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Peader’s hands, working with action and space.

The past few days in rehearsal I’ve been very aware of the different kinds of dramaturgy and the different kinds of text involved in making a collaborative piece.

We have a series of structures (or ‘scenes’) and we have begun to explore possible sequences and orders for The Echo Chamber. We are all working on the same structure, but with different modes of engagement. I’m struck by how each of us, with pens and scripts and books, are notating, exploring, working something out, or remembering.

Ian and Phillip make extensive notes which I assume are about their cues, movement, inner and physical scores; Ace, our designer and lighting designer, is drawing diagrams and thinking (I assume) in light and shade; Peader is drawing boxes, identifying how the space is used and activated during a sequence of structures; and I’m commenting on individual lines as they are voiced, thinking about the tempo-rhythm and flow of a sequence, and also thinking about the dramaturgy of the whole.

For a moment in the rehearsal room there is no noise but the scratch of pen on page. I almost laugh. And to think I thought I was the writer…

In the republic of poetry (6): 100 Houses by Colin Hambrook

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Cover of 100 Houses, written and illustrated by Colin Hambrook.

I’m deep in rehearsals with The Llanarth Group on The Echo Chamber, still writing and sorting the dramaturgy, so have little time to write – but I wanted to share an email exchange I had with Colin Hambrook, writer and illustrator of 100 Houses:

Colin Hambrook’s 100 Houses is an illustrated collection of visual poetry and an exhibition of ink drawings exploring mental health and the impact of the mental health system on the lives of those who become immersed in it.

He explores identity through the crystalline lens of psychosis. The concept of ‘home’ is a central theme – as a metaphor for a sense of belonging and a connection between mind and body.

KOR: Can you tell me a little about your your poetry – when you started, what the the poetry means for you, what your  intentions may be, and so on….

CH: Writing poetry in one form or another is something I’ve always done. Originally my preoccupation was with songwriting and letter writing – playing with words as a form of expression. I grew up during the late seventies and was smitten by the intelligence of much of the lyric-writing by punk artists like Poly Styrene, TV Smith and Siouxsie Sioux to name a few. In amongst the intensity and rawness of the sound, they wrote about alienation and otherness with a wit and an insight that was life-saving. I knew a lot of the songs by heart and singing (as well as writing and drawing) has always been an important diversion during times of psychosis when I can’t trust what is going on in my head. Not that I believe in the creativity/ madness correlation by any stretch. The writing that happens during episodes of psychosis is largely rubbish, although there are sometimes kernels of rich imagery that can be drawn upon as a basis for something else.

Since schooldays I have always had periods of absorbing ‘serious’ poetry, as well as music, but the words have to connect at an emotional level; there has to be something that strikes as truth, for it to mean anything. In the way that I write, as in much of my drawing, I have often had a tendency towards being too ‘flowery’; albeit with a gothic sensibility. In the drawing I like to create images that change and shift according to the mood of the viewer and their physical distance from the artwork. It took me a long time to realise that the same approach doesn’t work with poetry.

I like words; the way they sound in your head and roll off your tongue. I love the way that words can often imitate how actions and things ‘feel’. But it was the decision to learn to write in a way that communicated beyond myself that was the spur for going beyond the defensiveness that it is so easy to fall into as a poet. When people – in general – think of learning to paint they turn to watercolour. Similarly when they think of learning to write they turn to poetry. Both carry with them the peculiar misunderstanding that, respectively, they are the easiest forms of expression, when in fact they are both the most demanding.

It took me a long time to realise that I had to learn to keep the imagery in service to reality. At the same time I began to see the significance in showing rather than telling. I think it was a workshop with Pascale Petit when I first came across the notion of “learning to kill your darlings” ie deleting imagery and metaphor when it serves no real purpose other than to “sound good.” I still write as a way of explaining myself to myself, but I have to experience a certain intake of breathe or sense of satisfaction, before I can think of a poem as achieving anything approaching an intention.

I was fortunate to get a place at Dartington College of Arts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They had an approach to teaching fine art that focussed on the wider social context of the artwork; its imagery and its purpose. The usual art historical approach taught in art schools concentrates on the idea of the artist and their hierarchical position within a narrow definition of what constitutes ‘art’, rather than creativity as a raw and essential ingredient of life.

What about the relationship between words and image?

CH: There is something about the combination of image and text that is indelibly imprinted on my imagination. I have a strong capacity for thinking in images. But the stories behind the pictures have to be expressed in words if they are to make any sense. At college I began a series of paintings and writing that were made in response to each other. I kept dream diaries which I story-boarded and pared down to specific images, which were then turned into paintings and prints. I produced an exhibition called ‘Dreams of the Absurd’ which was shown as a whole and in part at a dozen or more art galleries during the 1990s. During the same period I was very involved with Survivors’ Poetry. Being co-editor of their second anthology ‘Under the Asylum Tree’, was a brilliant experience. I learnt a lot about giving a sense of order to a collection and planning book production.

I went on to become more fully absorbed in editing at the same time as I became immersed in the disability arts movement. I had that sense of finding the community that I’d been looking for a long time and became inspired and passionate about disability art because it is about tangible experience, and substance rather than form for the sake of itself.

Can you contextualise how this project came about?

CH: My poetry got largely left behind until I applied for an opportunity that came up as a Dada-South commission – as part of Accentuate. Titled Up-Stream, they were looking for creatives who were going to be able to use the opportunity as a stepping stone towards upping their game as a professional practitioner. It has been the spur to get me back into my stride as a poet. 100 Houses came out of a desire to learn to etch and craft previous material. In the last six months the writing has got stronger and I’ve developed more confidence in putting the work in a public arena.

What advice would you give to other writers/artists/creatives?

CH: I think the most important thing in learning to write is finding people you can trust to give you a balanced critique of the merits and demerits of your work. It’s a bit of a knife edge, when you are putting your soul on display. If you are not naturally thick-skinned and have a tendency to take things personally, it can take an enormous leap to learn to differentiate between good and bad judgement. But you can only learn and develop your craft as a writer, by making mistakes. So finding someone skilled enough to tell you why they think something could be better is extremely important. You then have to weigh up whether their reasons match your intention. Even if they they have misunderstood or are on a different wavelength, but can clearly describe why they don’t like a thing in a way you can appreciate, then it is important to realise that as an act of generosity.

Further information on 100 Houses can be found at:

100 Houses: Amazon.co.uk: Colin Hambrook: Books

http://100houses.co.uk/poem-02.htm

listen to mp3 of ON HEALING:

The Echo Chamber: second week in snapshots

.

.

.

.

.

Ian’s shoes. 

.

.

.

.

.

.

Reviewing video material of structured improvisation

.

.

.

.

.

.

First punt at sorting order of sequences.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Design meeting by skype with Ace McCarron

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Reviewing material before running a sequnce.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

A page of notation from my workbook.

All photographs KOR

12/1/12 copyright Kaite O’Reilly

Revision notes (7): feedback and other tricky customers

.

.

.

.

.

.

Although I’m deep into the making of The Echo Chamber with The Llanarth Group, I’m very aware of life and work continuing, despite my immersion in what feels at times a parallel universe. I’ve learnt over the years to organise my time and tasks well, so I don’t have to juggle too many at this essential crystallising period, or continuously switch heads like some kind of demented Worzel Gummage.

I’m aware, at the periphery of my mind, the next project and its tasks lining up, creating, if I’m lucky, an orderly queue.

I’m particularly aware of the feedback document compiled by Andrew Loretto and Daniel Evans of Sheffield Theatres sitting in my in-box; a full, focused response to my most recent draft of LeanerFasterStronger. I haven’t opened it, nor will I until my creative focus is clear from this current production, so no influences can seep unintentionally from one project into the other. To receive feedback from the creative producer and artistic director of a company demands to be treated with utmost seriousness and respect, especially from collaborators who have already committed to production. But what when the work has not yet got a home? So much of theatre production and script development relies on relationships,  often forged over a period of time. What then for the young in career writer who wants feedback and constructive criticism, but who may not have connections to key ‘gate keepers’ or script development professionals?

These are central questions about feedback: how to get it and who to get it from.

I was recently on the writers’ forum of the National Theatre Wales community website and saw a playwright looking for other playwrights or theatre practitioners to read their recently completed play. This seemed to be a good place to pitch for opinion or support, especially if there is some knowledge of the other members and their predilections. I’ve found feedback is more meaningful if there is an understanding of where these opinions are coming from.

By that I mean it helps to know that the person you received that blisteringly damning comment on your experimental script is really really into character-driven naturalism. Likewise, the bemused or cool at best comments on the book of a new musical you’ve created will gain a focus and context if you know your critic is into postdramatic performance and hates John Barrowman. Having this knowledge can act as a compass, helping you navigate the middle path and interpret advice and feedback, which is especially useful if they are conflicting, and from different sources. Which can be common. So which do you follow?

After completing the second draft of my play peeling, I knew I was writing something beyond my experience of structure and form. I felt like I really didn’t know what I was doing. I genuinely had no idea how to proceed. I was in a fortunate position at the time, as I was working with two literary managers who I asked to read the draft and advise me on how to proceed.

Both felt the script had potential, and both said they had not read anything quite like it before. ‘The more ‘real’ and naturalistic you can make it, the more effective it will be’ one told me. ‘The more you push the convention, the more experimental and non-naturalistic you are, the better it will be’ the other said. Neither knew of the other’s involvement and I didn’t want to enlighten them. So what should I do? Having a sense of their tastes and preferences in performance style helped me contextualise their comments. I realised in the end it was down to me to plot a path between their perspectives, guided by my own opinion, interpretation and deconstruction of their feedback: what had prompted it, where it was coming from, and whether I wanted to follow that proposed path.

In the end, it was down to me training myself – reading and seeing work, building up an understanding of what I felt worked, what I liked, what I believed to be effective. I had to know and trust my own opinion – not in an arrogant, ‘I know it all’ way – but as a means to make feedback (which we will always need, no matter how big and clever we become) useful – especially when coming from knowledgeable, potentially intimidating sources such as directors, tutors, or literary managers.

But it is as equally valid if your critic has no formal training, understanding, or even interest in your chosen medium. I believe we can gain insight from any person we are lucky enough to get to read or see our work. My father, a butcher and a farmer who had left school at a very young age, was one of my most insightful, hurtful, and inspiring critics. Knowledge and perception can come from any place – but these gifts often come with barbs – so it really helps to know what forces are at work on the response – their tastes, preferences, but also whether a hidden agenda may be present.

I have friends who are members of writers’ groups for the feedback and camaraderie, but they tell me, like any close knit community or family, there can be tensions and antipathies as much as encouragement and sympathies.

A former colleague who writes historical fiction had to leave one circle as she found she was unintentionally pandering to the tastes of the group which were more conventional and cosy than the edginess she aspired to. A former student dropped out of his evening class owing to what he described as a bullying, homophobic hierarchical dynamic which even held the workshop leader in thrall. ‘I’m glad we weren’t twelve. It would have been like Lord of the Flies‘ he memorably told me, returning to his ‘proud pink prose’ which had been dismissed so readily in the group feedback sessions (‘I’m sure it’s fine in its place, but does anyone really want to read this? I mean, would you ever find a publisher, or an agent writing stuff like that?’). The feedback he received was making him doubt everything about his work, so he did the right thing: he ignored it.

But there is a caveat to that. We can’t go around ignoring every piece of feedback which hurts or makes us doubtful, especially if we keep getting the same comment.

As my friend the artist, writer, and choreographer Sam Boardman-Jacobs taught me many years ago: When ten doctors tell you to lie down. LIE DOWN!

And finally, if you are seeking feedback, give a comfortable context within which your reader/critic can respond. Specify. Do you want a full-on, no-holds barred free for all? Or do you want specific feedback on certain areas you can identify (‘does the dialogue sound credible?’), but not others (‘I know the structure’s wobbly, I haven’t yet found the ending, but I’m working on that and it’s too delicate to get feedback on’). Be clear what you want a response to. Set parameters if need be – be realistic about what you really want to know and communicate that to your readers. Don’t forget to pull on those extra layers of crocodile skin before you receive your feedback.

Hope this may be useful.

Good luck, all. And to put the shoe on the other foot: Take as much care in giving out feedback as you do in taking it in.

copyright Kaite O’Reilly 9/1/12

The Echo Chamber. Rehearsal week one.

Trailer One – Warming Up from Kaite O’Reilly on Vimeo.

Buy this music at

http://boomkat.com/downloads/399130-ryan-teague-causeway