The Horizontal and Vertical Axes of storytelling

 

One of my students today mentioned a problem she sees in her writing. She was narrating a passage where her character visits a park for a walk. She (the author) put in a sense of movement, both by the character against the landscape (the character walked up the path) and the landscape against the character (the breeze blew in her hair) which is sound writing policy. But then the character stopped while the author described a piece of lichen. This is the problem the student/author highlighted - her writing has too many 'stop and observe the lichen' moments. 

This led me to think about a principle of storytelling, maintaining the balance between the horizontal and vertical axis.

Imagine a matrix in the shape of a crossroad. The left-right horizontal axis and the up-down vertical axis. 

The horizontal axis contains some of the following storytelling elements

·         - Incident and event

·         - Character action in reaction to incident and event

·         - Plot development

·         - Background information (exposition)

·         - Narrative structure (within scenes and their sequels, also the meta-structure of the whole narrative of the short story/novel/film)

·         - Pace

·         - Build-up of physical excitement and tension

·         - Plot turning points

·         - Breather scenes

·         - Act and story climaxes

·         - Denouement

·         - Character development

The vertical axis includes the following storytelling elements

·         - Personal meaning and resonance

·         - connection

·         - Questions of/to character interiority, e.g: – why did he/she react that way, where does that reaction come from, what was its genesis - a moment in their past? How does/will that moment and its fallout affect her?

·         - Subtext

·         - Emotional backstory

·         - Psychological backstory

·         - Metaphorical significance

·         - Symbolism and motif

·         - Denouement

·         - Character development

(Yes, a story’s denouement and its character development appear on both axes.)

Now back to the ‘lichen’ moments. I have a recommendation for writers who find themselves discovering such moments in their stories.

• Stop
• Take stock. 
• Why/how is this significant? Is it, or how can it be metaphoric of a situation or (interior) struggle the character is having?  

The writer’s mind is a powerful device that often throws ball bearings under our wheels, slowing us down when we want to keep plugging away along the horizontal axis.  In our desire to find out what should happen next it gives us reminders that (in a story of layered depth) we can only know that by knowing the characters and their story from the inside out.

Writing isn’t a matter of taking inventory, or reading a map with all the steps written out in advance. It’s emotional and psychological graft, reaching out in the dark. Or as Trisha puts it in her post exploring emotional time as opposed to chronological time  – quoting Kurt Vonnegut -  ‘writing is like crawling through a dark tunnel on your hands and knees with a crayon in your mouth.’   

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (noted in my post below) there is a moment when the adult character discovers a Mickey Mouse watch she’d dropped in the garden when a child. The author imbues that watch with metaphoric power, to the point it becomes a motif. At first glance it is a small moment, and I’ve always wondered at what point in the gestation of the story Mickey Mouse with his hands spread (forever) at ten-minutes-to-two appeared.

So when you come to a lichen moment – stop. Why are you dallying here? What can such moments in description reveal about the deeper story. You can find meaning in the seemingly mundane. The mundane or the ordinary is the best place to find meaning, as it lessens the risk of the author going for ever larger scope, which is the road to melodrama.

A wise writer would do well to bear in mind both the horizontal and the vertical axis. To what degree depends on you and your needs and expectations as an author and a human being, and also on the genre/context/audience expectations of your story.

Is there somewhere a guarantee that all such ‘Stop and observe the lichen’ moments carry metaphorical depth – no, there isn’t. But many do. And if you hasten to go past or around them, to get going or keep going on the horizontal axis, you run the risk of not only passing the lichen by without a second glance, but doing the same to the deeper aspects of your story.

Truman Capote

A new biography has been published about the American author Truman Capote, a complex man whose public flamboyance hid a secretive nature. I was surprised to find - many years after I read it - that he was the basis for the boy who comes to stay, in Harper Lee's great novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Here's a link to a review of the biography in The Weekly Standard.


A few years ago two films about the life of Capote, the better of which - Infamous - featured a powerful and nuanced performance by Toby Jones.

Capote was a master of the documentary novel, where non-fiction material is written with the same sense of creative layering as a piece of fiction. I recommend In Cold Blood, as a starting point.

The just-released biography is called a psycho-biography, which is a new term on me. Supposedly a biography written from a psychoanalytic perspective. An interesting concept, in terms of both fiction and non-fiction. Be interested to hear of other examples in this 'genre'.

Legacy Writing

In my earlier posts on the blog on folk music and the American Folklorist, Alan Lomax, I touched on the issue of preservation. Of leaving a trail for those who follow us, to say, this is me, this is who I was. Songs have filled that role for centuries, books too. One of the finest forms of preservation is photography, which has the added sense of always being in the now. A photograph is in permanent present tense. The image below is the first photograph ever taken, of a Paris street, that shows a human figure. Down in the left hand corner there is a man having his boots shined by a bootblack. The street beside them looks deserted but in fact it was full of horses and carts, horse-drawn taxis, people walking. Because of the very long exposure time required by the early cameras, anything moving couldn’t be captured. So the street traffic is rendered invisible and only the bootblack and his customer remain. 

Photographs not only capture subject and context but voice. They are in and of their time. 

I’ve become involved in a concept called Legacy Writing, where we become our own folklorists and photographers. Us, not just famous people, but all of us. Our stories are logged like the photograph, in the permanent ‘now.’ The field of Life Writing has been around for years, developing out of the class biography and autobiography, but it has always been from a point in our later life, looking back. So we’re reflecting, analyzing, sometimes justifying. Perhaps even seeking forgiveness. But what were our thoughts and motivations in the moment. The diary and journal has always been the format to capture that part of ourselves, and now social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, Blogging) and forms like digital storytelling and electronic scrapbooking allow us to log those moments and make them available to view. 

With the electronic media now available we have an opportunity to record ourselves in the now – a permanent now – in the way we’ve always done using photographs. The flared jeans, family gathered around the fondue set lit by the glow of the lava lamp, catching the subtleties of the orange and brown vinyl wallpaper. Masterpieces of style like the Schwarzenegger shoulders on your 1990 power-suit, the clean lines of the 1980’s mullet that puts Billy Ray Cyrus to shame.

One of the most useful tools with the new electronic media is the ability to link, to show viewpoints, creative works, story forms beyond your own, and ideas beyond your own. Large scale media forms like e-books allow this too. This gives us a unique chance to branch out beyond just our thoughts in biographical form and use the full range of our creativity. 

• Digital stories (images with overlaid music and text)
• Video (self filmed)
• Audio clips we make ourselves
• Linked images to audio and video clips
• Poetry and Prose with images included

In Legacy Writing, written text lies at the heart of it all. The word. The use of point of view, voice, description, narrative style and structure. Written text is the glue. You don’t have to just use your own voice, or a documentary style. You can create characterizations depending on context, as fiction writers do all the time. We’re talking about a repository for all of you, including your storytelling in all its forms. It is a creative record, not just a chronicle. I’ve always had my doubts about Bill Bryson’s story of being roomless and freezing and sleeping on a park bench with his underwear over his head. But it could’ve happened, and even if it’s embellished, it’s still a vivid example of his creative voice, which is as legitimate a part of him as his factual history.

Give it some thought. Those bits and pieces you put on Facebook, where will they go, where will their life take them. Or those bits you never record anywhere, how will they be preserved. Will they be preserved. There is so much about my immediate family history that is lost, just a few fragments and snatches of anecdote. Modern technology gives us the ability to avoid that, and be creative. There's no need to be rendered like moving figures in that Paris street - unseen.

Give it some thought…

Arundhati Roy

Indian Writer Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, has released a collection of essays about the tribal and political struggles in India. Here is a link to an article and interview from FT Magazine chronicling aspects of her life and detailing her leanings towards Maoist rebels (while serving mangoes brought out by the home help - irony perhaps?) and another from The Independent, less fulsome in its praise.

I've long waited for another fiction work from Roy, as I find her 1997 novel the pick of the Indian Renaissance novels of the last 30 years, above Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It is a rare example of omniscient Point of View (POV) in modern literature, and in fact is a feast for students of manipulating POV and voice. I recall one review saying (paraphrasing) that 'a novel of real ambition should invent its own language,' which is interesting, though fraught with risk. If you haven't read it, I'd recommend it. If you can get through the omniscient narrator with its continual wordplay, the story within and beneath the text is compelling and moving. 

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the The God of Small Things is Roy's ability to use the mundane (an old Mickey Mouse watch, the smell of rusting metal, pink nail polish, a hull of a dinghy) and fill them with metaphoric and symbolic power. That is an ability any writer should work to develop and hone. It allows the reader to make the connections in their own head, enlisting them as part of the storytelling process, even if brought out via an omniscient POV, which in theory, gives the narrator all the power. We have a natural tendency to link, to empower symbols to speak of emotions and concepts, have the concrete represent aspects of ourselves buried deep, even unacknowledged.

Be good to see Roy writing fiction again.

When real life rises beyond Hollywood story...

Was talking this morning about stereotyped storytelling, with character arcs mapped out for 'our hero' to vanquish the villain and return with the elixir (garbling several story structures from Campbell to Vogler - my apologies to both.)

Sometimes real life rises and falls beyond such formula.

One such example I've always found compelling is a guy named Matthew Saad Muhammad, who was abandoned on the median strip of a Philadelphia highway at the age of 5, to be found bloodied and wandering lost by a street cop who took him to an orphanage. He rose from that to become a professional boxing world champion and multi-millionaire, then blew and lost all his money on crooks and hangers on and ended up broke, destitute, to find relief in a homeless shelter. He is now an advocate for the homeless of his native city, using the one thing he has left - his name - to raise funds.

Here's a link to an article about him. I guess he doesn't fit the model of a Rocky, for Hollywood to come calling. Make a hell of a story though, but then it already is, even without a wordsmith.

Boxing has always been a vicious real life version of so many different kinds of narrative. Man overcomes the odds and obstacles, man seeks redemption, morality plays where man wins it all then blows it all. It gives its audience a chance to live and throw punches vicariously - and not have to worry about the cuts and bruises. It's a fact that more movies have been made about boxing than any other sport. And as so (the fantasy version) is open to so many romantic cliches. The reality is plainer, nastier, usually bereft of happy endings. A place where middle-aged men look like old men, their eyes puffy, their words slurred. A place where their fans live in a kind of time capsule with them, remembering only who they were, preferring the story of the past to the reality of the present.

Photo: Muhammad Ali and Matthew Saad Muhammad, 1980. Two men who lived the dream, such as it was.

Interview with Claire Keegan

Here is a recent Listener interview with Claire Keegan.

Claire Keegan workshop

As part of this years Auckland Writers and Readers Festival (May 11-15) I attended a workshop run by multi-award winning Irish short story writer Claire Keegan. (She has published two collections of stories, Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields, as well as the long short story, Foster.)

I found her teaching style stimulating, even bracing - it was obvious she didn't suffer fools or pander to the punters, and she definitely didn't like tricks, gimmicks, or shallowness - and good on her for all that. I was glad of her honesty and sincerity as well her intelligence and admired her ability to put a stake in the ground about writing fiction.

The workshop was entitled How Fiction Works and one of the things she empahasised was the importance/centrality of time, particularly as a way of thinking about structure. I'm still mulling over all the ideas she presented and the points she made but below are some of my (rough)notes from her comments and discussion about time.

Start by making an incision in time; mine this piece of time; consider and reconsider time

Before and after a story are often unstated

Not everything is told in a story so you need to choose what moments in time to show; let the reader join those moments into a whole

Think about what to include, what to leave out and how much silence there should be

In your second and third drafts think about whether you have chosen the right slice of time

The language of a story begins at a certain point of time

Write what happens over time through the point of view of a character - follow the gaze of the character and stay inside their vocabulary

Transitions in time follow the desire of the character, what she or he wants, doesn't want or has lost.

I like her phrase 'incision in time' very much and I'm finding it a helpful way to think about different possible points of entry, exploration and exit - much more helpful than being told to have a beginning middle and an end. This way of looking at story structure at least offers no pretence that beginnings, middles and endings are easy, obvious or transparent.


Keegan also spoke about 'show don't tell' in an interesting and fresh way:

Good writing works on the level of suggestion

Don't make statements - e.g. she was happy/sad - or analyse, summarise, tell anecdotes or make explanations

Take care of the person/character you are writing about; don't make a point of them, i.e. don't use them to make a point

The internal thoughts of a character follow the gaze of that character.

There was much else besides what I have just mentioned in the hour and a half workshop. It was a treat, and a steal at $40.
Congratulations to the organisers of the festival for re-instating the workshops.

The dark tunnel

One of the things I find hardest to achieve when I’m writing a story is developing an effective structure, one that supports both movement/action and character. It’s hard enough to do in a short story but particularly daunting in a novel.
I guess one of the reasons I find it so difficult is because I like reading and writing in emotional rather than chronological time. I’m sure this indicates I favour character insight and development over plot or, to be more accurate, internal over external plot. Of course, in reality this means that I need to find ways (other than just resorting to simple flashback) to work with both.
Exploring time, history, memory, and different realities and perspectives, is one of the main reasons I’m driven to write, but learning how to transition from one time or reality to another, as well as finding ways to balance them, is something I find very difficult.
It’s not that I have anything against starting at the beginning, moving to the middle and finishing at the end, it’s just that I often have no real idea what the beginning, middle or end of something is, either in ‘real’ life or when I’m drafting and redrafting a story. It seems to me there are endless possible beginnings and endings even when we are simply (orally) recounting something from our lived experience: we emphasise, leave out, gloss over, skip forward and backward in time, surmise, exaggerate, interpret – often this is done almost, or even completely, unconsciously.
Given how easy it is to reconstruct experience into ‘story’ orally in everyday situations, you’d think it would be much easier than it is to sit down and consciously construct a narrative with a character, a particular point of view and voice, and then to layer their feelings, experiences and actions in a way that is coherent and meaningful for the reader, rather than only for the writer and character.
Recently, while doing some background research on dream interpretation, I came across what seemed to me to be a classic/traditional story structure. Andrew Samuels (1999, pp 232-3) mentioned that Jung believed dreams have a typical structure: exposition; development; culmination; solution. Noticing and understanding how specific dreams conformed to or deviated from this structure was/is part of the art of interpretation (or of finding meaning).
Jung’s typical dream structure made me remember another possible (short) story structure, that of Alice Adams (quoted in Lamott 1995, p 62): action; background; development; climax; ending – ABDCE. Fascinating that this structure is so similar to Jung’s one on dreams.
I read a quote somewhere (attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, I think) that said writing is like crawling through a dark tunnel on your hands and knees with a crayon in your mouth.
I’m not sure if he was talking about short stories or not but that pretty much sums up how it feels trying to write and structure a novel.

To be human...

It was once said of Ralph Waldo Emerson that he was the 'Sage of ordinary days.' I was reminded of this while watching English director Mike Leigh's new film, Another Year, which is an exploration of the lives of a small group of friends over the course of 12 months. Here is the cinematic trailer.

Leigh's films have a total absence of fanfare or cinematic slight-of-hand, but still achieve a grandeur. That grandeur however, is not so much up on the screen, it's a realization in the mind and heart of the viewer, as Leigh's characters, always allowed room to flourish beyond mere scripting, show us not just who they are but who we are.

American screenwriting teacher Robert McKee, writes of the same principle and effect, in his book, Story, p.123.

'A great work is a living metaphor that says, 'Life is like this.' The classics, down through the ages, give us not solutions but lucidity, not answers but poetic candor; they make inescapably clear the problems all generations must solve to be human.'

'Another Year' is about a small circle of friends and family around the characters of Tom and Gerri, a couple close to retirement age whose main passion is their garden. Their house is a hub for the wheel of core characters around them. During the course of the film in fact their friend, Mary, becomes the key character and emotional talisman. Mary, a lonely middle-aged woman is consumed by that loneliness, to the point of desperation. That desperation, exacerbated by heavy drinking, drives people further away from her, spiraling her deeper into loneliness. Actress Lesley Manville plays her with empathy and ragged depth, managing to show from the inside out a character we all know, but without going into stereotype. It's a characteristic of Leigh's films that he elicits strong performances from actresses, playing characters lost in familiar surroundings, being both of their domestic world and alienated from it. Mary, who is aching for human warmth and affection, attracts only an older man, Ken, who is further along the road to emotional oblivion than she is. Their scenes together, and her total rejection of him and his cloying advances, crackle and singe. Perhaps she recognizes herself in him, a view of her endpoint so shocking she can't be anywhere near him. Perhaps her conscious self doesn't or refuses to recognize their similarities, but some part of her does, and that horrifies her.

There's no real moment of redemption for Mary, as Mike Leigh isn't interested in the shallow and deceptive promise of big victory, but she glimpses a corner to turn by her unexpected connection with another man, Ronnie, whose wife has just died. Their non-conversations, almost wordless, stand tall by the fact they don't attempt to push each other away, but allow the other to exist close to their space. People seared by grief showing their humanness by what they don't do, by not pushing each other away. It's about as big a victory as this film promises. It is also riveting cinema, as close to McKee's 'lucidity...and... poetic candor' as you're likely to see on film this year.

Leigh's films, which in a strange way speak of what 'reality TV' could have been if not dumbed down to moronic level, show us ordinary lives, people facing trauma we have faced, trauma we will face. It is cinema as mirror, honest, often raw, compelling in its sharpness of detail and nuance. His stories make a mockery of stereotypical Hollywood film structure, with its focus on setting the character a goal/problem to solve, then putting antagonists and obstacles in their way until they triumph in a moment of glittering glory. His characters aren't heroes, nor even anti-heroes, but they are heroic, in a meat-and-potatoes way. In the way they wake up in the morning and just go on. Sometimes that's all we have. 

It's difficult to categorize Mike Leigh's best films as masterpieces, because the term almost forces you to think of epic sweep of scope of ideas and physical boundaries. This film, and indeed Leigh's other great movie 'Secrets and Lies' are too smart for such things. They look to show the world in a postage stamp, almost a pinprick. Almost everything of any meaning explored in a couple of houses, a single street. This film, to revisit McKee's quote does not give me answers, but it does ask enormous questions, and sometimes, like Mary who gets up in the morning and just goes on, that's all we have.

A movie that reads like a short story

On Saturday evening I went to a movie called "Get Low" (starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murrary, Sissey Spacek). It's a movie I'd recommend to anyone interested in the craft of story telling. It was a great example of how impressive a story can be when it focuses on character and the expression of a point of view, rather than simply plot. But what struck me most was how much the tone, voice and structure of the movie worked like a short story. Much was left unsaid in terms of information about the main character's past - a little bit like many of Raymond Carver's stories where the reader is required to piece together what might have happened and why, and what might happen next and why. As well, the drivers for the plot and climax were internal rather than external, deeper emotions hidden from everyday view. Many of the scenes set a tone rather than explained everything so that the reader/viewer is left with questions to mull over. This allows the story to continue in the reader's head long after the story/film is finished and, like a good short story, is one of the purposes and pleasures of the form.

I'd be interested to hear what others think of this movie.

Writers from the ground up

It struck me at the CHCH Earthquake Event readings how few opportunities there are for writers and readers to interact in Auckland. The festivals now are mostly filled with international guests, and a lot of events around journalism, sports writing, magazines.

It was interesting to hear people read from and talk about their projects, some of which were non-fiction insights into areas of NZ life that are rarely explored. It was also a great opportunity for writers who hadn't read in public to 'road test' their stories.

I'm thinking we wait too much for other people to organize festivals on a large scale, when we could be doing more frequent events on a smaller scale, and not wait until one of us has a new book out.

The folk festival/poetry live model is a good one. Flaxroots events to connect the work, its creator, and the audience.

Thankyou to Auckland writers and readers

I want to express my gratitude to everyone who participated in the writers and poets fundraiser for Christchurch held in Auckland libraries last Friday(25th). The weather was wet and miserable but the generosity and integrity of the writers was heartwarming.

I attended two events (Henderson at 1pm and Remuera at 6pm) and have heard reports from friends who went to other libraries. The general consensus is that the quality of the writers and their readings/performance was superb. The only disappointment expressed was that the audiences were often small.

It is always difficult in Auckland to organise 'literary' events, particularly ones that celebrate and promote local writers(although there have been some notable exceptions to this, for example, some of the events organised by the The Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby - perhaps their secret is the newsletter and network they have developed and promoted over many years).
The public often seem to prefer the glamour and glitz of international writers rather than supporting New Zealand ones - evidence of this is in the huge numbers who go the Auckland Writers and Readers festival rather than to the the equally excellent Going West festival held each September in Titirangi.

A spin off from the events held on Friday has been a sense of excitement and appreciation of the fine work our local writers do and a need to hear more from them.

The unreliable narrator

The recent tragic events in Christchurch and how the media responded to them has been a topic of many public and private conversations in the last two weeks. Chief among complaints has been the intrusive and insensitive reporting of some Australian journalists - a repeat of some of their coverage of the Pike River mining disaster last year. One of the explanations for their behaviour, and lack of respect for victims and distressed survivors, is that it is their business to get to the ‘story’ as quickly as possible, preferably first – after all, the argument goes, that’s how they make their money.

As well, John Campbell’s now infamous non-interview with weather and earthquake predictor, Ken Ring, (Monday 28th February) has drawn huge criticism from the public, and rightly so. It was about as bad as it gets in terms of professional journalism and Campbell’s so-called apology the following evening seemed simply another excuse for him to put his own emotions, - I let my heart get in the way - and his purple prose, front and centre, something he does far too frequently.

Like some of the Australian coverage, that particular Campbell episode (and some of his other interviews) had all the hallmarks of really poor storytelling: overblown and repetitive language, including the constant use of cliché and a range of very tired adjectives; lack of real interest in, and respect for, the subjects (or characters) of the story; an hysterical and hectoring tone that treats both the subject and audience as if they have no discernment or subtlety; stating, or claiming they know, how people should feel, think and react rather than exploring the complexity of human response to pain; a pretence that the journalist has discovered a ‘story’ (or the truth) readymade and isn’t in the business and process of constructing one with a particular point of view - this, along with the above mentioned tone, puts them very neatly into the role of being an unreliable narrator. And, as is the case with all unreliable narrators, this makes the story all about them and not about the other characters at all.

Thankfully not all the media coverage of the Christchurch earthquake has been so bad. While there are exceptions, some of the best narratives I’ve come across haven’t been on television but in the still photos that have been up on many news sites. Many of them have shown (rather than told) what was happening, capturing moments of intense experience without over explaining or shrieking, leaving the image to resonate. As well, some of the interviews on national radio with ordinary Christchurch residents as they struggled to cope were full of warmth and compassion, and explored the small details that say so much about fear, courage and resilience.

Writers and Readers event for the victims of the CHCH earthquake

I'm an organizer for a Writers and Readers event to be held city wide Friday, March 25th from 6pm to 8pm,  with proceeds to go to Red Cross fund for the victims of the Christchurch earthquake.

The event will have:

• a set list of writers reading from their work
• poetry readings
• refreshments available
• an open mic session for anyone who wishes to read
  

We're looking for:

volunteers to help with set up
volunteers to help on the day, prepare and sell refreshments
writers to read
writers to have a go at the open mike
volunteers to help with transport on the day

The venue will be multiple libraries across the Auckland region. Auckland City Libraries are looking to host at all 55 of their sites. Here's the link to the Facebook page set up to gather volunteers.

Writers and Readers event for CHCH earthquake victims

If you prefer, either email myself at pihasanddunes@gmail.com or Maggie Tarver of the NZSA at
director@nzauthors.org.nz. 

It strikes me that each of us is best served doing what we do, as an offering. So coming to the event to listen to the readings and bringing a koha is a contribution, as we cant all be rescuers in the rubble. Artists can create their art in dedication, singers sing, writers write. I can't fly a helicopter, but I can read to an audience. So we should encourage all who feel the need to have their voice heard, have a chance to do so.  

Please circulate over your networks and let us know if you can help.


Thanks,
James

The passing of Judith Binney

I was saddened this week to hear of the death of Judith Binney, one of New Zealand’s most eminent historians and storytellers.
My only personal contact with Professor Binney was in the early 1990s when I was studying history and politics at Auckland University and I took her comparative paper on the colonisation of New Zealand/Aotearoa and Mexico. Her lectures and tutorials were fascinating - she was a dynamic storyteller who understood both oral and written narrative techniques and used them with considerable power to explore and analyse historical events, characters and relationships.
Her books are national treasures and I guess it’s some comfort to know her work was honoured while she was alive.
May she rest in peace.

New audiences, New Forms

An interesting facet of the last couple of Auckland Folk Festivals is the increasing numbers of young people (under 25ish). There may be several reasons for this. There's a current of individuality in younger people and their interests and a rebirth of interest in grassroots entertainment and pursuits, where the field and form comes up out of the audience and community, not imposed down from above. In sport this is reflected in a move away from organized professional team sports (which are so reliant on Public Relations branding and spin) towards more individualized sports (snowboarding, mountain biking, BASE jumping). It's also a rejection of corporate culture itself (which is what major sports franchises have become). This trend is reflected in listening to independent music labels, or the contemporary process of ignoring record labels altogether and building up a following through gigging and social media sites, e.g: Facebook, Twitter, You Tube. It's an irony that makes me smile that this modern phenomenon leads some listeners back to one of the oldest (known) forms of music - folk music. A form where so much is still back porch stuff - and that's its strength.


There's a parallel there in the reclaiming of the process of being published and read away from the corporate publishers, that online publishing is now helping to foster. Where someone can record something simply and have it heard or read. The music industry has changed drastically with the artists themselves empowered with the opportunity to record and publish. I wonder what the publishing landscape will look like in 10 years time. Very different, I'd imagine.

Summer folk...

The annual Auckland Folk Music Festival has come and gone for another year. As always it was a fascinating mix of song and story, and song as story. I posted a link on Folk Music and Writing in December. It's as much a gathering of storytellers as it is a gathering of musicians. One of the highlights is to wander among the tents in the early evening where you can hear songs from all over the world and from several different folk traditions getting new airings. In many rural societies of migrants music was a form of currency, something to bring to the table. It reflected either the differences in tradition of different migrant groups and cultures or often a shared heritage. That shared heritage could cross many national boundaries and periods of time. An Appalachian folk ballad would carry strains of Celtic music, so people who had no everyday knowledge of its tradition and the people who crafted it would carry that tradition within their music, within them, all the while building a new tradition.There are performers now who combine cultural traditions. A trio from Christchurch Emeralds and Greenstone played a fusion of Celtic and Maori music in contemporary interpretations of those forms.

For me one of the highpoints of each festival is the concert with amateur performers. This is music stripped of all pretense, of all tainting by marketing imperatives. People play music because they like it, or because they grew up with it. There's a floating community between songster and audience as the audience recognizes the songs from their own cultural heritage. Music as whakapapa. I was on a Maori writers tour a few years back where we had some First Nations writers from Canada and they smiled at the fact that when our troupe had finished reading and singing the local community audience would do the same in return. A swapping of story and song. The First Nations visitors noted how the same tradition lived in their own culture.

I recently watched a documentary on the 1951 Waterfront Strike where the government banned all public discussion and viewpoints from the workers (watersiders, miners) so only one narrative - the government's narrative - could be heard. The 'media' of the ordinary people moved underground, via pamphlets, bills posted on walls, meetings in peoples' homes (all of which were declared illegal under Emergency Powers.) Folk music has often played the same role, of keeping the ordinary people's narrative alive.

Long may it continue to do so.

Teaching schedule in 2011...

The new academic year is almost upon us and I have a lot of teaching to do this year. I'll be teaching and mentoring on the Master of Creative Writing programme at AUT Centre for Creative Writing throughout the year plus teaching the VOICES paper on their BA Programme .

The Centre also have a paper which is proving increasingly popular, the Special Project Paper, a 30 credit paper where the student works with a Mentor on a piece (or series of pieces) of their choosing, developing it through to submission stage. This paper has no structured or set class times but involves submission of samples for critiquing and analysis, then follow-up meetings face to face. It's popular with those students who can't devote a set number of hours per week for structured classes (working people, mothers with children etc) or prefer to work with a more fluid structure. Technical points are covered as and when they come up in the writing samples and projected future work. It's a good way to progress work on a story collection or a longer single work over the course of a semester. I'm now having students sign up for successive semesters. It's also a decent preparation for the writer/mentor environment a student will later work with on the Masters programme (if that's a future step they have planned.)

I'll also be teaching at Unitec School of Communication Studies  in both Semester 1 and 2. I've been teaching their Introduction to Narrative Course since 2008 and we're adding a Narrative - Stage Two paper this Semester to take the study of the field further. I'm told this is the most 'Westerly' creative writing paper in Auckland and the classes cater to a very vibrant storytelling community that doesn't get much exposure.

If you're in Auckland, have a look at some of these options.

NZ Book Month

New Zealand Book Month is almost upon us. Starting March 1st and running until the end of the month. It's a non-profit initiative begun in 2006 to acquaint NZ readers, books and authors and has taken on a few guises over the years.

Probably the most interesting of the events they came up with was the Sixpack, collections of six short stories (by different authors) sold for $6. That generated quite a hubub in the writing community with authors disciplining themselves to complete and send off stories for publication in the collection. Shame it vanished...

There are a lot of good locally centered events which are driven from the grass-roots writing community upwards: book launches for local authors, local dramatic groups performing NZ drama, interviews with the authors of life writing projects and local histories.

In Aotearoa New Zealand we're often told how to define ourselves (The little country that could - via some branding expert... the All Blacks...the America's cup soap operas) when I feel we could be thinking of ourselves more in terms of our stories. Who are they about, who wrote them, what do they say about us?

Here's a link to the events calendar to check out what's happening near you.


Events Calendar NZ book month

Traveler

I heard an Aboriginal proverb the other day that has echoes for the writing experience.


Traveler, there are no paths, the paths are made by walking...

Short Stories - on ongoing investigation

I was asked recently on the Story Bridge forum about the structure of contemporary short stories. That is a large and complex question which I'd like to examine in more depth over coming posts, analyzing the style and structure of some significant contemporary short stories.

Perhaps the most significant developing in short story style is the growing use of emotional and psychological time, as Trisha notes in her post here. I too have heard (and shuddered at) the advice sometimes given that beginning writers should stick to only using straight chronological time. I think that is reductive and doesn't credit writers with the nous to explore other forms of managing time in storytelling. Our minds work very well in psychological and emotional time, and always have, due in large part to the fractious relationship between our conscious and unconscious.

For now, here's my take on contemporary short story structure and where and how it differs from more traditional styles.


Contemporary short stories of the last 25 years or so have been an unraveling of traditional short story structure. In the 19th century the traditional structure was that of a tale, almost a novel in miniature. It started with exposition about the main characters, some background, some statements, often baldly expressed about their emotional and psychological state, then developed through an inciting incident, added complications, conflict, to a climax and resolution.(For examples, see the work of Anton Chekhov (The Lady with the Dog), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlett Letter) Guy de Maupassant (The Necklace) and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

The majority of contemporary short stories don't do this. Instead they take one of the following forms.

1) A single scene - where an incident is described, with little reference to past or future. Any character backgrounding comes out in their behaviour in the scene itself, with clues to their emotional state and backstory. This form is a moment suspended at a single point in the continuum of a longer story which is left for the reader to speculate on. There is no onus on the writer to resolve any conflicts that come out.

2) A slice of life - which may be a single scene or several scenes chosen to be representative of a character, a theme, a relationship. The writer may choose to resolve conflicts or not, in the story itself, or leave any resolution to be enacted in the mind of the reader.

3) An illumination of a state. The state can be a mood or a character's psychological or emotional state, which is the legacy of an event. The event may or may not be detailed in the story itself, or the story may just be an exploration of the fallout from the event. What plot is there is often in emotional or psychological time, with events coming and going as they appear to the narrator/protagonist, not in some kind of chronological order. This is a complex style and structure - here is a good example. Wheat, by Tracey Slaughter.


I'd like to revisit the subject of short stories in more detail in coming posts. Watch this space. 

Life Writing

One of the areas of writing that has grown considerably in recent years is Life Writing. I was thinking while introducing the review of the new book about American Folklorist Alan Lomax, that Life Writing is a form that allows people to be their own Folklorist. Individual collectors of narratives not just of their own lives but their own times and places.

Where this differs from traditional biography and autobiography is those forms focus generally on people who are already well known as subjects. Or someone with a particularly dramatic true tale to tell. Life Writing is more a stick placed in the sand, a statement that 'I was here, these were my times.' So the field of Life Writing by ordinary people in New Zealand becomes a storehouse of our collective folklore, in the way that folk music and folk art does.

There are many reasons people wish to record their lives:

•  as a legacy, for family, for those that come after them
•  to tell of a time and/or a lifestyle now past
• as a cathartic experience for the writer, and perhaps for the reader
• to write of a particular issue that has perhaps been recorded from a limited perspective that the writer can enlarge upon

When I was researching and writing my first novel I found some official military histories (from the early 1920's) which were no help at all. They were a catalogue of troop movements and maneuvers from an exalted position way above the ordinary soldier. Fortunately there were some beautifully written and compiled collections of personal narratives to refer to.

Life Writing should be not only of the writer but in the writer's voice, as that captures their essence. I'd shudder at any attempt among those teaching or editing Life Writing works to attempt to 'normalize' the voice, or flatten or universalize the perspective. If we follow Hemingway's maxim that 'What is most personal is also most universal' then someone's story (behind the text) already has universal elements. We all know love, loss, guilt, the need to try and rebuild. The job of the Life Writing teacher or editor or compliler could then be described more as one of arrangement, of getting the proportion right to allow the writer to be able to bring both the personal and universal elements of their story out. 

The fundamental building blocks of effective storytelling (including Voice, Point of View, Character, Narrative Structure etc...) apply in Life Writing as they do in other forms of non-fiction and fiction.

One of the great opportunities e-publishing will give is it dramatically increases the opportunities for people to get their own stories out into the community.The value of this cannot be overstated. Whereas publishing a life story with a traditional publisher has always been extremely difficult, e-publishing will give us far greater opportunities.

It is crucial to the health and history of any community for stories to be told from the ground up. Not just from our 'leaders.'And our written histories should never just be a catalogue of the famous. Living in Auckland is a constant reminder of a city has torn down its historic architecture all too easily, often via decisions made away from the public. We need to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to us.

There are courses offered in Life Writing in most communities. Keep your eye out for one. Bear in mind that your story has its own validity. Because you were here, these were your times.

Alan Lomax - American Folklorist

One of my favourite people from the past is Alan Lomax, who traveled around rural America recording traditional folk and blues artists, often for the only time in their lives. He understood that theirs was an underground narrative in history, part of what Frank O'Connor, the short story critic referred to in Trisha's post below as writers speaking out of and through a 'submerged population.' A new book is just out about Alan Lomax and the battles he faced getting traditional artists recorded and heard and the tremendous legacy that left of a time whose historical storytelling would otherwise be left to politicians and historians often cast by politicians.

Lomax is usually given the beautiful designation of Folklorist. I especially like the quote from Alan Lomax that his vision was to 'Bring 'em back alive, all the voices.'

This review of the new book about Lomax comes from the Wall Street Journal, (by reviewer Eddie Dean. You can read the entire review here.

Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World

By John Szwed
Viking, 309 pages, $29.95

In his barrage of strategies in which folk music could be used to inspire a united fighting force, Lomax paused to take a jealous swipe at a hit record that had won over a nation primed for patriotic fervor: "I need not overstress my opinion that 'God Bless America' and Kate Smith are both extremely dull and mediocre," he wrote. "They have both been elevated to an artificially astronomical position by the power of mass advertising and the star system." 

Smith's operatic bombast had little to do with what Lomax called "real American music." For him, real American music was performed by rural people such as Texas Gladden, a mother of nine who Lomax recorded a year later in her southwest Virginia home, in a capella, bare-bones renditions of "Gypsy Davey" and traditional songs handed down for generations. "Texas sings her antique ballads in the fashion of ballad singers from time immemorial," Lomax said. "The emotions are held in reserve: the singer does not color the story with heavy vocal underscoring; she allows the story to tell itself." 

Capturing such performances and the stories they told was a lifelong obsession for Lomax, who wandered America and the globe in search of the sounds of traditional music endangered by the very technology he used to record them for posterity. His travels took him from his native American South to remote outposts of the Caribbean and across the ocean to the British Isles and the fishing villages of Italy and the mountains of Spanish Basque country. His work spanned six decades, from the Depression all the way to the 1990s. (Lomax died in 2002.) He began his career gathering songs with a 300-pound disc-cutter in the back of a Model A and ended it using hand-held video cameras for backwoods documentaries. No matter what the gear, Lomax never wavered from his mission—to find evidence that the world's poorest places offered some of the richest cultural treasures.

An illustration of a reel-to-reel tape machine graces the cover of "Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World," the first biography of the renegade folklorist who, says John Szwed, "changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America." The drawing shows the type of portable, hi-fi recorder that made possible Lomax's most influential fieldwork, like the 1959 recording of a Mississippi prison work gang that later appeared on the soundtrack for the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000).

"Po Lazarus"—rendered by black convicts chopping wood and singing in unison—is vintage Lomax in its utter fidelity (sonic and otherwise) to a world where the grace of artistic expression can rise from the depths of misery. The song is part of the vast Lomax archives. They include more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, which have been mined by artists from Aaron Copland and Miles Davis to Bob Dylan and Moby, a fitting legacy for a visionary outlaw who believed, says Mr. Szwed, that "folk culture could become pop culture."

The staggering output came with a heavy cost, dooming Lomax's first marriage and other relationships as he followed his collecting compulsion, often working himself to the point of physical collapse. A charmer and a bully, an antiacademic who depended on educational funding, a man equally at home in a straw hut in Haiti and at a White House reception, Lomax was a controversial figure, often accused of exploitation and grandstanding. He made enemies well beyond the field of folklore, not least the FBI agents who trailed him for years on account of his radical politics. An early file report depicts "a very peculiar individual in that he is only interested in folklore music, being very temperamental and ornery. . . . He has no sense of money values, handling his own and Government property in a neglectful manner." Even so, Lomax had fiercely loyal supporters in high places, ranging from Margaret Mead to filmmaker Nicholas Ray, and he has been a revered mentor to several generations of historians, including Mr. Szwed.

As a biographer of Miles Davis and Sun Ra, two notoriously difficult and singular characters, Mr. Szwed is in thorny but familiar territory. He is a reliable if at times overeager guide along the Lomax trail, one that is littered with miles of tape and mountains of paper. Mr. Szwed is especially helpful in establishing the explosive dynamic between Alan Lomax and his father, John, who set the often wayward son on his life's journey.

The author of a landmark 1910 anthology of cowboy ballads, Texas-born-and-bred John Lomax was a towering force in American folklore circles by the time a teenage Alan began accompanying his father on song-collecting trips in 1933. The material they sought for the Archive of American Folk Song broke from the norm. Instead of merely transcribing song-texts, in the tradition of European scholars, they made recordings of performances, mostly those of rural Southern blacks from the work fields and prisons, whose culture was deemed lowlife and unworthy of collecting, much less studying.

If Lomax shared his father's love of this music and an appreciation of its enduring worth, he had his own epiphanies that went beyond aesthetics to ideals of social justice. He wanted to break free of the prejudices of his conservative, Southern-patrician father, with his Stetson hat and cigar and superior manner toward the folk he recorded. The father-and-son road trips featured a lot of quarreling, culminating in a blow-up over John's patronizing treatment of Lead Belly, the black songster and ex-convict whom the Lomaxes had recorded in prison and helped gain parole and fleeting fame back East. The elder Lomax also engaged Lead Belly in an ill-fated business arrangement that included Lead Belly performing duties as John's chauffeur.

The Lomax Legacy

 

The colossal scope of Alan Lomax's recorded legacy, housed in climate-controlled stacks at the Library of Congress's John Adams Building and widely available in a steady torrent of releases, can humble even the most adventurous listeners. Here are three of the best, from an introductory compilation to an eight-CD box set, which convey the astonishing range of what Lomax captured in his quest to "bring 'em back alive, all the voices."

--Eddie Dean

—Mr. Dean is co-author of Dr. Ralph Stanley's "Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times" (Gotham).

The entire review can be read here. 

Practice...

In the video below Natalie Goldberg says 'I never think I have a gift for writing, but I practice, and I keep showing up.' For me those are wise words. Don't spend too much time analyzing this 'gift' you may or may not have (and who is to tell?) but keep working and most of all, keep learning. Seek out more ways, new ways, old ways that can breathe new life into your work.

Creativity is a process, it's a 'doing.' The best gift is one you bestow upon yourself, perseverance and a mind open to learn.

Natalie Goldberg - Writing down the Bones - Interview with the author

Summer time

Happy New Year – summer holidays always make me feel philosophical about how we experience time and one of the things that interest me about writing (and reading) is the way in which we employ, manipulate and experience time. Some of the ways we do this are quite obvious and others take a bit more thinking about.

On an everyday level, there is the common experience of being so caught up in a story (either reading/viewing/listening to it, or writing it) that we become unconscious of time, we are in the zone, totally absorbed, and an hour or two can go by without being aware of anything other than the story itself. We are inside the space, time and emotion of the story itself. This ordinary experience is usually considered to be an ideal state for a reader, one that denotes an excellent book, movie, play etc.

A second aspect involves how writers use time as a technique to ground, develop and enhance a story. I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of listening to Owen Marshall talk about handling time in fiction, once in 2005 and again in 2009, and some of the issues and challenges he discussed included: the use of tense, e.g. using the present tense rather than the past, or using both past and present tenses; flashbacks and flashforwards; the acceleration, abbreviation or expansion of time; cuts and transitions; and conflation of time where the past is brought into the present, or the present into the future. If my memory serves me right, Marshall said that Annie Proulx’ story “Brokeback Mountain” ( on which the film was based) is a textbook on the use of time and that William Trevor is an expert at conflating time in his stories.

A third area that interests me is the use of, and the difference between, chronological and psychological time in a story (Mike Johnson in a fascinating talk on short stories to Auckland NZSA members in February 2008 used the terms, vertical and horizontal time). A great example of a short story structured by psychological rather than chronological time is Wheat, by Tracy Slaughter (which won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition in 2004).Vertical or psychological time disrupts chronological time, transforming it into what is emotionally linked or meaningful and more closely resembles the way memory and everyday internal experience are linked to emotional triggers. I’ve often heard it said that beginning writers should stick to the more simple technique of using chronological time to structure their stories but I’m inclined to disregard such patronising advice, believing that, at least since James Joyce, psychological time is more relevant and more interesting, although admittedly harder to pull off.

Another aspect I’d like to find out more about is around the differences between how time is used in novels versus short stories. Frank O’Connor (The Lonely Voice, 1963, p 103) suggests that, "The short story represents a struggle with time – the novelist’s time; it is an attempt to reach some point of vantage from which past and future are equally visible…" Easy to think of many of Raymond Carver’s stories as meeting this criterion. I wonder what Charles May would have to say on the subject?

And finally, for a while now I’ve been ruminating on a quote from Margaret Atwood in her book, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2009). This book is a collection of the Empson lectures Atwood gave, and in the second lecture she uses the metaphor of Alice in the Looking Glass to discuss the idea that when we write we call on two, sometimes complimentary, sometimes conflicting, aspects of the self: the ordinary flawed, everyday person who possesses no special wisdom or insight (Alice looking into the mirror) and the artist, (Alice looking back from mirror at real life and the ordinary person). She says: “…here is my best guess, about writers and their elusive doubles, and the question of who does what as far as the actual writing goes. The act of writing takes place at the moment when Alice passes through the mirror. At this one instant, the glass barrier between the doubles dissolves, and Alice is neither one thing nor the other, though at the same time she is all of these at once. At that moment time itself stops, and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world.”[my italics]

I like that: all the time not in the world.

Happy New Year

Happy new year everyone and very best wishes to you and yours for 2011. Big year ahead. I have a couple of books to (finally) finish and a fair bit of teaching to do. The summer weather here has been scorching so far, and it's only early January. February's going to be a challenge.

Good to see more members have joined, remember to leave a comment, or let us know if you have some thoughts to contribute by way of an article or post.

Also any links to interesting storytelling related sites.  

For now, feel the need for some more time by the sea...