One hundred ‘rules’ for writing fiction: 52-56

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Five further provocations from the published great and good on writing fiction, collated over the years from interviews and articles.

52. Who says you have to start writing first thing in the morning? People worry that you have to have a structure to the day; that you have to get a structure to the day; that you have to get a certain number of words written. Who makes these rules? This sort of thing makes people anxious about their writing before they’ve even started. (Susan Hill).

53.  Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action. (Kurt Vonnegut).

54. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.  Never use a long word where a short one will do.  If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.  Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (George Orwell).

55.  Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary. (Elmore Leonard).

56.  You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)  (Diana Athill).

LeanerFasterStronger: collaboration between science and the arts

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Dr Dave James welcoming the company to the Centre.

It’s the first week of rehearsals for LeanerFasterStronger at Sheffield Theatres, and director Andrew has organised a company outing to The Centre for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University.

The project is a fascinating collaboration between scientists and theatre practitioners, part of imove, the Cultural Olympiad for Yorkshire.

In posts last year I wrote about the research residency Chol and Sheffield theatres had at the Centre for Sports Engineering Research, getting access to the motion capture lab’ and other sports science technologies, exploring movement and our attitudes to our disabled and non-disabled bodies.  http://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1034&action=edit

Now, we’re back – the actors who will be portraying the characters I created informed by my research here and elsewhere, supported by the ever-enthusiastic Dr Dave James.

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Entering the lab’

The meeting is a crash course in Sports Science and human enhancement for the actors. It’s a context I’ve become familiar with over the past twelve months and Dr Dave James fields questions on blood doping, enhancement, and other issues the script touches on.

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Morven 

It’s fascinating seeing lines which I wrote informed by bioethics becoming dialogue between diverse but credible characters. When Chol first approached me with the commission, I never thought saying yes would lead me to a biomechanics and sport engineering laboratory.

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It has been a rich experience, collaborating with so many partners, and I’ve particularly enjoyed the challenge of taking academic material regarding human enhancement, placing it within a sports context, and endeavouring to make theatre from it.

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Kathryn in the gym

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LeanerFasterStronger: First Day of Rehearsals.

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Cast list of LeanerFasterStronger pinned to the rehearsal room door: Ben Addis, Kathryn Dimery, Morven Macbeth, Christopher Simpson.

It’s finally arrived, after so many months of preparation and research: I’m in the rehearsal room of the Lyceum Theatre, part of Sheffield Theatres, on the first day of rehearsals for LeanerFasterStronger.

The full cast are here: Kathryn Dimery, Christopher Simpson, Morven Macbeth, and Ben Addis, as is the designer, Shanaz Gulzar, composer and sound designer Shane Durrant, co-producer Susan Burns of Chol Theatre, the great crew, and director Andrew Loretto.

We began the morning with a read-through of the play. It’s the first time these actors have met and yet within ten minutes of meeting, they’re collaborating as though they’ve worked together for years. I’m impressed with their immediate complicity. As a playwright, I always think the first read-through is important: You are hearing these words outside your own head perhaps for the first time and so never again will have that freshness in noting any false notes, clunkiness, or gaping holes in the narrative or dynamic.

I always want to get the actors’ immediate responses to the work. In my experience, performers can instantly locate areas that require attention – areas which may not be discernible again until later in the process. Our director Andrew asks them to record their initial gut reactions on flip chart sheets pinned to the rehearsal room mirrored wall: Questions. Images. Delights.

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Kath getting first images and responses to LFS down.

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The actors get their thoughts down and we go immediately into a second read-through for the partners of the project. The rehearsal room bulges with Sheffield Theatres staff, Rebecca and Susan from Chol Theatre, Dr David James from Sheffield Hallam University’s Sports Science department, and staff from imove, of the Yorkshire Cultural Olympiad.

Again, to my delight, the actors give a fabulous reading and I start wondering if they can gel together this well, after knowing each other less than half a day, what might they be capable of after several weeks rehearsals?

After the reading Shanaz gives a presentation about the design and the physical and visual world of the play begins to take form. Earlier, during the second reading, our composer/sound designer Shane had created soundscapes and sound effects, exploring the sonic possibilities.

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L to R: Christoper, Shanaz and Ben discuss the design

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After lunch Andrew Wilcox takes us on a backstage tour of Sheffield Theatres, which is currently hosting the World-famous Snooker Championships. The Crucible Theatre is where where the tournament happens, and the studio, where we will present LeanerFasterStronger in a month’s time, is currently used as a practice room. We stood in the space, surrounded by snooker tables and World-class snooker players, trying to imagine Shanaz’s design in the space, imagining what we may present here in a month’s time.

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L to R: Morven, Christopher, Ben, Kath and Andrew Wilcox in the transformed Crucible Studio. 

One hundred ‘rules’ for writing fiction: 47-51

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Further words on ‘how to’ or ‘how not to’  or ‘how I do’ from interviews with fiction writers.

47, You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up. (Margaret Atwood).

48. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. (Kurt Vonnegut).

49. I’m trying to get better at the plotting, because I don’t think it’s my natural strength. I would say I have sort of a natural gift for character, and following one person’s point of view at a time, and dialogue, but I’m not naturally good at strong plot. So something like Room I’ve done a lot more planning on. And it’s not cold-blooded planning; it’s more like planning a military campaign or something. It’s quite exciting, because what you’re trying to do is to keep up the reader’s energy at every point. You’re looking for those spots where things would sag or get lost or come off the rails. You’re trying to keep up the momentum. Playwriting is very good training for that, because people are quite indulgent in a novel of any softening in your pace—they can just choose to read faster, or to take a break from it and come back. But in a theatre, your audience is trapped there. So if you’ve got any bits that feel dull, the audience will literally shift and cough. Even if they don’t walk out, you can tell that they’re restless, so you have to really shape your play well, or they’ll be shifting in their seats. (Emma Donahue).

50. 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).

51. Editing is as important as the writing. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. (Truman Capote).

Setting up a writers group …. Guest Blog by Sandra Bendelow

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Publicity for the Writing for Performance Group, set up and led by Sandra Bendelow – presentation on 19th April 2012, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 7.45pm.

Kaite O’Reilly writes:

I first met Sandra Bendelow some years ago when she came to support the rehearsed readings of Travelling Light: The Mentoring Scheme I led for several years at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. We both live in West Wales and are acutely aware of the dearth of opportunities for performance writers here. Travelling Light was my way of contributing something, but Sandra has since gone above and beyond. I admire her immensely, as she has set up her own Writing for Performance Group – creating not just a community, but support and opportunities for herself and fellow writers and theatre practitioners in a place where there weren’t any, before. This Thursday 19th April the group are presenting The Town With No Traffic Wardens at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. I asked if she would guest blog about how and why she created this group, and what lessons she has learned along the way. I’m delighted to reproduce her email, below:

Sandra Bendelow writes:

It is almost a year now since the Aberystwyth Writing for Performance Group met for the first time. The reason for setting up the group was simple, I wanted a writing group to go to but there wasn’t a performance writing group in the area. But I dithered for a long time wary that running a group would distract me from my own precious writing time. However it’s been the opposite, it’s made me far more productive. Monthly meetings and deadlines for the next showcase are always on the horizon and the fact I lead the group means I really can’t get away with excuses for not writing. I have to lead by example and that means I have to be producing work.

I knew that I wanted it to be more than a monthly meeting of writers. It was about Writing for Performance so I wanted to get the work of the group produced as script-in-hand readings.

Aberystwyth Arts Centre runs a programme called Open Platform which allows anyone to propose a project to be performed in the Round Studio. Open Platform is a great scheme which allows small companies and individuals to perform their work so I knew there was a structure in place at the Arts centre that would allow us to do rehearsed readings.

Gill Ogden, Head of Performing Arts at Aberystwyth Arts Centre embraced the group right from the start, offering support, space and potential performance through Open Platform should we choose to do it.

I remember that very first meeting of the Writing for Performance Group filling me with complete fear; would I be sitting alone for two hours wondering if anyone else would turn up? if anyone turned up would I be able to “lead” the group?

Groups are also very tricky things, dynamics of groups operate around a strange indefinable vortex. Groups can often be maddeningly flat stifled things or explosive, combustible things – and that’s any group let alone a creative one!!! Also let’s face it, us writers are often freakish creatures of one form or another. Was it really advisable to take a group of writers used to secreting themselves away into lonely dark rooms, drawing them out into the daylight and putting them into a room together?

However the group has always surpassed my best expectations. It has an interesting make-up of writing backgrounds, a number of former prose writers who wanted to try their hand at theatre, a number of screenwriters interested in expanding their portfolio and a few with some theatre writing experience.

As for the dynamic of the group I literally couldn’t have created a better one, it’s supportive, it’s entertaining, it’s firm but fair. It’s an exceptionally good dynamic for a group and that is sheer luck.

At the very first group I suggested that we could put together a showcase of short plays, together we discussed a theme and came up with beginnings. The group threw themselves into it, they had no choice, a date was set, it was in the brochure. They had to get writing.

The writers were writing but also I needed to find performers and directors. Aberystwyth has a thriving community arts culture full of exceptionally talented people so this part was actually much easier than it should have been. In fact many performers and directors contacted me to say that they were interested in being involved in the project.

All performers and directors involved in the first project, Beginnings declared a wish to be involved in future projects and Town with No Traffic Wardens comprises of performers and a director all involved since the first project. The director Richard Hogger, a writer himself, is incredibly passionate about new writing and very supportive of the group. He is also extremely patient with the writers, sometimes it has to be said, more patient than we deserve.

Our incredibly talented cast Tom O’Malley. Julie McNicholls and Sian Taylor are joined by four of our writers who are also performers, Dan Rebbeck, Carmel George, Branwen Davies and Tony Jones. Again, patient is a word that springs to mind with the performers. In creating a supportive environment for writers, where the writers needs dominate, the performers do have to deal with taking a far more subservient role than is usual. The performers are actutely aware of the writers presence in the room and repeatedly tolerate the writers demands and needs with heart warming sensitivity.  The demands on the actors are hard, playing through a multitude of characters, style and tone.

Town with No Traffic Wardens began as a proposal by me that we looked at a subject relevant to Aberystwyth to root the group firmly in its location and to explore how to structure a full length play by working together. We worked together exploring the subject, the potential themes, the possible scenarios, the potential characters. Then each writer wrote their own plays, we did initial an read through of each play and shared feedback. The individual plays developed further. Some of the writers chose to respond to the themes in one plays which began to create a cohesive sense within the piece of exploring the different sides of the stories. We began to stitch the pieces together. There were a few gaping holes which had to be plugged but also we had to look to find framing devices. In the end many of the framing devices are elements that will come into play when we move the piece to full production which is scheduled to take place later this year though once the piece has been presented to the public we will look to see what else can be done from the writing perspective to frame the whole piece.

It has been fascinating to see how different writers approach the same subject. Many of the writers found it difficult, feeling the subject to close to them or finding it hard to connect to a subject thrust upon them. It is an important part of a writers skill-set to be able to respond to a commissioned subject so it was important to find ways to connect the writers group to the subject. Part of the ongoing process has been to find ways to fire that connection – continuing to discuss headlines and stories that emerged locally – looking for that spark. I think that the strongest moments in Town with No Traffic Wardens, as it currently stands, come from those writers who found a way to write their own plays whilst still maintaining the connection to the Town.

For some of the writers this is their first time writing for theatre for others it is still just their second play to be presented for public consumption. All of the writers are still very new to the world of writing for theatre, they are still very fragile and vulnerable to how an audience will perceive their work. But all of them are getting their work out there, not just writing it their rooms for an audience of themselves and trusted love ones. They are thrilled by seeing their characters come to life, they are enjoying the moments when an audience laughs at your jokes, they are feeling the power of making an audience feel the pain of a darker moment.

Town with No Traffic Wardens weaves through a vast world of interconnected stories, stand-alone stories and scenarios. Comedy plays a very strong in many of the pieces and yet also a few of them touch on darker elements which has given Town a vital balance of light and dark moments.

Carmel George, Catrin Fflur Huws and Sean Langton have explored the world of journalism including local, national and TV journalists, exploring the motives behind the stories journalists choose and questions what is “news”.

Three of the plays operate almost as stand-alone pieces, Tony Jones piece explores events spiralling out of control, Branwen Davies explores whether loneliness is actually a bad thing and my play is a journey inside excuses and justifications for bad behaviour.

I have lots of favourite things about Town but amongst the top ones are; the character of Chardonnay created by Branwen Davies for Combating Loneliness. She is such a delightfully dippy character who gets thrown into a very dark situation.  Julie Grady Thomas has written her first play, Death of a Traffic Warden for the play. For months Julie, who is a screenwriter, has been coming along to the groups, listening in the background, unsure if she was really interested in theatre and then she’s produced an incredibly moving monologue from a traffic warden on her last day before losing her job. Marit is another new member who has never written a play and yet she’s produced two surreal little stories full of amazing dialogue.

Town with No Traffic Wardens is still very much a work in progress with a a group of writers who are still very much works in progress. Writers still finding their voices, finding their feet, stepping precariously along a pathway. But most importantly they’re writing.

It’s been an incredibly successful first year, and in our second year we plan to move onto a radio writing project, a run of longer plays and a full performance of Town with No traffic Wardens, and a Writing Festival in summer of 2013.

World Premiere and writing workshop by Kaite O’Reilly

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World Premiére of New Olympics-Inspired Play

Sheffield Theatres press release:  10 April 2012

Warm up to the London 2012 Olympic Games celebrations with Sheffield Theatres and Chol Theatre’s co-production of LeanerFasterStronger, premièring in the Crucible Studio Theatre from Wednesday 23 May – Saturday 2 June.

Written by Kaite O’Reilly, winner of the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry in 2010, and directed by Sheffield Theatres’ Creative Producer Andrew Loretto, LeanerFasterStronger is a darkly-humorous and provocative theatre experience that explores the limits of what being human means. Set in-the-round in the Crucible Studio Theatre, different characters examine the themes of enhancement, new science and bioengineering and ask the question, how far would you go to be the best?

A new collaboration with neighbouring Chol Theatre in association with iMove, this new production will be brought to life by four young performance artists doubling as multiple characters. Acclaimed interactive media artist, Shanaz Gulzar (Transform season at West Yorkshire Playhouse), will design the show which will feature real-time film projections, with lighting design from Gary Longfield (Lives in Art and Peter Pan) and sound design from Shane Durrant (Thirsty).

LeanerFasterStronger writer Kaite O’Reilly said: ‘When I was a student in Sheffield during the early mid 80s, Sheffield Theatres was a major landmark on my cultural horizon. As an aspiring theatre practitioner, it was somewhere I went to learn, to be provoked, entertained and to be inspired. Returning after twenty years and having my own work on in the Crucible Studio Theatre, that I attended so frequently, is quite wonderful. I hope that LeanerFasterStronger will continue the tradition for emerging practitioners and audiences alike.’

As part of the season, on Tuesday 29 May at 6.00pm Kaite O’Reilly is running a workshop for aspiring playwrights aged 18 years and over. Tickets cost £10.00, for more information call the Box Office on 0114 249 6000.

LeanerFasterStronger forms part of Extraordinary Moves, an exciting arts and science partnership between Chol Theatre, Sheffield Hallam University and iMove, Yorkshire’s Cultural Olympiad programme. For iMove, Sheffield Hallam University are also hosting a series of Olympic inspired events including a panel discussion with Paralympic athletes (25 April), an Olympic Games guest event in association with BBC Radio Sheffield and a unique opportunity to ‘Meet the Olympic Commentators’ (9 May). For more information visit www.shu.ac.uk/events. Site Gallery are also premièring a new thought-provoking exhibition by artist Jason Minsky.

Tickets for LeanerFasterStronger are on sale now from Sheffield Theatres’ Box Office, priced £10.00 – £15.00.

Hang-ups! Aerial and Disability

Here’s a link to a fascinating short film by aerialist and academic Tina Carter, film maker Anton French, and writer/performer Sophie Partridge.

I worked with Sophie back in 2002 on the original stage and radio productions of my play, peeling with Graeae Theatre Company, and some years later as dramaturg on one of her early forays into playwriting.  Sophie is always interesting and well worth a look.

Please go to:

http://curiousfilms.co.uk/hangups.html

The myth of waiting for inspiration: Things I wish I knew when I was starting out (7).

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image courtesy of http://www.123rf.com

“Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.”     Nietzsche.

One of the more troubling questions I get asked when people know I’m a writer is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’  In India, the UK, Korea, the US; at festivals, in taxis, at workshops, even ‘talkbacks’ after a performance of a script I’ve written, this question has appeared, usually from a tense-looking individual who, when pressed, reveals personal artistic ambitions but a lack of belief in their own creativity and imagination. Why else would they ask such a question, unless they distrusted their own inspiration, or felt there was a secret to be let in on, a better, faster, more guaranteed way of accessing that seed that grows into artistic projects?

I love the fact that the word ‘inspiration’ has its roots in breath – ‘being breathed upon’ in one online etymological source – as though artists were blessed or touched by some form of supernatural or divine grace. A thirteenth century source is even clearer: ‘immediate influence of God or a god’ (www.etymonline.com).

However, this lovely but romantic notion promotes the myth that we create through an external inspiration – a fickle force, sometimes favouring us, sometimes not – as though it is something other than the potential within each of us. Such persistent but old fashioned ideas suggests some people are creative and others not, and we must wait until the muse or inspiration strikes. It promotes being passive rather than active and making our own luck, our own inspiration, our own work.

I’ve written elsewhere that I believe the difference between writers and would-be writers is the former gets on with it, whilst the latter sits around waiting, talking about doing ‘it’ when the time is right, once inspiration strikes and an idea comes.

My belief that we need to be proactive in our creativity – inspiration is often worked for, not given – has been affirmed in a new book by Jonah Lehrer: Imagine: How Creativity Works. I’ve given some links to reviews and interviews with Lehrer at the end of this post.

So where, exactly, do we begin and where do ideas come from?

From the ether, from life, from over-heards on the bus, from anecdotes we’re told, from newspaper headlines glimpsed on the train, from memories, from idle thought, from documentaries or articles, from received stories and pre-existing sources, from visual art, from going for a walk, from dreams, from anything and everywhere. The trick is in recognising the tug of interest and gathering up the stimulus or noting the idea before it goes, for it will. We will never remember those fleeting thoughts – they need to be notated before they evaporate.

We have to be like magpies – open eyed and curious, ready to dive down and snap up any bright, shiny thing that catches our attention. We often let the seed of an idea or inspiration pass, as it is simply a stirring, not a fully-formed plot, or an immediate understanding of what to write. In my experience that is inevitably a later phase, requiring considerable thought and effort, like heating and beating metal into pliancy and shape. The important task is to recognise the initial call and to understand it will take effort to make the oak from the acorn.

I don’t give too much thought to my selection of cuttings, images, essays, art gallery postcards and other miscellany which could be labelled roughly under ‘research’. It’s often completely instinctive – a tug in the gut and I’m buying that postcard, photographing that abandoned house or strange gully, surreptitiously tearing that article out of the decade old magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. I usually will not understand why I’m attracted to an image or a cutting or a phrase – I just know that it has spoken to my imagination in some way and so must be gathered, acknowledged. What this initial stirring turns into, if anything, is a different story….

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/books/imagine-how-creativity-works-by-jonah-lehrer.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/how-creativity-works-from-nietzsche-to-jonah-lehrer/254796/

(c) Kaite O’Reilly 10/4/12.

Working towards clarity – excerpts from a mentoring process for dramaturg geeks

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Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

Excerpts from a mentoring email exchange between Kelina Gotman and Kaite O’Reilly.

I was recently asked to interact and support librettist and director Kelina Gotman on an innovative interdisciplinary project she is making with composer Steve Potter for London Sinfonietta’s Blue Touch Paper: 100 Combat Troupes.

On 19^th Februry 2012, Kelina first sent me her draft libretto and some questions in an email she wanted engagement with – queries about structure and narrative. This began what I felt was a fascinating exchange, a process of mentoring where, through our interactions, Kelina clarified the concepts, dramaturgy, and intentions of the piece. By seeking my involvement – a stranger she had not yet met – Kelina had in effect decided to externalise her thoughts and creative process, responding to my queries and opening up in a remarkably fearless, and imaginative way. Her emerging thought processes became transparent; her rough initial explanatory notes consolidated into clear intentions and key concepts, culminating in the Preliminary Notes on her script, which I have included towards the end of this post.

Looking back over the development of her ideas and the forming of her thoughts in our emails, I felt I had participated in a wonderfully rich and rewarding exchange – and one which I thought might be of interest to those engaged with process and dramaturgy, too – so this is a one-off post, documenting a process, especially for the dramaturg geeks.

Kelina and I met twice, and I met her collaborator, composer Steve Potter, once over the past two months.  The following are excerpts from Kelina and my private email exchanges on dramaturgy and meaning – they were never intended for public scrutiny, but I have received Kelina’s permission in reproducing them here.

The emails are slightly edited (identified by a series of dots), but otherwise I have not rewritten anything with a view for publication, nor have I changed the layout, spelling, nor corrected any typos. The occasional word has been inserted [like this, in square brackets] to assist comprehension and there is a ‘dialogue’ where I inserted my responses to Kelina’s questions into her original emails, using capital letters or a different font.

None of Kelina’s script (apart from her preliminary notes) is reproduced here, just our email exchange. 100 Combat Troupes, as part of Blue Touch Paper, will be previewed on Wednesday 16 May from 7.30 at Village Underground, Shoreditch, London.

100 Combat Troupes   

Music by Steve Potter

Libretto by Kélina Gotman

 First full exchange by email – initial thoughts and queries from Kelina (KG) to Kaite O’Reilly (KOR) on her draft of 100 Combat Troupes:  9^th February 2012.

 KG:   Here is some of what I’m thinking about / what I would love to talk about and look at when we meet:

1.  Structurally, flow / narrative (or conscious lack thereof, in the case of narrative): we have developed an episodic structure, with virtually no narrative through line, though there is some sense of characters, and they do evolve…. But is the piece legible? Accessible? An episodic structure, with juxtaposition of scene-worlds, can create a wonderful sense of chaos and ‘sense’ emerging out of non-sense. If it is pulled off well- it approaches dream logic; but if not, it just loses people. I hope we can achieve the former, not the latter. So perhaps we can think about this in terms of the script and mise en scene.

2. Structurally/framing:…. you may have read in the press release that we were working with a Borges story (‘The Circular Ruins’), but transforming the Dreamer into a cast of revolutionaries, working together to dream up other possible worlds. This has sort of receded- or shifted- yet I think it remains formally significant, in terms of a framing device. We currently have the musicians standing in as these dreamer/revolutionaries, though nothing indicates it formally in a very explicit way…. I realised as if a thunderbolt had hit me that actually we were staging not so much an episodic structure as a denkbild (thought-image), specifically the Angelus Novus that [Walter] Benjamin describes, after the painting of the same name by Paul Klee. You’re probably familiar with it, but basically it’s the angel of history being blown inexorably into the future, with its back to it, looking at all the rubble of history, helplessly (and in despair). In a way, what we have is – in fact – not so much an episodic structure as a series of flashes- these scenes all go by very, very quickly- of history, and dreams. The angel actually emerges in the last scenes. I’m not interested in saying this explicitly- perhaps it’s just a figure we’re working with- but this notion of the explosive constellation at the end of time…. operates slightly differently from the episodic form… So, is the overall frame clear enough, or are the foundations clear enough at least on our end for the whirl of text and image to be anchored (and thus for the audience to enjoy this, even if they don’t understand what they’re enjoying exactly, and puzzle over it after- which I think is a great response to any work) (I’d much rather the audience feel stimulated, excited, and puzzled, as if they couldn’t put their finger on what they had seen, than to offer something simple and digestible on first watch…).

3) Moral/political ambivalence: Another thing we’ve gone for is an ambivalent sense as to the value of this ‘dreaming’. To a large extent, of course the take-home message is: dream! We need to dream. This is the year of Occupy, and the decade of the Arab Spring. Crony capitalism won’t go on forever. What do we want next? But rather than look just at political alternatives, we’re going the whole way and juxtaposing this with wackier worlds, nonsense worlds- also politically to say, these are important too. We need to remain playful. Joyce and Lewis Carroll are part of this world too (art needs to be funded, etc.) (this is also a political stance)…. Revolutions also produce dictatorships; technicolor dreaming in fantasyland also produces Disney, which in its sickliest version wrecks lives through too much disconnection with ‘reality’. We’re interested in these contradictions.…. it’s the ambivalence we want to inhabit… How do we make this moral complexity productive, rather than just confusing? The idea is that there are no simple answers… and we should be able to be okay with this…

KOR’s email to Kelina. 5^th March 2012, after a face to face meeting.

 KOR: ….I think some of the confusions I experienced were based on the draft nature of the text – ie, as director and writer, perhaps you were writing in shorthand as you had a strong sense of how each moment might be realised in your mind – ensuring this information is on the page may ensure misunderstandings don’t occur again and may help clarify themes, actions, motifs, and aesthetics both for you and your collaborators.

I love the truth in the old EM Forster quote – ‘how do I know what I think until I hear what I say?’ I think it was very revealing, the distance between what you described [when we met] in response to my query of themes and intentions of the work, and what’s actually on the page. Sometimes when in the process, it takes a while for everything to co-exist in the same time – and for the lingering ghosts of ideas to quit or be excised from the stage.

I think looking at each structure as an entity in itself, then scrutinising what the content is, how that might be read, plus the meaning it takes on when in juxtaposition with the other structures and the order in which they appear and therefore the whole – is essential.

I am also curious about the music, its tempo-rhythm, quality, energy, content and ‘sound’ and the impact this will have on the scenes. In many ways I was commenting on a fragment -

 Email interaction – KOR’s inserted responses into Kelina’s email. 12^th March 2012

KG:   …..Narrative/not-narrative. I was really struck by the extent to which you were finding narrative in there, and this has gotten me to rethink how to create radical polyvocality/push at the limits of incoherence to arrive at something that still is cogent, precisely as multi-perspectival. What I mean is that I want to push further in the direction of mood/different worlds, so that we’re not seeing narrative through lines, but rather a juxtaposition of worlds, as we had intended. (Having just seen the Cage Songbooks at Café Oto last night, I’m even more thinking about how to create these slightly anarchic multiple perspectives/non-hierarchical, but still with some coherence- that’s the challenge). What I’ve also realised is that this is not to discount the presence of ‘characters’ in these worlds, only that we need to reinforce the fact that they’re same actors, different people across these worlds. Like I said verbally, I think this will be greatly aided by the fact that they’ll radically be changing their voice and body masks, but I’ll need to really emphasise that, and have it be clear in the script.

KOR:   GREAT! I agree, it’s clarifying the DIFFERENCE between the figures/characters per ‘world’ – I’m doing similar with a show I’m doing for Sheffield Crucible – doubling and tripling – showing it is the same 4 PERFORMERS, but different ‘characters’. i think the change of body mask/voice will be essential – that was not clear in the draft I saw and so it invited the notion of narrative/journey of ONE figure/character throughout  - that’s what I mentioned re-[getting an undesired sense of] progression/continuous action.

I worked with a neuroscientist on my play about the brain – The Almond and the Seahorse – and he couldn’t emphasise enough that we are hot-wired for narrative and our brains will always try to find links, patterns and logic in even the most fragmented situations…. There are experiments where people are given a few tiny fragments and yet the brain/imagination will draw in something that is coherent and has a unity. Grotowski always said the montage exists in the eye of the audience – and of course that’s true. It’s, ironically, the balance between showing enough illogic to prevent a linear narrative (as the brain will look for narrative and connections), but also ensure it’s not so abstract as to irritate the audience and make them feel it’s ‘non-sense’ they’re witnessing…. There needs to be that pleasure and satisfaction, too….

KG: Frame: we’ve decided that really this piece is staging the Benjamin Angelus Novus, and so to just forget all this stuff about Borges, and stop trying to tell that story as background-to-where-we-got-now. I need to relearn to tell the story as a denkbild, and as the angel of history looking back over the rubble of history, being blown inexorably into the future. And that rubble is contemporary market capitalism, so the rubbish is definitely junk from the marketplace. And the musicians are the 1%, in grey suits, with ashen faces. …Will also cut the Beckett reference, which is unnecessary. But yes, in a way we’re streamlining the story/structure: this is just Benjamin/angelus novus, and we’re going to try to tighten up the mise en scene.

KOR: … Fantastic…

 Exchange by email – 14^th March 2012.  Capitals are by KOR, inserted as responses into Kelina’s original email:

 KOR: …WE HAVE TO ASPIRE – I ALWAYS THINK OUR AMBITION SHOULD POTENTIALLY EXCEED OUR GRASP, SO WE ARE ALWAYS YEARNING AND STRETCHING OURSELVES AND TRYING TO ATTAIN THE (IM)POSSIBLE…..  I THINK YOUR INTENTIONS ARE SO MUCH CLEARER AND THIS WILL MAKE EVERYTHING FAR MORE ‘CLEAN’…

KG: …I’m not sure this is helpful as an email. I should really rewrite the script – or just revise, making all these things more clear.

1. The play is enacting Benjamin’s figure of the angelus novus.

2. It is a constellation of image fragments, depicting scenes from the last couple hundred years; they should be jarring, discontinuous, but also funny, critical, and evocative of tropes from popular and political culture (feminist critique in Disney sequence, eco-critique in cereal box sequence, etc.).

3. The audience experience (if there is such- of course they’ll all experienced this differently) is a massive shock to the system/don’t know what hit them/bordering on overwhelming/baffling/hilarious, but that’s also what we’re interested in… through that mess, shafts of light, that reconfigure how they see themselves in a world… yes… gone mad (because our world has gone mad/is mad, and it’s healthy to see it that way sometimes, even if in Technicolor/exaggerated and sped-up form).

 KOR:  THAT ALL SOUNDS GREAT – AND SO CLEAR AND FOCUSED! I THINK WITH SOME OF THE MONOLOGUES YOU’VE WRITTEN – THE CEREAL BOX, ETC – THERE WILL BE A REAL LINGUISTIC SPIN FOR THE AUDIENCE – THE SENSE OF DAZZLE FROM WORDS, WITH WIT AND HUMOUR AND ‘STRANGENESS’, TOO….

KG:…Um.. signing out for now… I really hope this is not more confusing than before. It feels clearer in my head! Will send updated script as soon as I can… have been really swamped…

 KOR: THIS IS SO CRYSTAL CLEAR…. IT IS THE OPPOSITE OF CONFUSING. REALLY WELL DONE AND MY WARMEST WARMEST WISHES DURING THIS REVISION PERIOD….

Kelina’s preliminary note for collaborators, extracted from the new, revised draft after our second face to face meeting, with Steve Potter.  1^st April 2012.

 KG: From script: Preliminary note about the text and mise en scène: This piece stages a denkbild, or “thought-image”: that of the Angelus Novus, or Angel of History, painted by Paul Klee and described by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The Angel of History is being blown inexorably into the future, facing the past with horror. He can do nothing of the detritus spread out before him at his feet, which he witnesses in flashes. This is a constellation, a time fragmented, exploded, outside time: it is messianic, perhaps – time in which (here) all of modernity and capitalism is exploded, in shards. We stand in and outside of it simultaneously, from a vantage point that is estranged, but caught; trapped, but lucid.

The scenes, thus, operate as shards in this explosive constellation: they may partake of a single world, but they are discontinuous. These are not characters whose trajectories we follow, but personages woven in and out of disparate scenes, coexisting, bleeding or blending in and out of one another, without constancy, and without a singular narrative through line. This is a radically polyphonic universe: voice and body masks indicate shifts in the quality or mode of delivery from scene to scene, which change pitch, tone and hue. Some scenes are humorous, even hysterical; others are more sombre, or tranquil. All pass by so quickly that the audience hardly has the occasion to process what has happened before we move onto the next. Yet through this constellation, and these flashes, a sense of powerful alienation emerges, estranging these fragments of modern capitalist life: we see desperate dreams of Disney princesses; eco dreams of houses built romantically from scratch. Anarchism flashes by as a possibly viable alternative, before being tossed into a psychedelic dreamscape of hallucinogenic proportions: speed leads to exhaustion, which leads to insomnia and manic desires – a conquering Adam’s redrawing the rivers and oceans of the world – before all this folds into the messianic hum of quiet laughter, old jokes, and a ghostly forgetting: not quite redemption, but a sense of community or commonality that is oddly, uncannily familiar…. 

KOR’s email response to the revised draft. 1^st April 2012:

KOR:  I think there is much more clarity here – I do think some of the very good introduction you have written [above] would be useful as a programme note – you don’t need much, just that clarification of thought-image, shards of discontinuous exploded world(s) and not ‘characters’ with linear consequential action, but figures woven in throughout…

I think there reaches a point where we go ‘enough on paper – we need to see it, now’ – and I feel we’re virtually there. I think it’s very ambitious, what you set out to do (especially with our hot-wired for narrative brains!) and I think that multi-vocal, fragmented thought-image you wanted to create is certainly in existence in these few pages – the concept is clear, the work of the actors and musicians defined – time to flesh it!

…I think the concept is much clearer, as is the aesthetic and ‘rules’ of the worlds you are creating and getting your figures to inhabit, be it briefly. I think the clarity of images and what you are communicating will be obvious once you start rehearsals.

My only thoughts when we met were

1) about linking the Angelus Novus to the singer on her stage truck…. You may want to decide how pronounced or subtle that is once you start getting the work ‘up’

2) drawing out that link between the central concept/image (Angelus Novus) and the quote from Marx  [“The social revolution […] cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past.”] – you’ve started to pull that out more, and it’s pleasing to me – question is, whether you need to tweak or echo or develop that connection more in the end…

I also wonder if you want to be more explicit (as opposed to putting it in brackets!) when you refer obliquely to the 99% and Occupy Wall Street/St Pauls, etc movement. If it’s important that reference is understood and received by the audience, you may need to make the reference precise. Your scenes are dystopias and not necessarily this world we inhabit now – if a figure refers to political activity/peaceful social disobedience and you want the audience to know this is referring to the occupy movement, you need to make it explicit, as the audience may assume you are referring to an imaginary world. If this isn’t important, no matter – but if you really want the audience to get that reference, you have to say so.

One other thought is probably unnecessary to state, as you are also director – but as a writer, I would never leave responsibility of an important moment to an actor to have to improvise…. You need to script that – even if roughly, otherwise you’re putting a lot on the actor (even if you are also directing the performer)… To a strict dramaturg (which I can often be), this looks like the writer copping out of an important moment! I often pull people up on this – when the stage directions tell us how scary or amazing this improvised or rehearsed moment will be…. As strict dramaturg, I would say if this involves language and text, a script should be provided for the actor to improvise or jump off from – so I think you have a little bit of extra work to do here!

That aside, I wish you all the best with this. I’ve really enjoyed our short but stimulating interaction – I will also write something at some point on my blog, but will run it by you first, to get your blessing before putting it in public domain.

Kelina’s response to KOR’s edited email exchange as possible blog post. 4th April 2012:

KG: Hi, this is GREAT! It is so great to see the conversation traced… as narrative (of course, now am conscious of a different ‘voice’- the voice that becomes the blog post… but no matter)… You have my blessing.

Thanks again for such a stimulating set of meetings and exchanges. I’ve learned hugely, and hope dearly that we’ll continue to be in touch!

Kélina

One hundred ‘rules’ for writing fiction: 42-46

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Further tips, pearls of wisdom, or words of warning on writing fiction, gleaned from interviews, festival appearances and articles:

42. Don’t follow trends. Aspire to set them. (KOR).

43.  Imagination is everything. What you do when you’re a novelist is play Let’s Pretend. Just like children do, but on an adult level. You become a prep school boy, a First World War soldier, a police detective. I can’t stress it enough. (Susan Hill).

44.  Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments. (Roddy Doyle).

45. The basic rule given us [when students] was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all – so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words. (John Steinbeck).

46.  Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page. (Zadie Smith).