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Writing someone else’s story

By admin on January 14, 2015Comments

Over 5 days last week I co-wrote a short story with someone 3,330 miles away. The actual time spent on it, though, was more like 5 hours. Here’s how it worked.

Those of you who’ve been here before may remember a blog about coincidences, in which I mentioned Eden Baylee and how we, along with others, are regular contributors to Richard Wood’s Word Count Podcast. (A couple of blogs were also devoted to an interview with Eden to coincide with the publication of her first crime novel, Stranger at Sunset.) She and I had chatted before about co-writing something and, when Richard posted his prompt for the latest show – the words Frozen, Time and Whisky – we decided this was the opportunity.

We’d write a story in 4 parts
1. Introducing the characters and situation
2 & 3 Developing them and it
4 The resolution

Each part would have 250-300 words and Eden (in Toronto) trusted me (in Aberdeen) to toss a coin and tell her whether she’d be writing parts 1 and 3, or 2 and 4. It was tails, which meant she’d write 1 and 3.

A little aside here. Much of Eden’s previous work has been in a genre I’ve only once tried (for a bet) – erotica. It would have been an interesting challenge if she’d decided to go down that route this time but the scenario she set up was fairly open, although my development of it could legitimately have taken it in that direction if I’d had the … er … nerve so to do. The situation Eden had sketched was that of a woman who’d drunk too much, slipped on the ice and, when she came to, heard 3 male voices discussing where they could take her to do whatever they had in mind. And that’s all of the story you’re going to get because I’d rather you listened to the end result when the show’s been put together.

So it was my turn and it’s very interesting developing someone’s else’s characters, especially when you know you’re going to have to relinquish control over their fates. They may start to emerge and separate into goodies, baddies or whatever, but then you have to hand them over and wait for them to be returned, having taken directions you might not have anticipated. But the lovely alchemy of writing takes over and in this case, Eden picked up on one line of what I wrote and decided to take part 3 in a direction which wasn’t identical to what I had in mind but was close. So, at the end of it all, instead of having to solve a conundrum I hadn’t created, I could relate to the characters as I had before and tie the story up in what Eden accepted was a satisfying way. I should stress, though, that there’s no guarantee that collaboration will always run that smoothly, but then, the harder you make the goals that have to be met, the greater the satisfaction in meeting them.

‘So what?’ you cry.

It was all done via emails, of course, and time zones played their part in the experience – each of us effectively writing when the other was asleep. We made comments and suggestions for what turned out to be minor adjustments to each other’s copy and the whole thing was great fun. We then recorded our individual pieces, Eden sent hers over and I edited them together into a single narrative with which we’re both happy.

Well, it’s very refreshing to be forced out of a comfort zone, to be set writing problems which haven’t arisen out of your own psyche. It’s energising to find inspiration coming not from a muse but from someone else’s imaginings, which then become your own. It’s intriguing to see a narrative weave off in an unexpected direction and have to help it towards a conclusion that fits in with everything that’s happened. And I’m sure it’s just as intriguing to set up a situation with no idea where it will lead and to see someone else take it to a satisfactory dénouement. It’s a great writing exercise with a fascinating end-product. Try it.

Beyond Imagining

By admin on December 31, 2014Comments

As writers, we’re supposed to be able to imagine things – unlikely things, even impossible things. But there are some experiences that transcend everything, that challenge us to go beyond our limits. I’m not just talking about abstractions or those seemingly ineffable things such as ‘love’ or ‘faith’. I’m talking about a feeling I had after reading about the various phases of the Deep Field project.

The night sky’s big. And full of stars. But the scientists operating the Hubble telescope decided to have a look at a tiny black bit, a 24 millionth of the whole sky which seemed to have nothing in it. ‘Seemed’ is an important qualification because, in fact, they found about 3000 visible objects there, nearly all of which were galaxies. So they focused on an even smaller area within the original one, the Ultra Deep Field, wherein spun some 10,000 more.

Remember, the light from these objects has to travel a long way to get to us so what Hubble was seeing were galaxies as they appeared 13.2 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang that started everything. Pretty impressive, but they wanted more, so they narrowed the field even further, choosing a tiny space near the middle. They were now looking at a piece of sky about the size of a square millimetre of paper held about a metre away from the observer and, sure enough, it was crammed with yet more galaxies. In this, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, they could add another 5,500 to those they’d already seen. All this in an infinitesimally minute patch of black sky, each galaxy teeming with stars, trillions of which have planets in orbit around them.

Now, keep on multiplying those galaxies in every square millimetre of sky and ask yourself this: in all that unimaginable profusion, what are the chances of an organism developing in the ocean on just one of those planets, deciding to find out what it was like on the beach and ending up making and launching into space a telescope capable of seeing over 13 billion years back in time? The answer? Slim. Nonetheless, that’s what happened. How unlikely, how absurd.

When confronted with the vastness of the universe and our own (in)significance within it, my mind can’t cope. People say looking up at the stars puts things in perspective, but in reality everything’s so unimaginably huge that it goes way beyond what we call perception. We can’t grasp the extent of those distances, the monumental emptiness in which these clouds of gas and lumps of matter hang and move.

But that’s just one end of the spectrum.

The hero of the terrific 1957 sci-fi film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, has to confront the issue of infinity directly after sailing through a cloud of toxic gas which causes the shrinking to start. He gets smaller and smaller until he’s microscopically tiny and it’s at this point that he has a revelation, that there are two infinities – the infinitely large and the infinitely small – and that they meet to close the circle of creation. If you haven’t seen the film, I recommend it, if only for his brilliant final monologue.

It’s unfortunate that he undermines the magic of the moment by deciding that something as vast and beautiful as the universe ‘had to mean something’. After dismissing concepts of ‘beginnings and endings’ as a ‘limited dimension’ belonging to humans not Nature, it’s strange that he doesn’t also accept that the same is true of ‘meaning’.

But the reason I’m mentioning the film isn’t to quibble about matters of faith, it’s because it brings together the two awe-inspiring extremes of our condition, extremes beyond description or even comprehension. It illustrates that there are limits to what we can conceive, imaginative states in which there are literally no words to convey the experience.

And the final words of that monologue? The proud assertion ‘I still exist’.

The Trifle In The Sky

By admin on December 14, 2014Comments

Much against my normal inclinations, I started to write a Xmas blog and thought it might be entertaining to parody some carols. Right away, though, there was a problem because I chose ‘Away in a manger’ as being instantly recognisable and therefore the one that would make my intention clear. But, rather than engendering merry thoughts and introducing the idea of peace on earth, goodwill to everybody, etc., the thought of a homeless baby being born in lowly surroundings, reduced circumstances, and with little apparent hope of any sort of future was too close to what has become a quite familiar situation in our advanced, ‘civilised’ country. The result was that, after just a few lines, I knew I’d have to change my plan. The lines went as follows:

Another wee stranger, whose mother’s not wed,
Arrives with no prospects, no home and no bed,
No welfare provision, no future, no luck,
Cos some blokes from Eton just don’t give a.…

…well, you get the picture.

And then, another recent item in the news suggested a different angle might work. In the posh Claridge’s Hotel in London’s Mayfair, a waiter carrying a large napkin approached a woman who was breast-feeding her baby and asked her to use it to cover up what was presumably considered to be a gratuitously pornographic display (although before and after photographs reveal that, where one might have expected to see a breast there was just a tiny hairy skull).

One of the spin-offs from this item was that it gave high- and low-brow papers licence to reproduce works of art depicting exactly the same act (sans napkin). In most cases, unlike in Claridge’s, the baby’s head didn’t obscure the offending mammary gland and, more pertinently, the woman concerned was the Madonna and her child. (As an aside, the Jesus depicted in some of them looked way beyond breast-feeding age and, rather than being asked to cover up, the mother and child would certainly have been evicted from the restaurant and possibly even reported to the police.)

At first, I thought that might offer a better chance at the entertaining, satirical parody I had in mind, so I tried another familiar carol, the one about the shepherds, which might be livelier and make more sense if someone came along and said ‘Why are you sitting around in the freezing cold looking at sheep? There’s this woman in that stable down there… Well, come and see for yourselves.’ But that’s a gag that’s at best tasteless and at worst blasphemous and, anyway, finding rhymes for ‘it’s’ was too easy.

On the other hand, it may be Xmas, but we’re still living in the age of Simon Cowell, who’s not only understood the zeitgeist but made a fortune from it. It’s OK to gawp at others, turn them into a spectacle, belittle or objectify them for our own pleasure. Today’s Three Kings of Orient come bearing an unguent which dispels both sympathy and empathy and a contract to star in Carry On Suckling.

So, before cynicism takes a terminal hold, I prefer to remember the variations on carols that my (now very grown-up) children produced when they were little. ‘Ding-dong, Meriel the Fly’ and ‘O come, poorly faceful’ were just funny, but what prescience they showed in:

‘Joyful all ye nations rise,
Join the trifle in the skies.’

Happy Christmas and I hope that 2015 starts bringing some sanity back into how we live and how we treat one another.