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...

Heart and soul books on writing

Two of my favourite books on writing - Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (1995), and Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg (1986) - fall into a category I call ‘heart and soul’ books on writing rather than those that focus on the more technical aspects of craft.

Each of these books has kept my spirits up when my motivation was flagging, when the odds of finishing something, let alone sending it off somewhere in the hope that it might be published seemed (and seems) insurmountable, and when I get stuck in the middle of a piece of work and can’t find a way through.

I must have read Bird by Bird, cover to cover, at least four times and dipped into various chapters and sections countless more. Lamott is a truly funny writer, especially when she shares not just her insights on writing but her own experiences. One of the things she does that I particularly like is refuse to buy into that elitist attitude or tone you sometimes get in books (or in writing courses) where the published writer/tutor preens in front of the unpublished and uses the reader/student as a mirror to polish their own superior status – something I have, unfortunately, experienced more than once. Lamott is quite the opposite. She is warm, generous, full of emotion, and truthful – writing is work, unlike lying on the beach which is recreation. And although not a technical book, it is still full of practical suggestions, like the chapters on short assignments and plot.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg is probably more well known – it is really a series of meditations on different aspects on writing, often interspersed with quotes from Katagiri Roshi, a Zen Master Goldberg studied with. Writing as a Practice is one of the chapters and provides insight into her teaching and writing attitude and focus. She is quite different in tone to Lamott, yet they share something precious in common – the ability to cut through pretence and ego, to talk about the process and the work, and to address the reader/student/writer with respect.

A couple of my favourite quotes from Goldberg:

“Don’t worry about your talent or capability: that will grow as you practice.” (p30)

“Be willing to look at your work honestly. If something works, it works. If it doesn’t, quit beating an old horse. Go on writing. Something else will come up. There’s enough bad writing in the world. Write one good line, you’ll be famous. Write a lot of lukewarm pieces, you’ll put people to sleep.” (p161)

Both books are available on Amazon.

Actress, reviewer and writer Michelle Langstone talks about 'Escaping into Stories and Worlds.'

I’ve spent my entire life wanting to live inside books.  I became an actress so that I could escape into the stories and worlds that I loved.  I wanted to be the characters, really inhabit them, and feel how they felt, think their thoughts along with them. While I have always loved language it never really occurred to me until I turned thirty that perhaps I might try my hand at storytelling in a format other than acting.

I took six months away from acting last year to take a writing course with James George.  I thought I was leaving my profession behind, changing hats entirely. Actually what I discovered was that the two are one.  Or rather, that acting informs the way I write, and vice versa.  When I write (or try to write!), it is with my understanding of how to embody a character in the physical, with text as the leaping off point. I write from the same impulse that I act from – the feeling world. To date, my exploration of writing is very strongly through character driven narrative. I suppose that’s because I vaguely know how to do that, given that I spend my professional life creating character. What I’ve discovered, unexpectedly, is that learning to write is teaching me how to be a better actor.  Some of the same rules apply to both.

Something I have found very interesting in writing is how to find a voice.  I was surprised to discover that, much the same as with acting, I can’t write a thing, I can’t learn one single line of dialogue, until I can HEAR the way the character speaks.  By that I mean tone, I mean register, I mean rhythm. An example of this is that I recently completed filming a new show for South Pacific Pictures called The Almighty Johnson’s.  My character in that show is a very strong, very defiant and compelling woman.  She was a stretch for me, because she is fairly ferocious, and quite sexually forceful.  When I set to work on my scripts I found could not learn the lines because I could not hear her voice.  I had to experiment, to muck around with vocal resonance, and finally, to sink into a much lower register and feel the vibrating of sound lower in my body.  When I found that sound, the lines were in.

Similarly, in the Narrative Writing course last year, I was absolutely stuck and unable to write a thing until, during a class exercise, a voice popped into my head that I did not recognise.  I heard this voice, this sound unfamiliar, and I started to write for that voice. Or rather, I let that voice tell me a story, and I wrote it down the way that I heard it.  Now I think about a story I might like to write, and I wait to see who wants me to tell it - which character has something to say.

As an actor, I’m always looking to find a physicality that is specific to each role I play.  How my character holds herself, how she walks. Is she fast or slow?  Heavy or light?  Focused or unfocused? I like to find specific things that each of my characters do – my character in Almighty, for example, can hold a gaze like no character I have played before.  Her unflinching gaze was a way into a still and powerful physicality that was a key to finding her “front”.  In my writing I’m trying to find the little things in a character that may give them away, or inform the reader about them in a very specific way.  For example, in a piece I am working on now, a little boy whose story I’m telling likes to crouch.  He’s always crouching, and it’s for a number of reasons that become apparent as the narrative unravels.  It’s interesting to explore what happens when I put him in a situation where he can’t crouch, and see how he copes when his physicality is arrested.  Another character in that same story now has a swift deftness of physicality that I observed in another actor on set.  This actor is so light, he dances with his dialogue and with his body, and I’ve taken that trait and I’m trying to work it into the lightness of this character in my story, who is quite connected to musicality.

One of the exercises we learnt in class I have directly pinched for my acting.  “The Objects on a Mantelpiece” exercise is where you imagine a mantelpiece, and let your unconscious drop items onto it – like a pottery egg cup, a broken locket, one half of a torn photograph.  From there, you can embark on a story, either fleshing out the character that owns these objects, or telling a story involving them.  In The Almighty Johnson’s I sat and did this exercise as a way to flesh out the world and private life of my character.  I only had a small amount of back-story for her, based on what the writers had told me.  I wanted to make her as real as I could.  Her mantelpiece was interesting!  When I could see those objects and write how they belong in her world, how they make her feel, why she has them, where she got them – I began to feel fully dimensional.  It’s a great trick, and one I intend to use from now on.

Ten years ago I had a guest role on Shortland Street. It was one of my first professional jobs, and the dialogue coach showed me how to build a character arc for each episode, and how to plot the emotional journey for the character on it. This is helpful in shows like Shortland Street because you can pretty much guarantee you will be shooting your scenes out of order, and you don’t want to end up breaking down emotionally too soon, getting angry too soon, or just blowing your load before the appropriate build, pretty much.  It helps to plot an emotional course, to keep track, keep a reign on the beats of the story, and the beats of the character.  We learnt this in writing class too, and I’m now investing much more time in both my writing and my acting, to nut out the right course for navigation.

Happily, it also means I’m ok about writing an end before a beginning, in my stories, or writing a scene that belongs somewhere in an arc I haven’t created yet!

At the moment in my writing I’m thinking a lot about the feeling world of my characters and the room they leave inside themselves to let feeling grow and diminish.  I’ve always had a bad habit of cluttering up my acting with too much stuff.  I try to do too much, I’m too fast, and I try to cram too much in, too many facial expressions.  I do the same in writing and one thing I am learning in both areas is how to do less.  What one sentence can I write that can show the reader what I want them to see?  What one gesture, what one look can I give, what one sound can I make, that can convey everything I need to the viewer?

I’m simplifying.  I’m paring back, working on the maxim that less is more.  I know I have more in me, but if I can rein it in, and trust that everything is living inside the story, inside the role and inside me, then hopefully it will translate.  That’s about trusting in the world of the story.

As an actor I know how great it is to work with material loaded with subtext.  The emotional undercurrent, the true meaning, simmering away under the surface.  I’m trying to write like that.  I’m trying to imbue the dialogue in my stories with a greater subtext.  Stripping the dialogue back to the bare minimum, but loading it up, so the truth is shouting beneath the words.  I guess as an actor I’m always on the lookout for what my character is ACTUALLY saying, which is often working in opposition to what appears on the page.  The playwright Harold Pinter is a great example of subtext.  I did one of his plays – “The Lover”, earlier this year and it was fairly torturous trying to unravel the layers of subtext and truth.  What I discovered with Pinter’s writing is that in his characters, as in life, there is always ambiguity.  One choice is not the only choice; it is the thread
of many choices to be unravelled.

I’m thinking about that in my writing.  I’m resisting the urge to sew things up tidily; I’m leaving a bit of ambiguity, to allow the reader to stretch a little further to what the truth of the story may be for them.  We all resonate toward truth that is specific to our own concept of the world.  I’m learning slowly that I don’t have to tell anyone to how to feel in a story, they will absorb it and sift it through their own perspective. If I can reduce the clutter, the story is more accessible for them to reach.  It’s the same with acting – say the words, get out of the way, let the story come out, let the viewer come to meet it.  I think that has to do with trusting the writing.  I don’t trust my writing yet, but I know how it feels to hold a script that soars with excellent language.  I’m hoping I will know it in my own writing when I see it, if at all.

(Michelle has a weekly book review slot, Bookish and Awkward, on George FM.)

Text and Subtext - what you read, what you read into what you read.

Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a very short story. Even by modern standards, this is short.


                        For Sale
            Baby Clothes
            Never Used


Look closely. Is that a story? How many characters are in that? Is there a plot? Is there subtext? 

Yes it's a story, and there's a vast amount of story in those few words. The text is tiny, the subtext is vast. Questions come at you from all over, and questions are the beginnings of story.

There's a sketch by Rembrandt that works in a similar way:


Is she sick/dying? Is she in terror? Has she awoken from a nightmare?

Note how her features are clearly defined but the world around her is left wild, almost dreamlike. There's something unsettling in the combination of the background's spareness and its boldness. Almost a violence. The visual storytelling text gives the viewer the beginning, the rest is for you to discover and interpret.






(Hemingway's typewriter at his former house in Key West, Florida, pictured with its current owner. Perhaps contemplating that 3rd rewrite and finally solving that transitional passage after the second act turning point and how to get Uncle Herbert back from Alaska in time for the climactic car chase. Either that or 'Where's the chicken?')

Omniscient and/or multiple First Person Point of View and Voice

I notice more and more examples now of stories being told in multiple first person point of view. In the AUT Masters of Creative Writing class I mentored and taught on this year there was an excellent example by one of the students, where she used this form to bring out multiple perceptions which gave the story as a whole many possible realities as there was no one voice or perspective a reader could take as some kind of objective truth.

This is not a new form though it’s becoming more prevalent as authors break further away from the traditional omniscient narrator -  a single entity and presence in the story (though not an individualized character in it) who knows and has the power to tell all. Omniscient is one of the oldest Points of View, derived from folk tales and mythology and the work of the Epic Poets. Originally along the lines of:

Oh gather around me men of the land and I shall tell thee a tale of triumph and tragedy.

Or more recently something like:

Spofforth was an irascible boy, as such boys – as we will discover – are want to be.

These openings are really almost a way of saying:

Once upon a time…

The examples (the first two poorly written, by my own hand) above are as much examples of Omniscient Voice as they are Point of View. An omniscient voice feels like a human presence, a perspective, with biases and quirks and foibles and fixations. It’s palpable, not neutral. If you want neutral of voice, go for Third Person Limited (note my post on the work of Kent Haruf.) Not all stories that are omniscient in the scope of their perspective are omniscient of voice. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace with its 500 named (!) characters has to be omniscient point of view by default, because of its sheer size, but the voice is calm, restrained, often quite objective, doesn’t really sound like a palpable overlord presence, but more like the voices of many of the individual characters.

Modern readers by and large seem happier to juggle multiple truths, and try and look for their own truth somewhere in those multiples. This could be because of the influence of other media like cinema where the viewer is right on the edge of the scene, almost with their toes touching the edges of the story’s ocean, and have to find their own way in the scene by the clues laid down by visual symbols, dialogue and the subtext they sense beneath and around the text.

Omniscient narration hasn’t died out altogether and won’t. It’s still popular in magic realist novels, in sagas with great scope of time and place, often in Fantasy works. Satire is a natural home of omniscient, where the narrator’s worldview, usually mirroring the author’s, is critical to the tartness of the story and its context. In satire the author is usually trying to make a point, often ironic, or by using black comedy. The Harry Potter books are an excellent example of contemporary omniscient. Others would be: the work of Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude there are passages where the narrative perspective shifts into several different characters’ perspectives and thoughts in a single sentence. That’s because the thoughts are never really the characters’, but the narrator’s perception of them. To be honest it can be a basket of handgrenades in the hands of the unwary. Not everyone can do it, not everyone enjoys reading it. Sometimes because the voice ‘nags’, sometimes because the omniscient narrator often goes too far in explaining and leaves no room for the reader to come to their understanding. Omniscient can all too easily slip into:

                And the moral of this story is…

 

Multiple first person is omniscient’s polar opposite. There is no promise of a master position, or meta-knowledge. Everything is individual perception, brought out in individualized vernacular voice. The reader gains the position (to a degree) of the omniscient narrator only after taking in the totality of the story.  Even then the inherent ambiguity of hearing the ‘truth’ from several biased sources leaves that process of understanding the story’s themes and meanings to the reader. 

Examples of excellent work in multiple first person would be: William Faulkner, ‘As I lay Dying’ written way back in 1930. Graham Swift, ‘Last Orders’ from 1995, Junot Diaz’ ‘The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,’ from 2007, and a fine example from Aotearoa, Lisa Cherrington’s ‘The People Faces,’ from 2004. 

 Things to consider if you’re thinking of trying omniscient.

• Do you have a single storytelling voice that’s interesting, perhaps idiosyncratic (but not to the point of annoyance) that you can sustain over a large group of characters?

• Will the master storyteller’s voice actually enhance your story – to the degree that first or third person (limited/subjective) wouldn’t?

• Are you sure you’re doing it for the good of the story and not just because you want to play God?

Things to consider if you’re thinking of trying multiple first person:

• Can you find differences in the individual characters’ vernacular voices?

• Do you want to have potential multiplicity of perception and meaning?

• Are you comfortable that no one entity will likely possess any degree of objective truth?

Both omniscient and multiple first person can add richness and depth to a story – in very different ways. As an exercise, if you’re backgrounding a short story, say 3000 words, try the first few paragraphs or pages in both omniscient and multiple first person. The obvious difference is that – in terms of character – omniscient is writing from the outside in, multiple first person is from the inside out. See which way serves the story. You’ll discover different things, in different ways. Think of those discoveries from both angles, how it works for you and how you think it’ll work for your reader. 

Explore…

Reading, writing and dreaming

I discovered the following comments written by Lindsay Clarke a while ago and return to them often - among other things, they remind me of the importance of 'show don't tell' and how that fundamental technique connects the reader to the writer and the story.

"Reading and dreaming have much in common. In both we generate images out of a limited visual field. These images move and disturb us because we are immediately involved with them... yet they arrive without overt explanations and require us to work for meaning." (p 257)

"...dreams remain a great mystery, but their vocabulary of images seems to allow the oldest, pre-verbal parts of the brain to speak to the neocortex, thus opening a channel of communication between the conscious and unconscious minds. By flexing all the inward senses of the imagination, fiction can tap us into that hotline...good writing literally works like a dream...we are set free to dream the story ourselves." (p 258)

Both quotes come from Clarke's chapter, "Going the last Inch: Some Thoughts on Showing and Telling", in The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Writers Share Advice and Exercises for Poetry and Prose, (eds) Julia Bell and Paul Magrs, Macmillan, 2001.

Traditional Folk Music - A stellar cast of folk singers sing 'Wild Mountain Thyme.'

Folk music and writing...

The weekend of January 28-31 will see the 2011 version of the Auckland Folk Festival. This annual event has been going since the early 1970's and showcases folk music and the many forms of narrative storytelling contained within. The festival features traveling musicians from Europe, the U.S.A. and New Zealand and many other points. It's music at its purest and well worth a look. We've made an annual pilgrimage (the most appropriate word in the circumstances) to the event for years. Keep checking the website for dates/times/line-ups.

Folk music has a whakapapa stretching back to oral storytelling and the earliest forms of music that cataloged and celebrated early peoples' lives, in both pragmatic (birth, hunting, family) and spiritual/mythological ways. I recall seeing buffalo hides in the museum in Calgary, Canada with artistic renderings of symbols of the rites and rituals of people's entire lives, created by members of the Blackfoot nation. Folk music also carries this breadth and intimacy of narrative.

Folk music has always been a tool for bringing together communities, and has such has been used by working class people the world over. You can listen to folk musicians from Central Otago and hear Celtic origins, both melodic and in storytelling style. Appalachian folk music from the U.S.A. is filled with the sounds of Ireland, Scotland and England. Early 20th Century folk musician Dock Boggs is now recognized as a progenitor of American Folk, Country and Blues, and by extension - modern rock. That's a lot of different roads for one ol' coal miner from the Virginia mountains.

There has always been a crossover and cross-pollination between folk music and writing. In the 1930's in the U.S.A. for example novelists John Steinbeck, photographer Dorothea Lange and folk singer Woody Guthrie were all telling stories of the plight of the rural poor drifting westward in the Great Depression.

Dorothea Lange's famous photograph 'Migrant Mother' (pictured - right) helped raise awareness of the plight of the migrant workers across America, as did Guthrie's musical ballads and Steinbeck's writing.

Many novelists in various cultures write community derived narratives which are true in design and effect to the fundamentals of folk music. (Stories of family/village/provincial survival, working songs, parent/child songs to be handed down, songs of history and genealogy.) Writers whose narratives for me are reminiscent of folk music would be: Kent Haruf, Toni Morrison, Patricia Grace, Ben Okri, Roddy Doyle, even someone like Raymond Carver.

For me, one of the basics statements of folk music and any other form of narrative that carries its breath would be something like:  this is my stake in the ground. I have survived to write this. For this moment, if in no other, I was here.