Reading group on Tuesday night at Doug's. He had a beautiful huge Christmas tree, tastefully decorated with red baubles and tiny white lights, which made everyone exclaim as they entered, and people brought Christmas food, mince pies and chocolates, and Jenny had a bag of samosas left over from her other reading group at Didsbury library which had had a Christmas gathering earlier in the day. And no one was much inclined to get down to business and discuss the book.
In the middle of all the hilarity I asked everyone if they minded my writing about our meetings on my blog (previously my reports have appeared on my website), and everyone said it was fine. But then Doug said suddenly that that reminded him: he had a good mind to start a rival web report because my last one (on Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn) was totally biased (towards my own view of the book) and ended on a yah-boo-sucks note. (Trevor added that he's always shocked by how different my memories of the discussion are from his.) Quite right! I retorted, refusing to be chastened.
Anyway, this is my memory of the discussion we had on Tuesday:
Ann had chosen Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop in which, in a classic case of mistaken identity, a naive aristocratic nature-features writer, Boot, gets sent as a war reporter to the fictional African Republic of Ishmaelia, and in which journalistic contempt for the truth is famously satirised. Having read other Waugh novels and enjoyed them, she said she had chosen it as a civilised and urbane antidote to the linguistic grimness of Selby Jr. However, having expected to enjoy it without reservation, she now wasn't so sure, finding it on the whole to be in fact more of a farce than a satire. Everyone readily and strongly agreed, although most had enjoyed it - though Sarah said she had given up after the first seventy pages, for the very reason that she hates farce.
John pointed out that, while the overriding trope of mistaken identity and that of the innocent abroad were in the realm of farce, there was true satire in the treatment of the activities of the journalists and their newspapers, and most people agreed that the telegrams passing between them were very funny. Most were agreed too that the book was in any case very clever, but John and Ann weren't so sure since it wavered between satire and farce. Trevor said that, having previously avoided Waugh because of his right-wing reputation, he had been amazed to find how even-handedly Waugh had poked fun, representing the aristocratic Boot family as dodderers mainly confined to their beds. At which point Jenny expressed her oft-stated opinion that aristocrats are anything but duffers, it just suits them to have people think they are, and Waugh (who was not in fact aristocratic) had fallen for that.
John also noted that Boot is something of a psychological blank, and he said that while this is part of the satirical or farcical point, he found that it created a sense of something incomplete. We discussed this - the fact that in a satire you don't really need psychological complexity but that somehow here it seemed like a flaw - without coming to much conclusion as to why this should be. I said it was particularly noticeable in the 'love' interest (Boot falls innocently in love with a young German woman who is quite cheerfully taking him for a ride), and Trevor, who'd had quite a bit to drink by then, explained to me their relationship. I said I understood what their relationship was, I was talking about the treatment of it, and he explained it to me again.
Ann wondered how much more impact the book might have had in its day, as we are now so much more used to the idea of not trusting the press, but Doug said, haven't there always been satirical cartoons?
And that was about it. A very short discussion (as far as I remember it), and by the time Mark arrived, late from putting his kids to bed, we'd long gone onto other topics which we stayed late discussing, even though Doug had to go to London next day...
Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Thursday, December 14, 2006
North West Playwrights at Christmas
Christmas Party at North West Playwrights last night. Nice red wine, a lovely Christmas tree with silver baubles and a room full of playwrights gabbing about playwriting and the eternal obsession: HOW TO GET PLAYS PUT ON.
NWP was originally started by a bunch of playwrights including Dave Simpson and John Chambers (both veterans of Coronation Street and Emmerdale), as a yearly showcase of work by north-west writers, presented as script-in-hand readings at Contact Theatre. My first-ever try at writing for stage - a one-act play, Cakes - appeared in the showcase, and later I was privileged to be invited onto the judging panel. More recently, NWP has evolved into a somewhat different organisation, with a different emphasis. Headed now by a Director, Chris Bridgeman, and Deputy Director and playwright Sheila McNulty, it is geared towards nurturing and developing the careers of playwrights in a more ongoing way via not only script-in-hand performances but also workshops, training sessions and links with several theatres.
There was much talk of course amongst us playwrights of the recent debate, prompted by the Guardian's Lynn Gardner, about the frustrating aspects, for writers, of theatre 'development' schemes (which I wrote about in an earlier post). Everyone was agreed however that North West Playwrights is very different, its aim being not only to help writers develop their skills and scripts but also to find homes for their plays.
One guest was Dave Slack, co-founder of 24:7, the yearly Manchester theatre festival with an increasing profile, and a question on everyone's lips was: 'Are you putting something in for it?'. As I said to someone, 24:7 is one place where you can come from nowhere with a play, put it on unchanged by anyone else or for any theatre's philosophy, style or mission statement about 'development,' and then by virtue of having put it on, can be regarded as a professional playwright (rather than someone 'in need of development' by theatre professionals other than writers). Many theatre professionals might presume that this would make for inferior plays, but for two years running now plays from 24:7 have won prestigious Manchester Evening News Awards.
Closing date for 24:7 is 31st January.
And then it was time to go, and guess what, I'd been vain and worn my high heels, and when I went to meet John it turned out he'd had to park the car at the other side of town...
NWP was originally started by a bunch of playwrights including Dave Simpson and John Chambers (both veterans of Coronation Street and Emmerdale), as a yearly showcase of work by north-west writers, presented as script-in-hand readings at Contact Theatre. My first-ever try at writing for stage - a one-act play, Cakes - appeared in the showcase, and later I was privileged to be invited onto the judging panel. More recently, NWP has evolved into a somewhat different organisation, with a different emphasis. Headed now by a Director, Chris Bridgeman, and Deputy Director and playwright Sheila McNulty, it is geared towards nurturing and developing the careers of playwrights in a more ongoing way via not only script-in-hand performances but also workshops, training sessions and links with several theatres.
There was much talk of course amongst us playwrights of the recent debate, prompted by the Guardian's Lynn Gardner, about the frustrating aspects, for writers, of theatre 'development' schemes (which I wrote about in an earlier post). Everyone was agreed however that North West Playwrights is very different, its aim being not only to help writers develop their skills and scripts but also to find homes for their plays.
One guest was Dave Slack, co-founder of 24:7, the yearly Manchester theatre festival with an increasing profile, and a question on everyone's lips was: 'Are you putting something in for it?'. As I said to someone, 24:7 is one place where you can come from nowhere with a play, put it on unchanged by anyone else or for any theatre's philosophy, style or mission statement about 'development,' and then by virtue of having put it on, can be regarded as a professional playwright (rather than someone 'in need of development' by theatre professionals other than writers). Many theatre professionals might presume that this would make for inferior plays, but for two years running now plays from 24:7 have won prestigious Manchester Evening News Awards.
Closing date for 24:7 is 31st January.
And then it was time to go, and guess what, I'd been vain and worn my high heels, and when I went to meet John it turned out he'd had to park the car at the other side of town...
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Normblog Writer's Choice
Famous blogger Norman Geras has invited me to contribute to his Writer's Choice series, where writers discuss books which have been important to them. I write about Wuthering Heights as perhaps the most influential on my own writing, and the shock I had when I re-read it for the purpose. The piece appears today.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Lost Literature
You can't help wondering what literature, both written and potential, is lost through lack of outlets. Commenting recently on my other blog, nmj relates how she started out as a short-story writer and got an agent on the strength of her short-story writing. However, she discovered, it wasn't the stories themselves the agent was interested in, and she was immediately persuaded to write a novel, and her short-story writing went by the board.
My own experience was the same, and I'm sure we are not the only two. It seems to me that the AL Kennedys and Ali Smiths are only the exceptions that prove the rule: Ali Smith, indeed, has stated in an interview that she feels she was helped towards publication of her first collection by things extraneous to her (marvellous) prose: the fact that she was Scottish, and the fact that she was lesbian.
Once upon a time short stories were all I ever really wanted to write. I loved the form with its special poetic yet muscular compression. Once I had published several stories in literary magazines, I began hoping to publish a collection. I went on an Arvon course and to my delight and gratitude my tutor Martin Booth sent my stories off to his agent, who immediately rang me. (And there are people in the blogosphere insisting that you don't need assistance and contacts to get taken up!) But this agent said the same to me as nmj's did to her: we have to have a novel, it's impossible to sell short stories. So I wrote a novel (The Birth Machine) - not a very long one that first time, more of a novella really; it took me a while to ease out of the short form - and then another (Body Cuts).
I didn't stop writing stories; I just went on publishing them in magazines. But then the magazines began to die away, and there didn't seem any point in writing them any more... And my novel publishers got bought up, the usual story, and the list I was on was remaindered. And, just as I found myself out in the cold, the commercialisation of publishing accelerated, and, after a beginning when all doors had opened before me, getting fiction published seemed no longer the easiest thing in the world. And since the doors in radio were flung wide open - I had written a play on the off-chance and it had been broadcast and won a prize - I became a radio dramatist instead.
Of course you don't stop altogether, you can't keep the urge down. And this week a collection of short stories won the Guardian first book award. Small presses like Comma, Salt, Elastic and Leaf are springing up to specialise in short stories. There are doors swinging open again.
My own experience was the same, and I'm sure we are not the only two. It seems to me that the AL Kennedys and Ali Smiths are only the exceptions that prove the rule: Ali Smith, indeed, has stated in an interview that she feels she was helped towards publication of her first collection by things extraneous to her (marvellous) prose: the fact that she was Scottish, and the fact that she was lesbian.
Once upon a time short stories were all I ever really wanted to write. I loved the form with its special poetic yet muscular compression. Once I had published several stories in literary magazines, I began hoping to publish a collection. I went on an Arvon course and to my delight and gratitude my tutor Martin Booth sent my stories off to his agent, who immediately rang me. (And there are people in the blogosphere insisting that you don't need assistance and contacts to get taken up!) But this agent said the same to me as nmj's did to her: we have to have a novel, it's impossible to sell short stories. So I wrote a novel (The Birth Machine) - not a very long one that first time, more of a novella really; it took me a while to ease out of the short form - and then another (Body Cuts).
I didn't stop writing stories; I just went on publishing them in magazines. But then the magazines began to die away, and there didn't seem any point in writing them any more... And my novel publishers got bought up, the usual story, and the list I was on was remaindered. And, just as I found myself out in the cold, the commercialisation of publishing accelerated, and, after a beginning when all doors had opened before me, getting fiction published seemed no longer the easiest thing in the world. And since the doors in radio were flung wide open - I had written a play on the off-chance and it had been broadcast and won a prize - I became a radio dramatist instead.
Of course you don't stop altogether, you can't keep the urge down. And this week a collection of short stories won the Guardian first book award. Small presses like Comma, Salt, Elastic and Leaf are springing up to specialise in short stories. There are doors swinging open again.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Sundar Kanta Walker - exhibition of paintings
Yesterday I went to the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Sundar Kanta Walker, 'This Precious Place', at the new Waterside Arts Centre in Sale in South Manchester. Kanta's paintings are vibrant with pure colour, as can be seen above, brimming with a seething yet patterned life, and also often with humour. That's Kanta above, standing next to one of my favourite paintings in the show: 'Ethnic Chick'. If you can't afford one of the oils, there are limited prints available, and I persuaded John to buy me one for Cristmas!
Kanta is of course also a writer, which was how I met her, when she and I once did a reading together, along with novelist Jane Rogers. So it was no suprise that there was another writer at the show, and to my delight Kanta introduced me to her: poet Judy Kendall, who has two books due out, a collection of poems from Cinnamon Press, and the edited letters of Edward Thomas from Carcanet.
I haven't been to Sale for a long time and was amazed to find how gentrified it's become. The Waterside Arts Centre is in a splendid new complex looking out over a paved and lamplit area next to the canal. There were other things going on in the centre besides the opening, and towards the end a group of people drifted past the gallery entrance, coming downstairs from a North-West Playwrights training day. And who from among them should come rushing in to the gallery but my actress friend Mary-Ann Coburn. You could see the pub across the canal through the glass wall of the gallery, so no prizes for guessing where we ended up then...
Kanta's exhibition runs until the 20th January.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Whose writing is it anyway?
In yesterday's Guardian Maddy Costa writes about an 'extraordinary' collaboration betweeen five women playwrights at the Royal Court Theatre this week, instigated by outgoing artistic director Ian Rickson and echoing a similar experiment in 1971 with seven young men including Howard Brenton, David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff. Well, the play does sound exciting, so maybe it's extraordinary in that sense, but it's a little amusing that the concept of collaboration should be considered so innovative once it's applied to mainstream theatre, when it was of course a commonplace with alternative theatre in the seventies and eighties, and often still is to this day.
It puts me in mind of the time I took part in a similar exercise. Two other playwrights, Sue Ashby and Janet Mantle, invited me to join them in writing a play for Theatre in Education on the subject of child abuse, It's OK to Say No. I was interested and excited to find out how such a process would work, and what it would be like writing someone else's concept rather than my own, and something so very research-based.
First off, we did the research by talking to professionals. Next, we mapped out a story and a structure for the play. This was easier than I'd imagined, sitting swapping suggestions and coming to a consensus - partly, I suppose, because our aim, teaching children how to deal with abuse, very much dictated a structure. Then, like the Royal Court group, we divided up the scenes between us and went away to write them. It was a good experience - I liked the learning process, I loved the companionship and sharing, but I have to be honest and say that it felt more workmanlike than writing usually does for me, without that thrill of inspiration that comes from somewhere deep.
Halfway through the writing period I dropped out. After we had talked to one of the professionals I began to have doubts about the professional methods and ideology for dealing with child abuse which she was describing and which our play was endorsing, and I left Sue and Janet to it.
At least one of my scenes remained, however, a pretty crucial one, and it was a very strange experience to attend the first performance of a play over which I no longer had any claim and no longer felt any ownership, and to witness that scene being acted out. I'd written it, but it was no longer mine; I didn't even feel the need to claim it. Weird.
It's OK to Say No has toured schools all over since, mainly with Action Transport Theatre Company, who probably know nothing of my early involvement with the play. Maybe my scene has long gone anyway, but whenever I hear of another production I get that strange mixed feeling of disconnection and ever-so-vague connection.
It puts me in mind of the time I took part in a similar exercise. Two other playwrights, Sue Ashby and Janet Mantle, invited me to join them in writing a play for Theatre in Education on the subject of child abuse, It's OK to Say No. I was interested and excited to find out how such a process would work, and what it would be like writing someone else's concept rather than my own, and something so very research-based.
First off, we did the research by talking to professionals. Next, we mapped out a story and a structure for the play. This was easier than I'd imagined, sitting swapping suggestions and coming to a consensus - partly, I suppose, because our aim, teaching children how to deal with abuse, very much dictated a structure. Then, like the Royal Court group, we divided up the scenes between us and went away to write them. It was a good experience - I liked the learning process, I loved the companionship and sharing, but I have to be honest and say that it felt more workmanlike than writing usually does for me, without that thrill of inspiration that comes from somewhere deep.
Halfway through the writing period I dropped out. After we had talked to one of the professionals I began to have doubts about the professional methods and ideology for dealing with child abuse which she was describing and which our play was endorsing, and I left Sue and Janet to it.
At least one of my scenes remained, however, a pretty crucial one, and it was a very strange experience to attend the first performance of a play over which I no longer had any claim and no longer felt any ownership, and to witness that scene being acted out. I'd written it, but it was no longer mine; I didn't even feel the need to claim it. Weird.
It's OK to Say No has toured schools all over since, mainly with Action Transport Theatre Company, who probably know nothing of my early involvement with the play. Maybe my scene has long gone anyway, but whenever I hear of another production I get that strange mixed feeling of disconnection and ever-so-vague connection.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
The Frontlist
Times in an author's life, there's no point in having any pride. The Frontlist seems like a good idea, says Fessing Author. That's what I thought too.
Like Fessing Author, I wasn't a new writer, but I emailed Tom Lodge, who runs the scheme, and got the go-ahead to put something up.
First the synopsis. This is really important, the site tells you, so important that they provide you with guidelines. I look at the guidelines. A synopsis should be all about plot and story, they tell me. It should be written in the style of the novel and should include a flavour of the dialogue. I scratch my head. This doesn't quite sound like the kind of summing-up paragraph I know most publishers and agents prefer (and anyone else, surely). I email Tom again. Is he looking for something longer or something shorter? Tom says it's all early stages yet, and it's really up to me but he thinks something that an agent would like sounds best. But he also says that on the other hand it might be a good idea to write something my peers would like, and some people have been marked down for not making their synopses long or detailed enough.
I scratch my head again. I compromise. I write as short a synopsis as I can while trying to outline a ridiculously complex and psychological story and include a sense of the (fluctuating) voices of the novel.
I post up my submission, synopsis included.
Straightaway I get five pieces to critique. Each piece has to be given a mark out of 5 on each of several criteria. Firstly Syntax, which to my surprise is explained as spelling, punctuation, grammar etc, and which - although I know that writers who can't do the basics mostly can't come up with the bigger stuff - seems a rather nit-picking and superficial approach to establish in beginning to look at a novel. Next Concept which we are told we should judge via the synopsis. Well now, I can see that a synopsis might indicate that a novel has a good shape, etc, but just because it fails to do that doesn't mean a novel hasn't: as anyone in the business knows, a synopsis is one of the most difficult things to write, and the person it's most difficult for is the author, so necessarily close to the subtleties (why would you write a novel if you could sum it up in a paragraph - or a page or two, as some of these synopses run to?). So I'm not so sure about the idea of at least one fifth of the marks being based on the synopsis, about which there seemed to be some confusion in the first place...
Then the last three: Originality, Intelligence, Readability. Nothing about narrative thrust or characterisation (though later characterisation was introduced), nothing about voice. And the explanations of some of these categories seem confusingly to cut across each other...
Now to look at the work I must critique. Well, I've done a lot of critiqueing of work at all sorts of levels, and I am sorry to say that some of the pieces were not, shall we say, of the best I have ever seen. I am pretty used as a teacher to commenting constructively on people's less-than-good work (I am being euphemistic here), but on this occasion my heart sinks, because what I am doing with my comments - and the marks which I must in all honesty give them - is denying them their goal in entering this scheme, being passed to a publisher. No way can I bring myself to use the word which comes to mind about one of them: 'semi-literate'. But there is one good one, thank goodness, pretty brilliant actually, and with relief I can say so and give the author practically full marks.
It all seems a bit embarrassing, I think. Professionals pitted against would-bes, and let's face it, never-will-bes...
Ha! Here's my come-uppance, my own critiques. Sparse dismissive comments, eg 'Waffelly' (sic); I am told that there is nothing original, complex or insightful about my novel, several times I am told that my 'syntax' is poor, I am pulled up for my 'improper' sentences (by which the reviewer doesn't mean indecent), and my narrator's use of the word 'caff' (for cafe) is marked down as a spelling mistake of my own. I'm even told that at one point my novel is 'a bit illiterate'. And it's the synopsis they really have it in for: some tell me it's too long, others that it's not detailed enough (and all the time its 'syntax' is faulty). Not all of my reviewers are negative, there's one who gives me almost full marks, but even he/she feels obliged to take marks off for my synopsis.
Crumbs. (No doubt they'd tick me off for that verbless sentence.)
And the overall results? Well, some of the ones I didn't rate did a whole lot better than me...
Like Fessing Author, I wasn't a new writer, but I emailed Tom Lodge, who runs the scheme, and got the go-ahead to put something up.
First the synopsis. This is really important, the site tells you, so important that they provide you with guidelines. I look at the guidelines. A synopsis should be all about plot and story, they tell me. It should be written in the style of the novel and should include a flavour of the dialogue. I scratch my head. This doesn't quite sound like the kind of summing-up paragraph I know most publishers and agents prefer (and anyone else, surely). I email Tom again. Is he looking for something longer or something shorter? Tom says it's all early stages yet, and it's really up to me but he thinks something that an agent would like sounds best. But he also says that on the other hand it might be a good idea to write something my peers would like, and some people have been marked down for not making their synopses long or detailed enough.
I scratch my head again. I compromise. I write as short a synopsis as I can while trying to outline a ridiculously complex and psychological story and include a sense of the (fluctuating) voices of the novel.
I post up my submission, synopsis included.
Straightaway I get five pieces to critique. Each piece has to be given a mark out of 5 on each of several criteria. Firstly Syntax, which to my surprise is explained as spelling, punctuation, grammar etc, and which - although I know that writers who can't do the basics mostly can't come up with the bigger stuff - seems a rather nit-picking and superficial approach to establish in beginning to look at a novel. Next Concept which we are told we should judge via the synopsis. Well now, I can see that a synopsis might indicate that a novel has a good shape, etc, but just because it fails to do that doesn't mean a novel hasn't: as anyone in the business knows, a synopsis is one of the most difficult things to write, and the person it's most difficult for is the author, so necessarily close to the subtleties (why would you write a novel if you could sum it up in a paragraph - or a page or two, as some of these synopses run to?). So I'm not so sure about the idea of at least one fifth of the marks being based on the synopsis, about which there seemed to be some confusion in the first place...
Then the last three: Originality, Intelligence, Readability. Nothing about narrative thrust or characterisation (though later characterisation was introduced), nothing about voice. And the explanations of some of these categories seem confusingly to cut across each other...
Now to look at the work I must critique. Well, I've done a lot of critiqueing of work at all sorts of levels, and I am sorry to say that some of the pieces were not, shall we say, of the best I have ever seen. I am pretty used as a teacher to commenting constructively on people's less-than-good work (I am being euphemistic here), but on this occasion my heart sinks, because what I am doing with my comments - and the marks which I must in all honesty give them - is denying them their goal in entering this scheme, being passed to a publisher. No way can I bring myself to use the word which comes to mind about one of them: 'semi-literate'. But there is one good one, thank goodness, pretty brilliant actually, and with relief I can say so and give the author practically full marks.
It all seems a bit embarrassing, I think. Professionals pitted against would-bes, and let's face it, never-will-bes...
Ha! Here's my come-uppance, my own critiques. Sparse dismissive comments, eg 'Waffelly' (sic); I am told that there is nothing original, complex or insightful about my novel, several times I am told that my 'syntax' is poor, I am pulled up for my 'improper' sentences (by which the reviewer doesn't mean indecent), and my narrator's use of the word 'caff' (for cafe) is marked down as a spelling mistake of my own. I'm even told that at one point my novel is 'a bit illiterate'. And it's the synopsis they really have it in for: some tell me it's too long, others that it's not detailed enough (and all the time its 'syntax' is faulty). Not all of my reviewers are negative, there's one who gives me almost full marks, but even he/she feels obliged to take marks off for my synopsis.
Crumbs. (No doubt they'd tick me off for that verbless sentence.)
And the overall results? Well, some of the ones I didn't rate did a whole lot better than me...
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Taken over...
Oh dear, I have not been blogging. Why? Because I have an idea for a play simmering, and I'm one of those writers who, once this happens, can't think about much else. The play takes up all of my attention, I stop halfway through the washing up and find myself leaning on the windowsill thinking about those characters, wondering how the heck I am going to get them from A to B; halfway through cleaning my teeth I find I have wandered downstairs, toothbrush in hand, listening to the conversation they are having which has sprouted unbidden into my head...
And we writers wonder why people sometimes look at us askance...
And we writers wonder why people sometimes look at us askance...
Friday, November 17, 2006
Driven to drink?
Reading group on Wednesday night. Only six of us drinking, and when I got up next morning there were eight bottles to clear away! I don't think I drank much of it, but if I did, this is why.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
What are playwriting schemes for?
Today on my other blog I ask What is Theatre FOR? but you could ask the same question about playwriting schemes, and when I came back from holiday I was alerted to the fact that Lyn Gardner has.
Wondering where all the good new playwrights are nowadays, Gardner speculates that they are clogged up in burgeoning playwriting development schemes, which she suspects exist for their own sakes, and to keep personnel in jobs, rather than actually to bring plays to the stage.
Some of the comments on her post endorse my own about theatre script readers in an earlier post here about my attempts to place 'O'Leary's Daughters' with New Writing mainstream theatres. (I hesitate to betray the arrogance of placing myself among the 'good playwrights', but the play has been fringe-produced, twice, and has won prizes, and I'm a pretty established, you might even say veteran radio dramatist). Gardner might have added that the playwrights are stuck in never-to-be-touched slush piles: it was February when I sent the play off, and I'm still waiting to hear back from several of those theatres and know now that I never will. But of the responses I did get back, more than one betrayed the tendency I described earlier to apply naturalistic measures to a non-naturalistic play (and thus to find it lacking), and the rest appear to fulfill Gardner's suspicions. I have been repeatedly told that my 'well-written and engaging script' can't however be put on by a theatre, since the theatre only puts on the plays it 'develops'. Once or twice this has extended to putting my name down on a list for 'the next development programme' (ie to write another, different play, which will, as Gardner says, be molded to the theatre's mission statement).
The most encouraging response was from Suzanne Bell, the Liverpool Everyman's Literary Manager, who I have to say quickly is a great person, but her hands are tied by this system. Again she said that the theatre only puts on the plays it develops, but she said she wanted to keep links with me and invited me to a workshop with Paines Plough and Graeae Theatre Company. But what was this workshop? Oh dear, yes, the Paines Plough and Graeae people were lovely, but it was one of those workshops which I used to do all the time with schoolkids, and then later with WEA adults, you know: get into pairs, each think up a character, swap characters, then write a dialogue using the two characters. Oh... Groan. For godssake, I just want to get my play on a mainstream theatre; it's already wowed audiences, I'm a radio writer going long in the tooth... what am I doing BEING TAUGHT HOW TO WRITE FROM SCRATCH????
A few weeks later I get an email from Paines Plough. Would I send them what I wrote at the workshop? A bit later another: if I've developed this piece since, or written anything else, would I send it, as they are looking for writers for their Wild Lunch series of rehearsed readings. What they are looking for is 30-minute plays. Oh! Well, sounds like an opportunity you can't miss. I sit down and develop my piece into a 30-minute play.
A couple of months later I am informed that unfortunately I am not one of the fourteen writers they have selected to develop their 30-minute plays into 45-minute pieces. Fair enough, but what was I doing being diverted through hoops to no avail, WHEN I JUST WANTED TO GET MY ALREADY WRITTEN PLAY STAGED? This week I am sent the Wild Lunch programme of rehearsed readings. Eight plays, eight writers. Which means that SIX of the fourteen CHOSEN TO DEVELOP THEIR 30-MINUTE PLAYS have been dropped!
Oh please! These lovely, committed and hard-working people aren't to blame, it's the system, but this is playing with writers. This is not taking seriously any concept of writers' individuality or professionalism, just as Gardner laments.
Wondering where all the good new playwrights are nowadays, Gardner speculates that they are clogged up in burgeoning playwriting development schemes, which she suspects exist for their own sakes, and to keep personnel in jobs, rather than actually to bring plays to the stage.
Some of the comments on her post endorse my own about theatre script readers in an earlier post here about my attempts to place 'O'Leary's Daughters' with New Writing mainstream theatres. (I hesitate to betray the arrogance of placing myself among the 'good playwrights', but the play has been fringe-produced, twice, and has won prizes, and I'm a pretty established, you might even say veteran radio dramatist). Gardner might have added that the playwrights are stuck in never-to-be-touched slush piles: it was February when I sent the play off, and I'm still waiting to hear back from several of those theatres and know now that I never will. But of the responses I did get back, more than one betrayed the tendency I described earlier to apply naturalistic measures to a non-naturalistic play (and thus to find it lacking), and the rest appear to fulfill Gardner's suspicions. I have been repeatedly told that my 'well-written and engaging script' can't however be put on by a theatre, since the theatre only puts on the plays it 'develops'. Once or twice this has extended to putting my name down on a list for 'the next development programme' (ie to write another, different play, which will, as Gardner says, be molded to the theatre's mission statement).
The most encouraging response was from Suzanne Bell, the Liverpool Everyman's Literary Manager, who I have to say quickly is a great person, but her hands are tied by this system. Again she said that the theatre only puts on the plays it develops, but she said she wanted to keep links with me and invited me to a workshop with Paines Plough and Graeae Theatre Company. But what was this workshop? Oh dear, yes, the Paines Plough and Graeae people were lovely, but it was one of those workshops which I used to do all the time with schoolkids, and then later with WEA adults, you know: get into pairs, each think up a character, swap characters, then write a dialogue using the two characters. Oh... Groan. For godssake, I just want to get my play on a mainstream theatre; it's already wowed audiences, I'm a radio writer going long in the tooth... what am I doing BEING TAUGHT HOW TO WRITE FROM SCRATCH????
A few weeks later I get an email from Paines Plough. Would I send them what I wrote at the workshop? A bit later another: if I've developed this piece since, or written anything else, would I send it, as they are looking for writers for their Wild Lunch series of rehearsed readings. What they are looking for is 30-minute plays. Oh! Well, sounds like an opportunity you can't miss. I sit down and develop my piece into a 30-minute play.
A couple of months later I am informed that unfortunately I am not one of the fourteen writers they have selected to develop their 30-minute plays into 45-minute pieces. Fair enough, but what was I doing being diverted through hoops to no avail, WHEN I JUST WANTED TO GET MY ALREADY WRITTEN PLAY STAGED? This week I am sent the Wild Lunch programme of rehearsed readings. Eight plays, eight writers. Which means that SIX of the fourteen CHOSEN TO DEVELOP THEIR 30-MINUTE PLAYS have been dropped!
Oh please! These lovely, committed and hard-working people aren't to blame, it's the system, but this is playing with writers. This is not taking seriously any concept of writers' individuality or professionalism, just as Gardner laments.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Artists and Power
Power. It's nothing, but it's everything.
You're a writer. You don't have a publisher/producer. You petition everybody. Everybody turns you down. You feel like the lowest of the low.
You go to a 24:7 Theatre Festival meeting (as I did tonight) . People come up to you. You say you're an actor (as I did half the time). They look at you with matey commiseration. You say you're a writer (as I did the rest of the time). They hand you their CV, they tell you (with a wild , longing look in their eyes) that they'd love you to get in touch if you ever have a play produced. You feel like Herod or something.
Sometimes I think it's hell being a writer, but, honestly, there are worse things to be...
But I'm off out of it, from tomorrow I'm neither, I'm just a holidaymaker...
You're a writer. You don't have a publisher/producer. You petition everybody. Everybody turns you down. You feel like the lowest of the low.
You go to a 24:7 Theatre Festival meeting (as I did tonight) . People come up to you. You say you're an actor (as I did half the time). They look at you with matey commiseration. You say you're a writer (as I did the rest of the time). They hand you their CV, they tell you (with a wild , longing look in their eyes) that they'd love you to get in touch if you ever have a play produced. You feel like Herod or something.
Sometimes I think it's hell being a writer, but, honestly, there are worse things to be...
But I'm off out of it, from tomorrow I'm neither, I'm just a holidaymaker...
Friday, October 27, 2006
Spooked by a cough
It's great to support your writer friends, isn't it? Hm...
I've had a stinking fluey cold, which is why I haven't even been writing my blog, but last night I felt better, which meant, Great: having missed Nick Royle's launch during the Literature Festival, I could go to his reading with Conrad Williams in Didsbury Library. I kind of knew Conrad, too: I'd met him once, though I couldn't remember where, London, I think, and now, it turned out when I got there, he had come to live round the corner from me.
Nick and Conrad both write stories 'on the dark side' - stories which touch on the surreal and on alternative realities - so this reading, the brainchild, I gathered, of the Manchester Libraries fiction buyer, was intended as a Halloween event. It was intended also as a test of the viability of a series of readings, though as a one-off receiving consequently minimal advertising, it was not expected to be full. Huh. It was packed! They had to bring extra chairs and people had to sit just outside the reading area...
Lucky me, I got there early, making it through the chilly wind and revelling in the fact that I was no longer sneezing and coughing, and got a seat slap-bang in the middle. Nick began, a chilling story about strange events in a lonely pub. Then Conrad: another short spooky story, followed by a longer, seemingly realistic story about a wedding. It was just as you realised that there was something ghostly happening - just when the tension racheted - when, oh no, my throat began to tickle, and the uncontrollable coughing began. Oh no, I'd have to leave, stand up right in the centre, distracting people just when the story was at its most tense, and I did, I walked out, and fled off down the library towards the foyer, whooping and spluttering in a way which the library ceiling seemed to hollow and exaggerate. And, oh no, here came a kind librarian with a cup of water - what a fuss I was causing! - and at last the coughing stopped, but only just in time for the break, and I'd missed the end of Conrad's story.
Worse - in the second half I sat near the edge in case it happened again, and it did, and those lovely librarians chased me with more water, and when that didn't work a sticky toffee, and when that didn't a Strepsil tablet.
How to ruin your friends' readings without even trying...
I don't really think I did, though: the audience seemed thrilled by the readings, and the fiction buyer said that the success of the evening meant that a series was definitely on the cards.
I've had a stinking fluey cold, which is why I haven't even been writing my blog, but last night I felt better, which meant, Great: having missed Nick Royle's launch during the Literature Festival, I could go to his reading with Conrad Williams in Didsbury Library. I kind of knew Conrad, too: I'd met him once, though I couldn't remember where, London, I think, and now, it turned out when I got there, he had come to live round the corner from me.
Nick and Conrad both write stories 'on the dark side' - stories which touch on the surreal and on alternative realities - so this reading, the brainchild, I gathered, of the Manchester Libraries fiction buyer, was intended as a Halloween event. It was intended also as a test of the viability of a series of readings, though as a one-off receiving consequently minimal advertising, it was not expected to be full. Huh. It was packed! They had to bring extra chairs and people had to sit just outside the reading area...
Lucky me, I got there early, making it through the chilly wind and revelling in the fact that I was no longer sneezing and coughing, and got a seat slap-bang in the middle. Nick began, a chilling story about strange events in a lonely pub. Then Conrad: another short spooky story, followed by a longer, seemingly realistic story about a wedding. It was just as you realised that there was something ghostly happening - just when the tension racheted - when, oh no, my throat began to tickle, and the uncontrollable coughing began. Oh no, I'd have to leave, stand up right in the centre, distracting people just when the story was at its most tense, and I did, I walked out, and fled off down the library towards the foyer, whooping and spluttering in a way which the library ceiling seemed to hollow and exaggerate. And, oh no, here came a kind librarian with a cup of water - what a fuss I was causing! - and at last the coughing stopped, but only just in time for the break, and I'd missed the end of Conrad's story.
Worse - in the second half I sat near the edge in case it happened again, and it did, and those lovely librarians chased me with more water, and when that didn't work a sticky toffee, and when that didn't a Strepsil tablet.
How to ruin your friends' readings without even trying...
I don't really think I did, though: the audience seemed thrilled by the readings, and the fiction buyer said that the success of the evening meant that a series was definitely on the cards.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Rhyme or Reason
Yesterday I wrote on my other, critical blog about an article in the Observer by Jason Cowley on our current era of winners-past-the post cultural prizes. Afterwards I fell to thinking about the time I didn't actually win a glitzy prize but may as well have done, and got to experience how it felt.
The occasion was the Sony Radio awards. I had just had my first radio play, Rhyme or Reason, produced. One morning Robert Cooper, my producer, rang up and said that something wonderful had happened: my play had been nominated for the Best Production category, and Harriet Walter, who had played my protagonist, for Best Actress. I was invited to the dinner and ceremony at the Grosvenor Hotel, and since Harriet was in LA and wouldn't make it, would I collect her award if she won?
Crikey. Help. But yes!!! Yes!!
So off I went on the train, worrying about what I was wearing, worrying about getting up on that stage, rehearsing the speech I might have to make, almost shaking with nerves the whole way in fact, in through the doors of the hotel, down the stairs (behind Ned Sherrin, in fact) and into that vast ballroom filled with glittering tables. I'm not sure why I didn't actually faint.
And I couldn't sit with Robert, the only person there I knew; as a nominee (nominated for Best Production for two plays) he'd been placed at a table near the front, and I was stuck right at the back with a table of unnominated BBC employees. They had no idea of course who I was, and I was so small and black in my dress and my nervousness, so removed and silent in my agony (what if Harriet won?) that they clearly decided to leave me alone. I listened a little, understood that some of them were producers whose names I knew, but most of the time I blanked out. Needless to say, I hardly ate a thing.
Then the ceremony. I followed the programme, my heart going like a goose in a bag. 'Best Production.' Robert Cooper! 'Best Actress.' My heart flapped up my throat. 'Harriet Walter. Unfortunately, Harriet can't be here this afternoon, but the writer of the play, Elizabeth Baines, is here to collect her award for her.'
Funny things happen at moments like this. Not for nothing are they done in slow motion in films. That's exactly how they seem to happen. I stood, and in the space of what must have been only seconds - I had to get across that vast floor, between all those staggered tables - I saw in minute and leisurely detail the way the people at my table turned and looked at me in astonishment, the changing of their expressions to realisation and then delight.
In his article, Jason Cowley writes of how winning a prize can change someone's life as a writer, and it's true: even though I hadn't actually won a prize - it was Robert and Harriet who had won - in that moment I went like Alice through a hole into another dimension, out of literary anonymity into recognition, out from 'struggling' into 'established' and 'successful.'
That whole vast room clapping and cheering as somehow, remembering my performance skills, I got quickly across it. Jane Asher kissing me (she was presenting the prizes), then down off the stage to a barrage of flash bulbs. And back to the table and everyone there waiting to hug and kiss me. 'Congratulations!' they kept saying. 'But it's not me who's won!' I said. 'Rubbish!' said the woman with the long hair who had turned out to be the producer Enyd Williams. 'No one gets nominated for a play that isn't great!' 'It's your win too,' they kept telling me. 'Make sure you put it on your CV!'
And then they called me to go with them in their taxi for a celebration at the BBC.
And afterwards? Well, as a radio writer I was made. One unfortunate result was that Robert - Sony-award-winning radio producer - quickly moved off to TV and Dublin, but the prize made it easy for me to get another radio producer. 'Anything you write, I'll produce it!' said Sue Hogg, who did indeed produce my next play. (Though there came a time of course when BBC Radio embraced Marketing, and no producer could say such a thing.)
But you can't help thinking how much luck is involved. What if that play hadn't fallen into Robert's hands? I had entered it in a Radio Times competition, and it hadn't won that - wasn't even a runner-up - and it could have fallen into oblivion if someone running the competition hadn't made the decision to pass it to Robert. I could have taken it as a message that I couldn't do radio plays and abandoned the whole idea... What if Robert had been less ambitious, and hadn't bothered getting a well-known and respected actress to play the part (bound to get more serious attention then)? What if he'd been less good at marketing and hadn't created a series of linked plays of which my play was one (an innovation at the time, that got a lot of attention)? What if, what if... As various people have commented, not least Grumpy Old Bookman, people take prizes as serious measures, but there's much about them that's random and not a lot of rhyme or reason.
The occasion was the Sony Radio awards. I had just had my first radio play, Rhyme or Reason, produced. One morning Robert Cooper, my producer, rang up and said that something wonderful had happened: my play had been nominated for the Best Production category, and Harriet Walter, who had played my protagonist, for Best Actress. I was invited to the dinner and ceremony at the Grosvenor Hotel, and since Harriet was in LA and wouldn't make it, would I collect her award if she won?
Crikey. Help. But yes!!! Yes!!
So off I went on the train, worrying about what I was wearing, worrying about getting up on that stage, rehearsing the speech I might have to make, almost shaking with nerves the whole way in fact, in through the doors of the hotel, down the stairs (behind Ned Sherrin, in fact) and into that vast ballroom filled with glittering tables. I'm not sure why I didn't actually faint.
And I couldn't sit with Robert, the only person there I knew; as a nominee (nominated for Best Production for two plays) he'd been placed at a table near the front, and I was stuck right at the back with a table of unnominated BBC employees. They had no idea of course who I was, and I was so small and black in my dress and my nervousness, so removed and silent in my agony (what if Harriet won?) that they clearly decided to leave me alone. I listened a little, understood that some of them were producers whose names I knew, but most of the time I blanked out. Needless to say, I hardly ate a thing.
Then the ceremony. I followed the programme, my heart going like a goose in a bag. 'Best Production.' Robert Cooper! 'Best Actress.' My heart flapped up my throat. 'Harriet Walter. Unfortunately, Harriet can't be here this afternoon, but the writer of the play, Elizabeth Baines, is here to collect her award for her.'
Funny things happen at moments like this. Not for nothing are they done in slow motion in films. That's exactly how they seem to happen. I stood, and in the space of what must have been only seconds - I had to get across that vast floor, between all those staggered tables - I saw in minute and leisurely detail the way the people at my table turned and looked at me in astonishment, the changing of their expressions to realisation and then delight.
In his article, Jason Cowley writes of how winning a prize can change someone's life as a writer, and it's true: even though I hadn't actually won a prize - it was Robert and Harriet who had won - in that moment I went like Alice through a hole into another dimension, out of literary anonymity into recognition, out from 'struggling' into 'established' and 'successful.'
That whole vast room clapping and cheering as somehow, remembering my performance skills, I got quickly across it. Jane Asher kissing me (she was presenting the prizes), then down off the stage to a barrage of flash bulbs. And back to the table and everyone there waiting to hug and kiss me. 'Congratulations!' they kept saying. 'But it's not me who's won!' I said. 'Rubbish!' said the woman with the long hair who had turned out to be the producer Enyd Williams. 'No one gets nominated for a play that isn't great!' 'It's your win too,' they kept telling me. 'Make sure you put it on your CV!'
And then they called me to go with them in their taxi for a celebration at the BBC.
And afterwards? Well, as a radio writer I was made. One unfortunate result was that Robert - Sony-award-winning radio producer - quickly moved off to TV and Dublin, but the prize made it easy for me to get another radio producer. 'Anything you write, I'll produce it!' said Sue Hogg, who did indeed produce my next play. (Though there came a time of course when BBC Radio embraced Marketing, and no producer could say such a thing.)
But you can't help thinking how much luck is involved. What if that play hadn't fallen into Robert's hands? I had entered it in a Radio Times competition, and it hadn't won that - wasn't even a runner-up - and it could have fallen into oblivion if someone running the competition hadn't made the decision to pass it to Robert. I could have taken it as a message that I couldn't do radio plays and abandoned the whole idea... What if Robert had been less ambitious, and hadn't bothered getting a well-known and respected actress to play the part (bound to get more serious attention then)? What if he'd been less good at marketing and hadn't created a series of linked plays of which my play was one (an innovation at the time, that got a lot of attention)? What if, what if... As various people have commented, not least Grumpy Old Bookman, people take prizes as serious measures, but there's much about them that's random and not a lot of rhyme or reason.
Friday, October 20, 2006
Bitches and Chicks
Manchester Bitch-Lit event last night and Waterstone's packed out for it. This time I wasn't performing, but could sit back and enjoy: delicious performances from Rosie Lugosi, Chris Scholes and Sherry Ashworth.
The tour is over for me now, though there will yet be events in Newcastle, Leeds, York and London. It's been interesting to compare the different events and the different audiences and audience discussions. The 'Bitch-Lit' idea really seems to have struck a chord: events have sold out, with people placed on reserve lists or turned away. (If you still want to go but find it sold out, then reserve a place, because at Manchester some people who had booked failed to turn up - though you might need to turn up on the off-chance.)
In the book and at the readings editors Mary Sharratt and Maya Chowdhry have pointed out that generally in literature female protagonists are allowed to be less trangressive than male ones, or if they are transgressive they must be punished and/or realise the error of their ways. A condition for submissions to this book was that protagonists must not be punished for their behaviour, but must triumph in their transgression. The idea was to counter the censorship on women writers - that sense that you'd better make sure that, in some way at least, your female protagonist can be seen in a good light. The female heroes would be autonomous, answerable to no one, and thus an antidote to Chick-Lit, where your heroine is usually pathetically desperate to get her man (well, that's what they say - I've never read any Chick-Lit myself).
At Sheffield, and especially at Ilkley, you could see that the audiences, mainly female - there were only three men at Sheffield - were really taken by this. 'We're celebrating female badness!' said Mary at Ilkley, and many in the audience grinned and nodded. I have to say that I didn't feel entirely comfortable with this sentiment, though of course it was not completely serious, rather a provocation. I wouldn't exactly celebrate or condone my protagonist's behaviour, I'm simply inviting the reader to understand the extremes of behaviour to which her situation has driven her. At another point (in the book's introduction) Maya says that the women characters in the book are not victims 'lashing out in self-defence'. 'I don't intend to be a victim,' my protagonist says at one point, but it depends what you mean by a victim, and you could say that her act of revenge makes her one, a slave to her vengeful emotions, and as desperate, in a different way, as any Chick-Lit heroine, to get her man. As Suzanne Elvidge, another reader at Sheffield, said to me in the bar afterwards, several of our protagonists are indeed, in this sense, victims lashing out.
As I said, though, in the Q & A at Ilkley, the real difference with this book is that it blows a breath of fresh air over the taboo subject of female badness, and does this largely by reclaiming the word Bitch. As I said then, if we can't say a word then we can't begin to discuss the issues around it, but once you reclaim the word you can break the taboo, and begin to discuss the concept of female badness more rationally.
Most of us were agreed that there has been a real taboo. At Sheffield we were asked if we felt liberated by the book into censoring ourselves less when we write, and even Sophie Hannah said that she did. Sophie is one of the most straight-speaking and independent-minded women I know, and one of the most balloon-pricking of satirical writers, yet she said that it has made her more determined to resist editors' pleas to 'make her protagonists nicer' (and thus, in Sophie's opinion, less lifelike).
Interestingly, however, when I asked Rosie the same question in the Q & A last night, she said that she had been developing in that direction anyway in her writing, and Sherry said that she had never felt censored, even though she writes books for teenagers, an area in which language is inevitably strongly policed by editors. I suppose, however, it depends how far you are already censoring yourself, and Sherry did indeed admit that although she had never been troubled by the b-word, she still found herself shocked by the use of what she called the c-word, a fact which many of the Manchester audience may have found shocking in itself.
It was a different kind of audience last night in Manchester, much more mixed in age and gender. A nineteen-year-old student in a red bakerboy hat said that she felt we were perhaps making too much of it all, and it was the same on the English degree course she had just started, as soon as you get to a woman writer people start on about the feminism thing, it really didn't mean a lot to people of her age and it irritated her, and furthermore she read Chick-Lit and enjoyed it and didn't see anything wrong in it. She clearly felt that there wasn't an issue, as the editors were making out.
The fact remains, however, that when Mary went on Women's Hour to talk about the book, Jenny Murray avoided using that word, as did many of the writers who rang up to inquire about submitting...
The tour is over for me now, though there will yet be events in Newcastle, Leeds, York and London. It's been interesting to compare the different events and the different audiences and audience discussions. The 'Bitch-Lit' idea really seems to have struck a chord: events have sold out, with people placed on reserve lists or turned away. (If you still want to go but find it sold out, then reserve a place, because at Manchester some people who had booked failed to turn up - though you might need to turn up on the off-chance.)
In the book and at the readings editors Mary Sharratt and Maya Chowdhry have pointed out that generally in literature female protagonists are allowed to be less trangressive than male ones, or if they are transgressive they must be punished and/or realise the error of their ways. A condition for submissions to this book was that protagonists must not be punished for their behaviour, but must triumph in their transgression. The idea was to counter the censorship on women writers - that sense that you'd better make sure that, in some way at least, your female protagonist can be seen in a good light. The female heroes would be autonomous, answerable to no one, and thus an antidote to Chick-Lit, where your heroine is usually pathetically desperate to get her man (well, that's what they say - I've never read any Chick-Lit myself).
At Sheffield, and especially at Ilkley, you could see that the audiences, mainly female - there were only three men at Sheffield - were really taken by this. 'We're celebrating female badness!' said Mary at Ilkley, and many in the audience grinned and nodded. I have to say that I didn't feel entirely comfortable with this sentiment, though of course it was not completely serious, rather a provocation. I wouldn't exactly celebrate or condone my protagonist's behaviour, I'm simply inviting the reader to understand the extremes of behaviour to which her situation has driven her. At another point (in the book's introduction) Maya says that the women characters in the book are not victims 'lashing out in self-defence'. 'I don't intend to be a victim,' my protagonist says at one point, but it depends what you mean by a victim, and you could say that her act of revenge makes her one, a slave to her vengeful emotions, and as desperate, in a different way, as any Chick-Lit heroine, to get her man. As Suzanne Elvidge, another reader at Sheffield, said to me in the bar afterwards, several of our protagonists are indeed, in this sense, victims lashing out.
As I said, though, in the Q & A at Ilkley, the real difference with this book is that it blows a breath of fresh air over the taboo subject of female badness, and does this largely by reclaiming the word Bitch. As I said then, if we can't say a word then we can't begin to discuss the issues around it, but once you reclaim the word you can break the taboo, and begin to discuss the concept of female badness more rationally.
Most of us were agreed that there has been a real taboo. At Sheffield we were asked if we felt liberated by the book into censoring ourselves less when we write, and even Sophie Hannah said that she did. Sophie is one of the most straight-speaking and independent-minded women I know, and one of the most balloon-pricking of satirical writers, yet she said that it has made her more determined to resist editors' pleas to 'make her protagonists nicer' (and thus, in Sophie's opinion, less lifelike).
Interestingly, however, when I asked Rosie the same question in the Q & A last night, she said that she had been developing in that direction anyway in her writing, and Sherry said that she had never felt censored, even though she writes books for teenagers, an area in which language is inevitably strongly policed by editors. I suppose, however, it depends how far you are already censoring yourself, and Sherry did indeed admit that although she had never been troubled by the b-word, she still found herself shocked by the use of what she called the c-word, a fact which many of the Manchester audience may have found shocking in itself.
It was a different kind of audience last night in Manchester, much more mixed in age and gender. A nineteen-year-old student in a red bakerboy hat said that she felt we were perhaps making too much of it all, and it was the same on the English degree course she had just started, as soon as you get to a woman writer people start on about the feminism thing, it really didn't mean a lot to people of her age and it irritated her, and furthermore she read Chick-Lit and enjoyed it and didn't see anything wrong in it. She clearly felt that there wasn't an issue, as the editors were making out.
The fact remains, however, that when Mary went on Women's Hour to talk about the book, Jenny Murray avoided using that word, as did many of the writers who rang up to inquire about submitting...
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Bollards, fences and boxes
When you're doing a reading, always turn up early.
Yeah, right.
Bitch-Lit reading in Sheffield yesterday evening. 7.30 start, plan to get there an hour beforehand to change into costume and check out the venue, so leave at five for the one-and-a-half hour drive. Oh-oh. Traffic blocked at Glossop. At 6.30, when I'm meant to be there, we're still scooping round those scary bends between darkening misty hills, not a city light in sight. 6.40, we hit the outskirts, zoom downwards to the centre only to find what no one has warned us about: the roads around it are completely dug up, it's all bollards and diversions, hardly any lights or signs, and no one around - why not? - it's like the surface of the moon, the dark side. We're going round in circles, and now we seem to be driving away from the centre again... One lone man walking. I wind down the window. 'We're looking for the station!' He scratches his head, not sure how we'd get there with all these altered directions... Another: with all these altered directions, he's not even sure any more in which direction it actually is. It's seven o' clock now. John's driving, so I rummage in my bag, thinking I should change in the car, but then find I don't have the room. Two young girls, about twelve and ten. 'Know where the station is?' 'Oh yes! Well... erm... MUM!' they scream up to a window above the shops. The window opens. 'Mum, where's the station?' The woman starts yelling down instructions we can't hear.
It's 7.10 when we get to the back of the station which we know is opposite the venue, the Showroom Cinema. 'Stop! I'll run from here!' I grab my bags and costume and jump from the car, my skirt dropping from the hanger onto the pot-holed ground. Snatch it up, run through the dark round the side of the station car park, stumbling over potholes, only to come to a high workman's fence and be diverted a very long way round. It's 7.15, when I finally reach the steps of the Cinema Showroom. I fling myself, breathless, onto the box-office desk. 'To the stairs and then left,' I am told. I race down the stairs. There's no left turn... I race back up. 'Where's showroom 5?' I call to an usher. Oh, he meant past the stairs and turn left!
Everyone else is ready and waiting. So where can I change? Not in an office as they'd vaguely suggested we might, but in the loo... Great. Race to the loo. Can't paint my bitch lips on, must have dropped my makeup bag when I rummaged in the car...
I emerge with my arms full of bags, coat, clothes and a coathanger to find the audience already being seated. Where can I put them? Under that table there, I'm told, which I must squash past the legs of the audience to get to. So much for making an impact as your character...
And the setup, which I'd come too late to have a say in? A lectern with a mic we didn't really need, and which would hide our carefully planned costumes. And each side of it and a little behind it, two chairs for the readers, which meant that in the long room where the seating was arranged horizontally, each pair of readers was hidden from half of the audience. And as for the Q & A session: well, I tell you, it's amazing the rapport we achieved with our sell-out audience from behind a big blue box!
Here Maya Chowdhry and I are trying to converse around the lectern with the other two readers:
And here we are at last released from the box [From left to right: me in my wig and dressed as my avenging wife character, Sophie Hannah as herself (because, as she told the audience, she is her character), Suzanne Elvidge as her avenging cook, and Maya Chowdhry as a fairy punk]
Yeah, right.
Bitch-Lit reading in Sheffield yesterday evening. 7.30 start, plan to get there an hour beforehand to change into costume and check out the venue, so leave at five for the one-and-a-half hour drive. Oh-oh. Traffic blocked at Glossop. At 6.30, when I'm meant to be there, we're still scooping round those scary bends between darkening misty hills, not a city light in sight. 6.40, we hit the outskirts, zoom downwards to the centre only to find what no one has warned us about: the roads around it are completely dug up, it's all bollards and diversions, hardly any lights or signs, and no one around - why not? - it's like the surface of the moon, the dark side. We're going round in circles, and now we seem to be driving away from the centre again... One lone man walking. I wind down the window. 'We're looking for the station!' He scratches his head, not sure how we'd get there with all these altered directions... Another: with all these altered directions, he's not even sure any more in which direction it actually is. It's seven o' clock now. John's driving, so I rummage in my bag, thinking I should change in the car, but then find I don't have the room. Two young girls, about twelve and ten. 'Know where the station is?' 'Oh yes! Well... erm... MUM!' they scream up to a window above the shops. The window opens. 'Mum, where's the station?' The woman starts yelling down instructions we can't hear.
It's 7.10 when we get to the back of the station which we know is opposite the venue, the Showroom Cinema. 'Stop! I'll run from here!' I grab my bags and costume and jump from the car, my skirt dropping from the hanger onto the pot-holed ground. Snatch it up, run through the dark round the side of the station car park, stumbling over potholes, only to come to a high workman's fence and be diverted a very long way round. It's 7.15, when I finally reach the steps of the Cinema Showroom. I fling myself, breathless, onto the box-office desk. 'To the stairs and then left,' I am told. I race down the stairs. There's no left turn... I race back up. 'Where's showroom 5?' I call to an usher. Oh, he meant past the stairs and turn left!
Everyone else is ready and waiting. So where can I change? Not in an office as they'd vaguely suggested we might, but in the loo... Great. Race to the loo. Can't paint my bitch lips on, must have dropped my makeup bag when I rummaged in the car...
I emerge with my arms full of bags, coat, clothes and a coathanger to find the audience already being seated. Where can I put them? Under that table there, I'm told, which I must squash past the legs of the audience to get to. So much for making an impact as your character...
And the setup, which I'd come too late to have a say in? A lectern with a mic we didn't really need, and which would hide our carefully planned costumes. And each side of it and a little behind it, two chairs for the readers, which meant that in the long room where the seating was arranged horizontally, each pair of readers was hidden from half of the audience. And as for the Q & A session: well, I tell you, it's amazing the rapport we achieved with our sell-out audience from behind a big blue box!
Here Maya Chowdhry and I are trying to converse around the lectern with the other two readers:
And here we are at last released from the box [From left to right: me in my wig and dressed as my avenging wife character, Sophie Hannah as herself (because, as she told the audience, she is her character), Suzanne Elvidge as her avenging cook, and Maya Chowdhry as a fairy punk]
Sunday, October 15, 2006
From the sublime to the wicked
Yesterday I went to the talk by Murat Belge in St Ann's Church - an event I found quite mind-blowing, and which I've written about on my other blog where I try to tackle the more serious matters.
Afterwards I wandered a bit gloomily, musing how in Britain we just don't value serious literature any more, when we damn well ought to: after all, the issues Belge was talking about, and in the novels he publishes by Nobel-Prize winning Orhan Pamuk, are even now being played out in Britain, not least in the current comments by British politicians about the veil.
And then I went into Waterstone's and found something to cheer me right up: there in the anthology section was Bitch-Lit, our light-hearted anthology with nevertheless a pretty serious point, turned out in all its bright-pink glory. Not only that, someone was reaching up to look at a copy! I tip-toed away, thinking, Good Old Waterstones, and Three Cheers for our lovely publisher Cathy Bolton at Commonword!!
Afterwards I wandered a bit gloomily, musing how in Britain we just don't value serious literature any more, when we damn well ought to: after all, the issues Belge was talking about, and in the novels he publishes by Nobel-Prize winning Orhan Pamuk, are even now being played out in Britain, not least in the current comments by British politicians about the veil.
And then I went into Waterstone's and found something to cheer me right up: there in the anthology section was Bitch-Lit, our light-hearted anthology with nevertheless a pretty serious point, turned out in all its bright-pink glory. Not only that, someone was reaching up to look at a copy! I tip-toed away, thinking, Good Old Waterstones, and Three Cheers for our lovely publisher Cathy Bolton at Commonword!!
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Salt added
Yesterday afternoon I'm waiting to cross the road to get to the fish shop and over the other side, waiting to cross in the opposite direction, is Steve Waling, poet and editor of poetry magazine Brando's Hat. He waits for me, looking somehow calm, beatific yet excited... What's cooking, I wonder? When I get there he gives me this exciting news: he has a poetry collection coming from Salt. No wonder he looks like the cat that got the salmon! There is nothing so wonderful, so heart-warming as the joy of a writer who, after years of working away, has achieved success (just look at Marie Phillips' blog recently)! And this small press, Salt, seems to have come from nowhere to become a hugely respected force in publishing in a very short time. Another reason for writers not to give up in the face of the more commercial trends in publishing...
Friday, October 13, 2006
One reason to turn to drink
Reading group last night, and another useful illustration for the writer of how differently people read and the different criteria they apply. 'Brilliant,' said Mark about our choice for discussion, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. 'Really clever marriage between journalistic and novelistic forms. The objectivity means there's a lack of sensationalism, prurience or moralising, yet it's a compulsive read, you just can't put it down.' Others differed. 'Afraid I struggled with it,' said Doug. Doug and others felt that the marriage didn't work, and that the book did in fact at times induce a prurient reaction on the reader.
See? You hone your prose, you think carefully about your structure and its effect on the reader, and then a load of crisp-chewing, wine-guzzling punters casually bring to your book their own preconceptions and taste and experience...
Ah well.
See? You hone your prose, you think carefully about your structure and its effect on the reader, and then a load of crisp-chewing, wine-guzzling punters casually bring to your book their own preconceptions and taste and experience...
Ah well.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Manchester Literature Festival
The Manchester Literature Festival, conceived by outgoing director Chris Gribble and built on the foundations of the Manchester Poetry Festival, kicks off on Thursday, and it looks pretty exciting. I'll be sorry to miss William Boyd that day, as I'm already committed to my reading group, but I'm looking forward to the Amnesty International event on Freedom of Expression in St Ann's Church on Saturday afternoon and to Sebastian Barry at the University of Manchester at six on Monday. Sometimes as a writer you JUST DON'T GET OUT, but I've got an embarrassment of choices later on Monday evening: free tickets to a rarely-performed Tennessee Williams play at the Library Theatre, cult artist and musician Ed Barton reading his poetry at Matt and Phred's, or the Manchester Blog Awards at Urbis. How on earth can I choose? Maybe I'll get a migraine trying...
I'm extremely sorry to be missing the launch of novelist Nick Royle's first short story collection at Matt and Phred's on Tuesday, not least because we published him in metropolitan, but that night I'll be doing the Sheffield Bitch-Lit event. Apparently, to our great delight, the Manchester Bitch-Lit event at Waterstone's on Thursday has long been booked out. Sharon Olds at Manchester Museum on Wednesday is a must-see, I'd say, as well as the 'Celebrating Burgess' event at the Whitworth Gallery on Friday, and the exciting festival-within-a-festival of Palestinian literature and the Decapolis European short story events.
I'm extremely sorry to be missing the launch of novelist Nick Royle's first short story collection at Matt and Phred's on Tuesday, not least because we published him in metropolitan, but that night I'll be doing the Sheffield Bitch-Lit event. Apparently, to our great delight, the Manchester Bitch-Lit event at Waterstone's on Thursday has long been booked out. Sharon Olds at Manchester Museum on Wednesday is a must-see, I'd say, as well as the 'Celebrating Burgess' event at the Whitworth Gallery on Friday, and the exciting festival-within-a-festival of Palestinian literature and the Decapolis European short story events.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
A schizoid moment
What do you do when your relatives decide to come to one of your readings? Bite the bullet, I guess: thank the lord they support you in your mad life's endeavour and hold no grudges about the way you've unfairly portrayed them, decide not to care about the clash between your carefully honed writer's persona and the real embarrassing you they could let slip in flash, and when the night comes shut your mind to the fact that they know precisely which bits of the piece you're reading are autobiographical, and can transmit this to the rest of the audience with their knowing, readier laughs.
My mum rings me: 'We're coming to the Sheffield Bitch-Lit reading.' Eek. 'But we've got this problem. We tried to book, but they told us because we're relatives we'd get complimentary tickets.'
They told them they were my relatives? (Like proud parents or something?!!)
'And they said you'd know all about it and would sort it out.'
Ohmigod. I know nothing. I want to know nothing... 'OK.'
I ring the festival box office, apologetic, foolish. 'Oh, that's fine!' they tell me. 'Yes, your mother and your sister: we've already put two comps aside!'
I feel just like when I was in the school play...
My mum rings me: 'We're coming to the Sheffield Bitch-Lit reading.' Eek. 'But we've got this problem. We tried to book, but they told us because we're relatives we'd get complimentary tickets.'
They told them they were my relatives? (Like proud parents or something?!!)
'And they said you'd know all about it and would sort it out.'
Ohmigod. I know nothing. I want to know nothing... 'OK.'
I ring the festival box office, apologetic, foolish. 'Oh, that's fine!' they tell me. 'Yes, your mother and your sister: we've already put two comps aside!'
I feel just like when I was in the school play...
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